» Fri Sep 21, 2012 12:03 pm I found out most of the dialogue on greeting 4 (like crime response) was shadowing important stuff on greeting 5 that should really override crime responses, so I loaded the plugin into a hex editor and changed the "4" in "Greeting 4" so it was "Greeting 5" and vice versa, then loaded the plugin in the CS and saved, and all was well.
Having lost too many hairs dealing with big collision boxes and marker arrows obscuring stuff I needed to see to work on, I figured out how to make them transparent using nifskope by adding an alpha property, so now I can actually see the crap I want to see instead of some huge opaque marker. These things probably should have been transparent from day one.
In a similar vein, a number of cells in Arktwend contained huge burning fires. You only see these things at one little time in the game, but in the CS they are constantly there, obscuring everything else. So I replaced them with little editor markers that spawn the fires with PlaceAtMe at the appropriate times.
Animating things to move together with Move/Moveworld is a pain in the ass, and if you're trying to animate an NPC in a boat going over a cell boundary, they seem to want to fall out. Meh. So animate one thing as a reference object, and move other things relative to it with Getpos/Setpos. Then use Setpos Z to make sure noone falls out and in addition, add an ability magnitude 100 slowfall to player/NPC when moving them around avoids jittery behavior.
I wanted to construct a room out of planks for a different effect. The downside to this is once you put the ceiling in place, you can't see into the room like you would using normal room pieces. So I assembled the parts of the ceiling to the side of the room, and scripted those pieces to move over the top of the room when the game is played. Now I can work on my room in the CS without the ceiling in the way, and I don't have to move the ceiling back and forth.
I really like the lighting effect of "negative" lights that can be used to give inky black shadows. But while they look great from a distance, if your character approaches them in-game even carrying a torch, they absorb all the light, and make things hard to see. So I created some scripted dark lights that disable themselves when the player is near. So as you approach carrying your torch, it gives a sort of "chasing the shadows away" effect.
Maybe there are better ways to solve these problems, but like the title says, I've gotten to the point where getting a solution that works is the most important thing.
