Dovahkiin Hideout esm how does it work?

[pogonoforysci]

Question to people familiar with Dovahkiin hideout mod. The mod adds a trap door to every house sometimes removing some furniture on the way but doesn't affect anything else in the house (furniture, items placed by the player, containers contents). I would think that to modify an interior you have to copy the target cell in CK, do your changes and than save it as an esp. In that case the modified 'replacement' cell replaces the vanilla one and appears as if it wasn't visited by the player yet (meaning all the items brought and contents of the containers stay in the original cell). The hideout does something different. It only changes a part of the vanilla cells not replaces them entirely. How is that possible? is it something related to the fact that the Hideout is an esm not esp? It would be useful for me to know how it works as I want to add a big basement expansion to one of the houses and would be great if I wouldn't have to replace the whole cell just to punch a hole in the wall (As far as I know replacing cells messes up all the house upgrade quests).

[flobalob]

Depending on exactly what you do you can change an existing cell (even if the player has already visited). But you DO have to know what you can & cannot get away with.

 

For a start you cannot get away with moving or deleting anything that is interactable, ie. Weapons, Armour, Junk, Food, Potions, Containers, Mannequins, Weapon racks, Bookshelves, Doors, Furniture. because the state is saved as part of your savegame. I've probably forgotten a load of stuff.

 

You usually CAN get away with adding things, emphasis on USUALLY.

[ch0k3h0ld]

I'd like to give you my 2 cents worth from my experience with the Dovakiins Warehouse, where I also added trapdoors to each of the houses. My original version was an esp file as I was using the CK. When I was looking for a location for the door in Proudspire Manor, I noticed there was space for rooms on either side of the hallway leading in from the basement doorway from the street. In fact, the room on the left as you are facing the doorway was already there but there was a wall in the way. That space was already in use by another mod I was aware of so I took out the wall to open the room, but I went the other way for my door. On the right side, I removed the wall from the hallway and created a room as an entryway to my door. It worked pretty well although I created a few gaps that I had to fix in the room above. When I created those gaps, I could see them in the game and fixed them before I released the mod. When I entered the Manor, I could hear things falling through the gap in the floor, which alerted me that I had created the gap. So I had more affect on other things in the cell than just adding the room and doorway.

 

I later converted the mod to an esm file as I was reading commentary that led me to believe that the esm would have fewer problems with the mannequins and NPCs. I'm not entirely sure that is completely true as the mannequinbs still move around some and the other NPCs still have blue faces, but that is another story. When I converted the file to an esm, it lost access to the extra rooms I had created as the esm was no longer deleting the original walls. The added rooms and the new doorway was still there, you just could not get to them through the wall sections that had returned only in the game. When I go to that spot in the CK, it still looks just like I modded it. My solution was to just put a hatch in the floor and give up the extra room. I suspect I could get it back with an additional esp add on file to my esm file, but I don't want the mod to be that complicated.

 

My take on this is that an esm can only add content to another esm, it cannot actually modify the esm itself. My conclusion may be wrong, but that is what I see. If you want to create new content, you can use an esm. If you want to make extensive modifications to a master file, you may need to keep the plugin as an esp. If you want to see what I mean, the old esp version of the warehouse 0.1b is still available on Nexus to compare to the current esm.

[pogonoforysci]

That's very interesting. So how do you convert an esp to esm??