We've all done it at some point - Wished that Bethesda would fix the damned thing :flame: ... and add some of those godsend features that would make life so much more easier.

Unfortunately, nothing ever came of it. Beth moved on to creating more trouble with the GECK, leaving us in the dust with an aging, one-legged buzzard. But hope springs eternal. I've created this thread just in case a lone (and handsome) vagabond chances upon it and takes to themself the task of fattening the damned bird.

Post features that you'd like to see, along with known CS quirks and bugs. But keep them within limits, for we don't want to scare away our savior. Here are a few to begin with:

• A better script editor - Please, for the love of Grud!
  
• Remove the need for mod de-isolation - :touched:
  
• Edit master files directly, without the need to ESPify them first.
  
• Create master files directly.
  
• Fix that annoying dialog editor CTD.
  
• Allow unknown records and groups in plugin files.
  
• Fast exit for the CS.
  
• Enhance the Find Text tool to allow the opening of records from its list.
  
• A centralized use info listing.
  
• Remove the 'No' button in the Editor Warning dialog box - To prevent accidental exits.
  
• Allow the selection of assets in BSA archives, without the need to extract them first.
  
• Fix the Cancel/Close button in the asset selection dialog to not clear the existing path.
  
• Fix the bug that causes the loss of dialog result scripts and flags when adding new topics.
  
• Fix the bug that causes the CS to CTD when clicking on the 'Face' tab in a NPC record's dialog.
  
• Fix the script compiler's 73 bytes/line bug with the vanilla set and if commands.
  
• Add a Cancel button the script save confirmation message box.
  
• Allow the modification of an asset's path directly, as opposed to using a file browser.
  
• The ability to copy asset file paths (as a companion for the above suggestion)

Long live the vagabond, whoever they might be !

Suggestions made in the posts below:

• The ability to specify a custom workspace.
  
• The ability to save mods under a new name.
  
• The ability to generate more than one distant land LOD per sitting. Currently, you can do one that comes out reasonably well. All subsequent attempts I've ever seen result in a random jumble of useless triangles in the mesh.
  
• Land LOD meshes that aren't such terrible approximations of the real landscape. I remember seeing somewhere that what we get is a 1% representation of the real thing. Could we bump this to 5% or something?
  
• The ability to generate landscape LOD textures that are better than the 1024x1024 quality we get now. Something on the quality level of the local maps. Or at the very least higher resolution.
  
• Fix the bug that causes black squares on the LOD texture if you switch to a different window. Annoying.
  
• Don't make the LOD texture generator load all the objects on the surface since they're not going to be used in the results anyway. Saves untold amounts of memory.
  
• Generate the textures and normal maps for LOD land in DXT1 format with appropriate mipmap levels to start with. Easy enough to fix, but why incur extra work?
  
• Allow selecting a faction for the IsCellOwner test in an AI pack's conditions. The function accepts factions in scripts, and the game will honor it if you use TES4Edit to force one in, but you can't use the CS to simply set one.
  
• The ability to pull up a 3D position edit window on door markers. I could swear we had this with Morrowind.
  
• Allow and display icons with mipmaps, since they do work in-game
  
• Fixing whatever it is that causes certain dialog and worldspace edit flags to occur when no such edits have been made to the active plugin (specifically: Load two plugins, one with dialogue type edits, particularly GREETING records, and one without. Make the one without dialogue records your active plugin. Make some edits that have nothing to do with dialogue, save, then go see your shiny new GREETINGS empty nothing whatever in TES4Edit).
  
• Allow adjustable rotation sensitivity and rotation snap-to-grid (why can't I ever rotate something exactly 90 degrees?)
  
• NPC refs update visually when their inventory is changed without plugin reload
  
• Option to automatically dump & reload models on cell load without plugin reload
  
• Hide unmodified records.
  
• Default z-coordinate when one drops pieces in the render window
  
• Batch editing reference data
  
• Lip sync generation
  
• Better looking CS water
  
• On-the-fly adjustment of zoom sensitivity

PS : O Mighty Maestro! Please don't take offense from any not-exceedingly-over-the-top-but-still requests there might be - We are but a bunch of clueless hedgehogs. In a bag.

Wouldn't this need a game change, just as much as a CS one?

I don't know that I'd need to be able to select assets from a BSA. If I could only edit the current path instead of having use a selection dialog, and the CS would then validate that the target exists, that would be good enough. Emulating the folder navigation is a much bigger effort than just allowing a text edit on the path. Once the path is editable, you get cut-and-paste from another dialog for free, so most reuse of existing assets could be done that way.

Add to that list:

• the ability to define your workspace so that you can work on mods outside out of the Oblivion data directory
  
• as part of that, the ability to define assets either inside or outside the Oblivion directory - of course if you could extract assets from a bsa without having to extract it first, that would lessen this requirement
  
• ability to save a mod under a new name (a Save As option, not just Save)

It's too bad we can't replace the CS with an Eclipse plug-in. I think it's too late at this point - it'd be an awful lot of work. Eclipse is probably the most widely used development environment for java and other languages... We're building an Eclipse plug-in for programming the Lego Mindstorms, for example...

• IMO the script editor is enough.
  
• Masterfiles aren't originally designed to be used by modders, as you probably have figured out by now.
  
• What do you mean by "dialog editor CTD"?
  
• My CS closes in about ten seconds... That's fast enough.
  
• As ghastley said, it would be silly to do that. It'd be better if you could just edit the path when selecting file.
  
• I lose neither scripts nor flags when adding new topics
  
• The fix for that problem is that you don't open the Face-tab

Seriously, man, Sami's got it right. There is nothing anyone will ever be able to do about any of that, ever. These tools were passed down from on high, you just have to learn to deal with their flaws!

And silly stuff like wanting to use the file browser to navigate inside an archive... do you have any clue what's involved in that? Above posters' suggestion of memorizing three-score-character pathnames is a much better idea. Heck, you could probably achieve that idea with an OBSE plugin.

What's wrong with Use Info, anyway?

Dear moderators: This post is a joke, and shadeMe gets it. It would be funnier without this tag at the bottom, but c'est la vie.

Despite what others have said, I think some of these could be useful.

The ESM stuff would be great, particularly when you want to make just a small change to a .esm-- now you have to exit, change the extension, espify, fix, esmifu, change the extension back.
Find text would be useful-- I know I've tried it a few times
No button would be the best-- the .ini setting stop all error messages, it seems.
For the BSA stuff, I think just being able to click the current MEsh/Texture path and Copy it would be ideal-- esp. if you could stop the clicking on it clearing it issue.

:ahhh:

I'm no programmer but I wouldn't think so. The game only cares about the master list - As long as there is an entry for each ESP master, it's fine. It's the CS that misbehaves. It appears that it explicitly filters out loaded plugins when populating the master list.

Good idea. Into the OP it goes!

• That sounds like another good idea.
  
• I wonder if that's feasible, as it'd require modifying the game as well. A substantial bit of it, I'm guessing.
  
• Another gem! Added to the OP.

Hmm, on second thought, you guys are right. I think I might have gone overboard with some of my suggestions (after all my preaching on how one shouldn't :shakehead:). My sincere apologies. I'll add a post script to the OP so that the awesome person won't take offense.


I think there already is. bEditorWarnings or something.
Added to the OP.

PS : By the dialog editor CTD, I mean the crash that occurs when you try to edit a response.

A fine warning for any tempted to suggest, "bugger all that."

Specifics on that one would be nice. I've edited responses before with no trouble at all.

What I'd like to see is probably more of a game change than a CS change, but I want to be able to move a persistent reference and have its position actually change in the game if I've already been there before. I get why some things need persistence, but I fail to see the harm in simply updating its position in the save without actually causing it to get a total reset. It would certainly make some situations a lot less of a pain to deal with.

Now, on to real wishlist stuff:

* The ability to generate more than one distant land LOD per sitting. Currently, you can do one that comes out reasonably well. All subsequent attempts I've ever seen result in a random jumble of useless triangles in the mesh.
* On the same related subject, land LOD meshes that aren't such terrible approximations of the real landscape. I remember seeing somewhere that what we get is a 1% representation of the real thing. Could we bump this to 5% or something?
* The ability to generate landscape LOD textures that are better than the 1024x1024 quality we get now. Something on the quality level of the local maps. Or at the very least higher resolution.
* Fix the bug that causes black squares on the LOD texture if you switch to a different window. Annoying.
* Don't make the LOD texture generator load all the objects on the surface since they're not going to be used in the results anyway. Saves untold amounts of memory.
* Generate the textures and normal maps for LOD land in DXT1 format with appropriate mipmap levels to start with. Easy enough to fix, but why incur extra work?
* Long shot, but provide a method in the CS to generate a low poly version of a mesh for use as a _far.nif. Preferably stripped of things I've found they can't use anyway.
* Even longer shot: Collision generation for .nif files.
* The Hail Mary shot: The ability to edit nifs in general within the CS. I'll spare the request for a full blown modeling system, but nifskope functions native to the CS would truly be awesome.

I'm sure there are plenty of other things to add here, but I can't think of them right now. Can you guess my major peeve is landscape LOD?

Huh. Integrating the CS and NifSkope might not be that hard, assuming one figures out how to edit the CS in general (JRoush, for one, seems to have done so with OBME). You could use Niflib and PyFFI for a lot of it, I think. That's an interesting idea, certainly, but way, way over my head; I can expose Niflib functions to OBSE, but actually recreating NifSkope within the CS is way beyond my abilities.

Excellent news, DW! But certainly our mysterious, hypothetical, well-endowed benefactor wouldn't want feature creep to delay an initial release. :spotted owl:

Do you mean the bug that occurs when you don't have a microphone plugged in in Vista/Win 7?


Me too, once I plugged in a microphone

I've edited responses since upgrading to Windows 7, and I don't have a mic. In fact plenty of dialogue for A Brotherhood Renewed wasn't even written until I got 7, and I know for sure a lot of it ended up getting edited.

Another wishlist item:

Allow selecting a faction for the IsCellOwner test in an AI pack's conditions. The function accepts factions in scripts, and the game will honor it if you use TES4Edit to force one in, but you can't use the CS to simply set one.

Derailing question, but probably relevant.

Do you prefer a single integrated tool, that might crash if any part of it is flaky, or separate tools for specific functions?

The idea of an integrated NifSkope is what triggered this. I can't even run NifSkope on the same machine as the CS, because my main machine's Video card has no driver available that supports both OpenGL and DirectX. It seems that if they fix one, they break the other, so I've ended up running NifSkope on an older box that can't run the full game. NifSkope doesn't exactly need a high FPS to be useful. Integrating the tools would give me a real headache. (of course an integrated tool wouldn't use two different video API's, but the point is still valid)

On the other hand, an integrated tool knows what you've just done with one piece, and can pick up the result and use it immediately. Just the esp/esm flip is a good example. If the CS was doing it, you wouldn't have to restart so much.

Discuss....

The main problem I see with integrating NifSkope, now that I think about it, is the impossibility of simply integrating new versions of NifSkope into it.

I wasn't exactly calling for a straight integration of nifskope, just the ability to edit nifs within the CS. I guess I'm not entirely sure if the wishlist was one for the devs to consider for TES V or if it's for CSE instead. If it's for CSE, then forget about the nifskope thing because it currently crashes on me too if I set it to render shaders and then click on any part of the mesh. Which is something ATI broke in a recent driver since that USED to work.

EDIT: One more wish - The ability to pull up a 3D position edit window on door markers. I could swear we had this with Morrowind.

I have one wish that I read somewhere. Ability to open properties window while having selected several objects in the Render window. For example select bunch of books and opening properties window where one could select NPC owner for all of them at once instead of doing it for every single object or for a whole cell.

I would dance a happy dance, sirs. This might shave hours off every interior for those of us who are particularly... particular. Not just ownership - pos/angle, scale, etc... please too!

More:
-Setting the alpha of an object in the CS via the Reference dialogue and not in the mesh, texture, or script
-Allow and display icons with mipmaps, since they do work in-game
-Fixing whatever it is that causes certain dialog and worldspace edit flags to occur when no such edits have been made to the active plugin (specifically: Load two plugins, one with dialogue type edits, particularly GREETING records, and one without. Make the one without dialogue records your active plugin. Make some edits that have nothing to do with dialogue, save, then go see your shiny new GREETINGS empty nothing whatever in TES4Edit).
-Allow adjustable rotation sensitivity and rotation snap-to-grid (why can't I ever rotate something exactly 90 degrees?)
-NPC refs update visually when their inventory is changed without plugin reload
-Option to automatically dump & reload models on cell load without plugin reload

And yeah, maybe this stuff will never get fixed; but if we don't tell them what we want, then we can't complain when we don't get it next go 'round.

Oh, yes, Good God yes, THIS. In all honesty if we get nothing else, give us this! Ownership, disable flag, enable parent settings, all of that being possible on multiple records within the CS.

We can do most of that now in tes4edit but it's so much simpler to do it visually in the render window.

The CS crashes when you attempt to edit responses on a machine using a Realtek audio chipset and haven't got mic plugged in.




I'd say an option to load a mesh into NIFSkope directly from the CS would be an ideal middle ground. And what is this CSE you speak of ?


Batch editing!
I thought you could change that in the Preferences dialog.

I should have been more specific - you can when you only have one object highlighted. But if you try to rotate a large shelf full of books ninety degrees, or really multiple objects of any variety/quantity, you'll see that it doesn't quite completely work. At least, not with any settings I've tried. :shrug:

Our hypothetical savior, the Certifiably Superb Eidolon, of course!

How about the ability to make duplicates of items inside levelled item lists, or specify how often they appear as ratios. If I want to make an item that appears only one tenth of the time in a levelled item I have to drag nine copies of the normal item in. Yawn.

Oh, that's a peeve all right. The way leveled lists are used internally by the game engine isn't likely to change, so it's probably good to still be able to see the raw format... so either a button to switch between "raw" and "sensible" formatting for the list; or on the simple end, a right-click "Duplicate..." option so you can drag one in, then just tell it you want 8 more.