Basically cause long story short, I invested a huge amount of time into a mod I "finished" about two years ago, and after a lot of trial and error almost everything was working fine. My life got very busy right around this time, and as a result I also lost a lot of modding knowledge about the specific project I was working on because of just how long certain personal matters distracted me from modding. Now after having more spare time, and re-reading some advice from the past and lots of trial and error I finally figured out the key to fixing that mod, and now it's just a matter of time. That mod in question is my Morrowind vampires mod, and the main issue is making the feeding work properly. (No it's not fixed just yet, but I intend to have it fixed up within about a week if not by today).

So how did I make this mod breaking mistake? Well I didn't realize you could rename a fragment script. And it was just confusion about fragments that delayed the improvement of my mod so much. So when I uploaded the most updated version, I had FORGOTTEN to upload the FRAGMENT SCRIPTS along with the other scripts, and couldn't even FIND the fragment script at that point after some data loss afterwards. If I had only clicked on "Advanced" next to Papyrus fragment, then clicked "Rename Script" and renamed it to something I surely wouldn't miss when uploading said mod would've made it past a broken state long ago. My other biggest modding mistake was that time in an unrelated hypothetical future mod when in vain attempting to make a huge Earth-Sized mod, I tried to have 50 cells open at once to produce a massive world... Needless to say, it ruined one of my hard drives, and I never ever did that ever again. On a much less frustrating note- but still frustrating note, I also learned interiors could be made too large, and that by fusing statics together you could make Skyrim more stable inside of huge places with tons of objects. When it caused a baffling glitch of the screen turning darker.

I feel very excited and relieved now, that I'm probably going to be able to fix that mistake from so long ago... Although the main reason I made this post, was out of curiosity to see what similar severe accidents others had with the Creation Kit. In short if anyone else ever has to use a fragment script, I heavily recommend renaming it. Uploading the regular PEX and PSC scripts generally seems to be common sense... Though it can be all too easy to accidentally leave out a fragment script when uploading if you don't know you can rename it.

The point of this post isn't asking for advice on a specific mod, just rather, hoping that some things some modders learn the hard way other modders can avoid entirely. I hope someone, somewhere, doesn't repeat my mistake of forgetting to keep track of a fragment script when uploading, or trying to load too much stuff in the CK at once, for example. And now I'm very curious what lessons other modders had to learn the hard way. So if you have any stories of massive modding mistakes you've made with the Skyrim Creation Kit, I'd be interested in reading about them, especially seeing as how some lessons are unfortunately often only learned when there's negative consequences. That way you get to tell a story about mistakes you've made yourself, and others can hopefully avoid repeating said mistakes.

the "what i learned" list, "biggest mistakes" list is implicite

- prefix every p.o.s. you ever give a name to.

- navmeshes can't be much bigger than 3000 triangles

- never ever save a navmesh before cleaning out all errors

- if your navmesh edits change an exterior navmesh's id, you've screwed up the navmesh

- no more than (roughly) 3 non-shadow lights can hit per object/texture without flickering

- build locations rather "sausage" than "meat loaf". else it's roombound- performance- and pathing hell for you.

- think about voice assets (or anything else you can't do yourself) you'll require for your quest story _before_ you build all the other stuff

- never condition your quests or try to build scenes tired, drunk or stoned

- seq files are wonky. story manager quest starts are not.

- start small

I'd add one to that list.

When you copy from what Bethesda developers did, make sure they got it right. If it works in-game it could be because the UKSP fixed it!

Not so much big, but "embarrassing"... Make sure you actually save your .esp...

(Wasted like 10 minutes today trying to work out why my Script was not working... All the debugs were fine... I'd been compiling the Script, but forgotten to save the .esp to update the properties... :: )

And the matching, "Make sure you activate your new ESP file before trying to test it."

This just happen to me tonight:

This one really astonishes me how it got by me. I did not re-register important events such as arrow release after reloads.

So it would work once but never again on save games.

So I did this in a player Allies script:

Oninitiate

    RegisterForMenu("Console")
    RegisterForAnimationEvent(playerref, "BlockStart")
    RegisterForAnimationEvent(playerref, "BlockStartOut")
    RegisterForAnimationEvent(playerref, "arrowRelease")
    RegisterForCameraState();Register for camera states
    RegisterForCrosshairRef()

;

And never did it again on player reloads! For some reason I thought you only had to do this ONCE and never again.

I just do not understand why I did not notice this before now.

Make sure all your scripts have a custom prefix added automatically when you create them you mean? Too right they're too easy to lose amongst the thousands of vanilla otherwise.

My advice would be start small, but when your ambition inevitably exceeds your ability do make sure you understand everything thats happening or the consequences, bugs and errors will neverending and you'll spend 100x more time and energy chasing endless rabbits down endless holes than if you took the trouble to understand exactly whats going on in the first place and understood the wider picture, tedious though it may be.

The second would be look for existing examples of scripts especially Bethesda's and work from that, its much easier than reinventing the wheel.

The CK's lovely habit of deleting exterior navmeshes and replacing with an identical copy in its place that won't function correctly? Thats fixable with xEdit, unless I misunderstood you (quite likely).

mmmmeh, when i read this, i was like "what? we can register for menus in skyrim now?",

and all excited they'd possibly have updated papyrus to the fo4 version*, since.... uhm... yesterday night when i last scripted for skyrim and they clearly had not

...so i rushed to the wiki, saw RegisterForMenu in the function list, excitement rises ----

and then it's skse............... bleh............................ )

(btw, i really hate it that se functions aren't marked in the all functions list. they even were, but some malevolent person took it out apparently)

* ...and i really wish i had fo4 papyrus in skyrim, just rescripting a skyrim mod of mine, and i could SO use structs for this (love them little thingies), would be 2/3 less script for the same thing

hehe, yeah, right

thing is, you can NOT fix this in xedit. i mean, for neighbour navmesh ck just fragged on the fly, yes.

but not for the ones you've actually edited, if you finalized anyway. else, you'd have to accordingly edit navmesh info map, too, and idk maybe you can make more of it, but a couple closer looks into that thing clearly told me that's one thing i'd NOT want to do, i'd be definitely be quicker renavmeshing all of tamriel than manually fixing _anything_ in that)

I think xEdit will fix up the navmesh info map too if you're referring to what I think you're referring to, you fix the navmesh i.d. then another window pops up asking you to confirm whether you want to fix up the navmesh info map too it autogenerates the fill data for you.

(I'm probably thinking of something else though you guys are way more experienced than me)

what i mean is, if you edit a vanilla exterior navmesh and that gets its id changed in the process, and you finalize and save,

you CAN uncheck the deleted flag on the original navmesh and delete the altered id version - but due to the finalizing, the neighbouring navmeshes (or info map rather) will still refer to the one you finalized with, which would be the one just deleted here.

and i haven't ever seen xedit attempting to fix info map

on reading your post though, it just occured to me i never tried like this: delete the original id navmesh entry from the mod, and change the altered id navmesh's id to the original one's. maybe xedit would try fixing stuff like this, dunno, but definitely gonna try (i'd have wasted many hours of redoing navmesh edits in vain, if this actually works

I followed this guide:

http://afkmods.iguanadons.net/index.php?/topic/3337-skyrim-fixing-navmesh-deletion-using-tes5edit/

Arthmoor is Akatosh basically

what, i though alduin = akatosh, so = arthmoor's a time defying evil lizard wanting to destroy the universe?

i'll not hope so, i'd have real qualms shouting dragonrend at him

...thx for the link anyway, this should definitely come in handy, not so much about navmeshes (got these entirely covered with my methods), but i keep running into problems moving records between plugins, pretty sure i'll find some answers there

edit: ...and i guess giving that afk-site itself a closer look might be worth the while as well...