Merged or Bashed Patch?

[kaliban]

[quote=Arkngt]

 

I think they work well together and do different things, so I'm not sure why you should choose either or. Two things I like about the Bashed Patch:

1. You can merge quite a few small mods, saving esp-slots.

2. And what I use it specifically for: you can use several different "make up" mods (i.e. hairs, eyes, eyelashes) at the same time just by tagging them with hair, eyes etc. and merging the records in Race Records. Without a Bashed Patch, you'd have to really merge the mods (thus all compilations of a zillion hair and eyes mods etc.) or make a manual patch.

I also think the Bashed Patch handles leveled lists better than a Merged Patch, unless you make the latter manually. Not sure about the last point as I'm no expert on such things (to say the least), but I've read it. (And when checking in FNVEdit, it handles more leveled lists than the Merged Patch).

Anyway, I'd use it for point 2 alone - and I see no reason not to use it as it doesn't conflict with the Merged Patch what I can see.

[/quote]

this is why i like the bashed patch plus the version by valda as alot more bash tags than wrye bash 305 or 306

and if you do the tags right you can get quite a lot of records moved over into the bashed patch i have done this with mods that had some conflicts and in the end the game was stable for me

in oblivion i had over 5k records merged into a bashed patch

[RoyBatty]

I don't want to waste time adding tags to things when I can just do it by hand a lot faster, and there are still a lot of things that bash can't do that only eyeballs and hand editing can. Bash also has this thing where it doesn't add masters of plugins it adds, which can cause serious problems.

My main merge patch has 10400 records in it.

I have a couple smaller ones for mods I haven't decided I want to keep or not. I also have an .esm with merged navmeshes in it, can only do that in FNVEdit and GECK ;)

Depends on how far you want to go, and if you want to spend the time... really it didn't take me that long to do these things. A couple of days of hand editing, and I have a perfect patch that I also know well and I can update it at anytime to remove things if need be, or add new ones. All I have to do is do some basic filtering in FNVEdit when I add a new mod.

 

[Arkngt]

[quote=RoyBatty]

I don't want to waste time adding tags to things when I can just do it by hand a lot faster[/quote]

To each his own, so I don't want to argue over using a Bashed Patch or not, but adding a tag takes like 0,5 seconds, so how can it be faster making those changes manually to a patch? Also, later in the post you mention that it takes some time to do all this manually so doesn't quite add upp.

I'd also argue that it goes way much faster to get, say, zzjay's hairpacks and drumber's eyes to work together by adding tags and building a Bashed Patch than merging them manually, plus it makes it easier/faster to try out other eyes/hairs as well.

Anyway, I think the bottom line is that the Merged Patch and the Bashed Patch don't really conflict, so no reason to choose either or. It's a bit like saying should I choose WRP or EVE.

[RoyBatty]

Because I have to look into each mod, and figured out what tags it needs.

The tagging system doesn't do certain things so I have to do those by hand anyway, not to mention the tagging system is poorly documented and difficult to understand. By the time I figure out what tags I need and if they even work correctly, I could have saved myself the headache and just done it by hand. IMO these tags aren't even needed and the tool should be smart enough to detect all conflicts dump them in the file to which you can just go over manually. I am hoping zilav makes FNVEdit do exactly that as that will save me the most time.

Yeah to each his own, I just prefer to have control without using yet another tool that has a learning curve and still doesn't do what I need in the end.

 

[kaliban]

yeah each to his own i have been using wrye since morrowind, before i even knew there was xedit for morrowind, it will add masters to it's self,

this is the main reason i use a bashed patch

[collapsed title=Leveled Lists]

Leveled Lists

•  Background

•  When different mods alter the same leveled list, the last mod to load will "win" overriding any changes made by earlier loading mods. This is particularly a problem with creature and the various releveling mods which alter so many lists.

•  To overcome this, it is necessary to merge the changes to the various leveled lists into a new "merged list" mod, and ensure that this new mod loads after all the mods whose lists it merges.

•  List Merging

•  During the scan process of the patch building, the list merger extracts leveled lists and merges them together. If mods only added items to leveled lists, this process would be simple. However, since mods often want to delete items from lists and/or relevel items in lists, it's often necessary to specify how the list merger will handle changes from specific mods. This specification is done through Bash Tags and/or manually configuring mods in the list merger dialog.

•  Untagged Mods: Mods that have no bash tags can only add new items to leveled lists. If a given item (e.g. a 9mm pistol is already present in the list (at any level or count), then no new entries for that item will be added. Also, if another mod has already marked that item as removed from the list, it will not be added.

•  Delev Mods: Mods that are tagged or configured as Delev mods can remove items from lists. Bash will figure out what to remove by comparing items in the mods version of the list to items added by its masters (FalloutNV.esm, etc.). Any items that are present in the masters, but not in the Delev's list are marked as removed. Items marked this way will be removed from the list, and the removal will be remembered so that later mods won't re-add the item.

•  Relev Mods: Mods that are tagged or configured as Relev mods can break the previous rules. They can relevel an item that already exists in the list ("relevel" means change the levels and/or counts for the item in the list). Relev mods can also overrule a previous deletion. (However, delevs that run after the Relev will overrule the relev mod for the items they delete.

•  Delev+Relev Mods: A mod can be tagged/configured as both Delev and Relev. Doing this just combines the effects of the two separate tags.

[/collapsed]

i have been using wrye long enought that i can tell which mods need which tag

don't get me wrong i still use xEdit to investigate the bashed patch to see if i need to add a new tag or not, i just dont know how to create a meshed patch that will actually work and not crash my game be it Oblivion FO3 FO:NV or Skyrim

there is a merge plugin script for tes5edit but it merges two or more plugins completely

[kaliban]

[quote=the girl who was death]

 

Hate. Wrye.

[/quote]

 

what about wrye do you hate?

[horredtheplague]

I just ran a side by side test of the two on my own install. The Merged patch was pathetic next to the Bashed patch (479 files vs 5480 files). The Bashed patch had files in four times as many categories (7 vs 28). Checking the merged files, maybe 85% of the merged patch was missing or wrong entries. The bashed patch caught about 85% of what was wanted, when compared to the files that Merged Patch chose to merge.

It's all in the Bash Tags. Right click on every mod, hit Details, look at its contents--see what it does, and attach the right tags. You only need to get it right once, and it will remember your entries next time. There's some decent documentation on Bash tags in the Wrye documents. It's worth the effort.

[RoyBatty]

My experience with Wrye was that it did a lot of stuff wrong, has useless features like setting armor and weapon playable and other weird stuff enabled by default. Totally ignores things like weapons which can be a real bloody chore to do by hand. So if I have to do it by hand, may as well do it all that way, as I said before.

It also doesn't add the masters of the plugins that have other masters, which can make a broken patch which I had happen many times and you can't fix it manually after the fact without a huge amount of manual work again.

 

[horredtheplague]

The Merged patch I made didn't even have any weapon entries, it stopped at non-player characters. Dozens and dozens in the Bashed patch. With Bashing the tags Stats, Weapon Mods and Sound can be useful. So can Destructible depending on the nature of weapon (mines e.g.). Even Graphics, in mods that change them.

The only time I've seen errors in entries related to master files (esm or esp) was when there was an error in the master file as well. It typically adds what is needed, at least for me--masters missing were missing for valid reasons (i.e. not needed for what was in the patch). I'm not shy with the Bash tags; better to clean excessive Identical to Master entries than miss something important. Sometimes the tags require some strategic placing to get the precise results, though no automated process is perfect as we all know (see human author for details).

I still use FNV Edit for checking and altering what's needed--just not for the initial patchmaking. Many things taken fixed, or at least brought to attention, that might have been overlooked. Been getting great results this way for some time. Best of both worlds, in my eye. I've also tried using the merged after the Bashed, but here too it ends up breaking much more than it fixes. Apples vs oranges, as others have said? Just saying this apple doesn't have a worm in its core. A great tool when/if used to its potential--was worth the learning curve.

[RoyBatty]

Yes it all depends on how involved you want to be, and how well you understand leveled lists, which can be quite confusing at first.

I'd be curious to see if you could tag stuff to come out correctly when using TTWFixes, EVE, Impact and WMX together for weapon records. I literally spent an entire day merging those entries together properly.

Also, your weather/lighting mods should go dead last after the patches, wrye merges region data and stuff last I checked which will override changes by the weather mod in some cases which is undesirable.

Another great benefit to looking yourself, you'll discover a great many bugs in mods and in the game itself. Leveled List with wrong flags is very normal because beth/obsidian just didn't give a s***. :D

I'm rebuilding CFW's lists because the way linerunner did it is just the most screwed up incompatible way of doing something I've ever seen in a mod, not to mention inconsistent, and dumping too much or wrong loot on NPC's at times.

This, This is why I like to do things by hand, because I learn how the game works at an intimate level, which makes it easier to add/fix stuff in the future and really take control of my game and how it works. Which is infinitely smoother now than when I was relying on automatic tools. They are a great starting point, but they will never be the be all end all solution, especially when it comes to user preferences.

:EDIT: Forgot the missing masters thing.

Here's what happens, a patch mod alters a record in another plugin in your load order, but that modified plugin is not added as master to your patch. If you change or add something to your load order which changes the mod's position in your load order (the one being patched) then the patch can no longer resolve that reference. It's common and even in compatibility patches released. All masters need to be added into the patch to avoid this so that the load order index can be resolved properly by the game's (and xEdit's) loader. That vanilla FO3 files even have such errors (!!!) Zeta is an example of this, as it has references to Anchorage but It's not a master, that's why TTW's and FO3's load order is important. :)