If you've got a few minutes (and are planning on using the Creation Kit), I recommend you watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlNBVOcuW3M

Pretty shocking. I'm a little bit.... taken aback. The problem is that Bethesda seemed to have ignored this MAJOR glitch in their mod tools. Why????


Incidentally, just in case there are actually even a handful of people left who believe Todd Howard's claim that Creation Engine was "rewritten from the ground up" - (when in reality it's simply an optimised Gamebryo), please consider that in a supposedly rewritten engine all bugs from the previous engine magically reoccur. Curious.

Yes, it's well known that Todd's spin about the "new" engine was just that: spin. Didn't even need the CK to know that, the "bloated savegame" bug was one of the first clues, a well as the fact that an intrepid modder unpacked some of the game code right after release and found nice remainders of code from Oblivion, Fallout 3 and NV sitting dormant in Skyrim's code. All they did was give Gamebryo a facelift and hacked in newer features. They basically re-wrote and added enough to make the engine qualify to be claimed as "theirs" in order to get out of having to pay licensing fees to Gamebryo's new owners.

It's one of those nice loopholes regarding software copyrighting that should have been closed long ago.

You can't hide the Gamebryo, those robot animations are the most iconic thing in Bethesda games. It's basically Gamebryo with new bits bolted on and a few thing ripped out.

Unsourced quotes aren't the best way to go about making a point when your point is that someone else is lying.

According to Game Informer's report, Bethesda's main goal in rewriting parts of the game engine was to improve scenery. There is no claim the entire engine was rewritten from the ground up: http://www.gameinformer.com/games/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim/b/xbox360/archive/2011/01/17/the-technology-behind-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim.aspx

"Rewritten from the ground up" doesn't necessarily mean a whole new thing built from scratch. You can build a house from the ground up, but that doesn't mean that none of its parts are preassembled.

The quality of the animations is not dictated by the engine used.

And you should broaden your search:

Modern Warfare 3 is built from a completely different engine from the previous CoD games. Could you tell? No.

An Engine is just a rendering tool. Gamebryo was the engine used for Dawn of War and Civilization IV in addition to TES. Neither of those games had any of TES's issues.

The common "bugs" are scapegoated on the engine, when they're actually an issue with the Developers. Even Daggerfall shares a lot of bugs with later TES games, and it's built on an in-house developed engine.

I never modded the Fallout games so I'm still learning this whole navmesh thing... I'm curious though, why was it not needed in Oblivion? Wasn't fallout 3 pretty much the same engine?

navmeshes themselves came with fo3, oblivion didn't have those. it used a system called pathing grid or something like that (not sure, haven't yet been modding back then)

for fo, it was quite easy to get around this: you'd have to just normally create your esp, save it, then open it in foedit, set the esm-flag, save and all mentioned navmesh issues magically disappeared (don't ask me why though), even though this doesn't even make the file an actual esm, but obviously makes the game treat it as one.
can't tell for sure for skyrim yet though, still busy getting a bit of an overview of available pieces, look into the new scripting language and basics like that

As much of a tool as I think the guy who made that video is, in this instance, he's right, and I'm currently catching the brunt of complaints about it via my Open Cities mod.

There's a workaround to mitigate it - right click the navmesh in a cell you're about to work on and give it an EditorID. The catch? Suppose the cell you're about to start working on has multiple navmeshes... or NO NAVMESH AT ALL. Then what do you do, because tricking it won't work when there's nothing there to start with.

Or, yeah, you could go the other route and convert it to an ESM. The CK doesn't save those though and we don't yet have a TES5Edit to do that sort of thing with.

I've noticed that converting to ESM reverts all changes you've made to vanilla objects (setting to 'initially disabled' for example). So for any mod that improves towns/cities, for example, the only workaround for the navmesh bug effectively ruins the mod by only keeping its addtiions but not the changes made to the vanilla world.

I hope you guys notice that a new game engine hasn't been created in almost ten years now... (Other than really small 'game engines' from Indie developers) I'll find the chart; All game engines since the basics came out, Unreal, Gamebryo, Source, etc, have been reworks of older engines. There is a great graph that depicts this. It shows the few starting engines, from the late 90's, and all of the engines that exist today, and how they are just 'altered' versions of what came before them.

Bethesda changed huge chunks of the engine, more than enough to call it a new engine, but yes, it's still based off the same middleware, Gamebryo. The engine is brand new, they didn't lie. The middleware it's based off the exact same, however.

Also, the guy in the video claims that we cannot make esm files, but that's BS. We've been able to since Oblivion (at least) so that isn't an issue.

Actually it is an issue, if you're isolated and sticking only to the CK (he and his community are). The CK will not produce a valid ESM file. I've tried by tricking it into loading one that's been converted. It comes back out after saving as a standard ESP file.

False flag conversions DO work, but they carry baggage in other ways, and you can't distribute those via the Workshop either.

Why not? Can you distribute actual esm's?

What's your recommended method of converting? I've been trying to esmify with WryeBash but the result is that the game doesn't seem to recognize that my mod's esm is above the master in load order and my changes are undone.

Nope, unless the issue has been fixed, actual ESM files get renamed down to ESP files when the mod is published to SW.

Wrye Bash would be how I'd do it. If it's not loading your mod before the normal ESP files, then that's broken.

You can rename a copy of your plugin to Plugin.ESM and load it as an active file. Upon saving, the CK will tick its ESM flag. At that point, *so long as you don't try to edit anything else, you can even upload to the Workshop, but users will end up with a false flag ESP as somewhere in the UL/DL, the file extension gets changed. Still, the flag is what matters and not the extension. Might help

*instacrash

It's not that it being an ESM broke anything, but the the engine remember stuff according to a plugin's name including its extension. Had the plugin always been an ESM or if it were to become a false flag ESP, you'd have never seen the 'This save relies on content that is no longer present. Some objects may no longer be available. Continue Loading?' message.

Good to know, but not useful in my case as I still have 3 more cities to transfer worldspaces with, and there will be sure to be bugs that require it be updated regularly. Unless I'm supposed to keep repeating that ritual each time I'm ready to upload it?

Lol, well looks like none of my mods are getting published to the SW then. (Unless they fix/change that)

As far as I know it's loading my mod before the other ESPs... the problem is that it looks like it's loading Skyrim.esm AFTER my mod's esm for some reason.

If you rename a copy to ESM, upload, then delete the ESM version, you'd be left with the original, workable ESP. Would be really nice if we could just edit and save ESMs with the CK and, furthermore, upload to WS w/o subscribers losing the extension.What you see in the launcher is in no way indicative of your load order. If you're using WryeSmash, be sure to sort by load order.

Perhaps of interest, say you have four plugins:

• BonaFide.ESM
• FalseFlag.ESP
• FalseFlag.esm
• BonaFide.esp

No matter how you sort them via modified date manipulation, they'll always load in the same order (as listed).

It just looks like it though. Skyrim is no different that past games. It will load Skyrim.esm (and Update.esm) before anything else. The rest go by dates. ESMs by date first, then ESPs by date.

Yeah, that's another way to go about it. One assumes that we're not going to run into the missing world chunks by changing that to a false-flag file? That ought to have been fixed in FO3, but who knows.

It works without the whole ground vanishing under your feet ...thing. They had fixed that for FO3 with the advent of ONAM lists in ESM flagged plugins' headers, listing all cell children (NAVM, REFR, ACHR, ACRE, PGRE, ACHR, PMIS). So far, Update.ESM has no ONAM list even though http://i.imgur.com/kzuTI.png. I've an ESM file with gobs overrides to placed stuff (interior and exterior) and it works flawlessly regardless of extension or ESM flagging, albeit I've no NAVM edits in it yet.

Yeah I'll call bull on that, skyrim is a great game no doubts, but I really wish beth could fix its editor. Seems they just rebranded gamebryo

Report on world editor bug in that video was from me turned the ground black, luckily roads are static now lol... could just build right over it.

I've found in the small tweaks I've done that when you edit the terrain there are still issues. Another big issue I've came across regarding the NavMesh is followers, for example give my Rorikstead house mod or any house mod for that that adds new NavMesh and you'll find that the follower refuses to leave the house. Even when you dismiss them. Luckily the follower package will teleport the follower to you if you go farther.

Anyone notice disappearing buildings too?