Tips for Skyrim Players and Modders

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Tuesday, 24 April 2012 16:47

Written by Giskard

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I have had some thoughts about the problems users seem to experience in Skyrim and have a little list of possible causes that users and modders might want to check out. Its not complete, its just issues I know about that you may not have thought about yet.

1) Console use to cheat their way past Quest problems can and does cause all manner of problems including Saved Game Issues.

2) FIX Mods, these mods are rarely taken down after Beth fix a problem and often remain in players mod lists long after the fix becomes obsolete. Fixing something twice should be harmless, but it depends on how the fix was made to how harmless or dangerous leaving it active would be.

3) Mods that edit things globally so they effect every instance of an item in the game often cause problems for other mods and cause crashing. For example a overhaul edits a cup, and 50 mods use that cup on tables in their new locations but do not otherwise edit it, they only use it. If that edited mug caused a crash, all 50 mods would crash out because of the 1 edit the global editing mod caused. Players would get a crash when entering any of the 50 mods cells and would believe those mods to be buggy when actually it is 1 mod causing all the problems and its not any of the 50 that used the cup.

4) Cutting and Pasting items from one default game location in to a location in a mod using the creation kit is now risky because the items settings tend to be copied too. Meaning its possible to move a quest trigger or patrol marker or something else that is very important buy designing your levels that way. So mod makers must check everything they copy and past has its info reset and will not trigger quests or NPC events that are nothing to do with the mod in question. This is a big problem.... always double check.

5) The Creation Kit is a very buggy piece of software, just placing an item you know works in to a new location is all you have to do stop the copy of that item from working at all. I recently moved a working trigger this way and found a fully functional trigger "I MADE" did not work in a new location when it should have done. Only when I repeated the process and did exactly the same thing again, did it work. I did nothing differently. That is the new creation kit for you.

6) Everything in Skyrim runs from a script, the new Scripting language is called Puprus and it is not a reliable scripting language. It uses a queue system and queues up scripts, pausing any big complicated scripts that take too long to run. In complicated quests this can be fatal, in live update situations where a quest needs to know when several baddies die or something similar, it may only get half the results it needs to move the quest on.This is because Skyrims new scripting language does not multitask very well, it loses information when too much is happening for it to handle, faster CPUs seems to help but not always. For example I had 3 NPCs with death scripts inform a quest when each had died. Because i killed all 3 quickly, the quest only got 1 result, not 3. The quest failed to advance because the new scripting language was incapable of counting up to 3 during intense action scenes. 

7) The modder has to make sure every command he uses works, not all commands seem to work in esp files. SHOW() being one of the dodgy ones that does not seem to work at all for me no matter how I use it. As a mod maker you must double check your scripts work as intended for this reason in order to avoid causing problems to players saved games.

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