So, it's been years, I've forgotten so much...

But I got a spark of inspiration to return to the Morrowind scene, at least for a bit. So: Hello my friends!

I wanted to give special thanks to some folks: Dragon32 for his tireless efforts with mlox and it's database. Also thanks to JH2011 who has always been very helpful and informative. And to keep it short, thanks to everyone else in the Morrowind modding scene.

The thing I'm most interested in at the moment is to update tes3cmd and make it more useful, if only so I can clean up my own Morrowind installation and mods I wrote way back when. Right now, I'm mostly brainstorming (if I can find my brain), but I have already been making a few small changes which will be tes3cmd v0.40 some day.

Anyway, I just wanted to say "Hi", and if anyone wants to talk about tes3cmd or that sorry orphan of mine, mlox, then get in touch and let's see where the adventure takes us. We can even talk about Arktwend and other Morrowind stuff too.

Welcome again, John.moonsugar. So, can you provide a tutorial about how to use tes3cmd with Linux?

Welcome back john!

It's good to see you.

I dunno where Dragon32 is today or what he does these days, perhaps it's RL who knows.

I'm glad to hear that you actually plan to update tes3cmd and I think most people here would appreciate a GUI version of tes3cmd that can be used in Yacoby's WMSA or in a newer WMSA instead of using a command line UI version of tes3cmd.

Unfortunately, those people who are working with WMSA haven't been active here for a long time now. However, the latest working WMSA fork is Sharlikhan's WMSA fork, which are based on Python 2.7.8 and http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1449775-wrye-mash-thread-6/page-4#entry23719696 is his post about it.

One thing I do intend on doing is provide some decent documentation on how to use tes3cmd, but first, I have ideas on refactoring it, maybe rewriting from scratch, plus new features and some changes to current features. For example, I'd like to make it easy to manipulate leveled lists during a leveled list merge, like making it easy to remove things from leveled lists.

Which is to say, proper documenation may be some time off. Until then, there is the command line: "tes3cmd help", which prints out command syntax and a few usage examples.

But if you have a specific question, feel free to ask and I will try to help you.

Hey JM! Nice to see you back.

I'm gonna have to agree with Leonardo about having a GUI version. A lot of people (like me) can't wrap their head very well around cmd programs, so a GUI would be extremely useful. At the very least, good documentation would be nice. I never use tes3cmd because it's so hard for me to figure out how to do anything with it.

I remember Greatness7 said he wanted to rewrite tes3cmd in Python, I think it would be worth contacting him and hearing what he has to say about the program. Other than that, it's great to have you back! Tools which are updated is a big need in the Mw community.

Hi Leonardo! Good to see you too. It's been a while, hasn't it?

Thanks for the info about Sharlikhan's WMSA project. I'll take a look when I can. Maybe one solution is to have that version of mash call the command line tes3cmd to do things.

A full GUI tes3cmd might be a bit farther off in the future. I've not done much GUI development myself, and I don't have a good setup for Windows development either. (Right now all I have is XP SP 2, that runs under Vitualbox, but I haven't even tried it in years, ugh).

If I can get tes3cmd tamed suffiiciently, it might be fairly straighforward to do a GUI front end as a separate application. If anyone wants to collaborate on that, it would help things go faster.

Completely understandable. Unfortunately, I know little about Windows OS, GUI programming or Python. I'm not averse to solving that situation, but naturally, it may take some time. And first I want to at least make the current tes3cmd a fully fleshed out prototype.

So, for example, if Morrowind still lacks a good object merger, that might go into tes3cmd. Back in the day all we had was Testool for merging objects, and it had some bugs, IIRC.

@john.moonsugar Thank, friend. That helped me a lot.

John, glad to see you getting back into things here I'm looking forward to it. Best regards.

Yes, it has been a while.

Yacoby, tried to do just that with his WMSA fork (based on Melchor's WMSA, the first released WMSA) about what you said about a mash call and AFAIK it had worked for most people including myself.

If you ever get yourself into Windows XP SP2 and try I think a lot of people here are willing to assist you. I can do some testing.

Another route would be, which I think is the easiest way, is to contact death_souls (BSF) or Visceral Moonlight (http://www.theassimilationlab.com/forums/topic/4777-welcome-to-the-assimilation-lab/) about GUI programming and he recently released an updated BOSS and http://www.theassimilationlab.com/forums/topic/15368-relz-boss/ is the relz thread. He is running Linux if that helps you.

One more thing, I almost forgot to mention the http://www.theassimilationlab.com/forums/topic/14241-wipz-tes3gecko/ project that AndalayBay started about 2 years ago.

Thanks for the info, Leonardo, looks like I have a lot to investigate. Are things still going on over at Great House Fliggerty and Modhistory? Or is this gamesas forum the central place for Morrowind discussion these days?

Dragon32 now runs the MW forum at Nexus forums.

https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?c=502,93,96

Things are pretty quiet on GHF these days and I've no idea how much work Fliggerty have done or how much work that's left to do, and all I know is what Fliggerty said http://www.fliggerty.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=99244#p99244.

Yes, I think so and the Morrowind forum over at Nexus has pretty much the same activity as it had in the past.

john.moonsugar is back!

I've been using tes3cmd pretty much daily for a good amount of time now and have come to accept that it's one of, if not the, most useful tools ever created for MW.

Regarding additional features, I'll definitely throw in my support for integration of a "merged objects" command. It seems like all the pieces are in place for such a function and it'd be a godsend to the community (whom often ignore generating such a file at all the days due to TESTool's crashing). Some cell merging functions would be a great boon as well.


I'd also love to have support for LAND (+LTEX?) records which could make importing cell geometry into 3D modelling applications (such as Blender) a lot easier.


This last one might be too large of an undertaking, but us scripters would greatly enjoy a command-line script compiler too.

Open TESPCD then click on the Operations menu and click on Options then click on the Conflict tab. The LAND record is supported by TESPCD.

Hi, thank you for the kind words. I orphaned tes3cmd (and mlox) before they were fully cooked, and I return to do my penance

Merged Objects is an interesting subject. I will try to document what an object merger should really do, pitfalls it might encounter, and strategies for dealing with them. Then I'll post it for discussion. If there's anything out there other than Testool for merging objects, let me know and I'll look at it too.

I never fully grokked the LAND and LTEX records, but I had an idea, and nowadays I think I can just use the source for OpenMW as a guide, so these things sound possible.

A script compiler would be really awesome, I will at least look into it as I have wanted this too.

And if you (or anyone) wants to be a tes3cmd beta tester, let me know. I'll probably have to find a new place to publish it since google code kicked the bucket. I think Dragon32 moved it to sourceforge, so I have to figure out if that is the right place, or maybe github.

So much to do ...

If you're looking for a repository TAL offer http://www.theassimilationlab.com/tal-services.html#git, similar to what GitHub is, and http://www.theassimilationlab.com/ is more information.

I'm happy you are alive and kicking

It's great to see you're still around.

I heard you helped Dragon32 with mlox? Thanks for that. I owe you guys!

i'd be happy to help w/ beta testing when ever it's needed.

Hello! I've been largely a lurker around here, posting a couple times, but I've used and appreciate what you've done with mlox and tes3cmd. I recently noticed a small issue with tes3cmd's multipatch and had been thinking about posting about it and I think this might be a good spot.

I noticed that the multipatch function, when merging leveled lists, sometimes undoes changes mods make in lists, something Wrye Mash's "Mashed Lists" doesn't. For example:

Let's say we have a leveled list with A, B, and C entries. Then mod 1 adds D, making it A, B, C, and D. But I have mod 2 which removes B and adds E (A, C, E). If I were to Mash lists with WM, The result would be a LL with A, C, D and E entries. But if I do the same with multipatch, the outcome is A, B, C, D, and E. (I noticed this when trying ot merge lists with Piratelord's Creatures XI mod. He removes the vanilla Dremora and Dremora Lord entries in LLs and replaces them with his own version of the Ranked Dremora system from oblivion. When merging lists with mutlipatch I had both ranked dremora and vanilla dremora/dremora lord spanwing).

Anyway thanks for your time and everything you've done. I hope this info is useful for what you intend to do going forward.

Thanks for your report! That's definitely something I will get to fixing.

Have you tried to remove the D entry in the LL with http://abitoftaste.altervista.org/morrowind/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=54&catid=45&Itemid=10&-Morrowind-modding-for-smarties-part-4-MWEdit-MWSE-MSC-Mash-Notepad?

I did it with EE, but i've gone back to using Wrye Mash since it doesn't require me to do that additional step.

As for using TES3CMD under Linux, simply grab the raw perl script from the repository (Or John, if you could start including that in the release packages again too, that'd be great!)

I've been using TES3CMD's multipatch function in conjunction with OpenMW (With OpenMW's new directory structure for mod installation) under Linux. I had to hack together a bash script that symlinks all .esm and .esp files into a fake Data Files directory, and generate a temporary Morrowind.ini based on the mods loaded in OpenMW's openmw.cfg, then run tes3cmd multipatch on that. It's kludgy, but it works quite nicely.