Ok so I've recruited the help of Colonel Tannanbaum for my mod, and he is more then happy to help, which is going to help me, I can get more sleep if I need to and focus on other thing's so its nice, but the only issue that is keeping us from working from two separate .esp's is that we're both not versed on the "merge" function in GECK, especially with reports that its buggy.

Is there an alternate way I can merge the work he has in to mine? Or vice versa? Cause for now he's editing the main .esp and gonna send that back to me, but this way would go much more simple, we can work on separate things at the same time, for now we're just trading off and its not productive.

Also I have a question about BSA's because I don't want to have the person who downloads my Mod have like 8 folders they need to keep track of and move around etc, and if they accidentally move or rename something wrong? Right now i have 2mb of extra content, but soon it will start climbing in to the hundreds of MB's with the radio, multiple gun's, armor's, doors etc, so I'd rather have it just look at a BSA rather then tons of folder's, and I am sure there are multiple benefits and drawbacks with using a BSA, but from my perspective right now the pro's ut weigh the con's. So can someone explain to me a few more pro's and con's and help me understand how I would go about utilizing it. :fallout:

As for BSA's the only cons I can think of with them is that you have to extract a file to edit it. The pro's include, its only one file instead of a huge tree of them. It makes deleting the mod easier, and many others. I would definitly use BSA's if I were you. Just, don't package them up until your done with the mod or you will be wasting your time constantly unpacking and repacking stuff into them. Also, I don't know if its the same in NV, but in Fo3 you were supposed to pack music files into BSA's. If you did they would not work, however .ogg files will, so you can package voice.

I'm not sure you can merge two esp/esm in geck at all. However, fnvedit does this well. There is a chapter in the fnvedit documentation that explains it. I have done this several times to merge (with proper credit given) items from other mods into my own.

There is an early version of FNVplugin Utility that has just ben released. http://sites.google.com/site/ronsworkspace/GameUtilities/fallout3 I used it's counterpart "FO3Plugin Utility" to do all of my merging for "DCInteriors". It is much easier and, faster than using FOedit. I haven't texted the new FNVplugin yet but, if it is any where as good as FO3plugin was it is the way to go. (Just make sure you backup your work before testing, It's creator "ScripterRon" fully admits it is in the early stages)

As for working with others, If your not too far along in your mod, I would consider creating an "Assets Master .esm". This way both of you could go about your business working on reliant plugins without the fear of loosing any progress. When finished you'll only have to merge them all together or, release a modular version. "The Colonel" offered to look at my WIP to see if he could notice where I'm going wrong with my texture issue, If your interested I'll send you the link too. You can look at the way I'm building "FNVInteriors", my "Core.esm" only contains new forms, texture sets and, a few generic cell templets. The main bulk of my mods work is in it's reliant .esp.

Hope this was helpful and, if you want a peek just let me know.

cev

Cev that sounds interesting, but since I rely on the regular ESM and nothing else, it seems a bit silly to create an ESM which I am suddenly reliant upon... unless you mean, for 2 days we work on things, we merge them in to an ESM, holding all the info we have, then after that point we just keep working but based from the newly updated esm, nothing else.

I was not aware of fnvplugin, thanks for the link. One of the challenges of merging two nontrivial mods is the reassignment of formid's. If you have a complex mod, and you want to merge all/part into another complex mod, it is likely that you will have to interactively change and update some formid's. It is hard to imagine a way to do this fully automatically. Do you know if fnvplugin allows this type of complex merging? So far, I have only needed simple merging which I could do automatically in fnvedit. But the case described in the fnvedit documentation shows this type of reassignment. For me the question is mostly theoretical, but the OP may require something more complex.

The way I did my merging for "DCInteriors" was to first use FO3edit to renumber all my forms in each individual mod. I ended up with six plugins so I standardized my merging system (the order I added the plugins) The form ID renumbering system Georgetown "010000", Mason "020000" and, so on, This insures there are no conflicts when merging. Then I ran them through FO3plugin Utility merging them (In order) one at a time.

I never ran into any issues working this way and, I didn't have to manually change any ID's after my initial renumbering. My disclaimer here, I don't have much experience merging other peoples mods and, always use a specific form ID naming convention. There may be issues if your merging peoples mods who haven't ben as meticulous with there form ID's.

Hope that was helpful.

cev

Can i have the link to that documentation ?

Thanks in advance ,

Hereticus

Here is FNVEdit -> http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=34703#

Though FNVEdit is VERY easy to mess things up.

FNVPlugin on the other hand, has a quicker and more smooth merge function: http://newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=39655#

Thank you ( but i don't see any documentation file for download about fnvedit ... it's in the same archive ?)

(thanks in another hand for fnvplugin , looks awesome and that's what i needed ).

Thank you ( but i don't see any documentation file for download about fnvedit ... it's in the same archive ?)

(thanks in another hand for fnvplugin , looks awesome and that's what i needed ).

FNVEdit is a very useful tool none-the-less. For example if you make a dirty edit to your mod, this can get rid of it easily. An example of that would be I edited the landscape around Boulder City SEVERELY for a single entrance only to use a better and simpler solution. So I left that edit there, still altering the world, FNVEdit got rid of all the edits i created in one fell swoop and defaulted it back to what it was. You might think this is nothing, but it could potentially crash the game or alter someone else's mod because they didn't know you made an edit to some place. It'd be one thing if was still using it, but i'm not, so it had to go. FNVEdit has other useful tools but that's the primary reason I used it.

Edit: Give me a second having net issues somethings going where they shouldn't.

Edit 2: Ok so what do you need? A Guide on how to work the programs?

Personnaly, when i made a mistake when modding , i use the tesnip tool from fomm to delete it i didn't know that fnvedit can do that .

I need the tutorial that explain how to merge two esp/esm in a single one but if the fnvplugin do it easily i'm happy with that