Creation Kit Rant

[GoodfellowGoodspring]

I don't see how any stable mods are made with the CK, in my experience even the smallest of tasks like creating AI packages or moving items from cell to cell WITHOUT cutting and pasting always seems to go wrong for me despite everything being the same as it was before but in a different position. The number of bugs is also frustrating, especially after the delay of the release of the CK and it still has bugs which need to worked around in order to use it.

 

 

• Lots of errors upon start-up displaying errors no one knows how to fix and should 'just be ignored.'
   
  
• Painting textures onto certain cells and positions will just display as black and cannot be removed, this has existed since the Oblivion construction kit.
   
  
• After a certain amount of time you receive a texture error message and most of the textures and models do not load at all, you need to refresh the window to get them back.
   
  
• .Nif could not be found errors, meaning models cannot be placed or previewed. Some items seem to have this problem upon start up and some have it during use.
   
  
• Dark face bug which has to be the most annoying to date which gives NPCs a darker head to the rest of their bodies even after editing an existing NPC, this still hasn't been fixed.
   
  
• Editing the landscape will leave the small rock decals in their original position meaning you have floating rocks, this can be fixed via the .ini file but you shouldn't have to do this.
   
  
• When navigate in render view, the camera travels so fast that you usually start loading up the cells next to the one you're editing due to the speed and the camera's sharpness, this can be 'fixed' by clicking on an item (thats if there isn't a maker in front of the item and you end up dragging the whole thing somewhere else.)
  

 

I understand Bethesda uses the CK program or a similar program to make their games and many modders make great designs with their mods, i don't see how this is possible due to all of the problems that i encounter when modding! :pinch:

Edited October 4, 2012 by GoodfellowGoodspring

[AnkhAscendant]

• The latest version is 1.6.89, I believe, and I believe that Steam updates it automatically. ( I would assume so anyway. I reinstalled it recently and got version 1.6.89, so if it won't update it reinstalling it would give you the latest version. )
  
• I've never seen the dark face bug but I've seen it plague people and the solution seems to be to export the facegen data using alt+F4 (or something that someone more knowledgeable will correct me by saying)
  
• Aren't the startup errors actually errors in Skyrim.esm, not the CK itself? It's not because there's anything wrong with the Creation Kit, it's because they left broken bits in the game. Which is another discussion I think... And if you're getting errors besides Perforce when starting the CK itself you really need to update.)
  
• I agree about render window camera speed. @_@ It might be fixable in the .ini but I try not to mess with things.

 

I actually had a heck of a time getting the stupid thing downloaded because I had no idea where to go and all links just led to the front page of the Steam store, but after I figured it out I haven't really had any problems with it since. (But of course I don't do anything with new meshes or textures, which is half of your list of grievances.)

[Ghaunadaur]

 

When navigate in render view, the camera travels so fast that you usually start loading up the cells next to the one you're editing due to the speed and the camera's sharpness, this can be 'fixed' by clicking on an item (thats if there isn't a maker in front of the item and you end up dragging the whole thing somewhere else.)

 

This can be adjusted in the 'render window properties' under 'movement'. Play around with the pan speed value to change the camera speed (i.e. mine is at 5.00).

[acidzebra]

[*]Painting textures onto certain cells and positions will just display as black and cannot be removed, this has existed since the Oblivion construction kit.

 

Sometimes the creation kit makes me want to scream. My personal favorite is crash-on-save, which is fairly rare for me but when it happens AAAARGH.

 

Just a quick note, for the textures, are you sure you are not layering 6+ textures on a given bit of landscape? That will yield black spots. See this post, under the section "consolidating textures" for the solution - http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/topic/4663-ck-basics-lesson-3/

Edited October 3, 2012 by acidzebra

[rinoaff33]

I too have a huge number of issues with it, not to mention that it takes forever to load. But the main two problems I have that just make me not ever want to mod things are: random crashes all over the place, and bugginess while editing NPC's faces that prevents you from modifying most of their face tints. The Skyrim NPC Editor program doesn't like to work properly with non-vanilla races, and the Creation Kit barely supports them. I really have absolutely no idea how there are so many custom NPC companion mods.

 

In regards to previewing models, I've found that I can usually just place an object/NPC into the gameworld to preview it while editing.

Edited October 4, 2012 by rinoaff33

[Ironman5000]

You must be doing something wrong, I would have a good look around for troubleshooting help instead of getting frustrated. I have made a few complicated mods using the CK, editing a LOT of data and ultimately came to some issues but after a bit research and posting in the mod troubleshooting I got the answers I wanted.

 

The CK isn't as bugged as you might think.

[JanusForbeare]

The CK isn't as bugged as you might think.

 

lol, Ironman, I hope you're wearing your Elven Codpiece of Flame Resistance.

 

That said, I've encountered a number of bugs in the CK, but once you know what they are, you can usually find ways to work around them. For instance:

 

-If an NPC has more than 13 lines of dialogue in a row, the CK will crash. However, I avoid this by having the player interject with otherwise useless little phrases like, "Interesting. Go on."

 

-I've suffered the crash-on-save bug once or twice, and while it is a HUGE bummer, I have the program set to autosave as often as possible, and I make a point of saving whenever I complete any changes of substance.

 

-NPC editing in the CK is terribly limited; however, you can work around that by designing your characters in-game and then exporting them using the "SPF" console command.

 

All in all, the CK has a lot of flaws, but is a beast that can be tamed (most of the time). I hope that some of the tips I mentioned above help some of you... and if any of you have other strategies you use to avoid crashes, I'd be interested to hear them, too.

[Gryphex]

yeah I have just had a bug which was it didn't allow me to delete a certain file.