Thursday, November 23, 2017

No Longer In There, Here!

Been playing around in the SSE Creation Kit off and on for the last week. Relearning the render window alone has been amusing/frustrating. Hit my first real wall (bug?) last night.

Decided to recreate a looting mod I wrote for Oldrim. Not too difficult but gets me back into the innards. Had to create a hidden cell, copy magic effects and a spell. The first magic effect required a script and the CK absolutely refused to create one.


The extension specified was the default 'activemagiceffect' which absolutely has to exist. Then I remembered that SKSE places a 'activemagiceffect.pex' that maybe the CK was rejecting. After a quick google search I realized it wasn't the .pex at all. The CK needs the source! It doesn't want to decompile the .pex! Of course.

The Data folder has a Scripts.zip that, when initially prompted, I hadn't unpacked. So I opened it up and noticed the folder structure was wrong. Went to over to Data\Scripts and manually created a Source folder to drop everything in to.

Still didn't work.

What?!

Opened up ActiveMagicEffect.psc and everything was fine. Closed down the CK to ensure it hadn't cached an incorrect lack of source files. Still nothing. Had to google the full "The extends script does not exist, please pick one that does." to find this, which didn't really help but got the mental cogs turning. Then found this, which finally made things click.

That "incorrect folder structure" I had immediately noticed in the official Scripts.zip is now what the CK expects!! Yes, the compiled scripts are in Data\Scripts. And for almost a decade the source for those scripts has been in Data\Scripts\Source. But now, for whatever goddamn reason, SSE CK requires source files to be in Data\Source\Scripts. *sigh*

Welcome back to moddding with Bethesda, indeed.

Monday, November 13, 2017

The Saddle

It's been a very long time since I've done any modding in the Bethesda realms. It took so long for the Fallout 4 Creation Kit to be released I'd never even downloaded it. Yet the recent Creation Club drama got me thinking about it. Been bored in Warcraft waiting on a new content patch so I decided it's time to poke around again.

With fresh installs I naturally got an error immediately. Since I tried to use all the DLCs in Skyrim, the CK wouldn't cooperate. It's always seemed strange that by default the official tool used to create both Skyrim and Fallout doesn't support multiple masters.

Figured relearning the ins-and-outs of modding again will give me something to write about. So my first entry is about how to make the CK work the way it should. Which boils down to adding one entry to the [General] section of CreationKit.ini:
bAllowMultipleMasterLoads=1
Barely worth posting but I did have to look it up. What will be next?