[RELz] Open Cities Skyrim

[Arthmoor]

Nothing I can do about that. The game won't let you directly edit a map marker's data to wipe out the name. That change becomes permanent on uninstall. So I did the next best thing and linked the closed city markers to their open city destinations. That, at least so far, has been reversible.

 

There's a lot of stuff that worked fine before 1.6 that's changed since then that people have uncovered in the form of scene bugs and such with the participants showing up in the wrong worldspaces. Which means I have work cut out for me to uncover why each one is busted.

[AndalayBay]

That's weird. Why is it doing it only for Windhelm? Because the city got opened after I had an earlier version of the mod installed? Just curious.

[Arthmoor]

That depends on how long you've been running OCS and whether or not you've been cursed with the version I found out about the problem of changing marker data problems with. Windhelm obviously won't have that, and neither would Solitude, because I knew better by that point. The duplicates don't always show up either but sometimes the UI exposes the second one below the first.

[AndalayBay]

Hmmm. I only see the duplicate for Windhelm when I mouse over it on the map. It just seems to pop up easier. So are you saying that the others are duplicated too and I'm just not seeing them?

[Arthmoor]

They all are, but there was one version of OCS where I removed the map name from the closed markers and the game PERMANENTLY decided those markers no longer exist. So they don't show up under the new ones and they vanish entirely if the mod is uninstalled.

 

Solitude and Windhelm being newer than that epic disaster, they won't have this issue.

 

It doesn't matter that I rebuilt everything for 0.5 either because the changes were to vanilla markers.

[AndalayBay]

Ah, so that might be what the issue is then. I haven't visited Solitude since upgrading, so it probably has the duplicate marker.Anyway, you've fixed it so that it doesn't matter which marker is selected, right?

[Arthmoor]

Assuming that's actually working for anyone other than me, yes

 

I added code to try and force the game to resurrect the old markers that got killed off but Papyrus had the audacity to tell me they aren't markers. Which doesn't sound good. They could be permanently gone, but obviously for my own game I won't shed any tears over it.

[AndalayBay]

I'm not having any issues fast-travelling, so I'm happy. :smile: My only concern was picking the right marker for Windhelm, but if both work, then all's good.Found another oddity. Now as you know, my current game is pretty glitchy, so this might be another symptom. But I found that none of the market vendors had any goods in their stalls in Riften.

[Arthmoor]

That's definitely a sign your game is pissed. The stall placements were straight copy+paste operations. They're dummy objects that call from leveled lists. Nothing particularly special about them.

[AndalayBay]

My game isn't the only thing that's pissed! :headbang: Considering that I can't load a saved game in that area... Yeah, time to put Skyrim away for a bit and restart when I'm ready to come back to it. At least now I think I've got a pretty good LO.

[Arthmoor]

Open Cities Skyrim v0.9

With this update, be sure and pay a visit to the gates in Windhelm, Whiterun, and Markarth so that the updates can be registered.

Recompiled all scripts from the mod to be sure they're in compliance with format changes introduced in Skyrim 1.6.89.
Whiterun: When asked to train outside with Vilkas, the participants all ended up going to the closed worldspace instead.
Whiterun: The argument at the gate for "In My Time of Need" will no longer be a one sided show with just the two Redguards and no city guard.
Whiterun: The city gate has been tweaked so as to allow the civil war door flags to operate properly. It will also now lock and unlock itself at appropriate quest stages.
Whiterun: The gatesman was not set in the right crime faction which allowed him to be freely slaughtered without the guards assisting him.
Markarth: Tyranus and Yngvar will now be found waiting in the proper locations for their scene outside the abandoned house.
Markarth: The scene with Endon, Karah, and Adara will now play out in the proper location in the open worldspace.
Markarth: The city gate should no longer displace itself when the mod is uninstalled.
Windhelm: The map marker should no longer be slightly offset from its counterpart in the closed worldspace.
Windhelm: The two city gates should no longer be rotated 90 degrees off center when the mod is uninstalled.
Riften: The fireball floating in the trees northeast of the city has been removed.

Dawnguard users beware: So far as I am aware the cities ARE subject to vampire attacks despite being open. I've confirmed two incidents, though both were in Riften. The second incident was ugly, many NPCs in the plaza died. Damn tempted to write up a mod to stop it from happening because an empty city is no fun. (I reloaded obviously)

[Arthmoor]

Open Cities Skyrim v0.9.1

The compatibility support system used by the Open Cities mods for Oblivion has been added to allow for authors who wish to support compatibility with Open Cities to do so without requiring a patch file between mods. A new document has been included which explains the system and how to use it.

Solitude: During the tower escape for the Dark Brotherhood, Commander Maro will no longer be missing from the scene due to having been moved to the closed worldspace.
Solitude: The quest marker for the Festival of Fire will now point to the correct worldspace.
Whiterun: The script to deal with unlocking the city gate at appropriate times was accidentally left out.
Whiterun: The Dark Elf gatesman had somehow been given sound data for giants, resulting in heavy breathing sounds near him.
Whiterun: A gap in the stairway leading up to Dragonsreach has been corrected.
Windhelm: The map markers for the city should no longer be shifted slightly out of position on the map.
Windhelm: The door to Hjerim lost its key assignment and has been corrected.

[Arthmoor]

Open Cities Skyrim v0.9.2

Whiterun: The trigger box that is intended to unlock the gate wasn't 100% effective. Added a check for the guard dialogue stage to force the gate to unlock.
Whiterun: Some of the patrol guards needed to have their linked references updated or they'd stay stuck in the closed city.
Whiterun: A few more marker problems sending people to the closed worldspace have been corrected.
Riften: A duplicate door at Elgrim's Elixirs has been removed.
Riften: Brynjolf's Falmer Blood Elixir bottles were not attached to the enable marker that cleans them up once the initial Thieves Guild quest is done.

[Arthmoor]

Well I finally had occasion to launch another run through the civil war. My orc was appalled at the choice of Maven Black-Briar for Jarl of Riften when he was trying to favor the Imperials at the peace conference, so he's joined the rebellion.

Anyway, upon reaching the Battle of Whiterun, the expected shenanigans of the game not handling the war properly with OCS installed came up. Sure, the battle goes well right up until the drawbridge. Then once that's opened all the soldiers walk up to the gate and simply vanish. Galmar and Ralof included. WTF.

I figured out why, they have a package that is telling them to do that. Ok, fine, I can work around that. Maybe.

The bigger problem of course was that I wasn't expecting to go through the gate and find that the city hasn't been changed into it's civil war state. Someone, somewhere, decided it was good fun to attach that change to an activation event on the city gate. Which is where the nightmare begins.

Untangling the rat's nest that is the civil war has just led me down more and more dark holes than I wanted to. I know WHAT needs to be done, I just can't figure out HOW. So I started with what should have been a no brainer. Set up a change location event to force-lock the city gate to prevent people from breaking the battle by opening it. Seems simple enough, except that the quest either won't start, or can't do what I'm asking of it. This doesn't seem like much to ask of the game:
 

Alias_WhiterunGate.GetReference().SetOpen(false)
Alias_WhiterunGate.GetReference().BlockActivation(true)

It's set on a node with the only condition being that the new location is WhiterunLocation (not the hold either). For testing obviously. The real conditions will be much narrower once I can make this happen. Fast travel in to the stables, walk to the gate. Standing WIDE OPEN (which in itself is massively irritating, it should be closed anyway). Worse, I was able to activate it to close it, which should not have been possible if the activation was blocked.

Not a single Papyrus error either.

It's not even going to be a pleasant thought to try and manipulate the actual drawbridge sequence because everything in the civil war is aliases and radiant targeting and NONE of it is making the least bit of sense. This much trouble for what ought to be a simple event?

And don't get me started on my render window suddenly deciding to stop rendering for no apparent reason, at random times while trying to get something accomplished. The rest of the CK is responsive and works, it just leaves a completely white render window. I can even click on shit blindly and do whatever.

I swear I'm about to just throw this entire mod out the window because of stupid shit like this and the overly convoluted layout of every single solitary thing that has to do with a city.

[AndalayBay]

That really sucks. Big time. I wish I could help. I'm afraid I've retreated to Oblivion modding and I might just stay there! And Gecko hell, of course.I wonder if you're running into a similar issues with persistence that you had for Oblivion and maybe you need to look at a SKSE plugin.

[Arthmoor]

No, it's just the game flat out refusing to start the quest as expected. I abandoned the change location event and attached it instead to a trigger box that's only on during the battle. I was then able to confirm that the door will lock, and was even able to take over the alias for the door so Bethesda's handler script for it worked. Although I still had to force lock the door because even with the script telling me I couldn't go in, the gate opened up.

 

What I'm running into now though is trying to figure out how to force-launch the CWAttackCity quest. It's one of those damned story event quests and for whatever reason it's not started until you enter WhiterunWorld. There's no conditions on the startup node to check location though. Which makes no sense.

[AndalayBay]

Can you attach an event to WhiterunWorld? I'm just taking a wild guess here - suggesting that it's triggered by an event on the worldspace rather than a condition.

[Arthmoor]

Whatever it is, it's tied to activating the city gate. No fucking idea what, but something. I've confirmed it's an alias failure. The game isn't able to fill the CWAttackCity aliases for some reason. It does so just fine if I pull OCS out of the load order even after the siege outside the city has started.

 

I hate how we have no eyes on WHAT alias is tripping things up when this kind of thing happens. If I knew that I could fix it easily.

[Arthmoor]

if it's the correct stage in the siege quest, finish siege quest and start the CWAttackCity quest by sending a story manager event

Yes, and it would have been quite helpful to see an actual call to a story event function somewhere in the script guys. A setstage command on the quest in question isn't going to cut it. Ugh.

 

This radiant system has too many black boxes.

[Arthmoor]

Open Cities Skyrim v0.9.3

All: Fixed the quest objective pointers for the house purchases.
All: Town music has been fixed in the region definitions and should play properly when in the cities now.
Windhelm: Fixed some markers and AI packs so Blood on the Ice will continue to work properly.
Solitude: The crates and furniture on the porch of Proudspire Manor were not attached to the parent object for the house quest.
Riften: The wrong duplicate door was removed in the previous update.
Whiterun: Backed out changes to the Companions werewolf rampage (C03Rampage) and reworked the access point to it in order to remove a conflict with Dawnguard.
Riften, Whiterun, Windhelm: Added woodcutters' axes at each chopping block where wood can be cut.

Not that it much matters since the Battle for Whiterun is still hosed on the Stormcloak side

[Arthmoor]

Open Cities Skyrim v0.9.4

Mod has been cleaned with TES5Edit. Yay! No more dirty edits or deleted records in the way!
Whiterun: Fixed navmesh edits in Breezehome to avoid a CTD conflict caused by the Hearthfire DLC.

[Arthmoor]

Open Cities Skyrim v0.9.5

All: The gatesmen for the cities have all been transferred to interior start locations so the civil war quests that send everyone indoors will take them too.
Solitude: The cell SolitudeMountainside was not properly listed as being in SolitudeLocation and was disrupting civil war data for the city.
Solitude, Whiterun, Windhelm: Location reference type markers have been stripped from the closed city markers to prevent them from stealing aliases from their open city counterparts during the civil war.
Solitude: The birds that fly overhead will now be disabled during the civil war battle.
Whiterun: The Stormcloak assault on the city should now be working properly.

A patch for Hearthfire is also included.

[Arthmoor]

Open Cities Skyrim v0.9.6

All: Old script assignments attached to the player house doors have been removed so they won't block access to the real ones.
All: Hana upgraded her Oblivion gate meshes to use real collision. The fake collision cubes have therefore been removed from the game. Improved textures have also been provided.
All, except Windhelm: Outdoor lighting in the cities will turn on and off for day/night changes. Windhelm will not be covered since the outdoor lighting doubles as sources of warmth.
Whiterun: A barricade outside the Drunken Huntsman was not tethered properly to its enable parent.

Skyrim Patch 1.8 is now required to run this mod.

[Arthmoor]

Open Cities Skyrim v0.9.7

Solitude: One of the civil war fires was not hooked up to the enable parent properly.

General: The script which fixes broken positioning on the original vanilla gates has been modified so that it will only attempt to execute once instead on every reload of the area.

[AndalayBay]

I'm having a bit of an issue fast travelling to Riften. The statics don't change over to the open city. So there are a lot of visual artifacts from superimposed meshes and the doors and gates don't quite work right. I can save the game, exit and reload and it will work fine. Let me know if you want screenshots.