Of Clean Plugins...

I ranted a tish the other day about a recent malcontent who went to the trouble of sending me a long PM, complaining in my general direction that my Remodel doesn't work right when masterupdated (Remember what Groucho would say, Kiddies!). I know I've been more out of it than usual, because the more I re-read the PM, the more I notice.

I was incorrect in my first assessment that he didn't name the plugin. Got to reading more today to reply, and found this little tidbit buried in there; that I had obviously heretofore skimmed over: "I havent done much testing, but I dont think the patch will cause problems. You can download it here:[url deleted by me]"

So... lemme get this straight. You do something to my plugin that it was never meant to have done to it; it doesn't work. So rather than ask me what the cause could be, you decide amongst yourself to "fix" it, and then upload said fixed version to Mediafire.

And then close your PM with a more-than-a-bit retarded sounding "Thanks for taking the time to read this lol. I hope its useful!"

I get the feeling that I'm intended to be grateful for the "help". I find myself gravitating rather more to moderately annoyed.

I just got done drafting my response:

I've been thinking about this since Friday; trying to come up with some way to respond that doesn't have me come across as a sarcastic and all-round unpleasant fellow, and I can't.

So I'm going to just be straight with you.

I'm perfectly well aware of the FO3Edit crew's professed "correct" method of cleaning a plugin.

I fought with that third rate program for a week trying to make it work right with my Remodel.

It doesn't. It never has. It likely never will.

That furniture and random statics you see out of place? Not an artifact of a dirty save. They were there, even after I started a new game to check. I tried 'undelete and disable', I tried manually setting and resetting the flags in the GECK. Even tried moving the affected statics elsewhere in the cell; outside the walls where they should be out of sight. Didn't work.

I should also note that "just open the console and disable it in game"? Not really a viable option for a self-respecting modder, as it has to be done by the player on their end; in every game. Fixes have to be relegated to things that work directly from the plugin, sadly.

Eventually, I just gave up, as it was immaterial.

Why, you may ask, is it immaterial?

Because the Remodel doesn't need to be a master. At all. Ever. There are no NPCs in it. There are no navmesh problems. It was never intended to be modifiable by a third party via plugin. Really, it works just spiffily as an esp file.

I can appreciate your apparent dedication to testing, but quite frankly I find it more than a bit insulting that you just assumed out of the blue that I don't make plugins the way you want because I don't know how. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom on the forums, "MAKE IT A MASTER!" does not fix all of Fallout 3's issues.

I'm sorry that you had crashing issues, but the solution to me would seem very simple - if it crashes when masterupdated, don't masterupdate the plugin. Granted, I'm a bit of a pragmatist.

For what it's worth, I think you had a problem somewhere else. I ran the plugin as a proper esm for awhile in testing, and never had any issues on entering the vault. Could have been corrupt save or anything; clipping statics rarely cause a crash in my experience.

If the "patched" version works well enough for your game, more power to you. That said, I have no plans to enact any such schemes in my version, and I'll thank you to kindly not go uploading my work to random places around the internet.


Of course, what I didn't note there was that it is entirely possible to disable the statics from within the game. It would take me all of five minutes to write a run-once script that would disable the misplaced statics when the plugin was first run.

Still not gonna do it, though. :p