Cheydinhal City missing ground

[AlbinoFoxRacer]

Today I created a CM Partner and decided to insert her into the Cheydinhal Mages Guild but after checking the esp and running the game, Cheydinhal doesn't have a ground. What did I do and what can I do to replace the ground without losing my CM partner I worked so hard on?

 

I apologize if there is already a topic on this. This is just a problem I ran into and really want to figure out what I did. Any help would be awesome! Thanks a bunch!

[David Brasher]

Make sure that you just put your work into an .esp and not an .esm that edits another .esm (including Oblivion .esm. Like if you had done this and put your mage in front of the Cheydinhal Mages Guild, then the Cheydinhal worldspace would be broken and there would likely be no ground.)

 

If you just made an .esp, then look for mod dirt. Do a thorough manual mod cleaning and you might discover dirty edits to the Cheydinhal worldspace.

 

There is also the possibility that your mod did not cause this problem, and that it was already there and you just discovered it when working on your mod. If you have examined and fixed your mod and there is no logical way that it could be causing this problem, then look into this possibility.

 

A problem sort of like yours can occur on a random basis if a loose item such as a weapon dropped by a bandit is laying on the border line between two exterior cells in the problem area.

 

You are not really in danger of losing the work you have done because there are ways to fix the problem.

Edited December 26, 2011 by David Brasher

[AlbinoFoxRacer]

Okay, thanks for the reply. This is what I did.

 

I started by creating a new esp named CM Sadie Partner than opened it in Construction set with oblivion.esm, cm partner's.esp & esm and my face.esp with my saved face from my character. Finding my partner named cmSadie I opened her than pasted the copied face on her and saved. I then continued without closing the program to edit her inventory, adding armor from a mod I have installed, then giving her spells, editing her AI, and changing her hair, hair color and eye color. After I am complete, I save once again than continue with placing her in Tamriel. This is where I believe I am making a mistake. If there is a step I am skipping that's vital, please tell me! Thanks a bunch for your help!

[David Brasher]

So when you examine the mod in the CS, or Wrye Bash, what mods are listed as the masters?

 

Do you use the CS or the Construction Set Extender? The Construction Set Extender causes bugs when new modders use it and creates all sorts of bogus masters they don't want and need for their mod to have.

 

It sounds like all your edits are in your new .esp. If you goofed and had CM Partners .esm espified and had it make an edit to the Cheydinhal worldspace, then you would have problems such as the ground disappearing.

 

If you play-test after modding and you have not got all of your esmified .esps reespified, then things will be messed up and there might not be any ground and everything will be falling when you load the game. So if you used Wrye Bash to turn an .esp into an .esm for purposes of using it as a master and using things from it (like armor) in your own mod then you will need to be sure to get the esmified .esp which is shown with blue text, changed back into an .esp with black text before play-testing. If you were to save your game when everything is messed up, the savegame could be permanently ruined even though you fix the mod problem.

[AlbinoFoxRacer]

Today, I remade my character starting from scratch and before placing her in the world-space, I enabled the esp and ran the game. It had the same issue.

 

I just got your reply, so I'm editing my post. The problem is only with this esp because when it's not enabled the ground exists but when enabled the ground disappears. I am trying to make sense of what you're saying. I apologize because I am very new. I haven't heard the term reespified

 

To answer your questions, I am using TES Construction Set, didn't know about the Construction Set Extender.

 

My masters for the esp are Oblivion.esm, CM Partners.esm, X.Races.Comp.esm, Westwind Rogue HGEC.esm, Ethereal - Eyes.esm, AsharasSirensandTritons.esm, Bad Lady.esm & CM Partners.esp

 

After rereading your post I think I understand a little more, still confused about reespified though. I think the problem lies with the masters.

Edited December 28, 2011 by AlbinoFoxRacer

[David Brasher]

Working with masters which are .esps rather than .esms is a rather advanced modding task, not for the faint of heart. (In other words, it ain't gonna work unless you are persistent, patient, and lucky.)

 

Your mod has an unusually high number of masters. You have 7 .esm masters and 1 .esp master. Most mods only have 2 or 3 masters, if they even have any masters at all besides oblivion.esm.

 

We will assume that none of your .esms have been damaged or edited so that they edit an exterior worldspace in oblivion.esm, which is a known cause of a problem like you describe. You stated that the problem has been isolated to your new mod, because it only occurs when your new mod is activated and goes away when your mod is deactivated.

 

I see a suspicious and complicated situation where your mod uses both CM Partners.esp and CM Partners.esm as a master and CM Partners.esp also uses CM partners.esm as a master. So CM Partners.esp is both a slave and a master in this complicated set-up. Results may be unpredictable.

 

It might be best for you to copy your NPC into your mod as a new NPC with a new form ID rather than editing the one in CM Partners.esp. I have worked with that file, and it is a nightmare. They used some strange anti-hacking method that I haven't figured out how to duplicate, and it is dangerous to try to make changes to CM Partners.esm or CM Partners.esp. This might carry over to editing CM Partners.esp with mastered patches. I believe their intention was that people would build new .esp files with CM Partners .esm as master, not CM Partners.esp as master. So if your new NPC resided in your mod with no dependency on CM Partners.esp then you could remove that mod dependency in TES4Gecko.

 

Then after doing this, you would just have 7 .esm masters and 0 .esp masters, which is good, because .esp masters are dangerous and hard to work with. If you have nothing but .esm masters, then you don't have to go into Wrye Bash and click "esmify self" (esmification) every time you make edits in the CS, and then you don't have to go back and click "espify self" (espification, reespification) before you can go play-test your work. This is the cumbrous procedure that people have to use if they have one or more .esp masters. One bad click, and you ruin your mod and lose the connection to your masters. Then you have to delete it and load up your most recent uncorrupted save, and hope that you made one and made it recently.

 

It sounds like the Construction Set Extender folks don't have this problem. They have other problems instead. Their software just inserts nonsense commented-out tags in their scripts, and hooks up everything under the sun to their mod as bogus masters that they have to go remove in TES4Gecko.

 

So I think the thing you might try would be editing things so that you have a new NPC in your mod that is like Sadie but is not Sadie and has her own new name and base ID number and exists in your mod. In-game she would exist alongside Sadie. There would be two people in the game, not one. You would remove the dependency on CM Partners.esp, and then see if your ground has come back when you play-test.

[Striker879]

As some background to what David is talking about, here's a link to the Construction Set Wiki De-Isolation Tutorial.

[AlbinoFoxRacer]

Ok, I will try removing the esp from the masters and see if that fixes the issue. You may be talking about this but I'm not quite understanding so I apologize, haha! I'm a little slow but is there a way to give an npc armor from a mod without having that mod as one of the master files? And to add onto what you said about creating an entirely new npc. Is it simple and how would you tie it in with the cm partner's mod? Just by adding the CM Partner's esm into the master file?

 

I am giving Kudos to both of you for helping me as well, if I can give kudos out to both of you? xD

 

I tried removing the esp and it still does the same thing, will try creating a character from scratch instead of using the cm Partners in TES Construction Set and see how that works.

Edited December 28, 2011 by AlbinoFoxRacer

[David Brasher]

To give an NPC armor from another mod, you can copy the armor into your mod by renaming it (giving it a new form ID.) This way the armor exists in both mods and will still appear in your mod even if you deactivate the armor mod. That way it will not depend on a master in order to get the armor. The downside is that you are not allowed to upload or share a mod like that unless the modder who created the armor gives you permission. (You can do anything you want on your own computer without asking permission, as long as you are the only one who uses the mods.)

 

It is really simple to copy an NPC. All you have to do is change the NPC's name and answer that you want to create a new object when it asks you. So if you had an NPC named CMSadie, you could rename her to AASadie and say that you wanted to create a new object, and the task would be complete. The NPC would now exist in your mod as well as in the original mod.

 

You can not remove masters until you have changed and deleted all the content that depends on the master so that your mod does not actually refer to anything in the master. Otherwise there will be errors, some of which could possibly prevent Oblivion from running.

 

To create a CM Partner, you need to have the mod use CM Partners.esm as a master and put the partner into certain factions at certain ranks. You may need to give the partner certain AI packages and certain items in inventory. If you don't do this, you won't be able to recruit the partner and have them follow commands correctly. Partners also must be essential so that they never die or non-essential so that they die forever. They may not respawn, or you will get weird bugs. There are dozens of pages of documentation on how to build a CM partner that come with the download. If you made a copy of Sadie in your own mod, then pretty much everything would already be set up.

 

It might be good for you to just do some simple experiments to possibly gain insights into what went wrong with your mod. Like your plan to just build a new character will show you how far you can go before the bugs appear. You can slowly add things with tests in between. Then when the ground disappears again, you will know that the last action you did broke the game, and you can load up an old version of the mod or undo the most recent change.

[Striker879]

I was waiting until David had a chance to give you the 'right way' on the armor question (if you are already creating the NPC in the CS then that is without doubt the way to do it). For those times you'd like to give an NPC something but don't want all the fuss of the CS here's Striker's quick and dirty method (aka the Confessions of a Console Serial Killer).

 

With the NPC in front of you in the game open the console (hit the tilde (~) key, just below the Esc key on standard keyboards). With the mouse single left click on the NPC. You should now have the NPC's name and referenceID (refID) displayed at the top of your screen. Type in 'kill' (without the quotes) and hit Enter. Close the console (hit tilde again) and the NPC will collapse in front of you. Loot anything you don't want them to have from their inventory and place anything you want them to have into their inventory. Keep in mind that their AI routines and game engine mechanics will determine whether or not they'll wear armor or clothes if they have both in their inventory. Those items can be anything that you have in your inventory, regardless of where you got them, excepting of course any quest items that you can't take out of your own inventory. Once you have them set up with the gear you want them to have reopen the console. The NPC's refID should still be at the top of the screen (if not click on them to get it there again). In the console type 'resurrect 1' (again without the quotes, and note that that's a number one at the end) and hit Enter. Close the console and they will stand up. Some NPCs will immediately resume their normal routines, others may need to wait for an AI package change before they'll get back up to speed. You can force a refresh of their AI by leaving the area (either going to an interior from an exterior or vice versa or going to a different cell if in the wilderness). You could also try toggling their AI off and then on using the console command 'tai' (make sure you have their refID shown at the top of the screen at the time) but I've never tested that myself.

 

There are also console commands that can be used to add items to an NPC's inventory, but you need the baseID (not the same as the refID) of the item. Again get the NPC's refID up top and then it's 'additem <baseID> <quantity>' (no quotes or brackets). You can get the baseID for vanilla game items starting from the UESP Wiki Items page. For mod added items you would need to fire up the CS anyway, so David's method would be preferable as it won't thereafter require you to have 'Joe's Cool Armor Mod' installed (the additem method would require the source mod for as long as you wanted the NPC to have the item ... same situation with mod added items and my first Q & D method).

 

I have a few mod added items distributed that way in my old guy's save games. There aren't any issues arising from giving away vanilla items that way.

Edited December 29, 2011 by Striker879