Merging Cells and Navmeshing Issues

[TechAngel85]

Is there a way to merge cells in the CK? The player home mod I'm working on is currently made up of at least 4 cells and it's really annoying working with some things across cells.

 

If the answer to that is no, is there a way to determine the size of a cell when creating from scratch or is that baked in?

[Kesta]

Is there a way to merge cells in the CK? The player home mod I'm working on is currently made up of at least 4 cells and it's really annoying working with some things across cells.

 

If the answer to that is no, is there a way to determine the size of a cell when creating from scratch or is that baked in?

Technically yes :

 

1) Double click on the cell you want to merge other cells into, so it load in the render window

 

2) Select one of the cell you want to merge in the previous one in the cell list with a single click (so the previous one is still the one in the render view)

 

3) Use Shift+Click to select all the content of the cell you want to move to the new one (from the list in the right pane of the cell view window)

 

4) Do a massive drag n drop from the list to the render window.

 

 

But you'll probably need a few try before actually having the two cells merged properly, so don't forget to save before doing this ^^

 

Be aware that drag n dropped stuffs keep their relative position, but the origin is the top of your cursor. Be sure to drop in a place where there is a "little something" (just add a tile of floor where you want to move the stuff), or the Z position will be super-messed up ^^

 

Also : don't drag n drop the navmesh if there is any, rebuild it once you're done merging/editing. And check in game, i don't know what's in the cells you want to merge, but if there is a lot of stuff linked to each other (like activator and so on), stuffs might end up broken.

 

And finally, you'll have to switch every loading doors to simple doors. And perform a quick check in xEdit in case there is any record that's kept from the former cell in the dat of the placed objects you added (stuffs like location, owner, and so on...), I'm not sure how this is getting copied when you use the trick described above. If you have massive changes, throwing in a small xEdit script to fix it all should do the trick.

 

 

But to be honest, I think it's a bad idea... I'm pretty sure you'll never get proper alignment between the various cells you merged together. But if you manage to do it somehow, you'll probably be a pioneer in one of the many sides of skyrim modding 

Edited July 6, 2015 by Kesta

[TechAngel85]

Interesting. Sounds like I sound just deal with it. Right now I'm playing around with Jaggarsfeld. The exterior is made up of at least four cells. I was wondering why the author did this instead of just placing the entire mod in one large cell. The navmesh is the annoying part. I've fixed a lot of the issues; however, the navmesh really needs to be redone from scratch.

 

One more question:

 

Can you create new navmeshes and rooms in an addon ESP and have it successfully overwrite the main mod?

 

The reason I ask, is I've been in contact with the authors of Jaggarsfeld and they are in "standby" mode and aren't giving up any permissions for the main mod just yet (even though it's been Nov 2013 since the last update). As mentioned, I've fixed a lot of issues with the navmesh; however, they don't seem that interested in the fixes. They are allowing any addons to be made, though, as long as the main file is kept as a master. So I'm asking if I put all my navmesh fixes and other additions into an addon plugin (planning on adding an additional room for child/followers) will they overwrite successfully?

[Kesta]

Honestly I have no idea how overrides behave regarding navmeshs. You can still fix it and see how it goes. But tbh, I just downloaded the mod to have a look, fixing it properly just with an addon seems crazy... there is a whole bunch of wild dirty edits.

 

 

And about my previous post : I'm not used to work with worldspaces (aka "exterior" cells), but I guess the trick wouldn't work for terrain edits, so exteriors wouldn't be mergeable anyway.

[TechAngel85]

Honestly I have no idea how overrides behave regarding navmeshs. You can still fix it and see how it goes. But tbh, I just downloaded the mod to have a look, fixing it properly just with an addon seems crazy... there is a whole bunch of wild dirty edits.

 

 

And about my previous post : I'm not used to work with worldspaces (aka "exterior" cells), but I guess the trick wouldn't work for terrain edits, so exteriors wouldn't be mergeable anyway.

Thanks, I guess it's a try and see situation. I'll PM Zilav first though and ask him about the navmeshes before wasting even more hours on it than I already have.

 

I understand what you are saying. This mod has a lot of issues which I wanted to fix. I just started with the navmeshes, but the authors don't seem to be interested for whatever reason. I guess they plan on returning to it someday.

 

As for the exterior cells, the author told me it was designed like that because he'd originally planned for the "trophy hall" to be in the same space but changed it later. He openly admitted they were learning the CK when building this mod. I'd just build my own if I could use that sorting system they're using, but they're not going to part with anything from this mod anytime soon so I'm just have to hope I can fix some things using an addon

[Kesta]

 I'd just build my own if I could use that sorting system they're using

I didn't actually try the mod, just looked at it in TES5Edit and the CK to see what it was about.

 

But for the sorting, if that's what I'm thinking aout, I'm pretty sure they used this : https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/24678

Or something similar, I'm not really used to house-mod related ressources, so there might be something out there more up to date than this link. But you usually don't come up with your own auto-sort / auto-loot script when learning how to use the CK ^^ (check other house mods credit section, you might discover some awesome stuffs)

Edited July 6, 2015 by Kesta

[TechAngel85]

Thanks! That does sound similar to what's in the mod.

[hishutup]

Honestly I have no idea how overrides behave regarding navmeshs. You can still fix it and see how it goes. But tbh, I just downloaded the mod to have a look, fixing it properly just with an addon seems crazy... there is a whole bunch of wild dirty edits.

 

 

And about my previous post : I'm not used to work with worldspaces (aka "exterior" cells), but I guess the trick wouldn't work for terrain edits, so exteriors wouldn't be mergeable anyway.

I did some testing awhile back, I'll add you to the conversation.

[Kesta]

I did some testing awhile back, I'll add you to the conversation.

Thx, haven't time to check the whole stuff right now (I'm supposed to be sleeping for 3 hours ), but there is some really interesting things in there. Preferred path have always been a mistery to me. Also I'm pretty sure there is some report on the decoding of navmesh records somewhere in a TES5Edit related thread (might be on github or the one on afkmod). Would be cool to be able to figure out the current state of the art regarding navmeshs (If TechAngel ever reach zilav, I think he'll have the link to the thread I'm thinking about).

 

 

Edit : Sorry for the half-off-topic @moderators/admins.

Edited July 7, 2015 by Kesta

[TechAngel85]

Yeah, Zilav said that the nevmeshes would overwrite just like any other record. There's not "merging" It's either one or the other. I really really want to do my own house mod now but editing in the worldspace is going to be a lot harder. I now see why all these tutorials have you building interior spaces.

[TechAngel85]

Need some more guidance. I'm going to give the whole story as all the information is presented:

 

I'm editing and fixing Jaggarsfeld, a player's home mod. The author has given the okay for mods that extend or fix it, as long as the main mod is a master. So I start off by loading the mod up in xEdit and coping the USKP changes into a new plugin call 'Jaggarsfeld Extended' (this will be the addon plugin to the main mod and we'll use JE for short). After this, I add Jaggarsfeld as a master to the new plugin and save and exit.

 

Next I load up the new plugin in the CK. The exterior navmesh is the first thing I want to fix so I delete all of it to start from scratch and save the file. Then I load up JE in xEdit again because I know I'll have to re-add it as a master to be able to work and save the changes in the CK to it (unless I'm doing this wrong). I noticed the new navmesh data for JE is present so I re-add Jaggarsfeld as a master again.

 

Next, I load up JE in the CK again to start work on the exterior navmesh. I noticed that the CK duplicated the mod's worldspace which is fine since I'm not saving to the main file and saving to JE. However, this is where my issue lays. When I load up the Jaggarsfeld worldspace (HunterCabin) and go to edit the navmesh, the main mod's meshes are shown rather than my the saved JE navmesh, which are currently empty since I deleted them. How am I suppose to get the navmesh from JE to take priority and work with them rather than with the main mods? I suppose if this is saved in the duplicated worldspace there would be no way of doing this.

 

The only way I can think of getting around this is by completely duplicating Jaggarsfeld's worldspaces and saving them to JE. Then I would only work from those duplicated spaces. This would be okay, however, I'm not sure how this will effect things down the line. I suppose I might be able to load JE in xEdit, re-add Jaggarsfeld as a master, and then clean out everything that is "identical to master". This, in my head, sounds like it would create a plugin that only adds or replaces things from the master, Jaggarsfeld (main mod).

 

This that the proper way to do something like this?

[TechAngel85]

I got to thinking, it might be better to do all the changes to the main mod and then rename it when done, add the main mod as a master, clean it, and then call it a day. xEdit through a fit about there being a duplicated world, if I remember correctly.

[TechAngel85]

Bump.

 

Guess I'm in "try it and see" territory now. I just do not want to do a lot of work to find out the plugin isn't working because I did it wrong. I know STEP isn't the best place to be asking about CK related stuff.

[Kesta]

I got to thinking, it might be better to do all the changes to the main mod and then rename it when done, add the main mod as a master, clean it, and then call it a day. xEdit through a fit about there being a duplicated world, if I remember correctly.

This won't work, because records from your new plugin, even if you add the old one as master, won't be considered as "override", they'll belong to your plugin, not the original. So you'll just have everything duplicated, thus overlapping and probably causing a big lot of z-fighting (if it doesn't just crash your game).

 

As for the rest of your question, I don't have enough knowledge to provide a decent answer just like this, and not enough time to validate some hypothesis and idea I have on the subject, so I'd rather keep quiet instead of sayin' ******** ^^

 

 

Best places to ask about modding right now are probably bethsoft forum or /r/skyrimmods

 

 

Edit : Oh, so their IS auto-censorship here... sorry ^^

Edited July 16, 2015 by Kesta

[TechAngel85]

Yep, we censor to keep things kid-friendly.

 

Thanks for your reply. I already posted this over on the Beth forum a few minutes ago. There are some great tutorials out there but nothing that specifically covers what I'm wanting to do here. Eventually, I'm going to be making my own player home, but for practice I wanted to do this first. That and I think Jaggarsfeld deserves some fixes since it is one of the two player homes that as inspired me. If you're interested in tracking the conversation, it's posted here: https://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1527452-creating-mod-addons/

[Guest]

You're modding? I would not have thought it would have been something you would have enjoyed Tech. I thought you liked tweaking and editing outside of the game itself. Why won't the authour let you do what you want if you are fixing it up? I don't  know why it has to be linked to the original mod if this person does not want to update it anymore. If it has custom assets that would be enough to get people to download the original. Don't include them in your version and tada! I may hate the CK, but please keep us updated. I am not totally clueless with this tool, honest.