Common Bugs

These are annoying problems with the CS and game engine.

Vanishing Landscape in a New Worldspace

This general problem is also listed under Common Mistakes because it can also be caused by using an ESM to alter the landscape for another master. In this case, however, it occurs whenever the current modindex for the plugin differs from the modindex of the plugin during creation in the CS (because the end-user's load-order will rarely be the same as the load-order during creation). This usually means that the only way to get the plugin to work in-game is to make it the very first thing that loads after Oblivion.esm, which is a terrible limitation.

TES4Gecko now includes a Move Worldspaces function to help deal with this issue by "injecting" new worlspaces into the 00 modindex.

See this ESF thread for the discussions that led to this solution.

Remove Item

The 'remove item' function doesn't work properly with more than one item sometimes. The in-game message (produced by the game) is correct, but the number of items the player loses is not. For example, you may get the message '5 ogre teeth removed', but only 3 were actually removed from your inventory. Certain mods can cause this by manipulating 'Extra Data' fields such as the Ownership field in the CS (i.e., Guild Ownership). As there is no way around the problem (short of scripting thousands of items by hand), and it's a part of the very popular OOO mod, and it may be caused by in-game actions (i.e., damaged equipment) you should expect it to happen.

This problem is fairly common with mods that do a lot of inventory manipulation, such as ingredient sorters.

Oblivion Realm Resets

Whenever the player closes an Oblivion gate, the entire Oblivion cell and everything inside of it is reset. This includes inventories of containers and NPCs, and for NPCs their spell list and location. Variables on world objects may be reset as well (NPCs seem to be reset, but not activators).

Adding Multiple Items with the Same Script

There are some oddities (well, the right words for it I won't use here) when you

1. add two or more items
2. with the same script
3. to the same container
4. at or about the same time.

This seems to happen for several situations:

• You add an item, which in turn adds another item
  • So I would guess it also includes using AddItem for two separate items
• An item that runs when the player adds them to a container, or the player takes them from a container
  • For example, if you have 2 of an item in a container (same base object), and the player double-clicks them, thus adding one after the other, you'll hit this bug
  • But using 'AddItem SomeItem 2' seems to work without hitting the bug

are some more examples
What exactly is going is anyone's guess, and the problems that can occur are very, very bizarre making them hard to trace. Also, the bug seems to be intermittent, sometimes working and sometimes not, and some scripts don't seem to run into the problem. The a few points to take away from this:

• Adding two or more items with the same script can produce weird results
• If you're adding multiple items and getting weird results, put a frame or two between when you add one and when you add the other
  • In the right situation, you can avoid the problem by changing the Scriptname of the items
• If there is a possibility of the player running into this situation, be sure to test for it

Activating an object every frame

This didn't cause a CTD with me, but as it causes unpredictable results there is a chance CTD's might occur.

When you have a script that constantly activates a certain object (in my case, to wait for a result that was published inside that object and could be retrieved in this way), other scripts might become unresponsive. I had several onadd blocks in other scripts that weren't executing anymore.

If you have to do this, build in a timer.

Weight Updates

The encumbrance of the player won't be updated if you change the weight of an object (SetQuestObject, SetWeight, etc.). You can add/remove an item to force an update.

Deleting vanilla references

Don't delete any vanilla references (from Oblivion.esm). If another mod modifies them, it will cause CTDs upon exit. Instead, use a quest script to Disable the reference.