Well in Oblivion those duplicate records are more often called Identical to master records (or ITM for short), but there is another set of records that are even more dangerous and that is deletions. So say a modder doesn't like that tree where he wants to place a house - he deletes it. This is no big deal if his mod loads last but if any mod loads after it that then tries to reference that deleted tree there are problems (usually ranging from crash on exit to an immediate ctd).
Are deletions an issue with morrowind mods too?
Yes it can happen in Morrowind mods; when running Vality's Bitter Coast Addon with Illuminated Windows you'll get:
'Object reference "flora_bc_fern_03" missing in master file.'
Can't remember which of the two does it but the one loading first has deleted the fern and then the one loading second wants to move it (for example) and the error is reported.
It sounds like these kind of errors are more serious in Oblivion. That's not the case with Morrowind. I think a lot of people will click Yes to continue (or have already learnt about AllowYesToAll=1 in morrowind.ini and don't even see the error message) and their game will carry on.
So, this happens but appears to be not as prevalent / not as serious in Morrowind than in Oblivion.
Note I have no experience of modding Oblivion (got the Collector's Edition sitting round here somewhere...)
Yeah, unfortunately while Morrowind has quite a few tools available for it, most aren't completely done so we have this kind of thing happen. That leads right back to why TESPCD didn't became the "IT" tool to replace TESTOOL despite the excellent GUI
I never used TESPCD before, but I'm curious what it did not do.
Then why is this the case when Morrowind has a long history of modding - Way longer than Oblivion and yet Oblivion has completed and functioning tools.
Well anyway - don't want to come off as bashing.
Well, the latest version (0.31) of TES Plugin Conflict Detector came out in 2003 and TESTool's final version was 2004. So, TESPCD's development was completed pretty much before Ghostwheel and TESTool came on the scene.
"Cleaning" of mods was something that started with TESPCD. It would compare a mod's records to those in the ESMs and delete those where the values were an exact match, "dirty" in TESPCD parlance. Also the evil GMSTS would be deleted.
You can tell TESPCD's age as it compares to all ESMs rather than just the Bethesda ones, I think it was released before modders were releasing their mods as ESMs.
TESTool then took this as a stage further by checking a Cell's ambient light and water height values. And some other stuff.
When TESTool came out I didn't even
realise this was a problem. Most modders who knew what they were doing (and weren't just releasing another Daedric armour recolour that was stuffed in the chargen barrel in Seyda Neen) would manually clean their mods using TESAME (TES Advanced Mod Editor), which allowed someone to manually inspect each record and subrecord and delete ones that were unintentionally changed.
Basically, before TESTool cleaning wasn't something the average mod user knew about let alone did.
I guess the difference between Oblivion and Morrowind is that people's experience of Morrowind led them to realise that mod cleaning was something that was needed and so tool(s) to do this were prepared before its release and developed afterwards. That's pretty much what Timeslip did with Oblivion Mod Manager.
So, for six years or so we've been perfectly happy cleaning mods with TESTool. There's a lot of gumf about "plugins you shouldn't clean with TESTool" (check out the discussion page on UESP, I really must get round to making that edit). I believe most of the plugins reported as being unsafe for cleaning were reported under the mistaken assumption that
all GMSTs were removed regardless of whether they were evil or not. I dunno. People, eh?
John.Moonsugar then tipped up and added to the things to clean with tes3cmd; the Junk Cells cleaning is, I believe unique. There could be other stuff as well.
[edit 2] what does this mean?:
Cache Invalidated for: tr_map2.esm (curr_size == 20122980, prev_size == 20124860
) at script/tes3cmd line 4899.
The cache file that was originally created isn't valid. I guess it goes; load tes3cmd, create cache file for tr_map2.esm, clean tr_map2.esm, load tes3cmd, notice tr_map2.esm has changed and so the previously created cache file is invalid and recreate it.
Yet another question ...
This time about implicit dependencies.
This is rarer in Oblivion modding.
I'm looking at the mod patches for Piratelords creatures and see that neither Creatures 6th house patch nor Creatures Great House Dagoth patch actually require those mods be active.
So if they are not required to be active - is that they only alter the creatures mod in a way that if they are active no harm done? Or are they actually referencing those mods just not in a way that is seen by mash or tes3cmd?
At this point I'm cleaning without them - hopefully no great harm from that.
In Morrowind plugin masters are invariably ESMs, I've only ever come across one plugin where an ESP was listed in the file's masters (RoHT TLSH Patch.esp). And that caused Mash to throw a tizzy so Wrye didn't expect it either. AFAIK, you'd need to manually edit the plugin header to get an ESP as a master; you couldn't do it through the Construction Set.
Oh wait - should Tribunal and Bloodmoon be cleaned?
I don't see the point. The reason behind cleaning is to remove any unnecessary, default entries from a plugin. The main reason for doing this is if plugin A has these default entries in and loads after plugin B which intentionally changes them you don't get the benefit of plugin B.
As the Bethesda ESMs load before everything else then you're not going to run into this problem.
I guess you may get a fractionally quicker game load (like pico seconds or something...)
Not really IIRC, but you can use http://yacoby.silgrad.com/MW/index.htm http://yacoby.silgrad.com/MW/Mods/escog.htm to see if a mod needs to be cleaned or not.
The escog will detect mods with both non-evil (black text) and evil (red text) GMST. However you shouldn't remove those GMST's that MPP and the official plugins has because they're harmless afaik.
And further you are stating that one should use a different program to see if a mod needs cleaning than one uses to clean with? I thought the point of ttes3cmd was that it was able to catch what other tools missed? Am I off base on this?
Yacoby's escog came out before tes3cmd. It merely runs through your Data Files folder and identifies those mods with the evil GMSTS in. It's nice to have everything checked at once but personally, I just use tes3cmd and let it do it's magic.
Here are the complete results of cleaning the DLC (not expansions - just the DLC):
So you are saying that these should not be cleaned either?
Clean them. Again, Bethesda's stuff was released before we knew about a lot of this dirty mod stuff.
[continued...]
[Edit: typos]
» Mon Aug 16, 2010 8:35 pm 
