Editing Help for Merged Patch

[bigv32]

I have long been a user of the "edits" from Fallout3 to New Vegas to Skryim. However, one thing I have always wondered, so I thought I would finally just ask.

 

I was wondering about some of the conflicts that mods have when I filter my load order. These conflicts do not seem major (to me anyways), but I just wanted to make sure. These conflicts are unique in that they some mods agree and some mods dont agree, so when a merged patch is made, the middle ones are left out. (I do understand that there are some differences that are the intent of the mod makers to make their mods work. I am not talking about those.) Here are a few examples.

 

When I filter,

 

1. Many workspace areas differ between mods simply because one area has been marked "compressed" while other haven't. The main mods that comes to mind is the Warzones and King of Riverhelm mods. Many of their edited workspaces are not marked "Compressed" while most other mods that add things to the area (such as some of the lantern mods) leave the zones as compressed.

 

2. For some armor mods (immersive armors comes to mind), the areas marked for the body type are slightly different. I am not saying they are totally different so as to be a mod authors choice. There are two areas dealing with the body. One mod has one area filed in while the other has the other area filled in. Both of these areas convey the same information, but there is a conflict winner and losers here as well.

 

Along the same lines, the keywords for these items also changes. Say the Skyrim.esm has 3 keywords while the next mod has 4 while the next mod has 4, but one is different from the second mod. The merged patch now has 5 words, but the middle two mods now show up as conflicts.

 

3. Again dealing with the world spaces, some areas in some mods have min/max x y values while others are blank. In these cases, each mod either agrees witht the skryim.esm or the update.esm.

 

 

Now for my question. What I have been doing is going through and making my merged patch basically eleminate as many conflicts like these as possible without obviously changing what the mod author intended. So for the first example, I go a head and mark the warzones worldspaces as compressed. I go back and alter the esp's of the armor mods so that they to have the new keywords and agree with each other. Simply put, I make it so that when TESV Edit filters for conflicts, there are as few Red words and/or highlights as possible.

 

Is this sort of editing good for the game in terms of stability? In my experience, it does seem to help, but I wanted the opinions or facts from people who are better than me at this sort of thing.

 

PS: I know this takes a long time and I know that theoretically if I add a new mod after doing this, some bad things could happen. I am just asking as a person who pretty much has his load order set in terms of major mods.

[bigv32]

Does anyone have anything to add or at least some advice? It would be nice to know this stuff going forward lol. Edited December 28, 2012 by bigv32

[rickerhk]

A plugin conflict is merely two or more mods that change the same form. It's only 'bad' if the results aren't to your liking. Manipulating the merged patch to fit your preferences is the way to go. That's what I've been doing since FO3.

 

If you have plugins where certain records aren't compressed - like actors or cells, that's an indication that the plugin was made/saved by a third party tool, like TesSnip with compression turned off. Not sure why they would do that except to try and bypass problems with corruption in compressed forms with that tool. I would be careful of these mods and just monitor the user threads to see if people are having CTD issues. If you have other plugins that override these uncompressed records with properly compressed ones, I would load them after. Flipping the compressed bit won't fix corruption if it is already there.