[BETA/RELz/WIPz] NifSE v1.0 : IV - Oblivion

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:00 am

I wonder if anyone realizes the significance of this: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v238/DragoonWraith/Oblivion/NifSE/ScreenShot8.png

Did you just...change the dimensions of the weapon via script? Or actually merged two Nifs? Either way the crafting possibilities would be endless! :ahhh:

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 10:41 am

SPEAR

...and yeah, merged and/or stretched NIFs. Possibilities etc. But I totally miss spears.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 1:37 am

Heh, merged. Stretched... hrm, probably not, that'd be difficult, since NIFs don't support direct scaling along a single axis.

But yeah, copying branches from one nif to another turned out to be dead simple. Literally took 10 minutes to code and worked the first time - which is insane, that never happens.

Now my computer's acting up... again. I am getting very tired of this. This one I'm pretty sure is my fault, but still.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 12:13 am

worked the first time

Screenshots or it didn't happen.

Now my computer's acting up... again.

Ouch.

Back up everything to DVD, quick...

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:51 am

Screenshots or it didn't happen.

Haha, to take screenshots I would have had to expect it to happen, and I honestly expected an immediate CTD just for trying it. It's what I usually get... then I have to slog through the ConScribe log to figure out how far it got before it died, etc. etc.

Ouch.

Back up everything to DVD, quick...

Sigh, probably. Running the harddrive diagnostics tool from the manufacturer, found 15 errors before it was even 1% done. This is the third one to die in less than four months. I'm going to have to talk to them about this, I could have bought a new drive for less than the shipping on the replacements. It's currently at 26 Errors, 47% done with the test...

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 1:35 am

So 26 errors was the final count, it did another test which passed, but I told it to redo the full test and it found another 2. It repaired those and once again passed, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Unsurprisingly, CHKDSK wanted to run (on C:\, which is a totally separate partition from where I have Oblivion and related projects, so I'm not really worried about that), so I'm letting it... it's deleted a lot of stuff, currently up to "CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)... 36 percent completed." which is where it's currently stopped. I'm going to let it try a little longer before rebooting... sigh.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 7:30 am

So 26 errors was the final count, it did another test which passed, but I told it to redo the full test and it found another 2. It repaired those and once again passed, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Unsurprisingly, CHKDSK wanted to run (on C:\, which is a totally separate partition from where I have Oblivion and related projects, so I'm not really worried about that), so I'm letting it... it's deleted a lot of stuff, currently up to "CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)... 36 percent completed." which is where it's currently stopped. I'm going to let it try a little longer before rebooting... sigh.

Sorry man, that's pretty rough. How old is the disk?

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 10:39 am

The disk that died over the summer was about three years old. They replaced it (warranty), and the replacement died in about two months. Now the replacement's replacement has died - and I don't think it's even been two months yet. This is ridiculous. I could have bought a new drive for the cost of shipping the old ones back to them, plus I have to keep reinstalling. I'm not happy about this, at all.

CHKDSK hung, so I restarted. Predictably, Windows once again failed to boot up. Ran the "Short Test" again, got a FAILED, running the Long Test now and I have 7 Errors after 30% of the drive has been checked. Grr, I say, grr.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 8:26 am

Has there been any luck getting functions for altering the aplha value on the material node yet?

From looking at the documentation i can add the NiStencilProperty and NiAlphaProperty to nitristrips now ( i havent tested it yet though)....would really want to finish my mod off soon

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:34 am

You can currently add NiAlphaProperty and NiStencilProperty blocks no problem. The version I have sitting on my harddrive (that has a trashed C:\ partition and therefore cannot load Windows) has functions for editing the various values of the NiAlphaProperty. I plan on adding similar functions for NiStencilProperty, probably with the next beta.

The issues are these:

As noted, my harddrive died again. Looks like this is actually due to a bad RAM stick; Seagate's replaced my HDD, and Corsair's going to replace my RAM, but for right now, I have no RAM (I sent them the bad sticks, they'll be sending replacements when they receive them). Since we're talking about ground shipment and we're on opposite sides of the US, I'm looking at 7-10 days total for the back-and-forth, though, so that delay is something I can't get around.
There's a bug in v0019 with respect to how plug-ins access arrays. Since I do that all over the place, I can't very well upload the next beta until v0019a comes out with a fix. Scruggs says that this is coming, but he's apparently exceedingly busy and can't give a concrete timetable on it. The fix is pretty simple (Scruggs and I have both fixed it on our copies of OBSE, and we're not alone), but I can't very well expect to compile their own versions of OBSE, and there are other things Scruggs needs to investigate (from what I understand) before v0019a happens.

So, for right now, we're looking at a delay of at least a week before the next beta comes out (with Alpha and Stencil functions as well as Nif merging), but depending on Scruggs it could be more.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 2:27 am

Heh, no rush. :goodjob: just wondering if you'd had luck getting it working. I can only imagine how difficult it is.

Now you mention changing values of those properties, however the NiAlphaProperty only allows alpha, it doesnt control it. To make something transpant you have to add that property to the nitristrip, then edit the alpha property on the Material Property.

So being able to add and edit the alpha property isnt alot of help if i cant set the alpha of it.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 1:49 am

Oh, OK, I'll also add the NiMaterialProperty to the to-do list then.

Adding access to new Property nodes is generally just tedious busy-work, nothing hard, so don't worry about requesting those. At the same time, I'm probably not going to bother going through all of them on my own - so you have to request those if you want them, because there's a lot of them and they're all slightly different, so I can't just copy and paste everything.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 2:04 am

Thank

thats the only ones I needed.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 8:56 am

Have you exposed the GetDimensions function from bhkBoxShape? I might be looking in totally the wrong place, but I'd like to be able to get the dimensions of an object that uses a box shape collision mesh.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:08 am

I haven't done anything with collision, but it's on my to-do list. I can take a look at implementing that, though it might be a bit trickier since I'll have to first implement routines for finding the bhkBoxShape.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 7:03 am

Details...

Yeah I wasn't sure where things were at, so I just thought I'd ask. Thanks for confirming (that I was reading the docs right

). I'll keep an eye on this.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 1:27 am

I really can't wait for the next release, copy/pasting branches is going to be a great feature!

How is it going Dragoon, already received the replacements for your system?

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 8:42 am

Alright, finally back in business (as in, after several reinstalls, I have Oblivion running again). That took a lot longer than necessary but I was being lazy (and had company last week).

Things I've done:

Added try/catch blocks around basically everything. This means that rather than learning about, e.g., the fact that you can't delete Ni blocks that are skin influences (and that many Oblivion nif's incorrectly claim that they do) through crashes and ridiculous testing, NifSE should catch and handle those errors with a (somewhat) more informative error message in NifSE.log, without a crash. This is a good thing, and I should have done it to begin with.
Changed the way nif IDs are handed out to avoid a potential issue with loading meshes that have copied blocks from other meshes, and debugged the issues that this change generated.
Reproduced the error where the Shivering Isles BSA is not correctly read on my machine.

This is in addition to the updates that I had done before my computer died (merging nifs, alpha properties). The next beta will be released once I have:

Fixed the Shivering Isles BSA issues.
~~Tested the Niflib fix to the incorrectly-set meshes, and shown that it actually works.~~ done - tested and it works.
Possibly implemented a function to double-check meshes for skin influence, since we can't rely on the flags for it.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 9:32 am

Alright, finally back in business (as in, after several reinstalls, I have Oblivion running again). That took a lot longer than necessary but I was being lazy (and had company last week).

Things I've done:

Added try/catch blocks around basically everything. This means that rather than learning about, e.g., the fact that you can't delete Ni blocks that are skin influences (and that many Oblivion nif's incorrectly claim that they do) through crashes and ridiculous testing, NifSE should catch and handle those errors with a (somewhat) more informative error message in NifSE.log, without a crash. This is a good thing, and I should have done it to begin with.
Changed the way nif IDs are handed out to avoid a potential issue with loading meshes that have copied blocks from other meshes, and debugged the issues that this change generated.
Reproduced the error where the Shivering Isles BSA is not correctly read on my machine.

This is in addition to the updates that I had done before my computer died (merging nifs, alpha properties). The next beta will be released once I have:

Fixed the Shivering Isles BSA issues.
Tested the Niflib fix to the incorrectly-set meshes, and shown that it actually works.
Possibly implemented a function to double-check meshes for skin influence, since we can't rely on the flags for it.

Would you like some nif's from hell to test with?

I've got a whole bunch - blocks copied from other nifs, strange versions, mixed versions, manual collision meshes, custom inertia... enough to bring any program to its knees

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 9:41 am

Well, I can't promise that I'll support such monstrosities (though if Oblivion does then I should...), but sure, send 'em my way. Really what I need is a mesh from the GotY edition of the game, though.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:33 am

Well, I can't promise that I'll support such monstrosities (though if Oblivion does then I should...), but sure, send 'em my way. Really what I need is a mesh from the GotY edition of the game, though.

I've got all the contents (and more) of the GotY version, but not packaged that way. Do you need the meshes from that specific release?

Oh, and I wound up with such monstrosities by starting with the vanilla meshes and importing them into Max 2011... Man, what a garbled mess. I was forced to cobble together a nif by copying the collision exported from Max into the original Nif :blink:

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:51 am

Ouch.

Anyway, KC33 came through with some GotY meshes, and they seemed to work perfectly, so I should be good there. Which is very nice, and I'm sure the GotY users will appreciate that.

I'm still working on the SI issues. Those... are proving more difficult, and I don't really have any leads. I don't know anyone anymore who knows the inner workings of BSA files; I've tried PMing Timeslip, but he doesn't seem to check the forums anymore so I don't know if that will work... I have no idea what about the BSA file is different from other ones...

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:00 am

Ouch.

Anyway, KC33 came through with some GotY meshes, and they seemed to work perfectly, so I should be good there. Which is very nice, and I'm sure the GotY users will appreciate that.

I'm still working on the SI issues. Those... are proving more difficult, and I don't really have any leads. I don't know anyone anymore who knows the inner workings of BSA files; I've tried PMing Timeslip, but he doesn't seem to check the forums anymore so I don't know if that will work... I have no idea what about the BSA file is different from other ones...

Unfortunately I don't know too much about them. I did discover that BSA commander didn't work for me at all under Win 7. It would appear to pack the bsa ok, but meshes were missing or unreadable. I have to use OBMM. I don't know if that gives you any ideas...

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 9:42 am

OBMM is unfortunately coded in C# and not C++, so my ability to use it somewhat limited by the fact that I don't know any C#. Plus, even if I did, decoding others' work is far from the simplest of things to do.

Huh... I do have an idea though. I mean, Oblivion must know how to open BSAs, maybe Scruggs can find where that code is.

» Wed Mar 30, 2011 12:43 am

OBMM is unfortunately coded in C# and not C++, so my ability to use it somewhat limited by the fact that I don't know any C#. Plus, even if I did, decoding others' work is far from the simplest of things to do.

Huh... I do have an idea though. I mean, Oblivion must know how to open BSAs, maybe Scruggs can find where that code is.

Ok, well the other one that still seems to work is TES4Files - maybe Mental Elf can help... And Scruggs might be able to help cut to the chase

I'll see if I can package up some hideous nif's for your testing and will send you a pm...