As per Kivan's finding, I've been going through COBL's version of Salmo changing deletes to Ignores. Easy for the most part, however I had some problems with doors. Salmo deletes two doors

I couldn't find either in the listed cells. Loaded up TES4View, and lo and behold the first door is a target... from a door inside Salmo's house. Combing through Oblivion.esm, I found the door in the Skingrad Worldspace, not Salmo's house. No such info for the second door, and I still haven't found it.

So, it seems that the doors are moved to a different cell when they're deleted. Maybe this is what causes the CTD on exit? Has anyone else run into this? And where the :banghead: is that second door ?

edit- wrong thread.

When you make any edit to a linked door, the other door is "dirtied" by the CS (the record is saved in the ESM/ESP though it's exactly the same.) The dirty record can be safely removed.

Good to know, but I don't think that's the case here. [oh, wait] Also, is it normal that the records move to the other cell?

After some more digging, I finally found "Bad Target" - it's the first target in Abandoned Mines, and I suppose, like it's namesake, is a default for bad targets. Not sure why it's deleted, though. The only thing that points to it is a mod-added package :shrug:

If you're looking to delete a door because you don't need it around, you should undelete it, load the CS, then find the door you want gone and instead check the box for initially disabled on its properties. This is what I ended up doing for Open Cities and it's worked perfectly.

I've added the http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Crashes#Deleted_References issue to the wiki.

I think we need a new subcategory for savegame problems. Right now I can think of a few major savegame CTD issues:

• Crash when loading savegame after removing a weather mod. Can be avoided by using the console to Force Weather (fw) to vanilla weather type, then making a clean save in an interior cell.
  
• Crash when loading a savegame after adding a mod that changes potion script name. No perfect solution known. Load the mod earlier so it doesn't change the script name.
  
• Crash when reloading a savegame made in another cell than the one you're currently in. Undelete references in the mods you're using (not an easy solution).
  
• Crash when loading a savegame that has mismatched variable types for active scripts. See http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Common_Mistakes#Changing_Script_Variables.

Also, there are probably plenty of less severe issues we could list, such as NPC stat changes failing to have any effect (Update NPC Levels) and naked NPCs (wait for respawn in a remote interior cell).

What do you guys think?

What else should be on this list?

EDIT: added script variables crash.

Well it is rather easy (for those with a minimum modding knowledge) and quick to do (both identifyng and undeleting the refs) with tes4edit.

FYI, another common mistake I see regularly, it is especially common when people make new innkeepers, is that they copy the topics from a vanilla npc not thinking that the voiceovers won't be copied and use the original topics for their custom npcs leaving the vanilla npcs voiceless (it is not very consequential in that it won't crash the game but it is annoying nonetheless).

Yes, it's getting easier now that Wrye Bash has some tools to help undelete refs, but undeleting the refs is only the start of what you have to do to fix the issue. You also have to then set them to Initially Disabled (which TES4Edit can't do yet) and/or move them out of sight. Just moving them doesn't work well for NPCs or spawn points (they will all end up spawning in the Tiber Septim Hotel unless you also disable them).

Anyway, the point of adding this is to let people know about the issue as much as how to correct it.

Here's are two more I don't remember seeing in this list yet. My apologies if they are duplicates:

1) Unless your mod requires SI, don't edit existing dialog under the SI ESM (ie greetings.) The change to the top level of the tree will get tied to SI dialog that isn't there if the player doesn't have SI. For most people this is harmless but some people report crashing to desktop if they are playing under the old ESM. This is very easy to clean out of a mod even without TES4Edit or equivalent; just load the ESP under the old ESM, you'll get errors about the missing dialog, Yes them away and then save the ESP and the bad links will be gone.

2) When an actor enters a cell or is enabled in it and acquires pathing, sometimes the engine doesn't seem to care about the Z displacement of the nodes, so the actor may appear at a pathnode displaced far below where they should be if the node is closer X/Y to where they appeared (if they go below the floor they will then fall out of the sky.) Make sure that the actor is very close to or on a node when appearing and there are no nodes directly below it to avoid missing NPC's and broken quests.

Excellent! Thanks, man!

It'd be good to have a list of what in SI can and can't work without it.

I know that you can have items from SI in a container without a problem, they simply won't be there if you don't use SI. Hmm... not sure if I ever opened said container, but I used RemoveAllItems without a problem.

Using an explicit reference from SI in a script - the script won't run until you install SI. Kind-of nice, actually, I had one script that added all SI material and just left it as is - no need to test for SI or anything.

Has anyone already documented limitations of the OnUnequip block? I didn't find anything on the wiki about it. Seems like perhaps it doesn't fire if the player drops an equipped item into a container. If it's confirmed, this is a major bummer.

I have been trying to give a horse an ability spell with addspell command and discovered Horses cannot hold onto Ability spells!

bummer...


But it makes sense I guess you cannot have a player getting fused to a horse (get on to ride) while the horse has some ability spell
attached to it, that I can see would cause problems!

I tested this by:

begin gameModeset fQuestDelayTime to 0.001if GetCrosshairRef == 0returnendifset target to GetCrosshairRefif target.IsActor == 0 && target.iscreature == 0 returnendif if target.HasSpell aadpHearAbility == 0 target.addspell aadpHearAbility messageBox"He got it."endifend

I got the message "He Got It!" repeated over and over and over again
if I faced a horse.


But it worked just fine on other NPC.


080008

Hello!

I'm having a big problem on the landmass. I dont know what makes this but after combining mods suddenly there are missing landmasses across the place where I've been working with a new mod. The land simply falls down and leaves a big rectangular empty place, only trees and rocks and other stuff on it. And every time I fix the landmass with height editor and render window and save my mod, it happens again..! Thelandmasses have vanished again but in different place...

Very odd, the house mod works fine but not the land.

What's going on? Pls, anyone?

Sami

Please excuse my ignorance, but having been on these forums for many years, I've never encountered the term "Gotchas".

Could someone explain?

Did you try it on other creatures besides horses?

Might be better to test it without relying on HasSpell, just to be sure it's not a limitation of OBSE spell detection.



Lots of different things can cause this. How did you merge them? Did you make it into an ESM file? Is it a new worldspace? Are you aware of the modindex problems with new worldspaces?



:)

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dict.asp?Word=gotcha

okay, excusing my increasing ignorance, but I know the meaning of Gotcha, but how does that term apply to fixing bugs and troubleshooting?

Gotcha is about catching, if you've caught a bug, then you squash it, and then it's dead.

You're looking at it backwards. The Oblivion game engine or TESCS is the one who "got you".

Also, we don't have the game code so we can't squash anything. All we can do is to document the behavior and provide suggested workarounds if possible.

The Wikipedia definition is better:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotcha

So, it's an accurate term for a lot of what we describe, though we also lump bugs into the same list. :shrug:

I found a solution to my landscape problem. I found the right instructions and the answer from TESC Wiki.

Cheers!

wow you were right!

I tried it on a bear and got the same problem!

Then I used IsSpellTarget instead and it worked just fine on NPC and Creatures (including horses).

What the heck?

So HasSpell will not work on Creatures?


:confused:

This is more of a tip than a "Gotcha" but it's a way that bloat can sneak in to your mod, so it's worthwhile posting here in my humble opinion. I've tried this out several times to verify the effect.

When TESCS saves, it compresses some data with ZLIB (I think LAND and PGRD resources are two of them like this.) If TESCS is using a lot of memory, it seems to drop the level of compression to reduce the size of the dictionary, so if you have a large mod, navigate through a bunch of cells or open the Heightmap editor or anything else that puts a lot of resources into memory, make only a tiny change or two and then save, your mod may become larger than expected.

So after saving your (large) mod with LAND and PGRD (and other ZLIB-compressed resources if there are any) terminate TESCS, launch, load your mod again and resave immediately. For me, with the the 9.2MB UOP ESP, this consistently knocks 20-30KB of bloat off of the size of it.

Definitely helpful, but only if you remember to grab your oblivion.esm before installing SI and set it aside somewhere. I didn't and therefore have no real choice on which one I can use and I'm not reinstalling the entire game over something like this. So TES4Edit will have to suffice

Bummer. Maybe the OBSE team can fix this in the next release.

We should probably add details on the http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?s=&showtopic=872295&view=findpost&p=12785215, but I'd like to make sure to get the exact definition correct.

From what I can tell, you can't have any VWD REFRs in a master, even if it's a new worldspace and even if you've done the Move Worldspaces fix.

The easy way out is to split the plugin using TES4Gecko. This means that if you want to put a new worldspace into a master, you can't just convert your plugin to ESM. You have to:

1. Start with new worldspace created in a plugin (ESP).
2. Fix landscape with TES4Gecko->Move Worldspaces.
3. Fix VWD REFRs with TES4Gecko->Split Plugin (puts the worldspace in the ESM but leaves VWD REFRs in the ESP).

Is that it?

BTW, are trees always VWD? EDIT: the answer is yes.