LE Skyrim - New Cell creation - help for a modder from modders

[turbosnowy]

Ok reason for the title is trying to entice people who actually already do this s*** to get interested, I am a modder - I make clothes, music and general tweak mods and got plenty of them. I have now decided probably due to poor decision making to venture into making new cells, placing NPCs and adding to a world space - plus I intend to add a quest - what's this all for? Well thanks for asking, it's for a shop to sell all my gear, of which a lot o it is already available on Nexus - mainly rubber/fetish clothing/accessories, so the more prudish of you can just stop reading right now and rejoice in my problems (which you won't know about unless you read further - oh the condundrum!)

 

So, long story short or at least medium is as follows - Skyrim seems to change what it views as my esp every single day based on cached memory or whatever. I leave a working shop one day, and come back to it the next day and it has changed things, like mannequins will be floating in the air, or rugs i put down will no longer be visble, or it just plain won't load at all.

 

So.. me being a clever type person thought, hey, since Skyrim seems to work on cell memory in saves, lets make a new clean install on another PC and use that as the 'clean test' rig. Am currently sorting that out as I type. However I am left wondering, since a cell I have created can jump from various iterations (with rugs to without rugs, to not loading at all as an example) for those clever folks out there who make new cells, how do you do it?

 

-How do you make a new cell that you know will work for someone else? (Without clean skyrim install with no mods but the one you are working on)

-Do you experience the same issues as me when making a new cell and never being sure you are seeing change in CK correctly due to Skyrim caching in saves

-Am I a numpty and there is an easy way to make sure Skyrm always loads the most recent version of a cell if a savegame has been there before in a previous version?

 

Any help appreciated as at the moment I get to a point where I think I am almost done, reload the game a day later and my cell (which is a shop) all over the place despite working perfectly the day before.

 

 

Making me think the whole CK/Skyrim Save/Cache thing is broken without redemption - if so, how the hell do people like Amethyst create such amazing works if CK/Skyrim is so borked? Any help appreciated from those that might have suffered my issues and know what the resolution is :)

[pufthemajicdragon]

You're probably on the right track with a second test rig. That's what I do. I build my mods on my laptop with only one mod and its data in the Data folder at a time, and then I bundle it all up into a zip and use NMM to load it up on my desktop for testing. I always use a clean save (from before my mod was activated).

 

I haven't gotten too far in Skyrim modding and haven't touched creating a new cell yet, but I know I ran into a lot of problems in Oblivion especially with scripts and packages. The best method I found to ensure I got everything right was to test from a clean save at the beginning of the game and slow travel to my load door halfway across the map. I always found COC and fast travel to be unreliable.

[Mujuro]

I recently delved into making new cells for the 1st time, and what I've done hasn't been released publicly yet (though it will likely go to closed beta tonight or over the weekend). Regarding the mannequin issue, that's been around forever. You can try getting the fix for it. Given that I was new at this, and needed to integrate the new cells into an existing mod, here's what I did, and so far I've not had issues with cell caching, etc.

 

1. Create a savegame testing baseline from before entering ANY of the newly created cells.
   
2. Create iterative saves to test "new" stuff you put in.
   
3. Consider using version control in the CK and work off iterative ESPs if you have multiple cells (that's pretty much what I did with my new areas; after I was happy with a particular area, I'd merge it into my main ESP).
   

[jedijas]

I leave a working shop one day, and come back to it the next day and it has changed things, like mannequins will be floating in the air, or rugs i put down will no longer be visible, or it just plain won't load at all.

 

This is caused when the esp you are working on is not set as the active file when you are loading the data in creation kit. You should select the skyrim.esm and your mod.esp and set the .esp as the active file. I had this problem when I started making cells but I'm not sure if this is the actual solution or I did something else that fixed the problem. Anyway, I hope this helps.