Hi.

I've seen a couple of mods using a subfolder within the Construction-Set item tree - e.g. the apachii-goddess-store. I think this is handy but I just can't figure out how to achieve this for my own mods.
And speaking of the apachii-store: Though' there is a subfolder called apachii in the armor-section, there still are some armor-items that do not appear within this subfolder, instead I have to select the higher-leveled armor-folder.
What I am trying to understand is how the CS determines which items go to subfolders, and which items go to the higher-leveled armor-folder. I don't have the slightes clue for now!

Regards

IIRC, you manually create the subfolder under the existing parent before opening the CS.

For example if I have a new set of armor I want to use, I would create a new folder called aellis and place my assets in the new folder.

The entire path meshes would be:
../Oblivion/Data/Meshes/Armor/aellis/xx.nif

And for textures:
../Oblivion/Data/Textures/Armor/aellis/xx.dds

Well, if it only were so easy :rolleyes:
This is for sure part of the solution. But it's not the trick.

I made some observations though:

1. the subfolders do only show up in CS when the esp is loaded (which is of course pretty obvious)
2. constructionset.ini - which in my case is located in the" my Games" folder - contains sort of menu-entries. But I don't get it:
For the above example (apachiistore) the ini-File has the following lines:
Object Type Armor=2
Object Type Armor apachii=1

When I delete those, CS still finds the apachii files and it still creates the subfolder in CS-Tree-View. On closing CS, those two lines get pasted into the ini-File again (unless the file is opened elsewhere, e.g. an editor). So on startup CS decides either based on some Information contained in the esp, or based on some fancy hack which item goes where. Which - as stated in OP - seems to work only partially.

I tried fiddling with the ini, with absolutely no effect whatsoever.


This seems to be tricky.

Edit: typo

Allright now I get it:

You were totally right: What I was missing is that both folders (meshes + textures) must exist before starting CS. Also (so I guess) the new items may not contain nifs from any lower level folder or a different branch in the filesystem. I'm still not perfectly comfortable with this, but i guess we can tag this #solved.

Thanks a lot. This will make things A LOT easier. :twirl:

Last time I checked it was the last foldername for the "world" models. The "biped" models apparently don't matter, and clothing/armor items don't have texture entries in the CS, as their textures are defined in the NIFs themself.
I'll remember to look into it again next time I start the CS. I just can't tell how many months it will take for me to get around to do so.

For weapons, misc items and such it's obviously different, but I can't remember what determined the foldernames of those.

Well. This actually isn't solved at all. Damnit.

I know about the NiSourceTexture attribute. My assumption was that CS only checks for equal file-structures in textures/meshes to create the treeview. But you are of course right. It does not matter where the NiSourceTexture points to.

But I don't get what you mean by "the last folder name". To stick with the example:

the goddesstore has different levels of subfolder is meshes, e.g.:

Data/Meshes/armor/apachii/outfit1/*.nif
Data/Meshes/armor/apachii/outfit2/*.nif
Data/Meshes/armor/apachii/collection/subfolder1/*.nif
Data/Meshes/armor/apachii/collection/subfolder2/*.nif

Data/Meshes/clothes/apachii/nicedress/*.nif ... and so on

The textures for armor/clothes are all in:

Data/Textures/apachii/outfit1/*.dds
Data/Textures/apachii/outfit2/*.dds
Data/Textures/apachii/collection/subfolder1/*.dds
Data/Textures/apachii/collection/subfolder2/*.dds
Data/Textures/apachii/nicedress/*.dds

In CS all the items appear in armor/apachii and clothes/apachii. Well at least the greater part of them - but not all. Which initially made me ask this question.

From what I have seen once you create an item using a mesh from a folder that Nifs folder tree will then be added in the CS and the item placed in the listing under that tree. so for example if you want a weapon to show up under the Weapons\JDFan\One Handed\ sub folder in the CS listing you would first place the Nif in that folder (ie. Meshes\Weapons\JDFan\One Handed\MYsword.Nif) and then in game create a new weapon and use that Nif -- then when you go back to the ITem List you will be able to find the item in the list under Weapon - Weapons - JDFan - One Handed - MySword along with all of the other weapons. If instead you placed it in say JDFan\One Handed\MySword.nif then create a weapon it will be in the item list under the main branch of Weapon but under a separate JDFan branch from the top level instead of in the tree with the other weapons.

So the CS places it in the main heading depending on what type of item you create and then using the path to the nif for the rest of the path in the CS

Seems I was wrong with the "last" in it. Apparently the whole folder structure gets imported into the item tree, not just the last folder of the path.
(I was talking of for example the path "/meshes/armor/xxx/YYY/zzz_gnd.nif" and thought the resulting subfolder would be "YYY", but I was wrong with that, as actually "/xxx/YYY/" becomes a new folder structure inside the tree.)

It is still the path of the "ground" meshes though for armor and clothing items. That part was correct.

As you say, the path to the ground mesh directory, not the item's directory. I learned it the hard way when I converted all the clothing and jewelry in game to armor and used the same generic box for all ground models. all were unsorted in TESCS in the same directory "genericbox".
So there is no need to create a directory for each type of real armor, but a directory for each ground model used. The whole folder structure appears, yes.