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ESL and sim settlement addons

D

Danest

Member
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86
Has anyone ever tried converting any of these countless addons to esl format? I'm thinking it would save a lot of space as I get around the mod limit, but I thought I'd check here in case someone can say "Yeah, I tried it, don't do it, it borked the files."
 
There's actually a Sim Settlements Add-On in ESL format. IDEK's Logistics Station
But the ESL format is still quite new and judging from IDEK's adventures with dealing with users who can't handle it, I don't think we'll see all to many add-on authors going down that path for a while.
(I believe IDEK is @EyeDeck on this forum btw.)

That it would save a lot of space could certainly be debated, but that come down to how you interpreted *a lot* I guess.
And yes, it would enable you to have more than 255 mods. Which pretty much will be a trainwreck waiting to happen. If you really see that as big problem, you could always learn howto merge mods. Also not a recommended practice, but it can be done.

But we'll see. When the mod scene learn to handle ESL's, the tools get better at using them and the mod authors learn howto make the best use of it, there might come a time were it's actually preferred to make add-ons as ESL's.
 
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Some mods, like a single simple outfit, convert smoothly to esl with no apparent problems and sit neatly atop an already stacked mod order. But it's hard to say what would happen with something a little more complex, for instance, can the ai in sim settlements interact with a file that has been converted to esl? Probably? Maybe? It's hard to say. I even converted a radio station to esl, and it worked fine. The next radio station I converted would only play the first song. So what can be converted and can't be converted is still kind of a mystery to me. It feels random.

Edit: As far as merged mods go, I spent a while learning to merge mods and after I did so, it just ended up demanding that the original mods be present as masters for the newly merged mod. Making it completely useless as a way of reducing the load order. I'd wasted a lot of time for nothing. Switching to esl is actually extremely simple; the complexity comes from figuring out whether or not it's still going to have full normal functionality in the game. It seems there's no way to tell ahead of time, which is just messy considering how much the game hates mods being removed.
 
I've never tried merging mods myself. Of what I read about it, I rather skip on some mods than go down that road.

Edit - the interest in Sim Settlements has gone through the roof, and we're already a pretty large team that are kept busy with supporting the players. What I'm saying is that adding something that might confuse a lot of players and thus add heavy burden on the team is not something you take lightly upon.
 
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Modding can become a dark, weirdly addictive path. I have to be careful not to get into a trap where I'm spending more time fiddling with modding than playing the game.


Whoops... too late.
 
NikVilKok said:
There's actually a Sim Settlements Add-On in ESL format. IDEK's Logistics Station
But the ESL format is still quite new and judging from IDEK's adventures with dealing with users who can't handle it, I don't think we'll see all to many add-on authors going down that path for a while.
(I believe IDEK is @EyeDeck on this forum btw.)
Click to expand...
Correct. It's worth noting that so far 100% of the end-user problems I've encountered regarding the new format is because NMM sucks. As soon as that pile of trash gets replaced by Vortex, I suspect there won't be any more significant issues with it.

On the back end it's a moderate pain in the ass because the Creation Kit's "compact form IDs" button doesn't work very well. For some reason it renamed almost all of my scripts and moved them to a different folder, which was annoying to fix, and still didn't automatically compact the form IDs enough for an ESL to work automatically because it left a bunch in the 0x1000+ range.

If you didn't already know this, I should explain that in an ESL, all form IDs have to be between 0x800 and 0xFFF. Ideally they should all be compacted as close to 0x800 as possible, so if there are e.g. 150 records, the highest form ID should be 0x896. The Creation Kit likes to randomly skip form IDs when you add new records for some reason, so if you make a plugin and work on it for a while before compacting, there's a good chance that all of the form IDs between, say, 0x900 and 0xF9C will just be empty, because only the form IDs above 0xFFF will have gotten compressed down as much as they could possibly be.

Normally the compaction routine should solve this, but it seems that it simply does not renumber any form IDs between 0x800 and 0xFFF, even if there's space to do so. This makes some sense, because if it did then running that routine on a plugin that's going to be an update and not a new install would break any old saves, however this means that by default, the CK doesn't take full advantage of the ESL format, and any plugin that the author didn't put more effort into than this will take more "esl slots" than the same plugin if the author had done it properly. (Note that this might not necessarily be true considering how little documentation is out there about the new format, so it might just be the total number of form IDs that's important and not their specific ID within 0x800 and 0xFFF. Someone would have to ask Bethesda about that one directly to get a proper answer I suspect.)

The solution, of course, is to open the ESP up in xEdit and renumber your form IDs by hand. Obviously this is a massive pain when you have 100+ form IDs that didn't get compressed properly.

After you've put in the initial work it's not as hard though. You'll still have to renumber form IDs by hand when making updates, but most of the time any individual update won't add enough form IDs for this to be that much of a headache.

Oh, and I suppose you have to take into consideration that ESLs always load after your ESMs but before your ESPs, so if you have any form ID overrides, they're more likely to get overridden by some other mod. Most Sim Settlements addons don't require any overrides though, so that's not as much of a concern. The last consideration I can think of is that since you want to minimize the number of new records as much as possible, things like SCOL records, and anything you've left in a building cell to make SCOLs out of ought to be moved to a separate "work" plugin. I believe there are some addon authors that do this anyway, however.
 
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So .. looking back on it .. would you still have gone down the ESL path, knowing what you know today?

And thanks for the in-depth info on ESL's.

(re NMM and its replacement. The only thing we can be sure about is that the new manager will introduce new bugs)
 
Judging by the timestamps on my backups, it only took me a few hours to convert everything from my moderately-sized mod and make sure it was working okay. That's not factoring in that I was probably paying half of my attention to something else at the time as well. Was it worth it? Sure, and if NMM didn't suck so much I wouldn't have any regrets at all. I've been deep into Bethesda game modding for long enough that little things like what I've described aren't much of a problem for me, just another thing to be slightly annoyed about for a few minutes before I get over it.
 
Yes, thank you for the esl information. This and skyrim are my main games I use mods on and this is the first esl file I've encountered.
 
Yeah NMM behaved wierdly when I installed EyeDecks mod, it didnt show up in the NMM modlist, I had to run LOOT and then restart NMM for it to even show up, and after I did that the newer ESL files were unticked in NMM for some reason.

I suspect NMM could be confused by the fact that Bethesda has changed the way it handles ESL files with the 1.10.40 update or the 1.10.50 update, I can't remember which one. The newer ESL files behave wierdly because the 2 oldest ESL files I downloaded when the CC directly became available have never been unchecked in NMM for me and they also show as "greyed out" in NMM just like the official DLC files. The newer ESL files get unchecked in NMM for some reason everytime you run LOOT, I don't know if LOOT or NMM is to blame for that.
 
@drizzan, I'm not sure why NMM does what it does, but I recall reading a post from Arthmoor mentioning that the official CC ESLs, like the official DLCs, are all hard-coded by the game to load, so it doesn't make a difference whether they're in your load order or not. Modder-created ESLs do need to be in your load order in order to load.
 
EyeDeck said:
@drizzan, I'm not sure why NMM does what it does, but I recall reading a post from Arthmoor mentioning that the official CC ESLs, like the official DLCs, are all hard-coded by the game to load, so it doesn't make a difference whether they're in your load order or not. Modder-created ESLs do need to be in your load order in order to load.
Click to expand...

The official CC ESLs won't show up in the ingame load order at all, so this may very well be the case that it is not possible to disable them other than manually deleting the files. Your mod does show up in the ingame load order though.

It is pretty clear then that NMM handles the new official CC ESLs wrong then, since you can untick them but the function won't actually do anything in the end.
A likely cause is that NMM can't tell the difference between the new CC Official ESL files and user created ESL files, cause they behave the same in NMM.
 
Some more annoying info about NMM: If you have downloaded official ESL from the CC, it is actually impossible in newer versions of NMM to rearrange your load order. You either need to run LOOT and hope LOOT is smart, or use the NMM version that cannot read ESL files and rearrange ESP mods in that one.
And for me LOOT does untick custom ESL files, I have no idea why but everytime LOOT is run custom ESL files are unticked in NMM, so if you run LOOT you then need to tick the custom ESL files back on again...

NMM is just a nightmare now with ESL files, really hope they get the new mod manager out ASAP.
 
The latest version of LOOT works with ESLs for me, it even has a new little icon for them. With new features come new bugs I guess.
 
EyeDeck said:
The latest version of LOOT works with ESLs for me, it even has a new little icon for them. With new features come new bugs I guess.
Click to expand...

Yes it is sadly the latest version 0.12.1 of LOOT that behaves like this, unticking the custom ESL files. Older versions of LOOT cannot even find ESL files so I doubt it is a problem there.
 
EyeDeck said:
Correct. It's worth noting that so far 100% of the end-user problems I've encountered regarding the new format is because NMM sucks. As soon as that pile of trash gets replaced by Vortex, I suspect there won't be any more significant issues with it.

On the back end it's a moderate pain in the ass because the Creation Kit's "compact form IDs" button doesn't work very well. For some reason it renamed almost all of my scripts and moved them to a different folder, which was annoying to fix, and still didn't automatically compact the form IDs enough for an ESL to work automatically because it left a bunch in the 0x1000+ range.

If you didn't already know this, I should explain that in an ESL, all form IDs have to be between 0x800 and 0xFFF. Ideally they should all be compacted as close to 0x800 as possible, so if there are e.g. 150 records, the highest form ID should be 0x896. The Creation Kit likes to randomly skip form IDs when you add new records for some reason, so if you make a plugin and work on it for a while before compacting, there's a good chance that all of the form IDs between, say, 0x900 and 0xF9C will just be empty, because only the form IDs above 0xFFF will have gotten compressed down as much as they could possibly be.

Normally the compaction routine should solve this, but it seems that it simply does not renumber any form IDs between 0x800 and 0xFFF, even if there's space to do so. This makes some sense, because if it did then running that routine on a plugin that's going to be an update and not a new install would break any old saves, however this means that by default, the CK doesn't take full advantage of the ESL format, and any plugin that the author didn't put more effort into than this will take more "esl slots" than the same plugin if the author had done it properly. (Note that this might not necessarily be true considering how little documentation is out there about the new format, so it might just be the total number of form IDs that's important and not their specific ID within 0x800 and 0xFFF. Someone would have to ask Bethesda about that one directly to get a proper answer I suspect.)

The solution, of course, is to open the ESP up in xEdit and renumber your form IDs by hand. Obviously this is a massive pain when you have 100+ form IDs that didn't get compressed properly.

After you've put in the initial work it's not as hard though. You'll still have to renumber form IDs by hand when making updates, but most of the time any individual update won't add enough form IDs for this to be that much of a headache.

Oh, and I suppose you have to take into consideration that ESLs always load after your ESMs but before your ESPs, so if you have any form ID overrides, they're more likely to get overridden by some other mod. Most Sim Settlements addons don't require any overrides though, so that's not as much of a concern. The last consideration I can think of is that since you want to minimize the number of new records as much as possible, things like SCOL records, and anything you've left in a building cell to make SCOLs out of ought to be moved to a separate "work" plugin. I believe there are some addon authors that do this anyway, however.
Click to expand...

Maybe this is explaining why some esl mods inexplicably don't work, other than the simplest stuff like clothes. of coure that messes up my game when I discover it later on, sadly. I'm having a great deal of trouble staying under the mod limit. I sort of envy people who are satisfied with just a few mods.
I'm practically addicted... "this one... oh, oh, and this one! ah look at these mods! mods for you mods for me mods forever!"
You ask what I have downloaded?
"The nexus."
 
@Danest, It's most likely just that NMM is being stupid in some arcane way. The ESL limit is reportedly 300+ in the absolute worst-case scenario, up to 4000-odd if mods are sufficiently small. I haven't found anyone explaining why the limit works that way in detail yet, since I can't think of a reason why the ESL in slot FE000 is would affect the ESL in FE001, but that's what the documentation I've read says anyway.

One thought, do you have an ESP in slot FE/254? For some reason the game is happy to launch in cases like this, but I believe the ESP will win out where form ID overlap occurs. Obviously this will break your ESLs in strange, likely crashy ways. A well-written mod manager would prevent the use of slot FE when ESLs are active, or at least whine endlessly that you're going to have problems... you've probably already read my opinion on NMM, so I have zero expectation that NMM would catch this automatically.
 
I used to have one in 255, got rid of it and it worked a little better. But some just don't work, which makes me wary of turning sim settlement mods (and many others) into esl, because I may not notice a partial esl-related glitch until later. Some radio stations convert, for instance, and work just fine. Other radios inexplicably glitch when turned into esl, even though there really isn't anything other than simple music tracks.
I seem to recall briefly looking at mod organizer (I think that's the one). I probably should have buckled down and concentrated on it, but at a quick skim at a glance it looked more complicated than nexus' "just click and go."
Additionally, the creation kit pretty much always lists a whole bunch of errors, no matter what it's loading -- even the base game, errors pop up. I am not sure I can trust it at all. It takes such a long time to even load a single esp where I only modified one single number. I don't like it much as a program.
 
255 would be even worse, since this is the slot your save file "mod" loads into. 254 needs to be clear as well for ESLs to work properly. Unless it's just NMM counting active files starting at index 1 instead of index 0 or something.
 
Pretty sure NMM was even counting esp files that weren't activated. Wrye bash "ghosts" such files and NMM seemed to stop counting them. Speaking of that, I'm not even sure that Wrye's bashed patch ability is working like it did with Skyrim
I guess I should switch to mod organizer like I almost did a while ago. And so I've uninstalled every mod through nmm and it still says I have 199 active plugins. Ugh.
 
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