mod i made doesn't appear

[Striker879]

With your item selected in the Render window hit the F key to ground it.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. The cities from Vanilla Oblivion are inside their own interior cells, whereas the cities from Open whatever Cities are put directly into the Wilderness exterior. Your mod now putting a new tree into the old Vanilla cell will never show up in the Open city. You'd have to put the tree into the Wilderness cell where Open whatever Cities put the city.

 

For this it isn't even really necessary to have Open Better Cities etc. as a "master" of your plugin. But it helps immensely in "seeing" where the city will be, as you cannot even see the city in the CS without the Open Better Cities plugin loaded as well. You can just as well place your new tree into the correct Wilderness cell without Open Better Cities being loaded, and it will still show up inside your game even after OBC put a whole city around it, but it will of course be a complete mess of blind guessing for you to place the tree at the correct spot that way.

[ratkiller13]

I generally merge a lot of ESPs that I'm not actively working on to keep the bloat under control, currently I have 9 ESP files active. With several dozen mods it would be rather difficult, but with only a few the easiest way is to load all the mods affecting the same cell, then set the one to be changed as the active file. Example;

Rowboat.esp - several player controlled sailboats on the water.

Cities3.esp - Assorted extra forts and villages.

1Sewers.esp - new sewer systems under various cities, some connected to vanilla dungeons.

So I have a new fort on an island just north of Leyawin, with a sewer exit from the Leyawin sewers nearby, and I want to place a boat next to a pier near the new island fort city. Check Oblivion.esm on, then check Cities3 and 1sewers on, check Rowboat on and set it as the active file. Now I have the fort city and the Leyawin north sewer exit visible, so I can place the new rowboat next to the pier (which is in the Cities3.esp but wouldn't be visible in the other two by themselves) and avoid placing it too close to or partially inside the sewer exit (which wouldn't be visible if 1Sewers wasn't loaded).

Obviously with a zillion mods in use at the same time that would be more difficult, for example if I was using one of the open cities mods my sewers and cities mods would conflict with any of those since they alter the same exterior cells.

[phillipjohnmc]

re: using f to lower to ground...yes i had done that but it was a bit near a rock and i think the rock kept it elevated. i used z to lower it manually and it's fine now.

 

as far as loading open cities.esp, better cities.esp into cs goes, i had done that in the beginning, but the city looked vanilla, as if it hadn't actually loaded those .esps. i had a hard time figuring out exactly where to place the tree. i had to go back into the game and find x-y-z coordinates. but in the end that tree didn't render in-game b/c of aforementioned issues.

 

i eventually placeatme'ed a tree in-game on the spot where i wanted it, but the rendering was 2D and it looked like a giant stick from afar, so i nosed around for a while to find something else, a lamp post (too short), an imperial lamp post (rendered way down into the ground), a statue (rendered halfway into the ground). then i had an idea; i saw a statue base, so i rendered one on top of the other, 4 high, then placeatme'ed a stendarr statue--perfect for Chorrol, then disabled the bases. it looks great and the floating flame is covered...https://imgur.com/1ewHo9J. i'm so OCD it's clinical.

 

i've read that too many placeatme's are not good for the savegame, but it's only this statue and the bases which i disabled, but perhaps some code remains in savegame file from the disabled bases. dunno how that works.

Edited December 14, 2017 by phillipjohnmc

[Striker879]

How large is your save after this?

 

I have the 'collector disease' (long story) ... my ESS saves generally run around 5450 to 5500 KB and the OBSE co-saves about 620 KB. When I enter a cell that contains a lot of my 'two legged trinkets' it will take a while for the cell to load (almost all of those 'trinkets' have been Blockheaded, which doesn't exactly speed up the loading process).

[phillipjohnmc]

the ess is 6,172 and the obse is 79

[Striker879]

Looking at the saves and co-saves for my two previous characters (which had somewhat different load orders than my current guy) I'd say that your save size isn't too big of a concern providing this is a character that has some hours on it (i.e. not fresh out of the tutorial dungeon). Load orders have some impact on the size of the saves ... looks like most of my current guy's collection is saved in the co-save (which is reasonable since Blockhead uses OBSE).

 

Something to note, which you may or may not find interesting ... the game playing time reported as part of the save name wraps back to zero after 1193 hours (my characters accumulate big hours, current guy is a bit over 2970 hours).

[DrakeTheDragon]

 

as far as loading open cities.esp, better cities.esp into cs goes, i had done that in the beginning, but the city looked vanilla, as if it hadn't actually loaded those .esps. i had a hard time figuring out exactly where to place the tree. i had to go back into the game and find x-y-z coordinates. but in the end that tree didn't render in-game b/c of aforementioned issues.

 

Just in case that's still a tad confusing, this is exactly what I meant. When you opened those ESPs with the CS, you did just about everything right, and their contents were indeed loaded correctly.

The mistake is in expecting them to change the city cells instead of searching for their contents in the Wilderness where previously only the cities' LOD was found.

 

If you look into Cheydinhal's cell after loading these plugins, you won't notice many changes (I think they added some exit means for stuck NPCs to get back out into the external world in case they were last inside the interior city cells when you saved your game before adding the mod). Seek one of the entrance gates though and follow the door marker linkage to the outside perimeter world space cell (just like in the Vanilla game when you pass the "load" door), only -then- you will see the Open City right behind you.

 

Due to the fact that everything city is now outside in the Wilderness cells, it'll always be a little more difficult to find the cities. I think every city might have a special name for the exterior cells surrounding it, but it is now in the Wilderness, not in its Vanilla city cell anymore. The Vanilla city cells are still as Vanilla as it gets, even with those mods active. The real city is simply "found elsewhere" from then on.

[phillipjohnmc]

ah, i totally got you. yes, in anvil for example, there's a rock for the AI (exists in Skyrim open cities also). in skyrim, it takes you to the vanilla city. but in Anvil, it takes you to bizarro world. don't know what's going on there. the terrain is really messed up and there's a canal with npcs floating in it. and the prophet is stuck there and won't stay out in the 'open city'. i tried to get him back but he just returns to bizarro world. (is there a fix for that?)

 

anyway, i understand what you mean about the cells. the open city cells are separate from vanilla cells. if i wanted to have any impact at all, i would have had to hunt down the open city cells and work inside those. maybe then it would have recognised my addition. maybe

[phillipjohnmc]

i only have 79 hrs on the game. perhaps that's a kind of big save game? i have 160 mods installed, if that matters.