Error checking in workflow

[ShabnamHoward]

I am accustomed to multiperson development teams working on commercial shrink wrapped software, and I guess it has spoiled me a bit.

 

Looking at where my time is going, I see that much of the lag time is in discovering errors much later than when I made them. For example, after having loaded Creation Kit, done some unrelated other tasks, then exercised something affected by the error whereupon there is unexpected behavior or CK crashes and I have to figure out what the cause might have been, only to go and find it was something trivial- like I had decided to enforce a new naming convention which broke some detail of a compound object, and typoed the name.

 

Watching multiple Youtubes of different experienced modders, I see this sort of Pita (exit/ reboot ck or game reboot time lag) for error checking is not an uncommon annoyance for Modders- there are frequent breaks where they need to reload after correcting some eror, and so on.

 

It seems to me this is all pretty avoidable wastage of our collective time and that it would be handy for the entire community to have a linker which uses the XEdit, Nifskope and Material editor libraries to go in and sanity check all the compound objects. The linker would have use for multiple games using Gamebryo/ Bethesda game engines.

 

The output would be the same sort of thing you would get out of the link step when running a project makefile on a C++ application. Like-

 

Sev4: Error MyCoolGun.esp(0x055E84) MSWP Shah_swpLndDirtBrown02 (MODS): File materials\ShaH\Landscape\Ground\Shah_swpLndDirtBrown02.bgsm Internal error:

Sev4: Normal file: textures\ShaH\Landscape\Ground\Shah_objLndDirtBrown01_n.dds : Invalid DDS type. Expected BC5/ATI2 format. Found: BC1/DXT1

 

Sev1: Error MyCoolGun.esp(0x055E84) MSWP Shah_swpLndDirtBrown02 (MODS): File materials\ShaH\Landscape\Ground\Shah_swpLndDirtBrown02.bgsm Internal error:

Sev4: Diffuse file: textures\ShaH\Landscape\Ground\Shah_objLndDirtBrown02_d.dds : Image dimension Invalid for BC1 compression- not a multiple of 4

Sev1: Diffuse file: textures\ShaH\Landscape\Ground\Shah_objLndDirtBrown02_d.dds : Image dimension Invalid- Dimension an Odd number value- CRASH Warning.

 

Sev4: Error MyCoolGun.esp(0x055E83) MSWP Shah_swpLndDirtBrown01 (MODS): File materials\ShaH\Landscape\Ground\Shah_swpLndDirtBrown01.bgsm not found

Sev4: Error MyCoolGun.esp(0x055E82) STAT ShaH_objLndGardenPlot01 (MODS): Shah_swpMatGroundDirt [MSWP:0x055E83] INVALID

 

Does such a tool exist, and if not, are there any collaborators interested in lending a hand on a GitHub project for such a utility? The idea is that it would be built for performance- to quickly give the modder an idea what fiddly bits need attention. Obviously, the number of possible inconsistent states are enormous, but the project would focus on the low hanging fruit kinds of errors that new modders most commonly run into. Naturally, there might be contributors only interested in put in a check for some obscure error that commonly plagues them/ their project team, and such contributions would also be welcome.

 

Any interest? Or does such a beast already exist?