This is a post from a moderator in another thread (new vegas). The original context is mods and consoles.



What I gleaned from this is.

Modding the original game's world areas - - those that reside in Fallout3.esm - are apparently, inherantly problem prone and Bethesda itself doesn't prefer to do it that way.

So we as modders may wish to think about this, and if we want to make new places, consider not tearing up the fallout3.esm worldspaces.

One thing I did was I borrowed (stole) a Bethesda test worldspace, I copied it wholesale within the GECK, and I turned off LOD because it was all wrong... and there it was, to edit and fart around with. Maybe that is in fact best practice for certain mods, instead of taking a section of Wasteland worldspace and messing with it.

If Bethesda is fighting to make its own DLCs work together well -- comparing their stuff to ours - - we're certainly in the wild and wooly wilderness with all of the mods we're making and which users are throwing together in gigantic lists of 100+. And we are having people load up old savegames with all of this trying to come together. So.. all of this is good for us to think about.

The first thing I come to think of is "If I DO delete something, intentionally or not, how can I get it back?".

I am working on my first mod, and I have deleted one (1) item in Megaton. I have worked many hours on my mod, how can I restore (and disable) the deleted item without starting over from scratch? Is it at all possible?

Regards,
The Nonsense Factory

Yes, http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=637 has an "undelete and disable" function for just that purpose.

Cipscis

Thank you for that golden piece of information, Cipscis!

Regards,
The Nonsense Factory

Sure but you should be careful because FO3 edit is pretty powerful and could screw up your mod even more if your not careful so always make a backup of the ESP before making any changes.

That is very good advice indeed. I will probably delay FO3Edit until everything else is complete, and then save a final backup in case the FO3Edited version breaks something (immediately or sometime in the future).

Regards,
The Nonsense Factory

This is one of the first things I learned when making Oblivion mods. Those new to modding gamesas games may not be aware of a lot of things you 'should' avoid doing. Some posts just make me laugh, but I wish them well anyway.

Yes, some good points in that. You can see that even Bethesda kept where their DLCs impacted the regular fallout worldspace to places completely out of the way, or ones highly unlikely to have people swarming to build on them. I've totally built over whole areas of the vanilla fallout in places, but that's only for my own enjoyment, not a mod anyone else will ever have to worry about. The one real mod I've been picking away at barely touches the normal worldspace at all.. lotta discreet doorways in out of the way places.

I know it's been a few weeks since the last post in this thread but I recently got into modding with FO3 so it raises some interesting points.





I saw another thread where it advised against deleting anything that's been place by the vanilla game but what about adding stuff? How much impact (aside from the obvious implications of conflicting with other mods that might add things in the same place) does this have in terms of stability etc?

And if deleting things is a bad idea? are there any problems associated with altering any landscape in vanilla content?



I only dabbled with Oblivion modding, though I did mod extensively in Morrowind but something tells me that there were less things to avoid when modding in Morrowind, the main things there, I recall, were to try not to build in places that other mods had and I seem to remember some problems if you tried to build so far out from cell 0,0.

What things should I be looking to avoid doing in the G.E.C.K.?

~Thanks

Adding new content to an existing Bethesda cell should not lead to any additional issues other that what you have mentioned.



Altering vanilla content is okay in the sense that moving vanilla objects diesn't seem to cause problems. Changing landscape heights and navmeshes falls into this category.



In regards to Gecking Bethesda cells, just try to avoid deleteing vanilla objects - especially persistent objects and objects that are otherwise linked somehow to other objects. Sometimes you can get away with deleting vanilla static objects, but this too can lead to problems as well. Its my opinion that one should never delete anything Bethesda placed into a cell. Instead mark these objects as initially disabled.

Another big no no for beginers is the 'Compile all scripts' option in the script window. Never select this option as it will make a copy of every script in the game and add it to your mod.

One I discovered recently when I was making the roving traders safe from the nastier enemies (enclave, raiders and deathclaws). With factions, never make a friendly faction friendlier to your enemies. This was an alternative to just setting them essential as I've read posts from people who've had some issues with this method.

I originally set the trader faction as 'friend' to the 'raiders' and the raider faction as neutral to 'traders' (apparently you can't do this either). Unfortunately, this meant Crow, Wolfgang etc would come to the aid of any raiders I was shooting. But, by setting their initial neutral disposition (20 to default, but 0 to new ones) to lower towards raiders, enclave and deathclaws than me, it meant they will help me with raiders if I'm close, but are otherwise safe if I'm not in the immediate area.

many mods are designed specifically to affect and change the vanilla game. for more or less, there is a mod that crosses many of these modding no-no boundaries. They whole mod might have did it on purpose. :shrug: its a mixed bag.

ideally you want to achieve your goal as painlessly as possible. or as bug free as possible. beyond that I say its all fair game. don't hold back from vanilla if you don't want to. :hehe:

I don't see where it suggests that modifiying the base game cells is inherently error prone, it just points out that new worldspaces - obviously - don't overlap with old ones, so there are no compatibility problems to worry about. That makes sense to me - if I modify a particular wasteland cell, I have no idea if there's another mod out there somewhere that is adjusting the same cell and may conflict with mine; however, I can be 100% certain that no other mod is going to conflict with the new interiors I create.

I can't imagine that Bethesda would even contemplate the original suggestion - what would they get out of it? Tons of work and nothing but endless complaints about which mods did or did not deserve to be included. It would be a nightmare!

Thanks for the answers



At the moment I am weighing up options whilst working through the Bethesda tutorials so I can get up to speed with the G.E.C.K.

It certainly sounds like the more that can be done in a separate world space, the better.

I do hesitate because there'll be things in my mod that I want players to revisit time and time again - though I think I may have a solution in mind if I can do certain things with scripts/objects.

Hmmm...what I get out of that is that there is absoulutely NO WAY IN HELL that Bethesda is ever going to get into player made content distribution, so you can pretty much do what you want as your work will never be "officially" released.

I would think not ripping the existing game world to shreds would go without needing to be said, but maybe not.

I also didn't take away from the post that modding Fallout3.esm will inherently cause issues. Though it is essentially impossible for us to determine the truth of this factoid, from experience we have learned the problems of LOD, Navmeshing and Heightmap changes that can cause "Issues" (Here I'm defining an issue being anything that doesn't work right, not necessary crash-issues). I find this hard to believe considering that when the GECK was first released to us in Nov 08, Fallout3.esm was the Only file we had to play with aside from our own plug-ins - which insinuates that any plug-in that changes records in Fallout3.esm is badness - and I refuse to believe that.

Also of note, some of the "issues" are fixed by turning our plug-ins into master files - which alot of big mods do. If the statements about modifying Fallout3.esm were true, would it then also apply to mods that were master-fied? How would we know honestly? It was not until some time after the release that Elminster gave us Fo3edit with enough capability easily handle this, so it could well-be that the "issues" noted only apply to plug-ins and not master files - but again we have Zero way of knowing it.

All in all I think the idea of Bethesda pushing some of our mods out is Great in principle, but would suffer hugely in practice and IMHO will never happen. The very idea of QA-testing a group of mods together for crash-bugs insinuates that Beth's QA group has the kind of time-cycles or ability to go back and QA-test Fo3 mods - and with all the new titles coming out, I can't see that. If bugs were found, would Bethesda then have to "adopt" the mod and fix it themselves? (I can just the devs screaming Nooooooooo!). Fixing someone else's code is the least-fun thing to do for a developer, and not something I can see them voluntarily deciding to do. And then the great decision game over which mods to choose and not choose - a huge ugly PR mess waiting to happen.

I would love the idea, but I don't see the financials behind it offering any sort of sales-boost to the franchise, and that's the #1 requirement for anything like this IMHO.

huhhhhhh

euhhhhhhhhhh

Aite.

What I was trying to say back when I reposted that thing was.

We as modders are making mods, right. For players to use. And those players have the habit of combining literally a hundred or so mods in a pile and loading them into a single game.

If Bethesda struggled to get their 5 DLCs working together well (think: they are like mods, right?), it would seem that as a general practice, we will want to take note of the things that helped them. One of their practices is to not do extensive editing of Wasteland worldspace, they tend to make new worldspaces and roll with those. So, the sense arises that maybe it's best practice from a standpoint of stability and good function for us to do similar.It's not about feeling restricted in what you can do, it's about understanding the impact of the changes you're making, and making the best design decisions.

Okay so maybe your mod is named Rewrite-All-Wasteland-Navmesh, or Replace-Megaton-With-Seattle. So alright, you're allowed to do that. But you should do it with the understanding of what the presumed best practice is in terms of game stability and conflicts (maybe even hard-to-identify conflicts), and maybe think of the best way to do it and get the game result you want.

For example - copying a small worldspace is like, a 2 click process, and that new worldspace can be edited pretty much freely. Then you can link the Megaton door to your copied worldspace, instead of editing the hell out of the original. I'm not saying your copy of Megaton would work properly AS MEGATON (and Hell it would NOT) but you get the picture I think.