Hi there, I'm pretty new to the creation kit and while developing a custom player home, especially early on, I've found that I somehow ended up with duplicate interlocking floor/wall pieces that are in the same position, right on top of each other, sometimes several, up to 5-7. Now, I'm sure my usage is quite prone to error, since I'm Ctrl+D'ing a lot of pieces, as my layout is fairly symmetrical, but I've tried to be pretty careful to not fat finger the controls. At any rate now I'm finding a bunch of pieces that are like this. Here are my questions:

1) Are there any known bugs/quirks that can cause unwanted additional duplicates when duplicating objects, or sets of objects?
2) Is there any way to even know when this happens? Obviously if I have duplicates in the same position that are not rotated exactly right or something I will get spiderwebbing that makes it obvious. However what I'm finding is that, when duplicates are right on top of each other, in the same exact position/rotation, there seems to be no visual indication of this problem until I go to select/move/remove a piece and find that there are several. This is also generally obvious with lights and translucent pieces like markers, but as I said I seem to have a lot of plain wall/floor pieces that are unnecessarily duplicated. It would be great if there was a way to somehow be able to recognize this without clicking on each individual piece, deleting until I see void, and Ctrl+Z'ing once.
3) In an ideal world the game engine would be able to recognize this and optimize the output by ignoring duplicate pieces that have no effect on the in-game result, but based on what I've seen on the... polish of the CK, I'm going to assume this isn't the case. That said, what kind of performance effect should I expect from this problem? I'm guessing a few extra pieces here and there isn't an issue, but when I see 10 identical pieces stacked on top of each other... well, let's just say it's worrying.

Thanks for any help,
== Roachy

1) Nah, it's just fat fingers ... It's easy to press it twice ... OR to have two selected when you do CTL-D (which makes two more duplicates).

2) It's a pain to find them ... you usually notice by testing in game and see the tearing of one on top of another (other than counting pieces in the Cell's Object-List there's no way I know of to detect it in the CK ... unless you see the tearing there too)

3) No real performance effect ... just looks nasty if you see the tearing of the textures.

(trust me, you'll find many more things to annoy you - on your modding adventures - than just this!)

Here's 2 few ways to easily find them.

Click/drag a box around the object and see how many objects of that type are highlighted in the Cell View window right pane. De-select one of them, them right click > Delete the rest, or,...
click the object to select it. Then hit 1 twice. This will make the selected object disappear. Click any object that's in the same space as the original and hit the delete key until all duplicates are deleted. Press F5 to refresh and bring back the original

I would agree with you, especially since I'm still trying to cement the controls in my head, but it still seems like I am finding 4-5 copies of items I'm sure I only ever copied once.

I would have expected actually, to see some tearing in these instances, but as the duplicates I'm finding are identical, there's no visible Z fighting, so it's basically impossible to tell.

Oh I have... I have.

I've been trying to do that, but as I have SO many copies of the same items (e.g. floor/wall objects), looking for multiple lines selected in the cell view window is nearly impossible. I'd have to slowly scroll through hundreds (maybe thousands) of objects looking for more than one highlighted line... for each attempt. The other thing I've been trying to do is use the status bar section in the bottom left of the main creation kit window to see the selection count (e.g. "NobleShelf02 + X more") to tell how many objects I've bounded... but as this little section is static in length (argh), is non-highlightable AND non-scrollable (ARGH), and does NOT include mouseover bubble functionality (RAARGH), the generally long length of object names nearly always pushes the "+ X more" out of view. So that's a dead end as well.


This is basically what I've been doing, except I haven't been bothering with hiding, I just delete until they're all gone then Ctrl+Z once. This is of course the most tedious possible method and really not feasible at this point. What WOULD work is if I could somehow bound the whole map and have it only select 1 of each visible object. At that point I could press 1 to hide everything selected, leaving only duplicates shown, and delete those. However this is obviously not how the bounding box works, and would basically be impossible as the CK apparently has no way of knowing or understanding which stacked duplicates have a higher priority

So it would seem I am stuck. What I may do when I feel like attempting it, is work room by room, first with the floor, selecting all of the visible tiles in one big selection group, hiding them all, then deleting the remainders. Then I would do the walls, ceilings, and other objects in that room, and then start all over with the next room. My map isn't exactly gigantic, but I'm focusing on making it a very plain player home, with lots of utility. As such it's basically a big plain house with lots of symmetrical, nearly identical rooms, to be filled with loads of chests, mannequins, weapon racks, etc. Because of this design, I have nearly 350 identical floor tiles alone (if there were no duplicates).

Nobody warned me about all of this... they drew first blood sir..... they drew first blood *rocks back and forth*.

For the record, somehow I stumbled across a better method for this. First of all, one way around the problem of your selection count being cut off in the status bar is to select everything you want, then lastly, select an object that you know has a short enough name to keep the count from being cut off. Then the status bar will display "ShortName + X more".

However the thing that really helped me was somehow being able to select objects while they are partially hidden/transparent. I don't know off hand how I did it, but I'm looking at my floor tiles right now, and all of them are transparent, but still selectable. This means that duplicate stacks show up less transparent, and are easily spotted, selected, deleted, without having to do any more hiding/unhiding.

I'm not sure of the exact reasoning, or if it's just a convenient bug, but what I did was:
- Select ALL floor tiles, using the Cell View window
- Press 1 making them transparent (this was enough to give me an idea of where the duplicates were, but to delete them I had to cycle back to unhidden mode, where I could no longer clearly see the duplicates), I might have actually had them all totally hidden. I can't remember
- Pressed Alt+1 to unhide all objects (I always hide all my ceiling tiles when loading my cell, so this covered up my view of the floor)
- I re-hid all my ceiling tiles
- Strangely, at this point, all of my floor tiles were still transparent, but selectable.

I don't know if it's because I had the floor tiles still selected, which acted like a reverse selection for the Alt-1 operation, or if the floor tiles, being hidden from view by the ceiling tiles, just failed to visually update to opaque mode or what. But that's how I did it.

Maybe someone could explain?

Edit: Upon further testing it seems Alt+1 consistently:
- un-hides invisible items
- and makes transparent items selectable
Also note: selecting an Alt+1-induced transparent/selectable object and pressing 1 cycles it to transparent/unselectable mode, as if it were previously fully opaque/selectable.

It's not exactly expected behavior, but this process is repeatable, and therefore useful for finding and removing duplicates. Ideally, the 1 hotkey would cycle through 4 modes, opaque/selectable, transparent/selectable, transparent/unselectable, and hidden/unselectable, to give more control over this kind of object manipulation, but I'll take what I can get I suppose.

Alternatively, you could select everything. Then manually deselect each visible model, after that you could simply delete the remainder?

Or perhaps instead of duplicating with ctrl+d, have you tried copying then ctrl+shift+v (paste in place)? It's something I use alot. Like you I am currently working on a pretty epic sized player home and I haven't really encountered your problem.

*EDIT: The "1" feature has hands down got to be my favourite new thing about the CK compared to the CS. I wish there was a logger for how much time spent on an esp in the CK and tracking of other miscellaneous trivia; like how many times "1" has been pressed. (Literally thousands for me )

I was not aware that "1" was not available in previous tools. I guess I'm the lucky newbie.

As far as your select everything suggestion, I had considered that, but it would require you to be absolutely certain you had deselected everything you wanted to save, or else risk deleting stuff you wanted to save. Given just how much stuff that entails, I would not trust myself to do that accurately.

I'm pretty sure "1" wasn't available before now??? I'll be damned if it was for Oblivion (I haven't modded any Beth titles since then)

Perhaps then you could cut to a dummy cell and compare the results? That's another technique I use. I fill up one or two dummy cells with junk I want to re-purpose or use in the future, I think it's a great way to reduce editor clutter.

Making backups of an esp prior to any potential risky editing is also prudent I suppose?