Diverse Guards

[Kayle]

So, I was browsing Nexus and found a pair of mods that make the City Guards more Diverse equipment wise.SPARTAN VIs Diverse City GuardsBanes Diverse GuardsBoth have good things going for them. Spartan's gear on the Guards themselves is a much better setup I beleive. But Banes has some better textures for the hooded masks, not to mention Bane's modifies the Legion troopers and battlemages as well. What I'd like to accomplish is to have Spartan's City Guards with Bane's hooded masks and Imperial updates... How hard is that going to be?

[Dwip]

Probably not difficult, if somewhat time consuming. Based on the brief glance at descriptions:- Start with Spartan's as your base mod.- For the textures, since it's just textures, probably what you can do is find where the appropriate textures are in Bane's, then just copy them over Spartan's. Rename the files as/if necessary.- There's a couple different ways the Imperial updates could go, and you'll need to dig through Bane's to see how he did it. If he simply retextured the existing Imperial armor, you'll want to do the same song and dance with texture copying. If he made a new set of armor, you'll need to recreate that set inside Spartan's mod, and make sure to put the models and textures in a logical spot for that. At that point you'd need to find and open up every Imperial guard in the game (they're pretty easy to find in the list) and give them the new armor. You'll also need to recreate the capes Bane's uses however it is he made them work, and add those to the same groups of Imperials.

[Conner]

Would the mods conflict with each other if you just installed 'em both?

[Kayle]

I would assume so, since they do the same things.

[Conner]

Too bad, that would've been the easy solution. So basically the two mods both do the same things and you want half of the task from one and the other half of the task from the other. Dwip's probably got the right of it then.

[Arthmoor]

If the two mods are not trying to both add inventory items to the same slot, Wrye Bash might be able to resolve it via tagging.

[Kayle]

They're going to be putting the stuff in the same slots.And I thought about it, and this might make a nice addition to the Open Cities Reborn project, since the cities are being redone anyway, a face-lift for the guards couldn't hurt any either. If I can figure this stuff out and get it working anyway...

[Conner]

It probably wouldn't hurt, but would it be within the scope of Open Cities Reborn?

[Kayle]

It might, or might not be. That's up to Arthmoor to decide.I installed Spartan's mod to test it, and I'm now in the process of backing up the Meshes/Textures folders and then I'm (hopefully before we leave for Christmas ...things...) I'll install Bane's and see what the results are. Then go from there.

[Arthmoor]

Editing guards would open up too big a can of worms. I'd never hear the end of the compatibility mess that would make

[Conner]

That's kind of what I was thinking. It does sound like a nice extra that would compliment OCR quite well, but actually including it as part of OCR would be more trouble than it's worth in long term compatibility issues.

[Kayle]

It doesn't actually change anything about the Guards aside from what they're wearing. And now that I'm home from Christmas stuff for today, Gonna give this another shot...

[Conner]

Still really doesn't sound like something that falls under the description of Open Cities to me, but if that really is all it changes maybe compatibility wouldn't be an issue?

[Arthmoor]

Well with the way plugins work, changing a guard's inventory is enough. The entire NPC is considered one record in the ESP. Change his inventory, and any mods that edited his attributes gets overwritten. That's why utilities like Wrye Bash exist, to give us ways around things like this. That way, if tagged right, both mods get their changes incorporated. Unless they both change the same subrecords, like inventories.So in the case of the two diverse guard mods, that definitely needs to be done via the CS to pick and choose what goes on each guard.Either way, it falls outside the scope of what Open Cities does.

[Kayle]

So, Bane's doesn't really seem to play well with OCR. At least as far as the Imperials go. They both seemed to do okay with things as far as the regular City Guards, but the Imperials just didn't seem to update right. Or maybe the load order is off. Dunno. So I'll pose that question.Should OCR and OCOD load before either of these mods, or should they load before those two?[Edit:] Okay, so swapping the load order does make Bane's modify the Imperials properly. So it's going to need to load after the Open Cities stuff. That's good to know. Now I just gotta figure out why the guards aren't dressed the way his screenshots show, and then I'll be ready to Mix the two.

[Kayle]

Alright, So after much digging, I've found that the Bravil and Bruma guards don't appear properly because a couple of meshes and textures are missing from Bane's Mode. CS is trying to load something from 'Armor/ninja/mask green.nif' And it doesn't exist, so I'm wondering if it's maybe something he forgot to include or maybe something from another Mod that he didn't realize wasn't vanilla, or what, but I'm gonna do a quick look around TES Nexus and see if anything pops up, befor eI turn in before tomorrows Christmas festivities at 9am... *shudder*

[Hana]

Did you download the "Fix" file at the same location?Or maybe this will work.

[Arthmoor]

Oh geez, I just grabbed the two mod files for diverse guards and realized which one Spartan's was. The one where he went crazy with making his own copies of guards and then force-swapping the referenced NPCs in each location. You couldn't have picked a more convoluted guard mod to play around with. The method he used for getting his changes into the game voids any other mods you might make to all of the city guards.I've looked at the way Bane's is set up, it would be far simpler to modify it to use versions of Spartan's stuff instead. While it does edit the vanilla guards, compatibility issues can be resolved via Wrye Bash using the "Invent" tag.Load order on Bane's should be a non-issue. OCR makes no edits at all to vanilla guards (or any other vanilla NPCs), so it doesn't make any difference where it gets placed.

[Conner]

Alright' date=' So after much digging, I've found that the Bravil and Bruma guards don't appear properly because a couple of meshes and textures are missing from Bane's Mode. CS is trying to load something from 'Armor/ninja/mask green.nif' And it doesn't exist, so I'm wondering if it's maybe something he forgot to include or maybe something from another Mod that he didn't realize wasn't vanilla, or what, but I'm gonna do a quick look around TES Nexus and see if anything pops up, befor eI turn in before tomorrows Christmas festivities at 9am... *shudder*[/quote']Sounds like you need to create a 'Armor/ninja/mask green.nif' file, even if it's an empty/blank file.Yuck, gotta love those early morning festivities that go with holidays like that... at least it's a Saturday and your only kid is too young to care about such stuff still. Just wait, in years to come it gets better... you'll really enjoy those Christmas mornings where your child wakes up at 4:30am and waits "patiently" at the tree for you to wake up til (s)he gets bored and wakes you at the first sign of sun-up so (s)he can get their new presents....

[Kayle]

I'm thinking I'll just make myself a new .esp to hold my diversified guards, and pull the bits and pieces from Banes and Spartan's that I like. I have to admit, I'm not real big on the bulky Sallet things they've got the guards in. I found the Mod where that mask stuff comes from, the problem I have is that I'm not entirely sure what to use to modify .dds files so that I can recolor the texture from the Dark Brotherhood style masks that it starts with, into the green and brown for the Bravil and Bruma guards.I see a lot of mods citing Photoshop as one of their Tools used, so mayhaps I'll see if I can get Photoshop to work. Or after I finish assembling Claire's new christmas stuff I'll check the tutorials stuff here and TES Nexus.

[Dwip]

Two options beyond Photoshop:- Samson uses Paint.NET for a lot of things. Reads/writes .dds natively, I forget if it can handle things like normal maps natively or not.- Me and a good chunk of the remaining texturers use GIMP. There exists a .dds plugin, as well as one to create normal maps.All depends on what you're most comfortable with. We also have some graphics tutorials here as well, although not recoloring I don't think.

[Kayle]

Well, Photoshop is what I'm most familiar with, I've got the Adobe CS4 Master Collection. I just have to find out how to make it work with .dds files.

[Conner]

Hana should be able to give you input on that, I believe that she prefers Photoshop too.

[Arthmoor]

- Samson uses Paint.NET for a lot of things. Reads/writes .dds natively' date=' I forget if it can handle things like normal maps natively or not.[/quote']Paint.NET has a normal maps plugin which I find works very well. Far simpler to figure out than GIMP's convoluted mess.Oh yeah, have I mentioned lately that GIMP's UI sucks balls? :PAnyone ever wonder why normal maps are still treated as second class image manipulations when they're so popular?

[Hana]

Yep yep, PS is my choice of weapon.You'll need the little plug-in set here for the .dds converter and the normal map filter. Once that's in, open whatever file you want, make your changes, then Save As filename.dds. You'll get a little popup box. In the very top long box make sure it says DXT1 no alpha and the Generate Mip Maps button is checked. You can use the same existing _n.dds (normal map) file that's already there rather than create a new one. If you were making changes other than colour you'd want a new normal map.