Symon

Vendors in shops have the 'continue if player is near' flag, so they don't suddenly attack you as a trespasser mid-sale at close of 'business'.

Do your street vendors have that flag? An open air vendor wouldn't need it and it might account for strangeness.

Again, I'm impressed!

I do indeed!

Linux is bugged and very unsafe and its terible in patching that.

(Falls about laughing.)

(Checks Nagios display with well over 200 Linux servers monitored. Randomly selects a DNS server, checks uptime.)

Over 18 months. Last reboot was a kernel upgrade.

I'm quite happy to be part of a team of two that build, maintains and runs those. I wouldn't want to look after a similar sized Windows estate.

I patched two of our servers on Friday:

Yum update

Press Y

All done in 30 seconds.

Last time I patched a windows workstation, it took 10 minutes, a long reboot and then I had to manually hack at the registry.

Yes, if you have no BSAs, you have no archives to invalidate. That said, as the bsa used there has one dummy asset, you aren't gaining much. (grin)

An excellent analysis - more on it later, but first:-

Ljacquard said of BSAs: "every major and well-designed mod for Oblivion uses them". He quoted some of these mods elsewhere. One of them I unpacked very recently. I'm not going to name it as my aim isn't to cast aspersions at anyone, but here is what I found:-

1. Corrupt nifs. At least 70% of the many included Nifs had redundant nodes, some badly corrupt and very oversize (delete node rather than delete branch had been used liberally).

2. Redundant assets. Commonly used assets in the BSA with the usual path. If I'd have left the BSA alone, I'd have had two copies, one in the BSA! I deleted numerous textures I already had.

Exactly the sort of BSA that anyone would be well served by unpacking and throwing away.

However, let's now discuss 'perfect BSAs'.

For access timing, what we really need to look at is a typical case. What happens when really common files, say footfemale.dds are accessed? This is a file that is going to be in graphics memory pretty constantly I'd say. If not there, then in normal memory, if not there, well, what would happen?

If loose: Call to read from NTFS, let it load file, (let's hope it has mipmaps).

If in a BSA: Call to load NTFS to get BSA index (hopefully in memory but hey), offset along to find file, maybe read chunk of BSA, extract file. Let's hope the BSA isn't fragmented.

In other words, your typical windows case is the norm. You almost certainly don't want every asset in a BSA there and then. You want handfuls of the assets, something NTFS and Windows is good at providing. As you say "but uncompressed files are better if you have to read it multiple times". For read substitute access.

A BSA is NOT magic. It's a file archive/compression format, like 7zip, zip, tar or bz2.

When creating a good archive, you generally have a choice between access speed and compression. However, accessing a discreet file in any archive is slower than native file system access, because you have to do BOTH. A decent o/s does NOT distinguish between memory and disk, that's how they work. If something that is needed happens NOT to to be in memory you get a read fault while the process (or thread) pauses while the o/s goes and gets it. NTFS is a decent filesystem.

One common misconception (not necessarily by Ljacquard) seems to be that all BSAs are always in memory (no matter how big) and that all loose files are always on the disk and are getting read constantly every time they are needed. This just isn't so.

NTFS loads things effectively and quickly into memory. BSAs are an extra overhead that are used in addition to NTFS.

No where else in all my years have a ever found cases where an archive format was faster to access than a filesystem. Ask yourself this people, if BSAs were so fast, why aren't they being sold as a format to o/s vendors to use instead of their 'slow' filesystems, even if only for special cases? Why aren't other gaming companies using them? Beth would surely love to be paid by Microsoft that would adore the magic speed.

A machine with enough memory to read ALL your BSAs and keep them in memory (Oblivion-Textures-compressed is over 1.1 Gb. Compressed = overhead to access it.) can also keep all the loose assets it needs in memory too. NTFS finds a loose file in memory faster than a monolithic file that the game then has to offset along

Honestly, this is a myth. Beth use BSAs because it makes for easier installations and consistent installs that are easier to support, not for performance.

Several people have found unpacking Beth BSAs leads to improved performance including me. Have you unpacked yours, de-fragmented and found your performance declined? This would be a test though at odds with others experiences.

The fact is ljacquard that everytime I download a 'big popular mod' with BSAs I unpack and optimize the Nifs and textures. It is very rare to find a clean BSA!!!! I loathe BSAs with a passion and find they have no advantages but many disadvantages.

Forcing oversize textures and Nifs full of extraneous nodes and a structure with thumbs.db files on me is certainly not a performance enhancement.

EDIT: Ok I found some men's armor replacer by senchan on nexus, but they seem to be for robert's malebody v4. Are these compatible with v5?

My experience has always been that V4 and v5.2 are close, but depending on the mesh, you might need to do a little work with Blender or Gerra's tools. A v4 to V5.2 lattice might be a big help.

Really? There aren't troubles in FO3?

Liberty Prime certainly wasn't going swimming all the time! I would have remembered because it was truly funny!)

 

While I'm at it, isn't Sarah Lyons supposed to be lying on a cot when you wake up? In FO3 I mean. She's not in TTW....

Never seen any such issues in FO3. I'd have just died laughing if Liberty rime had gone swimming on me! (It 'sounds' like he and the Pride are trying to reach markers or refs that aren't in the TTW worldspace or are otherwise incorrectly positioned?)

Yes, Sarah wakes up with you if you have BS loaded.

Honestly, FO3 seems pretty rock stable so long as you avoid the hopeless 1.5 patch. Make sure your FO3 is on 1.7.

The only weird thing I've EVER seen was Moriarty going missing once, but as he isn't absolutely required for the MQ, it didn't really pose a problem. (I think he managed to fall through the floor). The 20.2.0.7 Nif format seems pretty robust, although the vaunted CS is worse than Oblivion's, which is worse than Morrowind's; but that's Bethesda coders for you.

I've got to suspect something wrong with the TTW scripts.

In FO3, this admittedly silly battle seems to have no glitches at all so I have to exonerate the Beth guys for once.

Once again, exceptionally fine work. It's good to see something so imaginative rather than the usual fare.

It's also exceptional to open a Nif up and see that it appears completely clean.

Greetings.

With XP , no bug !

This is starting to make sense!

I use Windows2000, aka Win5.0. Windows XP is Win5.1

Oblivion was written for WinXP/Win2000 after all.

So I suppose the question is "Does this occur on Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 or any combination thereof?"

"Does this only occur if You have DirectX9 and DirectX{anotherversion} installed?"

Sorry, the 'meshes' are not skinned. Check the Nif's. I am looking at Meshes\b\b_n_redguard_f_groin.nif. A vanilla Beth mesh with no NiSkinInstance and 110 triangles! Shoddy to the extreme! A blobby sausage, not a woman's hips and groin! It doesn't move. Might as well be made of stone. Don't mention the vanilla texture for this mesh. (Of course if they hadn't wasted a ton of development time working on their own Xngine implementation that they totally abandoned!)

Compare it to another mesh, in another game using the same 4.0.0.2 Nifs released at approximately the same time. (They were doing the dev work at the same time Beth were).

I see an NiSkinInstance! A skinned mesh and it moves like one too!

Beth could have produced much higher quality skinned meshes! They could have produced higher quality un-skinned meshes. One of the first mod releases for Morrowind was smoother bodies! The same unskinned mesh concept but actually looking like a body!

Beth have never produced quality meshes or textures for 'people'. That's why every Beth game quickly gets texture and mesh replacer mods.

In the interest of providing morrowind support for my tools, would you be willing to pm me some nifs and animations (popular/representative mods, not vanilla...I have those) that I should use for compatibility testing/baselines?

Yes, I'll put some stuff together this weekend.

Not supporting Vanilla is the right idea. Those blocky, unskinned sausages that Beth decided to use for body 'parts' are useless to man and beast. So for that matter are most of their muddy textures.

It's a crushing indictment that the better bodies team were able to say. 'Wouldn't using the Nif engine this way be better eh?'

OpenMW is an interesting project that I've been watching for years. I've no intention of putting my MW projects on hold waiting for it though.

It's a bit like Tamriel Rebuilt which is still inching towards completion after over a decade. I do feel that it will be completed one day, but perhaps not for yet another decade. One day they might stop changing direction with it, which seems to happen to some degree every few years or so.

Oddly enough, a guy on the officials who has been working on MWSE got exactly the same 'why are you wasting your time? OpenMW will make it all obsolete!' response.

Morrowind is out and works now. OpenMw hopefully will arrive some day, some year. Until then no work on Morrowind is wasted.

In any event, I thought the whole point of OpenMW was that it supported 4.0.0.2 Nifs and Kfs, otherwise it would mean tossing away every Morrowind mod, which isn't going to gain any traction.

Symon's mesh post 25: in my game it has the White bug. (IC Lighthouse test )

That's irritating, I was hoping it was the Specuiar colour on the NiMaterialProperty node.

You see this does nothing unless you enable it with an NiSpecuiarProperty node. This is why a mesh can have this set to 000 (black) or 111 (white) but it not matter. I always set mine to 000 unless I want the specularcolour to do something.

Still never see this on my rig. Anybody else tried with the HDR turned off?

I can confirm the mesh I posted has specular of 000 and no vertex colours on any mesh.

It would be very useful to be able to convert Morrowind 4.0.0.2 Nifs to Oblivion and vice versa.

Converting Oblivion keyframes to 4.0.0.2 and then leveraging LizTail's keyframe tool might be really impressive.

As an aside, someone on the officials seems to be picking up the long abandoned MWSE torch. MWSE as it stands is nowhere near as useful as OBSE is to Oblivion.

2. Bone Priorities. In Oblivion, you can have multiple animations active on a given character at a given time. Chances are good that, at any given moment, multiple animations might be trying to influence the position of a given NiNode. The bone priority value determines which animation wins. So, idle animations generally have very low bone priorities, while attack animations generally have very high bone priorities.

You can set bone priorities to set the relative priority of the BBB motion of different animations.

This would be very useful as lots of Oblivion animations have rather idiosyncratic bone priorities and fixing them in NifSkope is tedious and using Blender is taking a sledgehammer to a nut.

I have yet to find a 'sexy sitting' animation that didn't need it's priorities changing.

Very nicely done!

I understand the problem now. I seem to remember you saying once how....strange... it was the way Skyrim meshes were handled. My fault, I've never been tempted by the game.

So if I understand correctly, they do nothing(?), make no sense but are difficult to cull?

Ah, let talk about women in IT and gaming!

First IT.

The very best programmer I ever met was a woman. She'd started in the 60's. She could toggle in the boot code for a PDP11 from memory, when drunk! She was brilliant. Made the average Microsoft employee look clueless (of course, Bill hadn't irritated his peers with his lackluster interpreter back then - the only code he is known to have personally written by the way). She had an interesting tale to tell. Back in the 60's and 70's, programming had a LOT of women involved. Why? Because it was seen as 'almost clerical' because it involved typing and a keyboard. Not a fit profession for an ambitious man.

During this time, most of the important IT advances were made. Compilers, the Arpanet, and later, tcp/ip and many more. Co-incidence? Who can say.

Then in the early 80's, IT began to be seen as 'a profession'. Idiot guys who'd have become accountants previously, invaded with their red ties and woman were just not appointed as much! What have we seen since? The rise of spam, bloated code, functionality churn, computer languages that don't seem to have been designed with a purpose in mind (Java anyone?) and 'Intellectual property' (I patent the wheel! What do you mean prior art? Uh? Swipe to unlock then!). I could go on. Coincidence? Everyone will draw their own conclusions.

I can assure you, a woman who has a technical role in IT these days will have to be at least twice as good as her male peers just to be regarded as adequate. I've met a lot of women in IT and as a rule of thumb, they are very competent, very conscientious but not load-mouthed enough to 'make an impact' like a less capable male peer.

The first computer programmer was a woman. Ada Lovelace (Byron) had arguably a greater impact than Babbage. Had she been a man, Babbage might well be a footnote.

As for gaming, well all I'll say is that the average female gamer is not as load mouthed and attention seeking as her male peers. It's interesting to note that many of the very best Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout3 modders are female and amusing to see how often male gamers 'just assume' they must be male. It's also interesting just how many give up correcting people on their gender. Is this because they don't want to poke their heads above the parapet to get them kicked? Again, you will all have your own opinions.

I read the Guardian article by the way (read it every day). Found it a bit dull and mostly said things that I thought pretty self-evident. Maybe I'm just a cynic?

I might be able to shed some light on 'redundant unrigged bones'. I see them in many, many Oblivion meshes and removing them is excellent practice whatever you intend doing with the mesh..

One of the sources would appear to be one of the 3DSMax exporters.

Another might seem to be the Modder's chosen workflow.

In any event, it is easy to deal with in NifSkope. Just apply the 'spell' remove bogus nodes and save.

Might be worth a try with your troublesome meshes here?

Now that is very odd.

Firstly because the white skin upperbody with KK animated nipples isn't morphed. The nipples are but not the upper body. Were the nipples also affected?

Secondly, because I've never seen this ever, and I've been using custom male and female bodies with morphs for several years with a customized version of Estrus Traps. I've seen morphed bodies many times in many locations but never seen this.

Thirdly, I've just specifically tried to replicated this in that lighthouse. Morphed lower and upper bodies by KK. Perfect.

So what are your graphics settings people? Mine are fairly low key. No HDR (not supported by my ancient card) nor OBGE.

What version of DirectX? Again mine is fairly ancient as My OS hasn't had (nor needed) a DirectX update for some time.

Which particular mesh are you testing with? I'll see if I can duplicate the issue and then find a fix.

Well, I can't see anything wrong either. I'll have to run by that Lighthouse. I'm wondering if the issue is something in the Lighthouse rather than the body meshes.

Like the nipples!