Ok, will do and report back. Thanks for the suggestions. Dinnertime...

Update: that worked! So import names needs something to compare against!! Funny because import cells works on its own. Documentation Wrye, hmmm?

Thanks for your help, guys. More mods to load...

I think that is in the docs somewhere... The whole point of importing is to have changes that would otherwise be overwritten by mods later in the load order (that would revert the changes on some level) "win". I always check everything in that section anyway, so I would not have paid that much attention I guess.


Edit: Bash had no reason to import the changes if they were not being overridden or were not overriding something else... Once you check the Oblivion.esm, that was not the case anymore. That is the only explanation I can think of anyway.

I can understand the philosophy and I'm not necessarily calling it a bug. The issue is that you do not have to make similar selections when importing cells. In that case, oblivion.esm is preselected for you. Perhaps it should be for importing names as well. Wrye Bash has already indicated to me that the mod should be imported and deactivated - what is the basis for that? It wasn't even clear to me that what that meant was that it wanted the names to be imported - I discovered that after some further research. I could find nothing in the docs about importing names at all, other than a comment that it is used for merging names with other mods. He also says that source files are "recognized" if they have the name tag. Also, if I am loading multiple mods, I will not necessarily know that I need to include specific mods when importing names. I can guess, and perhaps it doesn't hurt to simply select everything, but that is not clear from the scant documentation available. That's just my frustration with Wrye. Very good tool, but figuring out how to use it requires a doctorate!

You should select everything as they appear in the bashed patch with few exceptions - http://sites.google.com/site/oblivionpoinfo/finishinstall/bashedpatch <-- Names are up to you of course, but most tags are not their for aesthetic reasons

Oh, I've been reading your site, trust me I'm afraid it lacks a lot of the details I'm looking for in this case. This is all very familiar to you guys that work with this stuff all the time, but as a "user" coming in and trying to assimilate what I need to get my mods running, it's all too much. I was afraid to select most of the options because I don't understand the impact they may have. And a lot of it does not apply to me. And forget about Bain - it's too much of a pain

Your site is very good and has a lot of excellent information - don't get me wrong. It answered a lot of questions I had. Just remember that your audience is not necessarily a techie that will understand a lot of what you write. I am actually a techie - I just don't want to replicate my day-time job when I'm playing games!! Besides, I've retired from coding - and I'm old enough to retire from coding at least

Oh, and lastly, the issue wasn't the selections I was making for the bashed patch anyway. It's the options on which mods to include once you have made those selections. Try it! Import Names and only select the mod you want to import into your bashed patch - per the instructions. It won't work. You need to select a second mod to compare against, unlike some of the other import functions... You have to manually select oblivion.esm in this instance. I presume that if you select other mods, more names would be imported, so it probably wouldn't hurt to select everything you have loaded, but I haven't tested that.

That is why a say "safe". That is not technical at all. The page says that means you can check all options. There are only a few exception in which you would not check a plugin that appears in the bashed patch. You should check everything unless stated otherwise, or you know what you are doing and want to see a specific changes. Where is the techno talk?


Edit: Also, I am trying to make this site as newbie friendly as possible, so if you have suggestions, please post them in the site's thread. I would really appreciate the feedback. It seems that many newer users over think many of the suggestions. There is always rephrasing to be done...

Edit: I wonder why the selection of Oblivion.esm is not hidden.

The issue has nothing to do with what I selected, or didn't select. I could have checked all the options you said were "safe". That would not have helped. And it would have resulted in a larger patch than what I need. More is not always better!

Edit: If you want to make it newbie friendly, keep it concise to a couple of points. Humans can only process about seven items at a time (in a menu for example). Don't get into all the detail about what you need to do with the overhaul mods. One hopes a newbie wouldn't load those anyway - and if they do, then they get to go through all the detail. I don't use Bain - I install manually or use OBMM. I don't consider myself a newbie - I've done some modding in fact. I just don't want to sit down and read pages and pages of detail just to find out how to install a mod. If I have a very specific piece of advice or a comment, I will post to your thread. As I said, I think your efforts should be commended and I'm not dishing them.

If you had selected the Oblivion.esm files, wouldn't you have avoided this problem?


Edit: Checking plugins where they appear in the bashed patch is not about "more". It is about functionality. The user has little knowledge of a mod's functionality in comparison to its author, so it seems reasonable to expect that if the tag is there, it should be used, unless otherwise noted. Import Names is largely an aesthetic category, but not importing cells, race changes, inventory changes, or actor data can break functionality. Not importing stats or relations tends to break consistency.

Edit: My last "Edit" comments are largely applicable when you have overlapping mods, as many heavily modded setup do. Even many moderately modded setup contain overlapping cosmetic mods. Having the correct tags and using them are very important.

Edit: What does the bashed patch page have to do with overhauls? It is the user's choice to follow the guides. The Bashed Patch page is a bulletted list (now with a short introductory paragraphs.) I have taken great care to avoid "walls of text" as much as possible. Setting up modified Oblivion can only be so concise. If you have suggestions for doing that, again, please let me know.

Tomlong, the instructions said nothing about having to select other mods. They said to select the source mod that you wanted to import the names for. That's all you have to do when you import cells. It is inconsistent and that's all I'm saying.

Please quote this from the page because I do not see that. My interpretation of all of the bashed patch pages on the site are to check all unless specified otherwise.


Edit: If there are inconsistencies, I need to remove them as soon as possible.

Well, they really don't say much at all, and that is the major problem. However, this is what they do say:



In my case, the "renamer mod" was Ranokoas' mod. In just says "other mods", which I interpreted as simply importing the names into the bashed patch so that the names would override all other mods. It also says "souce mods are automatically recognized". Well the only source mod it recognized was Ranokoas', which I expected. I didn't expect to have to select oblivion.esm as a souce mod, which is what I had to do to get this to work.

I think this is an oversight on Wrye's part and is inconsistent with the way the other import functions work. Now, I'd like to get back to importing the rest of my mods!

Edit:

I'm not referring to your page at all here. Your page only says to select "Import Names". You would need to specify which mods need to be selected once Import Names is selected. I guess you could say to select the mod that Wrye has indicated in green italics **and to select oblivion.esm**, which Wrye's instructions do not specify.

"Recognized" means that the plugin appears in the particular section of the bashed patch, and the Oblivion.esm file was there. The most "inconsistent" tag are the race changes tags. The behavior is completely different. I do not think that description is inconsistent because everything was "recognized" as it should have been, but I guess it was unclear to you. This has nothing to do with the docs on my site though... It sounds to me as if you want a more detailed explanation of each tag. Do you want me to add such a page to my site? That is inconsistent with your previous statements about information overload, but I would not mind adding one. It will not be a main page, but users seeking more information would have it available.

Hmmm, just illustrates how people interpret things differently, doesn't it? I know in my line of work (application development, actually), there is nothing more enlightening than having users use your application.

Anyway, I think each list should be constrained to a few points. Making each point a tag that a user could click on for more information would be very helpful and would not contribute to information overload because they have focused on that specific point. The extra information page could be a single page with in-page anchors to each section. It's the long lists of items that are daunting

Do you want all feedback on the thread for your page or would you prefer a pm? Be careful of what you ask for I might give you more info than you really want!

You should see Psymon's posts in my thread... Go ahead and drop whatever you like in there. I do not have time to do serious revamping for another week, but when I return home, major updates will be set in motion. The sooner I can create a plan the better, so I would like to have the feedback now.

I really like the anchor idea. I want to do that for screen shots for the step-by-step guides, and it would also be useful for highlighting terms. The term glossary needs to be completed, but it is hard to get users to even venture to click on the links in the "Related Pages" section. The closer at hand it is, the better. I try to keep this lists a short as possible, which is why the bulletted lists do not go in more than three levels in most cases. The spacing helps too, but I have to include all of the bashed patch options. When the site is moved off of Google Sites and I have more freedom to code, doing these sorts of things should be easier (but the formatting won't be.)

Ok, I'll try to forward stuff along as I come across things. Doing web development is what drove me to retirement

okay a word from the developers (or to be technical one developer):
What is going on is actually 100% intended functionality...
import X (for the most part anyways) only imports sub-records (ie name, model etc.) that are 1. handled by that patcher and 2. changed in that esp from the master record of that item/object/cell etc AND not the same value for the sub-record as the current last loaded mod that changes that particular item.

So what was going on in your case was that roanoka's was the last mod that was changing potion names that was active. Hence no need to import the record so it wasn't imported. Selecting Oblivion.esm shouldn't have done anything (and shouldn't be done) but obviously was forcing it to think that the names were changed.
Hope that explains it cleary.
Pacific Morrowind

Aha. Too bad it didn't tell me it didn't have anything to do Ok, so I guess I should remove the deactivate tag (which I didn't add, but somebody or something did). Thanks for the info, that actually makes me much happier!! I'll also rebuild my patch.

The bigger question here then is why is Oblivion.esm visible on that menu if it's never supposed to get selected?

Actually if you look at this http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=149tg6r&s=5, you'll see that I actually had several options available, the only one of which I should select is Ranokoas' mod. Of the mods I actually have loaded, only the two csv files are invalid. That's why selecting oblivion.esm really didn't make any sense. At this point, I'm just glad I have it sorted, but I think there is some tweaking to be done

So correct me if I am wrong now, but if roanoka's esp was NOT checked and just imported, than it should have worked as intended right? If the mod was checked in his load order when rebuilding the patch then there is nothing to change since the records already exist.

That's one question I am not sure was asked. Was roanoka's esp checked when rebuilding the bash patch? If it was than I could see how this could cause your problem. Since roanoka modifies the names already there is nothing to override, but if you have it unchecked when BUILDING your bash patch it should then overwrite the changes from oblivion.esm.

I ran into that problem a few times. In order for imports to do what they are suppose to you should make sure they are unchecked so their changes actually get imported. I.E. no changes to make when its active means no changes to import... if that makes sense.

Yeah, that makes sense. I think I left Roanoka's mod inactive when building my bashed patch out of habit, so it worked properly, but I never thought to ask the OP whether they had it active in their load order or not.

This is what I want to know (which is why I asked in the main thread.)



I usually advocated leaving mods that should be deactivated, deactivated. However, if that ESP is supposed to be active, users should not be expected to do that. However, the OP should have checked and seen that the changes were not being overridden, but I thought that that was the issue. The names were not being imported and the mod was having the last say. If that was not the case, this whole mess was just a complete misunderstanding...



Does that mean that this mod should not be active? The bashed patch should be rebuilt with all active mods active so that the importing and merging is done as it should be, right?

Mods that only have elements being imported (i.e. ones that are recommended to be deactivated afterward, like TNR or OMOBS) don't have to be active when building your bashed patch. Wrye Bash will still grab the imported elements from them and add the dot to the box.

Since all he wanted was the names from this mod, it should have been inactive when building the patch. I didn't realize that have it active could actually cause bugs, though.

The exception is Race related mods, where they do have to be active, even if you only want to import things. That makes Race related changes somewhat more complicated.

I know. I said mods that are going to be active should be active during the building. I recommend deactivating all mods that are going to be merged or import-only. Having it active was not a bug if nothing was overriding it later in the load order. We do not know what the situation was. Hopefully, the OP will put in a word on that. If that was not the case, then that does seem to be a bug. I am not convinced yet, however.