Help request for a mod for BC-OCR

[1Mac]

tl;dr: I made this mod a few months ago to add walls to OCR Skingrad with the Better Cities patch. I'm most concerned about pathgrid and cleaning issues. I also disabled the gallows and wanted to be sure there wasn't any issue in doing so, like some sort of quest event or AI behavior. Thanks to anyone who cares to take a look and address my concerns!

Longer post: I really like the look of OCR with the Better Cities patch. OCR on its own has great city design but tends to look a little empty. BC on its own is just a little too over the top. Patched together, OCR and BC give great looking cities that are nicely filled-in without going overboard. One preference I wanted to effect was in restoring the central walls to Skingrad. There's a mod that does this for OCR already, but it doesn't work well with the BC patch. So I set about to create my own.

Here's what this mod does:

• Adds walls, towers, banners, gates and bridges to central Skingrad. This is modeled on original Skingrad but is not a perfect restoration of the vanilla layout.
• Moves the rangers guild (and sign, door, and activator thereof) from the east to the west end of town to accommodate the new walls. Adds a sidewalk in front of the rangers guild to better blend into the street. Entering and exiting the guild building works without issue, IIRC.
• Disables (not deletes!) the gallows, corpse, and related clutter from the center of town, in part because it got in the way of the new walls, and in part because I just don't care for that sort of thing.
• Moves or disables (not deletes!) trees and clutter, again to accommodate the new walls. I disabled the falling leaves as well, since I was using a tree replacer mod that didn't match the falling leaves.
• Adds new landscape textures, mostly to add or remove road textures as appropriate. IIRC there are no actual landscape edits.
• Adds new pathgrids. I didn't delete or disable any pathgrid nodes, but I did move or disconnect several. As a CS newb, I'm not sure if this was a bad idea, or what the best way to handle it is.

I also performed a basic cleaning in xEdit, but it seems there are more references I could safely remove.

These are my biggest concerns:

• Is removing the gallows going to mess anything up, like quests or AI or something else I'm not thinking of?
• There are a number seemingly wild edits in cells I did not intends to touch. Can these be safely removed?
• Is there a best practice for modifying pathgrids that I ought to have adhered to? Can I do anything about it now?

Thanks again to anyone who can help out!

BC OCR Walled Skingrad.esp

[Sigurð Stormhand]

Hi,

So I'm going to try to help a bit, as much as I can right now.

You'll need to do a clean save if you moved any activator, that means removing BC, OCR and your patch, loading a save, saving, then re-adding those mods. Otherwise the door to the ranger's Guild, or any other activator, will be stuck in their original location. The fix for this is to disable the original and create a replacement.

I don't believe the Gallows are relevant to anything but irrc they are added by Better Cities and I have not worked on that mod for years. You can ask Vorians, though, he's active on Nexus and generally very helpful and personable.

If you've altered the landscape textures then you've edited the Land record, which also includes the heightmap for the cells you edited. This shouldn't be a problem so long as your mod loads last, and if you only edited the cells inside the city you'll PROBALY avoid land tears elsewhere.

Wild Edits are caused by bugs in the Construction Set, you can get the Construction Set Extender to avoid these: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/36370/ Some people have issues with the render windows. If so, use version 4.0. It doesn't have all the fancy stuff, but it's still miles better than Vanilla. If you have wild edits the best thing to do is to identify the cells you WANTED edited and remove everything else in TES4Edit.

If your Pathgrid isn't crashing the Bash Patcher or throwing errors you should be good, pathgrids are a bit more forgiving than the meshes used in Skyrim etc.