Instances of objects that have persistent flag should not be cleaned. The main reason to make objects persistent is to be able to reference them in scripts. Tes3cmd removes those object instances from cells during cleaning. And when you load the game it crashes if a script could not find object instance it needs.

Could you send me an example plugin that is affected by this?

tes3cmd mostly should only clean duplicate object references, which means the reference should still be in the cell, just provided by one of the plugin's masters intead of the cleaned plugin.

Say what now? That's awesome, how have I never known of that shortcut? That will make running these programs so much more convenient. Thanks Dragon32!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28753474/Dwemer%20lights.esp . Script DWEMERLIGHTSOFF wont work after you clean the plugin.

When I clean that plugin (tes3cmd clean "Dwemer Lights.esp"), all it cleans is Evil GMSTs, no object references. What command line did you use?

Edit: If you could, report the tes3cmd version number and include the output of the cleaning command too, as that will help me narrow things down. Thanks

the same
tes3cmd v0.37s
output

Is there a way to get the position values of all the NPCs in a cell , for use in positioncell ?

Also, on a different note, where does output of dump endup? I havent found it where tes3cmd resides..

Yes. Just dump the cell and look for the ID of the NPC. Their position will follow in a DATA sub-record.
For example, you can look at the cell "Balmora, Guild of Mages"

tes3cmd dump --type cell --id "Balmora, Guild of Mages" Morrowind.esm > output.txt

(and then look at the output which is in the plain text file "output.txt")

The output goes to the screen (a/k/a "stdout") by default. There are two general strategies...
The example above puts the output in a file, which can be viewed with a text editor.

Or, you can look at the output one page at a time by piping it to the "more" command (hit space to get next page):

tes3cmd dump --type cell --id "Balmora, Guild of Mages" Morrowind.esm | more

The information for a particular NPC in a cell looks like this:

*FRMR: ObjIdx:67621  MastIdx:0  NAME: Name:galbedir  DATA: X:-549.60  Y:-73.19  Z:13.57  X_Angle:0.00  Y_Angle:0.00  Z_Angle:1.53

Note that this gives the NPCs starting position. Current positions are stored in your savegames, of course.
Hope that helps.

John, did you figure out why we get different results when using the same command?

I'm working on it. Sorry for the delay, but my life is complicated /smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' /> tes3cmd should definitely not screw up a plugin on the clean command. I'm going to try to devote time to it this weekend. The information you provided should let me figure it out. I just need to get a few hours without interruptions /smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Yeah, I see.
Looks like it doesn't differentiate between NPCs and others, too bad.

I suppose its a long shot but is there a way to narrow the list down, like may be only gives output of things with disposition or something.

Come to think of it, it only saves reference CELL record i guess, so no way to differentiate between them i suppose /unsure.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':unsure:' />

Still, its a lot of work reduced, thanks john /biggrin.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':biggrin:' />

Hello. Just one question (sorry I could not find the answer on Tes3cmd wiki nor in examples given above):

Does the global search/replace function allow to replace a static ID by another? I.e., I would like to replace a tree model in a whole area by another model (using another static ID linking to a new mesh).

yes

Yes. The search and replace basically allows any text string substitution, and object names are text strings.

Here is a quick example:

tes3cmd modify --type cell --id "seyda neen" --replace "/fargoth/bolvyn venim/" test.esp

by adding: --type cell --id "seyda neen"
we narrow which records the replace operates on. The important thing here is to make sure that we don't accidentally modify records that are not relevent.

the replace "/A/B/" means replace Perl regular expression A with the string B. Perl regular expression are like pattern matchers on steroids. If you avoid special characters (stick to letters number ...) then it will mostly act like a substring match. If something unexplected happens, let me know and I'll help you out.

when tes3cmd does the replace, it prints the new record as it has been changed. For CELL records, this can be a bit of output. You can redirect the output to a file by appending "> output.txt" to the end of the command line, and then view the file "output.txt" in any text editor.

Thank you for the very fast answer john.moonsugar, I will try this ASAP and report any unexpected behaviour.

BTW, it is possible to replace the cell name by exterior cell coordinates? If so, what will be the typo?

If you mean is it possible to specify a specific exterior cell by coordinates, the answer is yes. Here is how I would change the previous example:

tes3cmd modify --type cell --id "\(-2, -9\)" --replace "/fargoth/bolvyn venim/" test.esp

Note that since parenthesis are special characters in regular expression patterns, they need to be "escaped" with a preceeding backslash to make them plain characters (to make them act more like a string match). Note that there is one space after the comma, and that it is necessary (at least, for doing simple matching) to format the coordinates like I show in the example (with parentheses and one space after comma).

It sounds very clear, thank you again!

Hi qqqbbb,
Sorry for the delay. Please try cleaning your dwemer lights plugin with this new tes3cmd:
http://code.google.com/p/mlox/downloads/detail?name=tes3cmd-0.37t-2012.12.08.7z&can=2&q=

Morrowind sometimes works in mysterious ways. The previous cleaning philosophy was that if the group of subrecords for an object instance (reference) in a cell were exactly the same as in the plugin's masters, then it could be cleaned as a "duplicate reference". You found a case where this is not true: when the persistence flag for the object has been switched on. It seems illogical that we can't clean the reference, since the data in the master is exactly the same, but Morrowind must be doing something different internally that we can't see from the bare data in the plugins involved. Perhaps names of non-persistent objects instances are internally only kept with the 8 byte hex suffix and persistent objects are kept without the suffix.

In any case, tes3cmd 0.37t now checks your plugin to see which objects are marked persistent, and any instances in cells are no longer cleaned.

I hope to put out a more fully realized and debugged 0.38 version sometime in the fairly near future. But I supposed I should never commit to deadlines as I am constantly unable to make them /smile.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

Let me know if you encounter any more problems.

Thanks for the update, John.

I've been meaning to download this, and I must say - you are a golden god among morrowmen. What effect does not removing "redundant AMBI, WHGT" have? I understand it's the ambient light / water height, but how does nearly every plugin have this?

Edit: Also, a lot of ####~1.esp backups have been made, is there anyway to send these to a backup folder after they're already created? Nevermind, managed to move them all manually because I'm that dedicated.

Now I'm getting things like Unable to find referenced object "jo_ashl_door_02_yanit" in script jo_KaushtababiCamp_Script. which I never got before, and a ton of

Unable to find referenced object "alchemy_table_dhm" in script DHM_Alchemy_Load1 (this is from Uvirith's Legacy I know for sure) that I never got before

I think whenever you remove/add/renumber a reference in a mod the scripts looking for a persistent object belonging to that mod can't find it no more when you load previous save. Ignore messages, re-save after loading, exit Morrowind, load the new save and see if messages go away, else try Mash repair all on your save

Light mods modify AMBI. Any dirty mod loaded after your light mod will reset AMBI settings to vanilla.

The CS puts those sub-records in the CELL records. To avoid conflicts with lighting mods, you can use tes3cmd to clean them.

You can look at the --hide-backups and --backup-dir options. These will stash the backups away in a place of your choice.

If you are not using the latest version (0.37t), then please try re-cleaning with that version. Previous versions were cleaning duplicate refs that had been made persistent, but it turns out that is not correct.

I am using the most current version. I ended up fixing the immediate errors by replacing the cleaned files with the originals for now

I cleaned Uvirith's Legacy_Final_2.0 and loaded game with no problems.