[LE] Creation kit takes over a minute to save my esp

[cumbrianlad]

Hello.

 

I'm in trouble again with my first attempt at a mod. I'm not kidding about the file taking this time to save. Up until today, it took a fraction of a second to save. Opening the path test window now takes an age too.

 

The mod is based on the tutorial of Lokir's Tomb, except that I've added a couple of rooms (total 6 plus 1 cave, five rooms are small, one is large) and my layout is a bit different. I've added clutter and manually added a navmesh which works fine when using the path testing.

 

I looked at the file size first and it's a fraction over 8 MB, which seems ridiculous for a tomb of this size. I recall it being about 20 kb after I'd started adding clutter. I checked it out in game and it all seems to work correctly with no crashes.

 

The cell view shows only the items that I placed in it with no extra duplicates of any of the items that I can see. I've only placed twenty or so items of clutter and furniture in each room and there are a few urns, pots and sconces in each hallway. I don't understand where 8 MB has come from.

 

I downloaded SSEedit and ran that on the esp file...

 

Here's what I found. Other than a single reference to a chest (deleted) and the navmesh, there is nothing in the tree to view except in 'cells'. Here there are 9 blocks, each with 9 sub-blocks. The sub-blocks all contain headings like Bthardamz01 and Dustman'sCairn02.

 

I followed the Lokir's Tomb tutorial instructions to the letter, so I'm completely bewildered by this. I confess that I don't know what the SSEedit is all about other than highlighting conflicts but I just used it to see what it found in my tomb. I tried it on The Northern Star Retreat and it showed up only one cell and all of the items, effects etc listed under appropriate headings, so something's definitely gone sadly wrong with my esp file.

 

Does anyone have an answer to what the problem is?

 

Just for comparison here's some date from SSEedit for The Northern Star retreat and my tomb, along with the esp file sizes.

 

File size: My Tomb 8100 kb Northern Star 500 kb

No. of records: My Tomb 5986 Northern Star 5349

Navmesh data size: My Tomb 222,316 Northern Star 34,392

[Di0nysys]

The CK is creates dirty edits on its own after editing the contents of vanilla cells in any way. So say for example u moved a bunch of references an inch, then u hit undo, it'll still count as an edit. So watch out for that stuff. These edits usually are benign, and u can easily cut them out in Xedit. Delete all the unncessary vanilla data with xedit by cleaning ITM records and ur save times should be drastically reduced. 8mb is a lot for just a few cells + Nav data. Make sure to also delete any edits u did to vanilla cells and records that are not needed as those, apart from bloating, also cause incompatibilities down the line.

[cumbrianlad]

Thanks for the reply.

 

Since this is my first try at producing something with the creation kit I guess I thought it would work like any other program. As a design engineer, I could load and move or delete loads of items into CAD drawings, spreadsheets etc with no effect on file size.

 

As it is my first attempt, I've made lots of mistakes, or changed my mind about things and deleted them. Heck, I even followed the tutorial advice and used recast based navmesh generation. The result looked so messy, I thought I'd take more time altering it than doing it by hand. Guess what...I deleted the entire navmesh and started again.

 

From your comments I may have inadvertently caused all sorts of mayhem. I can see I'll have to learn a whole lot more about general housekeeping with the creation kit before I go any further. I'll start with xedit.

 

I've looked at my navmesh again and it could have a few triangles left but not enough to make a significant percentage cut.

 

xedit here I come.

[NexusComa]

Did you just add navmesh? ... there is a reason you do navmesh last and this is it ...

 

Also try TES5Edit and clean you mod.

[cumbrianlad]

Yes I just did navmesh...mainly because that was the order it came up in the tutorials.

 

I'm sure I've found the answer with SSEedit.

 

What I've done so far: I made backups of update.esm and my tomb.I cleaned update.esm, since it was a master for my tomb. I cleaned my esp. The file size fell from 8.1 MB to 3.14 MB. I then did some digging into the SSEedit data for my tomb

 

Here's what I found in SSEedit.

 

I found my navmesh and every item that I've placed into the tomb, markers etc. My navmesh is there and is 30 kb in size. All the rest added together totals about 20 kb, which fits with my recollection of the size prior to navmeshing. My whole tomb should have a file size of around 45 kb.

 

Every single other object contained in my tomb comes under the other 'cell' categories and consists almost exclusively of navmeshes for almost every location in skyrim. I totalled up the data size of half of these navmeshes until I found my data half way through. Surprise, surprise, the navmeshes that I found total 1.52 Mb. It's a good bet that if I'd continued to add up the rest of the navmesh data I'd have just over 3 MB of the stuff.

 

What I'm going to do next is to make a new back-up of my esp and see what happens when I remove a load of these navmeshes using xedit.

 

I've got to admit that it sounds a bit risky but the worst I can do is wreck my tomb and let's face it, it's pretty screwed up now anyway. I don't understand how all this junk got in there, unless it was something to do with my not testing from a master save in the first few weeks, which you pointed out to me, NexusComa (I've rectified that now).

 

Also, it's pretty odd that all my stuff is in one of the cell sections, unless this is to do with the order things are done in the tutorials again. The link to the outside world and renaming the cell is done right at the end. At the moment it's Lokir's Tomb in the EditorID but it's still named "Marker Storage Unit"

 

Here goes...let's hope this is not bye-bye Skyrim!

[cumbrianlad]

Okay,

 

Here's the result of deleting all those navmeshes with xedit.

 

My esp file dropped from 3.14 MB to 249 kb and runs fine in the creation kit. Nothing is missing.

 

There is still a good number of placed items showing up in the 'cell' section of SSEedit and also this section contains all the references to the different skyrim locations. I'm going to remove all of this and clean again. Skyrim still works fine too, so nothing I did messed with that. I even visited Treva's watch since I recalled deleting the Watch navmesh from my esp. Other than having to kill a few bandits nothing unusual went on there, either.

 

Edit: Peace at last. The final size is exactly 100 kb and it all works fine. It's about 1% of the size it was yesterday! Creation Kit now saves my esp in just under 2 seconds. I'll be sure to keep a beady eye on SSEedit after every session in the kit from now on. I'm off right now to give my approval to it! It's saved me from abandoning the Creation Kit altogether.

 

I'd still like to know what I was doing wrong to get all that junk in there in the first place so that it doesn't happen again.

[NexusComa]

You didn't do anything wrong ... other then adding the navmesh before you're done with the mod.

Even that isn't "wrong" it's just a hassle with long save times ...

[cumbrianlad]

Thanks Nexuscoma!

 

I wonder why navmeshing comes just over halfway through the tutorials.

 

I've now seen (thanks to SSEedit) that the single biggest memory hogger in a dungeon/home is the navmesh. In future I'll definitely add it last. It's too late for this mod because I spent too much time putting it in to delete it, especially in the secret passage and the other hallways where they crossed over the top of passages/halls beneath. That was a real pain because I had to use transparent mode and vertex/line selection only to avoid inadvertently selecting triangles beneath. As for the two spiral staircases...Bethesda should have invented lifts for the ancient Nord dungeons, so that you simply add an activator and it acts like a load door...maybe that's a nice idea for a little mod...a lift with pulleys and lever and rope made from vines would look pretty good...

 

It's nice to know it wasn't my fault!

 

P.S. thanks for the link that let's me swap players that you posted in the other thread. I'll give it a whirl.

[NexusComa]

I said the same thing when I did that ... "Well, I'm not gonna remove it now, way to much work"

A week later sick of saving times I removed it. Funny thing about navmesh is, it's so hard to work with

by the time you get it down you're a navmesh all pro ... lol