:)

Thanks, you guys!



Aha! Makes sense now. I updated the description with this clarification. Thanks!



:)

Thanks for these suggestions!

I don't understand number 1 :confused: Are you saying that if an object needs a parent, make it a new rather than use a vanilla, or are you saying that any moved vanilla or new object needs a parent when in a vanilla interior cell?

Number 2 is very good advice, I believe the CS tends to crash when the object being "F"'d can't find a solid surface beneath it to land on.

Number 3 - indeed this is something other modders would benefit from knowing.

Number 4 - naming new base objects and new cells uniquely is wise, but changing the Editor ID of vanilla placed objects or cells is best avoided, simply because when trying to merge mods together with Gecko where one ESP changes the Editor ID of something and another ESP either also edits it, or contains the record but does not edit the Editor ID will result in a failed merge.

==================================
From the "Crashes" page of the Troubleshooting Wiki:


You can safely set the Z value to -30,000 without fear of the CS generating warnings. -30,001 or more however will result in warnings. I presume that setting it to +30,000 will also be safe.

From the Performance page of the Troubleshooting Wiki:


Presumably shop keepers in interior cells, and other NPCs who lock their doors at night and unlock in the morning should not have "no low level processing" ticked to ensure that they open their shops on time?
But NPCs who are set to just wander aimlessly for most of their AI packages and don't need to lock or unlock any doors, should have the box ticked?

This probably won't make sense, but I need a script that moves a corpse from one location to another. Everything I've tried has not worked and I'm beginning to wonder if you can even move a "corpse" reference. I don't mean after killing a NPC and then moving it. The reference is already dead onload. So my question is can they be moved?

I've used variations of my current scripts using moveto funtions and don't want to use placeatme. Any suggestions?

Aoikani


ok, sorry, I didn't read the beginning of the thread concerning BG2408's posts on corpses. The thing is, I've searched with the Search engine with different parameters and couldn't find anything on something to help me. Wish we could narrow searches better. Anyway, apparently "Onload" the engine cleans corpses? Is this true? If so, is there a way to prevent this when I really need to keep a corpse reference in it's status with no changes from enabling/disabling? I cannot just kill a base object and then use it's corpse then it defeats my purpose. It has to do with skeleton sizing. If I begin Onload with this corpse defined as I've created it, within game it's perfect. For a better http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=927053

Yes, and sort of:

Yes - If you move a vanilla object, cached saved game data can cause players to see it in its old location. Assuming you aren't recklessly breaking things by moving vanilla objects, giving these objects a new object as a parent can force the position to update if the parent gets enabled after the saved game loads. Helpful when you don't want to just replace it with an identical object. Alternately, cut/paste gives the object a new ID, also forcing the position to update if you don't want to give it a parent. 21603 has a post up here somewhere involving the same issue and a certain Lighthouse.

Sort of - new unparented objects don't need a parent to be present & in place, of course. However, the number of children a vanilla parent object has is cached in a saved game. So if you add more children to a vanilla parent, they might not appear in-game if the player has already visited the containing cell; furthermore, children objects you add might show instead of vanilla children objects for the same parent. I'm not sure what decides which shows.

To further illustrate:

Let's say Chorrol House For Sale's dining room set is parented by the big table and has 15 children. Modder Mike decides he wants a fully spread table, so he adds the extra few chairs, more dishes, and food. Thinking wisely that these things shouldn't appear till the player has purchased the dining room set, he makes them all children of the parent big table.

Downloader Dave, who has already purchased all the furniture for & moved into Chorrol House For Sale, then downloads & installs the mod & fires up his saved game. A sideboard & two chairs are missing, and there are three pieces of ham floating with no plates underneath three inches above the table, and the rest of the food pictured in the screenshot is nowhere to found. His saved game remembers that the parent big table had 15 children, and it's not willing to show any more than that. Downloader Dave then gives Modder Mike a litany of unkind words for his apparent epic failure, and Modder Mike spends three days banging his head on his desk between playtesting sessions trying to figure out why this keeps happening.

To fix invisibly to player: Make one of the added objects persistent and have it parent all the other added objects. Where & how to enable the new parent I suppose is circumstantial, and dependent on how invasive the modder is willing to be. I had to go so far as rig up a mini-quest for Benirus Manor to solve the problem in that house; plus literally cutting then pasting in place every vanilla object in the house, tying it all to a new parent, and adding an extra tag at the end of MS02 stage 110 to make it work every which way. It's horribly invasive, but it spanks the saved game and sends it to its room for sure.

Otherwise, the player can use the console in-game to target and disable, then re-enable the parent object. This will force the game to recognize & display the correct number of children; however, it will not fix objects being out of position. I'm not sure which is worse - the bloat and potential conflict of mucking about with scripts and quests and replacing vanilla things, or requiring the player to break end-user immersion to get the mod to work how it ought to anyways. The latter makes me feel like a Windows dev so I went with the former, and I just pray that some big mod more popular than mine that conflicts with mine will never come to fruition.

Or you can always just not parent anything at all, and force users to deal with the "don't install this till you've completed this" or "only works with new games", which again I think breaks immersion. I think if I'm putting something up for download, I'm responsible for if and how well it works, and that burden shouldn't be on the player...that's another rant entirely, nevermind.

Sorry for the wall of text. I'm terribad at explaining this issue, no matter how many times I've tried.



I didn't mean renaming vanilla things. I mean if you borrow a non-vanilla object or script or any piece of someone else's work to include in your own, make sure to rename it in case a player runs both mods. Redundant is better than broken. IE if you make a quest involving giving the player a temporary "Bag of Holding" & you borrow pieces from that mod to make it work, make sure you rename them all in case players using your mod are also using the actual Bag of Holding mod, else your changes could affect that mod depending on load order and what-not.

I'm hushing up now before I dig myself into a deeper hole.

Edit: Okay, for the record, I do want to say that yesterday I learned what a float is. \o/

Only persistent objects' locations get stored in a saved game, non-persistent objects do not, and thus will always be in the location chosen by the last-loaded ESP which edits them.
Something to take note of, cut/paste equals deleting the vanilla object, something which is now recognised as a move best avoided by modders. Instead, Copy/paste, then mark the vanilla object as Disabled (break parentage if it is a child object).



I'll take your word for it, as nothing I've modded relates to this




Very good, I wasn't sure as you hadn't specified that you referred to new objects only

I just tested this in the Chorrol house, and I can't reproduce the problem, so I concede. In retrospect, the cell I was editing when I experienced this seemed buggy in various and infuriating ways. I wish I hadn't junked the screenshots; I'd move cups off a shelf and put them on a table, then add books on the shelf, then load the mod in-game to find all the cups stuck in the books on the shelf.

Perhaps there were other factors at play that are outside my scope of knowledge.



Waitwaitwaitwaitwait - does this mean I said something useful? Huzzah!

So, what exactly needs to be a persistent reference? Is it pretty much ...
Quest targets
Anything specifically referenced by a script
Anything specifically referenced by an AI package
Any animated object that needs to retain its state when the player is not in the same cell

?

Also any object that parents another & load doors.

I don't know the gory details behind parent/child settings, but my gut tells me this method is screaming from the mountain tops as a compatibility nightmare. If not a recipe for outright disaster. I could be way wrong, but cutting and then pasting vanilla objects is generally a bad bad idea if all you want is a COPY of the object. You'll trigger the now well-known crash at exit for sure, and if you're CUTTING persistent objects, that has been known to cause CTD issues while playing if some other mod for some reason touches the same object after yours. Oblivion is not a big fan of messing with deleted persistent records.

New gotcha - though I'm not sure how deserving of gotcha status this really is:

Path grid generation. In short, don't try it on an interior cell. The CS will promptly crash.

Behavior like this usually suggests another mod loading after your own is doing something to the objects you moved away. Could be someone grounded them, like with the UOP, or could be some mod has dirty edits the author doesn't know about that are causing the game to reset their positions. Unless the cups were persistent objects of course. But that seems unlikely.

Oh, it is, but it's just a house mod that changes nothing outside the interior cell. So I gave up and wiped it

Also yeah, the CS doesn't like generating path grids.

It's very tempting when you need to move stuff around in a cell to create a savegame there so you can load it and instantly see the results. Usually this doesn't work.

You either have to be away from the cell when you load or leave the cell (i.e., ~coc somewhere else), purge the buffer (~pcb), then return (~coc again) to see the change.

That might be another explanation what you saw.

Well, I was using a few different saves for testing when trying to figure out what was causing it. New games didn't have the issue, but others did, even when using ~pcb or loading from across Cyrodiil, if they had been in the cell before.
Honestly I just think Benirus Manor is bugged to pieces. Had a friend testing the mod and he experienced the same issues. But since I haven't made any other mods that deal with vanilla houses, I suppose I shouldn't have used it as a control for my theory I don't know. If I come up with anything concrete I suppose I'll come back with it.

I am not sure very many modders would do this kind of thing, But it had me baffled for a while and I thought I post it for you consideration.

I am using is controlpressed on more than one keys and using is moving direction (animation?) detection from OBSE.

Somewhere I got the idea that theses ismoving commands looked at the animation paying not the controls.

However this:

If IsControlPressed 0 == 1 && IsControlPressed 1 == 1 && player.IsMovingForward == 1
Messagebox"Result 1 script thinks you are pressing forward and backward buttons and that you are moving in the forward direction."
endif

If IsControlPressed 0 == 1 && IsControlPressed 1 == 1 && player. IsMovingBackward == 1
Messagebox"Result 2 script thinks you are pressing forward and backward buttons and that you are moving in the backwards direction."
Endif

So when I press both buttons together the PC moves forward But I get result 2

My guess is that for a split second the backward animation is enacted long enough for the script to see this and give result 2 but then the forward command to the game take precedence over the backwards command to the game?

120008

Well, when you press a button, and then another mutually exclusive button (opposite direction), the first gets ignored in favor of the more recently pressed button. If you press both "at once", you really press one first and the second momentarily later, so you see the second one.

However, your script would not go until both buttons are pressed, so I don't see how it could have seen the momentary motion in the opposite direction before the second button was pressed. It seems to me that you should be getting either the first message or both (if the game considers both states to be true even though it only uses one).

I don't really know why it's behaving that way. Maybe ask the OBSE team?

I think this qualifies as a gotcha:

You're configuring a shop. You've followed all the guidelines from the CS wiki. Even checked other shops in the game to make sure your flags are correct. Cell ownership, door owership, merchant chest, services AI pack, the whole bit. Yet, your shop won't open during business hours sometimes. Other times it seems to partially work. You'll break in, and he's there, but never unlocked the door. Sometimes though, you'll break in and he's nowhere to be seen. You've been over everything in the CS forward and backward. Tested with only your mod loaded. Still the shop won't open. Frustrating, right?

You'll never guess how stupid the fix was for this, at least in my case. I made a shop in a soon-to-release mod. Everything was by the book. AI packs and everything. Even used the same interior cell mesh as Hammer & Axe, so I knew it wasn't because the guy sleeps in the same cell. What was the problem? A small table and a bearskin rug on the floor were ever so slightly touching the wireframe man the CS uses for the furniture marker to the bed. As soon as the table and rug were moved away, everything fell into line. Including other AI the NPC had I wasn't aware was broken too.

Short lesson: Don't block the furniture marker wireframes. It was only after a friend of mine who was helping playtest tried moving those things that it kicked over for him. Ugh.

Not sure if this exactly qualifies ...

Whenever an object with collision (except statics) is dropped to the ground, it actually gets seated above the actual ground level. Seems that the object's Z is adjusted until its axises are above the ground. This can be witnessed by havok-placing an object in CS. When dropped from a height, the object falls to a surface which offsets the actual ground level. Have a look at http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/57/tesconstructionset20081ib9.jpg for a better representation.

Strangely, this isn't so for any other surfaces. If the object is dropped onto a table for instance, gets seated "properly". There is game setting ( fActorAnimZAdjust ) which offsets the player's Z from the ground, but I couldn't find one for other objects.

It's well known by many now that deleting any vanilla objects can cause a CTD on exit if another ESP attempts to edit the same vanilla object.

There are some vanilla objects which will cause a CTD when exiting to main menu or when quick-loading, if deleted and so should never ever be deleted. I only know one for a fact, along with a few more which when undeleted from a certain mod will stop it from causing CTDs. Whether all of those few actually NEED undeleting, or only certain ones, I do not know as they were reported by someone else, so I'll list them all (listing shows their vanilla placement. In a mod they may be Persistent rather than Temporary, and may even be in a different cell).

From interior cells, the group from a certain mod:
Cell, Block 2, Sub-Block 0, cell 0002C17A (ICArcaneUniversityArchMagesTowerCouncil), Temporary :
0005AFD2 (UCStool01B - stool placed at round table in Arch Mage's Tower Council Chambers)
0005AFD3 (UCStool01B - stool placed at round table in Arch Mage's Tower Council Chambers)
0005AFD4 (UCStool01B - stool placed at round table in Arch Mage's Tower Council Chambers)
0005AFD5 (UCStool01B - stool placed at round table in Arch Mage's Tower Council Chambers)
0005AFD7 (UCStool01B - stool placed at round table in Arch Mage's Tower Council Chambers)
0005AFD8 (UCStool01B - stool placed at round table in Arch Mage's Tower Council Chambers)
0005AFD9 (UCStool01B - stool placed at round table in Arch Mage's Tower Council Chambers)

Cell, Block 9, Sub-Block 2, cell 00049FC9 (ICArcaneUniversityArchMagesTowerLobby), Temporary :
0008534F (UCBench02Frtlt - bench placed behind teleport pad in Arch Mage's Lobby)

And the specific one which I know will cause this having had to undelete it from Better Cities several months ago:
BravilWorld, Block 0,-1, Sub-Block 2,-2, BravilExteriorEntrance02 (16,-9), Temporary :
000035CE (BravilLoadDoorLower01 - not linked to any other door, hidden inside the mesh of a building)

Disabling them is still safe, but deleting them is not.

I have been getting this error for a while now when trying to open the CS.

TESFile: Error inflating ZLib stream.

Can anyone help? I've tried reinstalling oblivion and the CS and it didn't work

EDIT: It only has this error after I install the Shivering Isles.

I ran to a problem.. I was making a new sewers when I accidently deleted a piece in the object window, it is now labelled as "D". How can I make it to not delete? It is a piece used in the Imperial City Sewers aswell and that could well mess all of the cells up. Is there anyway I can fix this?

Change the ID to, let's say AAAIgnore (optional, just makes the whole progress a lot easier ).
Select the Plugin in the load-Window of the CS and click on the Details-Button.
Select AAAIgnore (or however it is called) and press DELETE to mark the form as ignored.
Load your Plugin and press Save. Voil?, nothing of the form is saved in your *.esp anymore.

Well, everything went fine until the Details part. I've renamed it to AAIgnoreAAA for easy navigating, but can't seem to find the report. What if I can't find it? I've checked the full report atleast twice..

Just to make it clear: with renaming you mean changing the (Editor)ID?


Did you try to sort the Details-List by EditorID?
With an ID of AAIgnoreAAA it should be at the start (or end) of the list. Maybe there are a few without an ID before (or after) it, don't know where they are listed. :shrug:

Were you by chance trying to use an old version of TESCS?

I has a new Gotcha!

Don't toggle ignore on a cell containing a persistent ref if you still have other things referencing it in the mod. CS will crash on your next save, even if you manually remove all references to the missing persistent ref before saving.

Also, the thing happened to me again where non-persistent objects showed in their former location in-game after being moved in the CS, and disabling/enabling the objects didn't fix it. Had to cut and paste them in place to give them new IDs to force the new positions. These were totally different objects then what had happened to me before, and in a different cell. *shrug* I'm going to chalk it up to general bugginess.