Altering Castle Wolfspike : IV

» Fri Aug 13, 2010 10:15 pm

I've been trying to modify the guards from Castle Wolfspike to wear armor from the mod tda's Armory and use a couple weapons from trollf's Junkyard. What I do is open the three in the CS, make Wolfspike the Active File, and replace the default steel armor and weapons with the ones I want from the other two mods. Here's where my problem pops up. When I load my game (after re-BOSSing, of course), the guards only show up in their civilian clothes, with no trace of the items I added. When I open up the CS again and open the same mods again to look at why, all the stuff I added to the guards has disappeared from the CS NPC inventory menu.

My question is: Is there something in the Castle Wolfspike mod that prevents me from making these changes, or am I just doing something wrong?

» Sat Aug 14, 2010 10:53 am

My guess is that you're loading the Oblivion.esm file, the TDA's armory esp file and the Castle Wolfspike esp file. Here's where things go wrong. You can't use resources from one esp in another esp. You can only use resources from esm files. This is called "Mod isolation":

Many beginning mod creators get frustrated with TESCS because it seems to let you select Oblivion.esm and one or more ESPs in addition to your "active" file. The content from those ESPs will appear to be usable, but it's not. When you save your new plugin, TESCS will refuse to remember that your plugin was built on top of those other ESP files. If you then reload your newly created plugin, TESCS will be unable to find the internal references to connect it back to the ESPs you had loaded before, so you'll likely get lots of error messages and things generally won't work as desired.

This behavior is known as Mod Isolation.

Luckily, there are solutions for this problem:

Fortunately, there are several good strategies for how to get around this limitation. All such solutions involve either making your own actual master(s) or tricking the game into thinking you've got your own master(s). The latter technique is known as Mod De-Isolation.

* ESM Mastering. You can make the base (or "source") mod(s) into a master by converting it to an ESM. Both TES4Gecko and Wrye Bash provide functions to let you convert an ESP into an ESM. It works great for lots of things, especially new content that's not directly connected to the Tamriel worldspace.

However, masters generally should not modify other masters -- only plugins are supposed to modify masters. When one master directly modifies another master, problems can result, such as vanishing landscape. If you try to use TESCS to make a mod based on a master that modifies another master (especially worldspace changes), then you will very likely crash TESCS or encounter a bunch of "assertion errors" when you try to save your changes, leaving you with a plugin containing corrupt cell records.

* ESP Mastering. You can trick TESCS into letting you work with plugins as if they were masters. This can be done using a fairly easy bit-flipping method in Wrye Bash or a more cumbersome bait-and-switch method (also using Wrye Bash). It works by temporarily turning an ESP into an ESM so TESCS will let you to establish dependencies on it. Once again, however, these solutions can be problematic when working with plugins that include cell changes, such as the official DLC plugins, usually resulting in a crash or "assertion errors" when you try to save your changes, leaving you with a plugin containing corrupt cell records.

* ESP Patching. This involves using TES4Edit to directly create an add-on "patch" plugin or using TES4Gecko to create a patch file based on the differences between the original and your changes. This works best when you're not adding any new content to the source originals (i.e., you're just altering values in existing records, such as giving all mudcrabs more health or making certain weapons do more damage).

Each of these methods is explained in greater detail below.

I personally prefer ESP-Mastering or ESP-Patching.

The full tutorial can be found here:
http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/De-Isolation_Tutorial

Also this thread should be in the TES:CS section so I will request to have it moved there!

Trademark

» Sat Aug 14, 2010 10:19 am

Another way to get the armor you want into the mod is to add it manually. For a detailed walk-through, see http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1092891-leather-boots-help/page__p__15951734__fromsearch__1&#entry15951734. <--- That's actually about turning a piece of armor into clothing, but the same steps apply.

» Sat Aug 14, 2010 10:37 am

There's a much easier way than either of these, just select the item you want to use in Wolfspike, then change the editor name and when it asks you id you want to create a new form select "yes". The new record will be saved in the active esp, so you now have a version of the original item in your esp that does not rely on another esp.

It's better than creating dependancies if you're only had ten items or less, or if you have a lot of patience.

» Sat Aug 14, 2010 12:55 am

Aha! I didn't know that. Thanks for your help, everyone. Now, I'm off to make some new forms. :goodjob: