Since Wrye Mash only allows a total of 250 mods to be loaded (from what I can tell anyway), i'm trying to combine some mods to save space. These combined .esp's have just been for towns, items...only basically static-related mods (no scripts, NPC changes or anything similar have been combined). The LGNPC series has 12 seperate .esp's for different parts of Vvardenfell, as well as the Bloodmoon/Tribunal expansions and the Nerevarine. I'd love to use these mods, but it would put me over my limit of mods. If 250 mods is indeed the limit, i'd like to combine these mods. My first problem is that whenever I try loading these in the CS, it crashes. I manually selected the MW.esm rather than let these mods select their own dependancies. Is there a way to successfully load these without having the CS crash on me? And if there IS a way, is it wise to combine these mods together?

Cyrano has stated that it's not a good idea to combine the LGNPC mods. If you do want to combine them, you'll need to load them into the CS without selecting any as active, then creating a new plugin. Note that if you do not load up all three master files (Morrowind, Tribunal, and Bloodmoon), you'll have the 72 "evil" GMSTs and will need to clean those out of the plugin. If you want to try combining them, go ahead, just remember that they are being updated (albeit slowly), so you'll need to incorporate those changes into your merged mod when they're released. I would advise against merging Pax Redoran into that mod, though, due to the number of changes and additions it makes.

Yeah. They seem a bit delicate. I might pass on using them this time around.

It's not really Wrye Mash that is limting you to 250. It's Morrowind itself. That's how many esp/esm it can load at once.

I highly recommend the LGNPC mods, they are great and well made. You can always have one character that uses them, but turns off 12 less used mods.

They do seem really good, but at the moment I have 235 mods installed, and im still working on a few retexes. I reached well beyond 250 with my intended mods in an initial setup, and just decided rather than uninstall some of them (i've done this and ended up deleting important meshes/textures), I started from scratch. It seems like I have all the basic necessities installed as of now, so technically I may be able to use all of the LGNPC mods with 3 slots left over. Hmm, decisions, decisions. Do these conflict with any other NPC dialog mods such as NPC Functionality? I did have Lore Fix in the mix, but since LGNPC already has something similar, I deleted it.

You really do not want to try to merge the LGNPC mods. There must be others that are far more suitable.

Alternatively, assess your replacers. You may find there a pluginless replacers available that are just as suitable. Many replacers can be converted to pluginless too. They only have an esp because the texture names are different. If you rename all the provided textures to the vanilla name....

Yeah, I don't dare combine them. I do have them all in my game though. I'm presently using 240 mods, but when I try to merge objects with TESTool, it crashes. This crash seems to occur once TESTools reaches a file called UG2PhaseC_v07. It's an .esp created by someone (can't remember who right now) to repair crashes and other problems with The Underground 2. I haven't used this .esp before, but I HAVE used The Underground 2 in a game and didn't have this TESTool problem. I personally have never had this problem with TESTools until now, but I have read that it does happen to other people. I know that there's a new program called Esper by eeeickythump (http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1067443-wip-new-merge-objects-program/page__pid__15511920__st__0&#entry15511920) although I have yet to try it. Anyone out there tested that out yet?


Edit: I also notice it's a command-line program, and i'm not very familiar with how to use those. I also have Windows 7, so I think it's a little different.

If you need to free some slots, you may try the following trick: load TESPCD, select "Choose active plugins", and make a global conflict detection. Then take a full list of your mods (extract the according section from Morrowind.ini) and scratch out every mod that happens to be in the conflict list at least once. What remains, will be safe to merge into a single multi-esp. Thematically, of course, it will be a mess of apples and oranges, but as long as you only care for free space, it should be all right.

Uh oh.
That's me.
I'm really hoping it's still not a problem. I was having issues with TESTool if you follow this thread http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1060060-the-underground-2-patch-project/page__st__40
Could I ask you to do a big favor and try again using this link http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?55zo2gusi3ffb9t
It could be that you have the earlier upload of this (I'm hoping) and that trying the new one will fix you.
If it's still a problem could you please make it known what procedure you're using so I can run some tests. If anyone else is messed up, any light that can be shed on this would be appreciated.

Ok, huskobar. I don't know about this stuff to know for certain if that mod is causing the problem, but I have noticed it happened at least 3 or 4 times once it got there. I was going to skip TU2 this time around, but it does look like a great mod. I'm still in the middle of adding mods to my game, so i'll put it back in. I'm pretty sure that was the same link (it was the very last comment by you in that thread if I remember correctly). I know TESTools crashes if you try merging a bunch of mods, or so i've read. I could just take a vanilla game and test it out if that would good enough. That way I wouldn't have to worry about whetehr any other mods were conflicting.


Edit: On second thought, maybe it would be best if I had other mods installed. I suppose you're more concerned with merging rather than the TU2 fix itself.

My main concern is that the fix is what's causing problems for merging. I don't know a lot about what I'm doing, so it makes me nervous to think I've done something that causes crashes. But I guess that's what the process is all about - letting other people try the mod to see who has problems and who doesn't, so thanks for the feedback.
Anyway, I just ran a few tests merging about 3 groups of mods (20 or so in a group, some big some small) and I got crashing with an old homemade mod, but The Underground patch itself didn't seem to have a problem. And yes, it would be best to have it run with other mods to see if there are any it doesn't get along with.

Testools merge functions don't work properly and the merge dialogues is especially hazardous and potentially gamebusting, my guess is it could be that Testool corrupts the esp/esm files it is only supposed to read from. It happened to me once , after using Testool's merge functions i wasn't able to load save games or even start a new game so i ended up installing everything from scratch.

Ancient wisdom (it appears now, and if I remember correctly) was that merging dialogue using TESTool possibly wasn't a great idea, and would probably break some things.

Merging objects using TESTool (or maybe anything, but definitely TESTool) was extremely frowned upon, and would definitely break things.

I think the consensus was that TESTool was a very good effort for its time, but that it had been well and truly surpassed by Mash, etc.

I'll defer to more ES-technically qualified people, but that's my recollection.

I think you're confusing leveled list merging with object merging - TESTool's merge objects function works just fine as long as you don't try to merge together too many plugins; Wrye Mash is the recommended choice for leveled list merging over leveled list merging with TESTool, but Wrye Mash is not capable of merging objects.

I use Wrye Mash for leveled list merging and TESTools for merging objects. I did read about TESTools merge dialogue option being a bad idea, and haven't used that funcion in a few years now. I was happy to see Esper being created, but last time I noticed, it still had problems and wasn't really being worked on anymore. We (the MW community) definitely need another merging tool.

@ huskobar - I plan on hopefully getting all my mods in order today and trying to start a new game. I'll keep this topic updated.

Edit: tetchy, I know this is way off the subject of this topic or even Morrowind itself, but i'm in a local band here with a guy who created something called Nerdcore hip hop back in the 90's. He formed a project called MC Hawking and even got the permission and approval to do it from Stephen Hawking himself. It's good for a laugh anyway. He has vids on Youtube.


And now back to the matter at hand...

Edit: @ huskobar: I tried merging my 205 mods into a single .esp using TESTools 4 times and it kept crashing once it hit the Mournhold Expanded COM.esp. I don't really think it has anything to do with your mod. Aside from that, I thought i've merged this many mods before with no problems. I'm afraid to use Esper though at this point. I might just play the game without merging anything, although I don't feel comfortable with doing that.

I am having a hard time seeing how merging the the .esps in the cs would break the plug-ins, especially if one were to go into TESPCD first and manually edit all conflicts between the lgnpc mods and then delete any entry to be overwritten so that there is no chance of of the cs using the wrong entry.

Would anyone care to explain how that would break anything?

TESTool merge objects works well, and so far is the only tool doing object merging well. It has a text buffer limit though, so when you process a lot/big of mods it often overflows. You have to split your loaded mod list, generate a merge_objects.esp, rename it (for instance mrg1.esp), load mrg1.esp + the second half of mod list, generate merge_objects.esp.
The more/big mods, the more iterations necessary to avoid text buffer overflow.

I never realized you could do that, abot. I thought merging twice would maybe double some things, or cause other problems. I wonder if not merging all the necessary mods would cause CTD's or FPS problems. Does anyone know if that is the case?