SSE Two Questions: Polymorph NPCs and Facegen Conflicts

[PastChristmas]

Now that my mod has been published, I find myself needing to ask more questions, however I will just keep to two for now.

 

I want to expand my mod to improve the witches of Skyrim, moreover I discovered that previously in the lore they were able to change shape. I successfully modified the vanilla polymorph Skeever script so that NPCs can cast spells that change their race and turn themselves back after the effect runs out. What I didn't anticipate was that if an NPC dies in their polymorph shape spawned again, they will respawn in their polymorph state and be stuck that way. It seems to me that the NPC must change back to previous race before they are called on to spawn again for this kind of spell to be of any use, but even if I add code to run "OnEffectEnd" their death stops the code from taking effect. Does anyone have any possible solutions? Maybe a way for the code to transform the corpse back in to their previous race? My current idea is for them to be an animal for their non-combat state and to change to change to mage form when they fight.

 

My second question revolves around the infamous gray face issue. My mod adds new NPCS, so I anticipated this would be an issue. Once I had CTRL+F4'd all my new NPCs and saved their facegen data to meshes and textures, I was able to run WICO on my NPCs with no issues. I made sure to keep my facegen in a BSA for added protection alongside my .esp when I uploaded my file hoping that would be enough, but a mod user commented that they were still experiencing the gray face bug with my NPCs. They were using Tempered Skins, but my mod loaded afterwards, ostensibly he'd done everything right. This leaves me perplexed and I have no idea how to remedy this user's problem, is there anything I could be forgetting?

[TheWhispers]

.bsa can be unstable and weird I've noticed. For example I installed WICO and put it last in my load order... I still have to go into CK every hour to fix and NPC facegen because they have the black face. I know it's WICO because the export facegen doesnt do anything unless I load the WICO - Immersive People.esp into CK alongside Skyrim.esm... This pisses me off so bad. I'm going to dig through their BSA and see if I can just extract any facegendata out of it.

.bsa is great.. when it works. I recommend making a archive that has all the loose facegendata of your NPCs that people can drop effortlessly into their game folder in case they have this issue. This way you've provided the files for all of your specific NPCs, saving people like me loads of time so they don't have to go into CK and root out all your NPCs and export their facegen.

WICO is seriously pissing me off as it is the only Character appearance overhaul i use whatsoever, but I'm just about done with it.

 

As far as your NPCs messing up. If it is a spell that does all of this then there is an option in the magical effect dialog box to make sure that the spell automatically dispels on death. However to avoid the death cancelling your operations you could make them change back when they are under a certain health threshold.

 

I'm no expert, and finding modding knowledge that isn't from youtube is really really hard, especially with how vague the CK wiki is.

I've also heard of modders making a copyduplicate npc and safely storing away the original. The copy could be transformed and when the copy dies just place the original at the death location of the copy and then .kill() the original

Edited November 7, 2019 by TheWhispers

[PastChristmas]

WICO is one of those mods that strives to improve remain faithful to the original look, which is something I believe we both respect, that said you may have more patience than I!

After taking another look at my mod user's load order again, I see there may be other mod conflicts than just tempered skins that may be the issue, but you've given me good reason to think the BSA may be an issue here. Trouble is, although I would like to release my mod's facegen as loose files, but the uncompressed the size of both folders totalled to more than 2GB, and I'm adding even more NPCs with my next update. Perhaps l can encourage users to extract my facegendata with Bethesda Archive Extractor and give that a try if they have issues?

If only I read this sooner, as I trial-and-error'd my way through my own script a few hours ago. It works mostly like your example says. The NPC suffers damage and attempts to heal themselves with my "healing" spell. My scripted magical effect causes them to disengage combat, play a transformation animation, then my original NPC is swapped for another under the cover of some conjuration special effects.

Thanks for your help!

[TheWhispers]

O

 

 

WICO is one of those mods that strives to improve remain faithful to the original look, which is something I believe we both respect, that said you may have more patience than I!

After taking another look at my mod user's load order again, I see there may be other mod conflicts than just tempered skins that may be the issue, but you've given me good reason to think the BSA may be an issue here. Trouble is, although I would like to release my mod's facegen as loose files, but the uncompressed the size of both folders totalled to more than 2GB, and I'm adding even more NPCs with my next update. Perhaps l can encourage users to extract my facegendata with Bethesda Archive Extractor and give that a try if they have issues?

If only I read this sooner, as I trial-and-error'd my way through my own script a few hours ago. It works mostly like your example says. The NPC suffers damage and attempts to heal themselves with my "healing" spell. My scripted magical effect causes them to disengage combat, play a transformation animation, then my original NPC is swapped for another under the cover of some conjuration special effects.

Thanks for your help!

 

 

You can keep them loose without keeping them uncompressed. Use the most powerful compression method you can and make an archive that matches the folder hierarchy of the base game. You can do this by just putting a folder anywhere and building the hierarchy of folders within them and naming the parent folder your mod name. Then you can right click the parent folder and compress it.. then when a user opens it they can click the parent folder in the archive.. select all.. then drag and drop into their base game.

As far as WICO goes, keeping everything at the end of your load order list and ripping all facegendata from their BSA will ensure no black face bugs. I have zero now.

Most would fail to install your mod properly they had to go into BSA extractor and mess around with this and that. A lot of people wanting to use mods get way too confused doing a simple task like that. Keep it drag and drop whenever you can.

 

This keeps your bug tab from blowing up and saves everyone time in the long run.

[PastChristmas]

I'll try that with my next update next week, my main file will have the compressed loose files and I will present the BSA version as an alternative for those confident they won't suffer any compatibility issues. They will also be encouraged to keep my mod as well as the conflicting mods low on their load order list.

 

Thanks again.