[SUMMARY] Quest mod, Five Blind Mice, is dirty and does not have a patch.

I mentioned in a previous post that Atatar (a Aylied ruin for the fighters guild) was messed up.
Well it took a while, but FINALLY I was able to disect the cause of this problem.

An epic quest mod, called Five Blind Mice, seems to have a bug (and no patch for it) where many dungeon activators do not work, and apparently if you have SI, you can't do anything. So,longs-story-short; the mod is really messy.

Why am I saying this? Well first of all to give anyone a heads-up about it before downloading it. I am still intrested in this mod, as I can tell they put a lot of work into it, the voice acting is not that bad, and the quality of the audio is really good as well. However, It should be known, do not activate this mod until you are ready to play through it. In the mean time I suppose I should keep it off since it has prevented me from not only doing dungeon runs, but preventing some quests to progress.

Aside from warning you guys, I would also like to request that someone see about patching it. I don't know if the original author exists or not, but if someone could see about contacting him and letting him know, or asking for permission to make a patch for it, then that would be awesome (Yes, I, myself, am going to take the time too to contact him. The more people who bug him, the more likely he will do it)

thank you guys a lot!

Is it dirty in such a way as it can't simply be cleaned with TES4Edit? Why does it need a patch?

There is a script compiling error. Do not use that mod. I do not know that it is still being worked on either.

No the authors openly stated not to use it and no simple cleaning will not work.

It is an abandoned mod.

I am just going to use the mod to play through it once, afterwards I will deactivate it, because I can appreciate the work they put in to everything else.

The scripts...do not play...nevermind...

The mod is much more broken than merely the activator scripts. You can of course try it out, but chances are very high that even if you uninstall it, any saves made with it installed will be so messed up that you will encounter un-recoverable problems. But as long as you are prepared to start a new game (or go back to an old save) after uninstalling it again, you should be fine.

Sounds like it needs cleaning and fixing, not patching. And don't encourage people to contact him. The more "people who bug him" the higher the chance that he'll get annoyed and just tell everyone to leave him alone. Though "him" is in fact a team of four, according to the credits.



I'd be happy to take a look at it, see if I can fix it. Ntom, let me know what response you get. My intent would be to fix the original ESP itself then send it to the mod authors to test as much as they want, then for them to upload.

As I recall when I looked at this last, it's a serious mess. Simple cleaning won't cut it. It's filled with wild edits too. I was going to do a proper cleanup on it back then but the authors told me via PM not to bother because they weren't interested in messing with it anymore. So I tossed it in the bit bucket.

That is rather sad, you know? It seems like they put a lot of work into it. Scripted boss fights, story driven quest, good audio work...I wish it wasn't such a mess, but I guess I will just dump it.

Hypothetically speaking here, for a moment; What if a group of people (either the same team or another with permission) were to completely re-make it starting just from the Master .ESM and nothing else. Not working on the already made plugin, but starting from nothing. I would imagine, a few things may have to be changed due to the messy nature, but I am sure a lot of it could hold its integrity. The team wouldn't need to find voice actors, since the lines have already been recorded. I am sure that would be a lot of work, though, and I was simply speaking hypothetically.

Very sad indeed, it is a well designed and challenging quest with good voice acting, rewards and story.
It would be a real treasure if it were fixed...
But yeah, that would be more of a rework.

If the mod itself works as designed, and the only problem is that it breaks vanilla scripts by rewriting them instead of using new ones (as it sounds like based on the issues described), then it's fixable.

I looked it over and gave it up. It was so full of wild edits that only the designers would have an idea if they were intentional or not. And as long as they no longer support the mod, I think it's a lost cause.

Well, I did play through the quest without game-breaking problems.
The 'activator bug'(this mod caused every activator to be rendered inactive) was removed by uninstalling the mod(or even in the 1.1 patch?)

Are there truly that many wild edits that they can't be traced down manually?

1.1 patch notes:

Bugfixes:*Fixed an errant trigger that was causing a storyline script to run if the player ran over a certain monster spawning node in 'The Cage'.*Rebalanced the Sleepwalking Alyeid in 'The Cage'. The skeletons should now have significantly less max Hp at higher levels, making them killable.Cosmetic Fixes:*Fixed Helseth Norring's name. He is Helseth, not Halseth.*Fixed several lore-related misspellings.Compatability Fix:*Moved the entrance to the Wealdwater Mines two cells east to prevent conflict with the 'Elder Council' mod. Hopefully this will be far enough to preventoddities.Known minor bugs etc.:* Cobl compatability is still pending. Looking for this to go into 1.2* In the beginning, there are two lines of voice acting missing from Celed's dialog. We're still looking to see if we actually recorded it.* The FBM quest, in the quest log, does not have an icon yet. Pending for 1.2* Outpacing Torrin may cause the quest to fail, forcing you to repeat the run sequence. Not too big an issue, since its very, very difficult to outrun Torrin. Scheduled to fix in 1.2

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/993435-relz-five-blind-mice-v11-quest/page__st__120__p__15073985&#entry15073985 what bg2408 had to say about it back in october:

Hehe, how subtle.
Does sound pretty final, yes.
Pitty.

Strange how such a big project can be done with that kind of limits in Cs usage.

I downloaded and installed that mod several months ago. I started playing it but then read all the horrors about it so I stopped and deactivated it in my mod list. From what I'm reading here, my game may be terminally affected. I've been playing along ever since and don't think I'm suffering from any residual contamination but I think I should try to find out before I go any further.

Is there some way I can test my game to see if it still has problems left over from that bad mod?

Yeah, I tries this mod a while ago and fell in love with it. The story and immersion is really well done. But it got to a point where It was too buggy to let me finish it, so I grudgingly uninstalled it. I've always hoped it would be patched or fixed. It's one of the top five mods I'd ideally like in my LO. If I were CS savvy I'd take a stab at it myself. If someone else were to I'd be happy to hear it. Cheers.

FYI, I've fixed it.

REALLY!?! awesome! is the version on tesnexus the fixed one?

That's a pretty subtle message for something so amazing

No, I only just got home from work and fixed it. I'll need to know that the original authors are happy for it to be released before anyone else can have the file though.

well let us all know when you got the file up! that would be absolutely amazing to see this fixed!

Erm, I'm waiting on you

Who did you try to contact, and how? Or didn't you get around to it yet? If you didn't, let me know, and I'll attempt to make contact myself.

oh sorry, slipped my mind, I will go and see if there is someone I can contact right now.

EDIT:
Well I was hoping the readme of the file would show me some place to contact them, but, no.
I went to the TESNexus download page and mailed the uploader there, but there are 2 problems I am concerned with by doing that
1) the person is just an uploader, not an author
2) the person does not check their mail, or go to TESNexus anymore