Hi guys,

Me and a friend are working on a lan to make a mod with new worldspaces and cells. Naturally we would like to keep updating eachothers work to our plugins and ultimately merge whatever changes or work we've done to one plugin. The problem is that because we keep merging from two workplugins to one updated plugin that we then continue to work on seperately, duplicates are created. Ofcourse this is because his plugin has for example a room i made but my plugin has that room (Same reference) but then updated with whatever work i did on it.

I use the combine plugins option in tes cs, but unfortunately the combined plugin always turns up to be messy with duplicates all over and not even properly working ingame.. whole lands dissapear for example.. SO it takes a long time to figure out whats wrong and fix the combined plugin before we can both continue on that combine plugin and eventually do the same process again (merging them).

Could someone plz help me out so me and my friend can work more easily. thanks

Well, I'd start of with better organization to make sure you and your friend don't work on the same thing at the same time. I would also keep all the finished work in an esm file, and edits in esps dependent on it. That way cells aren't duplicated when you merge edits together.

Welll we dont work on the same thing at the same time, because he for example works on a magical 'sky' place that he build (an interior cell). And I made my own little basemant with some nice things in it. And now I made a whole new worldspace ( a desert). So we are creating different things but we want them to be merged into the same mod (because it is gonna be part of the same world). The problem as i already said lies with that whenever we try merge our seperate updated rooms or worlds the combined mod ends up not functioning properly and having al lot of duplicates. I dont understand how keeping finished work in an esm and edits in esp's would help, or how to achieve that. Could you explain or give a link where i could find out how it works? Thanks very much for your quick reply.

I'm not sure there is a link. Basically, when an esp edits another esp things can get duplicated and messed up quite easily. An esm is a master file, and esps can easily edit things in it without creating errors. Oblivion is an esm, for example, and if two esps edit the same cell in Oblivion they will work it out without duplicates (can still get messy, but overall much cleaner). I use TES4Gecko for merging and converting to esm, but you can also use TES4Edit.

In my current project (hammerfell), my esm contains a worldspace with regions and cities. I have several people working on interiors, landscapes, and AI, and each one of them creates a separate esp that I then merge on top of the existing esm. When I need to make more edits, I just make a new esp.

Ok thank you. I am gonna try to do as you said. I like you. Can we be modding friends?