That quote wasn't from the read me. As I mentioned it was in the earlier thread (the "old thread" linked at the beginning of this thread)

In case you didn't know, Blade117 made http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=8442 for Starfire's original.

Elaura is talking with Hrnchamd about making it so that the new NPCs can be added like grass and other ground cover plants are added to distant land. More than likely we'll be making a new mod or gutting the original one (mainly removing the leveled lists from towns, wilderness, etc.) and then doing a bottom up revamp. I like the idea of letting the player decide who spawns where, but we're still very much in the idea phase. As for your question, Mortimer, just load this up with whatever landmass mod(s) you use and make sure this is active. Then go to the cells you want new NPCs to spawn in and drop in a copy of the leveled lists; they should spawn in the next time you enter that cell. If they don't, you may have to wait 72 hours if they don't for the engine to do its cleaning.

I look forward to you all's work when it does get to that stage. I didn't realize that abot's water life and maybe some of his other mods checked FPS; I'm in the habit of just doublechecking for mod compatibility, installing and playing

I continue using your lite edition in the meantime. Although the FPS hit and stupid guars can get annoying at times, it's still better than a ghost town. Oh, one thing I notice in my games is that for some reason the NPCs like to end up clustering in a group at times, as if they get stuck. That happens to me a lot in Caldera for some reason. It's rather funny to be walking along and then come across a crowd of say ten or so NPCs in front of Irgola's shop. The other thing I notice and always wonder is why do some of the traveling merchants have two, sometimes three guars; I've always chalked it up to immersion but sometimes wondered if the guar is being doubled by error.

I think you're getting some doubling, JH2011. I've had it in my games before, but not in this particular install. I don't know what causes it or how to fix it, but it seems possible that the day/night scripting isn't disabling one guar before putting another there. It is also possible that is the cause of your clustered NPCs. Maybe you could back up your save, uncheck the mod, clean the save with Mash, load it again and wait 72 hours, then save and add the mod back in. If it isn't a scripting conflict with another mod, this should clean out your game of extra extras and give you a better experience.

Elaura, it'll be awhile before I run into the guar doubling because I just started a new game (now in game day 6). I'm not sure I understand how using Wrye Mash now would help because I use Wrye Mash to install all the mods and always use it on saved games when I update a mod. But I do rely upon visually inspecting the color codes of the installers, mods and saved games to indicate problems, so I could have missed something but don't think so. I'm using Jac's version of Starfire Lite NPC Additions, not the ver 1.11 I mentioned earlier.

I can't put it in a way that makes sense even to me, but I suspect the crowds gathering is a function of random paths converging in the city rather than any doubling because the crowds disperse within a few game hours, such as when I sleep. I just have to ascribe it to some magical math such as chaos theory or fluid dynamics but have no solid reason for my belief, only that the in-game behavior seems to fit with descriptions of said behavior from layman articles I've read (a long time ago)

So far as I can tell, there is a day script that spawns certain NPCs during the day and a night script that spawns others at night. If these scripts run day-night-day-night without stopping then by day two, conceivably you could have 4 NPCs (or guars) where you should only have one. That's what I was talking about. Starting a game and adding or removing mods from your load order, might precipitate this problem and cleaning the savegame might fix it.

Simply using mash to install and uninstall doesn't affect load order doubling or any errors left in your savegame. If you haven't added, removed, or changed anything since you started your game, then Mash won't help anyway.

The reason I suggest you may have a problem, is that I have run Starfires NPCs for years and have always had the issue with the guars, until this time, when I didn't mess with my load order after starting a new game.

That heppens sometimes in my games where my char is in a cave or inside and loses track of time clearing out the place. He may start around 6 p.m. and before you know it, it's 8 a.m. It's not a game breaking thing, because I can easily accept that some merchants carry more gear than others, therefore needing more pack animals, though I sure wish they had more gold to work with It's the hit on FPS, more than anything else.

I haven't had occasion to tinker with my load order for this game as far as mods that use an esm or esm file. I have replaced some pluginless mods the other day due to newer releases. Wrye Mash handles those easily enough, thank goodness But the pluginless mods shouldn't cause doubling as far as I understand it.

No, they shouldn't. Not at all. If you haven't added or subtracted any plugins then there's no need to worry about cleaning. There could still be a conflict, preventing the NPC scripts from getting to the "disable" stage, that would be interesting to track down.

Just saw this project and I'd like to say that I fully support it! This would be fantastic around cities that kill fps. i still need to look at adding those dresses to starfire's mod for you Elaura. I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet...

what about unique NPCs? starfire's adds some unique NPCs (like a vendor that only appear in Night Time near the Silt Strider in Balmora) with unique dialog, are you guys planning on doing something similar too?

Maybe. For those who can afford the FPS, we'll do our best to make our mod compatible with Starfire's original so her unique NPC's will still be there if you want them. We haven't really decided on implementation yet. We may do scripts with names, classes, races, and inventories randomly generated and have class-specific dialog rather than totally unique.