AlphaWoIF Posted October 20, 2012 Share Posted October 20, 2012 (edited) Got a big mod that is fast approaching a 400mb + file size and in the interests of me being able to manage my work on certain areas of the mod easier as its getting seriously confusing sometimes i would like to know the best practice of taking particular content from the mod and making those parts i choose a standalone plugin for the mod instead of being in the core file.without me having to redo the work already done by recreating it from scratch. this would help me better concentrate on what area i intend to maintain and fix and would also give fans the option to add what parts they want or not to the main mod as they see fit, while at the same shrink my files size down in to nice modules. what about this new TES5Edit_3_0_22_EXPERIMENTAL.could it be done with that. as i tried in the past with older version without much sucsess Edited October 20, 2012 by AlphaWoIF Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AnkhAscendant Posted October 20, 2012 Share Posted October 20, 2012 What I tend to do when I need alternate version of a mod I was din is duplicate the file and use the Details screen in the CK loading box to delete changes I've made. If you have done a lot and need to break it up into many smaller files that method might still not be as ideal as copy-pasting all the changes you want into a new file, but at least it would stop you having to redo everything completely. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Brasher Posted October 20, 2012 Share Posted October 20, 2012 You might make the portion of your mod that will never change into an .esm so that it will be read-only and you can do your work in small .esps. What you want to do is perfectly doable but things are likely to go wrong and it may take a long time to do the work and then repair everything that got damaged while doing the work. Skyrim mods have the tendency to get badly corrupted when you remove large parts of them. Especially if you have multiple masters involved. I have a lot of trouble with multiple master load order flip. Adjusting the master list load order is not something that the software is good at, and it is very difficult to predict the master list load order. Wrye Bash can't even read the master list load order properly and tells you something different than what the CK tells you. I believe what the CK tells you is the truth in this instance. But maybe your mod does not have masters besides Skyrim and Dawnguard and I am going off on a tangent. You can use modcleaning in the CK to remove large portions of a copy of a mod to make a variant. You can also use TES5Edit to do the very same thing. They both do an equally good job, but many people like the TES5Edit interface better. After you remove all this content, you will need to load in the CK and resave so that the CK can auto-fix certain errors. You will need to inspect your work closely to look for damage and corruption. You may need to reconnect or rebuild some things and make sure that nothing important was deleted by accident. You will need to playtest to make sure that Skyrim can still start and run with your mod variant installed and activated. You will want to playtest to make sure your mod still does what it is supposed to after the major surgery. It sounds like maybe you are wanting to build multiple mod variants for different kinds of users and will need to do the above process several times. In some cases you will be able to chop or edit a copy of one of your variants rather than chopping or editing the base mod. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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