In need of mod porting help - gypsy eyes caravan

[kanami24]

I've been following a mod porting tutorial lately in order to port the gypsy eyes caravan mod to sse so that i can actually use it.

here's the mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/33219

 

and here's the tutorial page: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/17990

 

There's a little back story as to why I'm doing this that I will type up at the end of the main topic.

 

Now, so far I'm only on section A of the tutorial where you extract the archive and the BSA and I've done that for the BSA. I didn't know whether or not if I should do the animation portion since I did not see any animations. At the moment I am attempting to transfer from section A to section B however I am unable to find this creation kit that is spoken of. The creation kit is suppose to help with repacking the BSA in a format that SSE is able to read, afterwards there's section C where I must convert ESP's and ESM's. however I cannot continue without the ability to repack the BSA in the proper format?

 

Now, the reason why I'm doing this is because I like the mod. But it's not available for SSE. I know, some people may say "if you've played with the mod, then why not just play with it on regular skyrim instead of skyrim special edition." And to that I say, 'because regular skyrim becomes stupidly unstable before and after you install your first mod -- atleast for me it has".

 

I started out playing skyrim special edition. Immediately started modding after playing the vanilla version for roughly a millisecond -- great game just painful as fk to play it unmodded. Literally if someone betted me to play it unmodded I would probably fus ro dah them in the head, stand over their corpse, and say "I win" instead. And I would say it in tod howard's voice too. But no, at the time I saw all of these cool mods but they were for regular skyrim, not skyrim special edition. After a few months of modding and all that jazz I cracked -- bought regular skyrim and the dlc's just to play skyrim with the mods I wanted, atleast until they eventually got ported to SE.

 

First mod, was crashing non - stop. I had put up with it for a long while and just started manually saving the game a lot more to avoid corrupted saves. That and because the mod "Additional techniques" isn't ported to SSE for some god forsaken reason. Atleast not yet. But my breaking point was -- the final part of the dawnguard DLC, where you fight harkon. So, you know the vampire cafeteria area right before you fight harkon? yea. Killed all the vampires there except one, he's in the tiny room with all the coffins downstairs on the left side of the vampire cafeteria. Hit him one -- boom CTD. loaded back in, saved the game right before I went to that room. Hit him once again -- CTD. Loaded back in, let serana and harkon go down there, they hit him once -- I CTD'ed again.

 

It wasn't all of the constant crashing that broke me. It wasn't having to run programs and most literally develop the game myself with enboost and all of that other stuff -- having to go into files and tinker with things for weeks trying to get the game to a point where its stable to run ON MY BRAND NEW LAPTOP BTW --with PLENTY of MEMORY to SPARE.

 

no..no… it was this. single. enemy. causing. me. to. CTD.

 

But you know what, mods like additional techniques, gypsy eyes caravan, and some of Elysees mods that are still for some reason not ported literally made me happy with regular skyrim -- that and I finally managed to get body physics to work on regular skyrim :V

 

Now, I know some people are gonna say, "there's dragonkiller cart" -- stop.

As of right now I did redownload special edition and I actually took the steps to convert from nexus mod manager to vortex mod manager properly. Which, btw, feels like the smartest thing I've down if anything at all yet. It's just so much cleaner now -- my load order. Not much of a need to run wyre bash or loot or anything with vortex. However, I do have dragonkiller cart redownloaded in my SSE mods. Now, before I had even went to regular skyrim back when I was using nexus mod manager, the cart worked however I had to ride my horse while my horse was hitched due to the cart spazzing out non - stop, making it practically unusable outside of having more storage and a portable blacksmith anvil. Now, it won't even hitch onto my horse -- and yes I do have the harness in the horse's inventory under the systems tab in the actual caravan itself. And when I encounter issue after issue with this cart, all I could think about was how smooth the gypsy caravan worked -- it actually felt good to use it. riding across skyrim -- granted I was ctd'ing every 5 minutes but still.

 

At anyrate -- I got fed up, looked around for a possible port of the gypsy eyes caravan mod and additional techniques. hadn't found one, and i'm not going to wait 30 years to find out that the mod authors had actually left skyrim. So, I would rather port them over myself and actually play the game for once :V

[RS13]

Piece of advice--and I mean this nicely even if it comes off as mean--don't write a wall of text. Think about it this way. Why are you even on the forums? Answer: because you want help. That's why I'm here too. Now, when I come here for my own reasons and see something I think I can help with quickly, I'm likely to take a few minutes and write and a response. But if I come and see this massive wall of text... yeah, most people aren't going to read that much to help on the side. Even I--and I'm writing a fair bit in response--mostly skimmed it.

 

Relatedly, you don't need to explain your feelings on skyrim or frustration with lack of ports etc. I get it. Skyrim is INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING to mod and sometimes you just want to f***ing yell about f***ing incompetent the devs were. But that won't help people help you.

 

Now, for the actual advice.

1. Where is the creation kit? You have to download the Bethesda launcher which can be found at Bethesda.net and then download the CK from that. (No, it doesn't matter that Skyrim is on steam and not the Bethesda launcher.)

1A. I wouldn't worry about repacking the mod assets. It's not strictly necessary and it won't affect stability. You still need the CK for esp conversion, however.

2. It seems like you're having stability problems before you've started porting any mods. Fix those first. Get the stable and THEN work on adding mods.

 

3. It seems like you're using outdated advice. Skyrim SSE is free of the memory problems that beset Oldrim. You do not need ENBoost and Memory issues are not the typical causes of a crash. Typically, you're looking at something like a scripting problems, a mesh problem, corrupted saves.

 

4. Relatedly, if you've made any ini changes from Oldrim, it's probably safest to just delete the inis and let the game generate new ones next time you launch.

Edited June 10, 2019 by RS13