Hi Everyone

I'm after a bit of help please if anyone can offer some advice...

First a bit of background. I created a 'basemant' style house mod that I published to Steam Workshop. The mod itself is pretty simple and is just built using vanilla objects and textures, there's no special scripting or anything in place. The mod is a 'Collectors Vault' which is aimed at people wanting to collect and show their prized possessions. It is therefore fairly loaded up with weapon racks, mannequins, plaques and storage.

I decided it would be a good idea to change my floorplan as I wanted to add a few rooms. Rather than modify the existing plan I created a second layout next to the original as some of the changes were substantial. For some reason I decided to put the new layout at a 45° rotation from the original. I think my aim was to avoid any 0/90/180/270 orientations. Anyway I set the new rooms up and decorated everything and finally moved all containers, mannequins, racks and plaques to the new area.

Now the problem. Moving the containers and mannequins was straigh forward enough. As they 'contain' the items simply moving them takes the contents over. Unfortunatly I didn't realise until it was too late that weapon racks and plaques don't work that way! Since the items are only 'bound' to the rack/plaque when you move it they item stays exactly where the player put it. When I went back to the new rooms to test I was...dismayed...to find that my weapons were no longer there. Instead I expect they are falling through space where they were originally hanging in the old room, which I have since deleted.

I'm hoping that someone might be able to offer me a simpler solution that the few that I can think of:

1) Go back to the old design and start again.
2) Try to rotate the whole new layout, which last time I tried just crashed the Creation Kit.
3) Put some floors/walls/ceilings back where the original was and create a trapdoor for people to be able to pop over to the old place so that they can pick up their stuff and transfer it to the new rooms.
4) Leave the original mod as is and upload the new layout as a different version.

So far I'm erring toward option 3 or 4. I don't really want to have two different versions published if I can help it so think that option 3 might be the best. But then I don't want to inconvenience everyone by making them pick up all the stuff they previously mounted to have to do it all again.

I'd be grateful of any suggestions you might have on this one!

you shouldnt rotate the architecture. you only need to slightly offset the activator objects away from square angles (even 0.15 degrees is enough), and only the activators which have no 3D (i.e. trigger boxes etc)

if you are not comfortable writing a legacy compatibility script to move the existing mounted item, i would say option 3 would work, just give your users a COC point and a set of directions how to get into the old cell grab the stuff, and get back out.

if you do pursue option 3, leave all the racks as-is, with their trigger boxes intact, so that the script properly cleans up when they grab their items (they will be floating in air as their motion type is set to keyframed, not havok-enabled)


alternatively, if in the future you want to use a different kind of weapon rack that avoids these issues (based on physical containers, not trigger boxes), i designed a new weapon/item universal display system that you can use here if you want:
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1372057-universal-item-display-script-weapons-shields-potions-etc-mini-tutorial/page__fromsearch__1

Hi Amethyst Deceiver

Thanks for the reply. I actually saw your script before I posted on here and I was very interested, however I'm new to modding and scripting is quite a long way out of my depth for now. I'd love to give your script a try but wouldn't know where to start .

Likewise a script to move existing items would certainly work but I think the time it would take me to figure out would be longer than just redesigning the whole thing

As a test I've gone with option 3 for now and recreated the original floorplan where the racks and plaques were. I also threw in a trapdoor linked to the new rooms so players can get to it without using console. In testing it seems to work fine, though I have just noticed that bookshelves do the same as racks so will have to add another room back in.

Is there anything else I may be missing? Another way that would cause less hassle for the players?

just remember, that when you put in the old room, you have to leave the trigger boxes from the original weapon racks and bookshelves intact, otherwise you may end up getting errors in the papyrus logs forever while those original scripts struggle to keep up with the new changes (as these are all saved in the user's save game files). if enough of these errors compound, the save games will eventually become corrupt

if you moved the actual references to a new area, but the weapons are left behind, it will definitely cause problems because the script still thinks that the weapon racks are filled, even though they are empty in the new area. if a player places a new item on it, it will throw the whole thing out of sync

OK, thanks for the advice.

One last question for you though. How do you get a piece of script into the game? I know that's a very big question but are there any guides that you could recommend? I'd really like to try your weapon rack script and need somewhere to start off.

Thanks again for your help.

if you are using my rack script you would need to create a container for that type of item. so for a weapon create a container and call it something like WeaponChest. i suggest searching for the bookshelf container since it has no 3D (its just an invisible collision box, and the perfect shape for a weapon rack), then duplicate and rename it to your chest.

remove the existing script that is on it by double clicking on the container in the object window. hit ok and close out of the window.
then double clock it again to re-open it and add a new script. give your new script a name like FKFF_ItemDisplayScript

copy and paste the code i posted and drop it into your script editor. make sure you correct the ascii-html typos if any, and also delete the line that includes my script name at the very top (i forgot to delete that part when pasting the code in). save to make sure the script compiles. if it throws up anyerrors, it is likely because of this forum converting ascii/html when displaying the text.

after it compiles, save and close out of the window. double click the item again (yes this is annoying but the CK is buggy so you have to constantly close out of windows after making a certain number of edits or else it cause problems)
fill in the properties by hitting properties under the papyrus section

Fantastic, thanks for that. I will give it a try once I've worked out my current problem

Hi again. Just hoping you can clear something up for me.

I've tried running the script and it crashed Creation Kit. From looking at the code it looks like the forum has converted the ampersand symbols. So there are a couple of lines like this:

If (aiItemCount == 1) && (PlacedItem == 0)


I've tried changing it around to see if I can get it working but I'm really not sure what should be in the middle. Could you please clarify what it should say instead of &&amp?

Thanks

damn html tags
it should just be &&

Hi, back again for more help!

I've followed your instructions and added the script so my new mount now works as a container, but whatever I put inside does not display on the mount. I'm guessing that I've missed something, maybe one of the properties? Any idea where I may have gone wrong?

make sure you have the item marker positioned correctly on the mount, and that the property of the script ItemMarker is pointing to that marker

What should the Property Type be that links to the marker? I thought it might be ObjectReference but that still doesn't seem to work.

I think I'm a bit out of my depth here! Either I'm missing something important or I've gone drastically wrong somewhere. Trying to figure this out for my first attempt at working with scripts is just throwing myself in the deep end. I would be extremely grateful if you could provide more detailed instructions on each step required but completely understand that it's asking a LOT. I appreciate the help you've given so far and don't want to seem like I'm trying to get you to do it all for me

Not to worry, I'll try and work around my original problem for now and hopefully come back to this at some point to see if I can figure it out. Thanks for trying to explain it all to me!