SSE BSA questions and potential problems with my esp

[cumbrianlad]

Edit: consider this answered and skip to my later post on the subject to see the reduced and more concise questions. Thanks to Soupdragon1234 for fully answering the first question!

 

Hi.

 

Good job I wrote this today and not last night when I was about to throw the towel in!

 

At long last I have everything in my mod in a state that I'm at least resonably happy with. I decided to use the CK archive system to generate a BSA that I could check over. Ultimately, I was going to move all the loose files and see if the mod performed properly using the esp and a BSA. When I looked at the BSA in BAE (Bethesda Archive Extractor), I got a few shocks.

 

Easy things first (just advice wanted). CK's archive generator did not include any textures or voice files. I've got mods that have separate texture BSAs but none that have separate Voices BSAs, even though I know for certain that they contain voice files. When making the final BSAs for my mod, is there any good reason to make separate Texture and voice BSAs. I know Bethesda structure their BSA files this way, but I wondered if that was for convenience or if there was some advantage, for instance using different compression on textures, voices and meshes.

 

Next comes what alarmed me (Issue 1: moderate?). The BSA included 17 vanilla meshes. These are mostly meshes that I have used at some point but when I used them in a mash-up or to alter textures for a new ingredient etc, I opened the mesh from my extracted archives on a separate drive. I saved them in my own folders in Data\Meshes. SSE edit does not say I've edited any of the vanilla forms that use these meshes and checking in CK confirmed that. 5 of them I've never even opened in Nifskope. I extracted all 17 meshes from my own archive and compared them to the meshes in the archive Generated from Bethesda's BSAs. They are identical. Also, in-game the items are the same. Any idea what could be going on here?

 

Last was the one that alarmed me most (Issue 2: Very bad?). The BSA contained 3 vanilla .pex files...

 

defaultaliasondeathscript.pex, defaultsetstageonclosebook.pex and defaultsetstageonplayeraquire.pex.

 

I've used these scripts on certain quest aliases but didn't alter them in any way that I recall. Opening the psc versions in Notepad++ they look entirely vanilla. All I did was set the properties locally, ie edited the properties on the script attached to the alias. Again any clue as to why CK might think these 3 scripts need to be included in the BSA? I could include them, but not if this could affect any use of these scripts by the vanilla game or other mods. These 3 scripts all show up in the 'Scripts' folder in Data. Opening up the pex files from both Bethesda's Misc BSA and from the files in Data\scripts shows that the files are the same as the psc files but with added champollion comments, except that Events have been replaced by Functions. So, Event OnActivate(0 is swapped for Function OnActivate().

 

The Champollion comment at the start is simply remarks about the Champollion version. There are also some remarked comments like 'Skipped compiler generated GoToState' and remarked comments for headings such as properties, variables etc.

 

How bad is this and what can I do about it if I've somehow messed up these scripts?

 

Feel free to answer about any or all of the issues. If you want to focus on one only, that's fine. Any and all advice is very much appreciated.

 

Edit: with respect to the meshes question, I've noticed that each and every item is one that is altered by SMIM. I've got this installed and have it deployed when I'm playing the game for fun. I don't disable it when working in CK. It was deployed when I made the BSA. I've never noticed before, but I just checked and CK renders the SMIM meshes when it is deployed.

[soupdragon1234]

I always open the Archive.exe tool directly rather than go via the CK which makes too many mistakes/screws things up.

 

Create a folder called Data, put all your files in their appropriate subfolders inside that i.e. Meshes, Sounds, Scripts etc. You can include Textures as well or create a separate {MyMod} - Textures.bsa. XboxOne should always have a separate {MyMod} - Textures.bsa.

 

Drag 'n' drop the Data folder into the Archive window. You should see all the files listed. Under the Edit dropdown click Check All Items.

 

Tick boxes as appropriate i.e. Meshes, Textures, Sounds, etc I've never bothered ticking any others except maybe Menus if it has those. I also tick Retain File Names and Retain Strings as I find that sometimes sounds won't play if you don't, your mileage may vary. A separate Textures.bsa can also have Compress Archive ticked and should for Xbox as they have limited storage for mods. Save.

 

Enjoy your archive!

Edited May 4, 2020 by soupdragon1234

[cumbrianlad]

Thanks for that. That is the tool i was going to use for the final version. this was just a test to see... until it turned into a nightmare. I think your comment about the 'Compress Archive' checkbox for textures answers why it's probably better to save textures separately. I'll bundle all the others into 1 BSA, but since I have many MB of textures even after re-doing all but normal files and any with transparency as DXT1, the size of the textures folder is big. I'll even do a test and make 1 textures BSA with that checked and 1 without to see the final difference in file size.

 

The 'Retain strings' comment is useful, too, since i doubt I'd have thought of it.

 

Cheers, mate!

 

Actually, I'm quite glad I did it now. 1, it may have found problems I didn't know existed and 2, comparing what was in the BSA with my meshes folder, it highlighted test versions of meshes that I ultimately didn't use but forgot to remove from the meshes folder. these are now gone. out of 171 meshes 10 were redundant, but 3 of these were pretty big meshes, so that's cut 10% or so off the meshes folder. it also highlighted 1 instance where I'd re-used one of my old meshes. I'd put the nif into the right place, but mistakenly left the form in CK pointing to the original folder. That has now been put right.

[cumbrianlad]

Okay, maybe this is premature... I get like that. Right now I'm listening to Rachmaninov's 2nd piano concerto, so I'm resonably calm. When it hits the 2nd movement, all will be totally placid.

 

I got convinced that I'd messed up those 3 pesky pex files, so I verified my local files on Steam and downloaded again (it found one). I then cleaned the masters. After that I deleted the pex files from the 'scripts' folder. Now I'm going to test on a clean save. I know damn fine where I used one of the scripts. I used it multiple times on several actor aliases. It was in a quest that 'allow repetaed stages' was checked. Each time a certain type of actor died, a stage was set. In that stage, a specific amount of gold was removed from a 'Mercy Chest'. If the player goes through the level without killing any of the soft targets they get the maximum gold as a reward... if they slaughter everything, they get nothing. That's the way it goes.

 

I'm now going to reload a clean save and see if the 'Mercy Quest' works. If it does, that proves that the 'defaultaliasondeathscript' has not been corrupted by my esp... if it doesn't work, I'll be playing Eminem or Megadeath, Linkin Park, Metallica or Motorhead and you'll probably hear it from wherever you are. This could be taken as a bad sign... or not, if you like any of the aforementioned bands. Ready your ear-plugs just in case!

 

Edit: if you haven't played Skyrim whilst listening to Rachmaninov, I'd recommend it.

 

Edit 2: Linkin Park is now playing: 'The Hunting Party', no less. Is that bad? Depends on how you look at it. I spent 3 hours trawling through my own mod. Jeez, but it's hard, even at level 22. Got to the end without killing anything, got the full 13,000 gold reward and realised it didn't prove a thing! The only proof would have been if I had killed 1 or more enemies. That would have displayed messages on screen and reduced the 13,000 pot, thus proving that the script was working . Trouble was I got so involved, logic went out of the window.

 

In the wastelands of today, when tommorow disappears...

 

Edit 3: Proper test for the script problem. The scripts fire properly even with the pex versions deleted from the scripts folder. I'm stumped. I'll make another BSA in CK and see if it includes these scripts again. If it does, I don't know what to do.

 

Edit 4: I've made 2 BSA files, a main BSA and a 'textures' BSA. I removed all loose files from the data folder and backed them up, then installed the BSA files in the Data folder, so that the game had no loose files to work with. Everything worked as expected. All quests ran correctly, all models and textures were loaded. To my mind, this doesn't prove that there is no need for the meshes and scripts that CK put into the BSA... they could still exist somewhere on my PC and I just haven't tracked them down. Nevertheless, it's a good start. I'll put on a new post, since one question has been perfectly answered by soupdragon1234. The new post will more concisely state the remaining 2 questions.