OMFG

u are a genius it worked

*fix'd

That's all Beth and Elminster as he's the one who figured this all out for Fallout 3.

So it appears we REALLY need TESVEdit with a -MasterUpdate parameter and/or the ability to set ESM flagged plugins as "Active" in the CK that it could ONAMify them upon saving (or a parameter, perhaps?).

man, this is amazing. so our legacy mods can get around the navmesh bug and bride of navmesh bug using esm and/or false-flagged esp with onam records.


this is good news indeed.


are there any downsides to having this setup?

mod-master.esm
mod-update.esp (false flagged with onam)
mod-slave.esp

No disadvantages I can see other than the current difficulty of creating ONAM lists. I'd put the WRLD, CELL, and NAVI groups exclusively in the bona fide ESM and updates to them in the false flag ESP such that the normal ESP would be entirely w/o those groups..

OR

Use the esp as the update plugin as well, but you'd have to toggle the ESM flag every time before editing w/ CK then recreate the ONAM list. A false flag ESP will necessarily load before all normal ones. That's not a problem if the ESP contains just new stuff as it's not likely to conflict with other mods unless it overrides Skyrim.ESM forms.

Yes, the downside is that .esm files and false-flag .esp files will be loaded by the engine before any normal .esp files. Meaning your mod will be loading BEFORE such things as the USKP.

MasterUpdate is a hack, genius level though it may be. It is NOT how things should be done. It's a band-aid solution to get things rolling again and is not something I'll ever endorse the use of because it throws load ordering completely out the window since you'd have to play the all or nothing game. Either *ALL* of the mods you use get this treatment or NONE of them do. There is no workable middle ground here.

With SW involved, this gets even stickier. So it really is best to let Bethesda have the time they need to fix this properly rather than sending Skyrim down the same doomed road as Fallout 3.

Just a thought, but USKP would do well as a bona fide ESM loading directly after Update.ESM (if CK ONAM'ification were possible). That'll probably become a necessity when DLCs roll out as ESMs, in which case the need for WS to host ESMs would be even greater.

While using FO3Edit on Skyrim plugins is definitely a hack, the ONAM list is not considering v1.5 Update.ESM bears one added by Beth. I wholeheartedly agree it would be problematic if there's not a forthcoming solution for plain ol' ESPs.

Sidenote: ONAM lists have been utilized by the engine from the beginning, but v1.5's Update.ESM is the first official use for Skyrim.

If we're going to resort to the old MasterUpdate hack, why did we even bother to have Bethesda try to fix the navmesh bug at all?

It still remains to be seen if, in the end, a normal ESP will cut it. Although right now ONAM lists seem to be the way to go, resorting FO3 MasterUpdating is A) not currently possible and B) probably overkill as pending patches will hopefully set normal ESPs straight and/or allow ESMs as "Active". It might turn out similar to Fallout 3 where an ESM was the way to go for anything with CELL children, but that would necessitate some new functionality from the Creation Kit particularly given there's no TES5Edit currently and the Workshop's limitations (no ESM extensions, supplemental plugins)...

I don't see why that would matter. The USKP is intended to fix the vanilla game. Not DLC content. The DLCs would have their own separate patches like they do for Oblivion, and like they did for FO3.

The workshop won't get updated to handle ESM files if they're being sent to us as DLC. There's no indication that modification to SW would be needed.

So the best solution is still to hold out for Bethesda to fix it correctly. Then nobody needs to use hacks and we're all happy. It would be even cooler if they'd backport the navmesh fix to the two older games, but that doesn't really seem likely.

Edit...scrap all that, I figured it out.

navmesh bug and bride of navmesh bug had a baby already (that was a short honeymoon): missing architecture bug

i'm now getting reports of save game data corruption caused by navmesh-related errors that will make architecture disappear permanently in game.

Is that new disappearing architecture or the stuff that's been prone to disappearing all along (but may have been fixed for a brief time in the update before the 1.5 update)? I have no new navmesh and never have put any in. I read about the bug before I started work on my mod so have new locations built but have done nothing about modifying vanilla navmesh and my new interiors are copied vanilla locations (I left the vanilla navmesh in place rather than deleting it because of the bug) so I have no navmesh bugs or CTDing on FT problems. However, I do have a large static (the blacksmith farmhouse) that was reliably staying put by checking "Is full LOD" but that isn't working anymore and it's disappearing on me now in the game (not in the CK though, which it was doing before. What I can't remember is when that started happening again and if it was after I updated to 1.5 nor have I been paying attention to see if it's only happening when I come back to the cell after I've been away in the game (like the navmesh bug). Just now it happened not on FT back but when I walked into the cell.

i'm mainly talking about disappearing architecture meshes in interiors (floors and anything that is touching a navmesh seems to be susceptible), although it may also happen in exteriors as well but have not gotten any reports yet.

in worst cases of data corruption, the mesh is gone for good. permanently

I haven't seen anything like that in interiors, though I've had scattered reports from people using my alt-start mod of parts of Helgen going missing (I don't even edit it directly) but finding out some other mod was actually at fault.

JustinOther sent me an ONAM enabled copy of Open Cities, only to find out that about 20% of Windhelm vanished without a trace, including things that were definitely not architecture meshes. All of the NPCs in Markarth went missing that usually hang around outdoors. Not even in the old closed worldspace. Whiterun had holes under many of the houses but none of those holes impacted actual travel areas.

There's already a documented bug that involves disappearing statics, but it's easily dodged for now by using the "is full LOD" checkbox.

this is different from the LOD thing.

and it is usually caused by some kind of cross-mod corruption. a savegame with corrupted data (so far generally seems like its coming from player houses type mods afflicted by the current bug) can cause interior architecture on another mod to disappear for no reason (sometimes almost the entire interior cell is gone, leaving nothing but a bottomless pit where they fall forever - usually from large set-piece type interiors).

i have no idea why. i only know that when people who have these problems with corrupted data, when they clean-coc into the affected areas of my mod with no other mods installed, the problems vanish (which to me means definitely corrupted game save)

if this is something else entirely (that is not related to navmesh) that has already been happening, then disregard.

i've only now started hearing about after patch 1.5, and it seems like it is somehow related to navmesh (because usually only the interior statics that disappear are the ones that have navmesh touching them)

i have personally never come across this in my own tests and save games because i do not have any other navmesh or player home mods installed

Probably more likely to be mods that need to be updated with CK 1.5.24. This is part of what can happen when authors insist on not updating when record sizes change. It doesn't just affect the record types that were changed. Other stuff that might get stored nearby inside the file can also be affected.

It's going to get to a point where you'll have to start deciding to drop stuff that's NOT made in 1.5.24 to avoid this, or someone starts a general campaign to prod authors into updating their stuff.

Most likely, that's 'cause Open Cities Skyrim has groups not recognized by FO3Edit (SCEN & LCTN), so I had to hack them out temporarily w/ TESVSnip and it left all the CELL records un"Compressed" when reinserting after FO3Edit had its turn. Other plugins not bearing unrecognized groups by FO3Edit seem to work fine after ONAM'ification. I could try it again and just carve those groups out, for science. More Interactive Items never made anything vanish so I'd bet that's something to do with TESVSnip...

*PM's link*

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The problem my little experiment showcased was the fact that we can all temporarily fix the bug by doing different things or, if we all do the same thing, we get different results. http://www.gamesas.com/user/764276-sluckyd/, someone said that because you have an outdated chipset, we can throw your experience of the matter away. I couldn't disagree more and, frustratingly, I can't say more than that - not without saying something I might regret. Firstly, the difference in bug behavior had your machine tagged as fairly new and high performance (which is why it is so difficult for you to reproduce the bug on your machine). My machine is more in the middle of the road, where I like to keep it to get the best of both worlds (i.e. gaming AND testing). So I see diverse results on a problem like this, which points to a resource management issue - if we assume that all our hardware can't have decided to fail at the same time.
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I downloaded your http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=10652 some time ago, but I somehow managed to miss the source code. I will take another look for it because I am interested in what else you did. I think I recall http://www.gamesas.com/user/766649-amethyst-deceiver/ telling me about that change from the OnCellLoad event to the OnCellAttach event which you are talking about. But, somewhere between the plug-in and my hardware, the OnCellAttach solution got broken. In previous incarnations of the game, there was a need to http://www.creationkit.com/MoveTo - but whether I put all this in the correct order will probably require quite a bit of testing.
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I just deleted just the link. Both the object and the formerly linked MapMarker are still there. Moreover, this is in an outside cell, whereas those mannequins are in an interior cell, admittedly, an attached interior cell. I'm yet to toss your plug-in in the grinder - but I will get to it.
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The Creation Kit (SkyCK?) crashes less than the TESIV Construction Set, for which I am truly grateful. It's the question of exactly when it happened to crash in my little experiment which is, perhaps, potentially amusing - or even interesting. When I mod, I take my time. I make sure that I am aware of whether or not I have made a change and, when I decide to make a change I check the title bar to make sure that the tool hasn't misinterpreted input and made changes of its own - in which case I restart SkyCK without saving and then implement the change. Once I implement a change, no mater how small, I save. I try to remember to backup the current version every time an in-game test of a given change succeeds - but that's a habit I developed monkeying around with the Fallout: New Vegas GECK which used to http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/310206-unknown-errors-with-probable-consequences/page__p__2838858#entry2838858 when there were too many exterior cell changes for it to keep track of. In any case, I'm hanging out for Elminster's TESVEdit when it comes out as it will, no-doubt, identify a multitude of problems - and TESEdit has always been a very effective and reliable tool to make sure that TESnip edits do not mess up other things.
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For building websites I might only trust Microsoft's plain old annoying Notepad (stock standard with every Microsoft operating systems since Windows 3.0) but for Papyrus scripts, I use http://www.creationkit.com/Notepad%2B%2B_Setup. It's a dream compared to what used to happen in the Construction Set. It was not just the crashes, but the stress of knowing that the thing could crash at any moment and one still can't find the error preventing one from compiling so one can save the script before it's gone to Oblivion; forever and ever, arrrghhhh!-men. It was enough to make one want to resort to swearing in Latin which would require that one learns to speak Latin; a bit hard given that the language is long dead, if uninterred. So much for my rationality. What was I writing about? That's right (or left): the whole thing of using another program to edit those scripts prevents those SkyCK crashes from intruding upon indecisive scripting moments and that http://www.creationkit.com/Notepad%2B%2B_Setup is magic once it's set up correctly.

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I was thinking more of at what stage during your mod's reconstruction did the bug first reveal itself?

Just curious, with respect to the latest discussion (RE: ONAM lists and Master updates), but could the load order be getting confused from time to time...?

the original navmesh bug happened at step 1. creating the navmesh

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But what about the current incarnation; Son of NavMesh bug...?

happened as soon as i saved the esp version using the new CK 1.5

Thank you http://www.gamesas.com/user/766649-amethyst-deceiver/,

That reminds me about another line of investigation. I'm running the graphics at Ultra settings with 1680x1050 screen resolution instead of the recommended Medium settings. When the bug returns to my plug-in, as I'm sure it will, I'll dump the settings down to medium at 1200x800 screen resolution and see what happens...

Navmesh bug already had a child. Bride of navmesh bug must be his (or her) second wife.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1356794-warning-son-of-navmesh-bug/

edit: Actually, I think the 'bride of navmesh bug' is actually the navmesh bug's ex-wife, whom he had a child with. Before the 1.5 patch, they were still together, but now that they've divorced and he gained custody of the child (which still unconsciously sabotages the auto-gen procedure), she seeks revenge by causing disappearing content in mods made before the patch. Meanwhile, Navmesh Bug's second wife is even more unhinged and crashes your game when a mod edits vanilla navmeshes. When will navmesh bug stop falling into bad relationships? Please hear his plight, Bethesda.