Dirty mods and MPCD : III

» Fri May 13, 2011 5:43 am

I'm in the process of sorting out some of my mods, and after some checks with MPCD, I've got a long list of dirty mods. However, I don't have the modding know-how to work out if a mod that intentionally affects all instances of an object would be labelled as dirty by the program by mistake. I'm hesitant to plough into the "offending" mods with Tesame just in case they're clean but mislabelled and I damage them beyond all hope of redemption.

Am I just being paranoid or are my concerns justified?

Here's a rough list of the mods listed as having dirty entries:

Spoiler

Fields of Kummu Expanded
Midnight Dragon's Earthly Delights mod (includes changes to the Acrobat class)
Assassin's Armoury
Nevena's Twin Lamps & Slave Hunters (LOTS of item & door entries)
Great House Dagoth
Adamantium Armour
Grow Your Own Telvanni Towers [final] (unclean doors)
LGNPC Ald-ruhn v1.3
LGNPC Seyda Neen (dialogue deleted)
Building Up Uvirith's Grave 1.1 (deleted items, this might just be to level the floors out as the creator previously suggested)
Crusader Class Fix
Ash Ghoul Hearts
Less Lore
Nerevarine Greeting Tweaks (dialogue deleted)
Her Tamed Lightning (dialogue deleted)
Lore Fix (dialogue deleted)
TransportMH (dialogue deleted)
Less Generic Bloodmoon (dialogue deleted)
Siege at Firemoth (unclean doors)
St Lothis Fix (unclean enchantment)
Warhammer fix (something to do with werewolf health)
Area Affect Arrows
Rank Advancement Revamped (companion entries, popups and werewolf values)
Mining Mod v1.5 Tribunal
Master Index
Better Moon and Star
Entertainers
EBQ Artifact
Sadrith Mora Docks
Dwemer Ruins Fix2
Clean Combat Angle Adjustment
Abot Guars v1.15
GOTY Script Tidy (Morrowind Patch Project version) (identical script to default entry)
Ghostgate shrine fix
Almalexia_voicev1
Brittlewind fix (brittlewind spell entry identical to default entry)
Weapon range balance (weapon entry identical to default entry)
Weapon Rotate - Tribunal (nerevarbladeflame entry identical to default entry)

I can post the full list if that would help, but in its raw form it's too long to fit in a single post.

» Fri May 13, 2011 6:59 am

Conflicting does not always mean dirty. If a mod wants to override/use/change something, usually it has to re-declare it.
I'd stay with pure automatic GMST removing (TESTool, tes3cmd -clean...) if you don't know exactly what your are doing.

» Fri May 13, 2011 6:00 am

it should be common practice to take a look at mods with tools this goes double with older mods, were dirty references,extra cells and the duplicate gmsts are more rampent.

» Fri May 13, 2011 8:30 am

I'm aware that conflicting is not automatically dirty - that compatibility mods will automatically "conflict" with the mods they fix, it's just a matter of getting them into the load order and letting the compatibility patch override the old. But I'll give TESTool a shot and see what happens.

» Fri May 13, 2011 11:52 am

dont use testools it tends to mess things up or from what I have heard

my experiance is that it works just avoid the merge options.

» Fri May 13, 2011 5:11 am

TESTool is safe to use if you keep "Restricted dialog cleaning" ON and "Restricted cell cleaning" ON and avoid "Just Fix it" button (which by default put them both off)
The first option can break dialogue intensive mods, so definitely better keep it on.
The second one can break mods using new empty cells, so better keep it on too.

tes3cmd.exe clean [mod list]
works also well

» Fri May 13, 2011 7:10 pm

just avoid the merge options.

Merged Objects works just fine. Dialog does not, though.

TESTool is safe to use if you keep "Restricted dialog cleaning" ON and "Restricted cell cleaning" ON and avoid "Just Fix it" button (which by default put them both off)

Exactly what I was about to say.
TESTools gets a bad rep because some of the functions don't work, but the basic "Clean esp" function has never caused me problems, and I've cleaned thousands of mods with it.

» Fri May 13, 2011 9:34 am

TESTools gets a bad rep because some of the functions don't work, but the basic "Clean esp" function has never caused me problems, and I've cleaned thousands of mods with it.

There are tons of mods that are older that just about have to be cleaned. I find that if it is 2004 or earlier, the chance it has evil GMSTs is (sadly) high. I run TESTool against every esp I load. I don't always keep the cleaned version (I always review the log and decide for myself if what it cleaned should have been cleaned or not), but I'd say I keep 2/3 of the ones it cleans.

» Fri May 13, 2011 7:04 am

Thanks guys! I think I'll give my mods a scrub with TESTool and port them over into my main game file when I have the time. Hopefully less crashing and more framerate will be the happy result!

» Fri May 13, 2011 5:27 pm

Hopefully less crashing and more framerate will be the happy result!

Well, that's not really what TESTool improves.
TESTool gets rid of any unwanted GMSTs and junk references that are not needed.

The Code Patch helps with less crashing, and things like the FPS Optimzer and various ini tweaks help with framerate.
There are other things too, like the 4GB patch.

Many factors also consider on what your hardware specs are.