Ah didn't realize you had experience with that, just saw how quickly you posted and thought you had just scaled them and not remastered at all ;) if you did HD-ify that texture you should publish it!
I hope you'll update this. And I hope you'll upload more mods! I love your work and I have most of it. For now I'll compact and flag this mod as ESL myself
No, it only replaces Karstaag. The Dawnguard-added Frost Giants have their meshes in the meshes\actors\dlc01\frostgiant folder, whereas Karstaag's mesh is unique and in Dragonborn's added folder of meshes\actors\dlc02\dlc2frostgiant.
This mod looks pretty awesome. Considering I vanquished him in Bloodmoon last year, it's hard to say no to this mod that brings him back to more of his former glory.
The fifth eye that I added is listed in the description multiple times. Karstaag does not have a crown in Bloodmoon. A made a texture for him, but I didn't include it because it is not visible at all given that he's a ghost in Skyrim. Though I do have an update in the works to make his texture visible as a pulsing animation.
Looking for an informed opinion, would anyone see a problem with mod functionality if this plugin was changed to an ESL versus an ESP? Would anyone have an idea that knows about ESLs?
EDIT - After further testing and more crashes without this mod installed at all, I believe the crashes seem to have been caused by Cold Region Behavoir, not this mod. Please do not take this post as any reason not to try out this awesome mod. I have been able to get this mod working perfectly with no changes (no loose vanilla files as described below). Original post and discussion left intact below.
I'm getting game CTD within 10 seconds of loading in after a "coc riverwood" from the load screen to do a new game test.
Eliminated everything I had changed recently except for installing this mod. Crash is reproducible. Tried experimenting with a few things and found a way to stop the crashes.
Installing the mod as is (downloaded straight with vortex), verified no conflicts in xedit with the ESP and no conflicts with any of the meshes or textures provided by the mod. - crash Totally disabling the mod - no crash Installing the mod but disabling the ESP - crash Installing the mod, disabling the ESP, and installing loose vanilla textures for the boss - no crash Installing the mod, enabling the esp, and installing loose vanilla textures for the boss - crash Installing the mod, enabling the esp, installing loose vanilla textures for the boss model, making a second dummy esp patch to overwrite all vanilla records changed by the mod back to vanilla (didn't touch any new records created but they weren't being used) - no crash. One record at a time tried forwarding the mod's changes to my dummy patch so they were active. * Summon spell - no crash * Karstaag NPC record - crash
Seems to be something with the effects based on the testing, since they don't show up until I enable the Karstaag NPC record that references them.
If I extract the 2 effect textures used from the vanilla BSAs and install them as loose files, lo and behold no crash. I'm not sure why my game is having trouble loading the vanilla textures from the vanilla BSAs for this mod......
I'd welcome any thoughts from the author or the community on what might be the issue or other tests I can try.
Thank you for the thorough details. A few questions though: 1) What version did you install (which Fomod settings)? 2) What textures? The mod has meshes, are you referring to those? 3) Did you repeat these tests to confirm that the crashes aren't occurring randomly rather than based on the conditions you listed?
I installed the extra effects and spell duration version.
I looked at your mod mesh and the ESP, saw which textures the new creature model and effect were pointing to, found the vanilla BSA that had those textures in it, extracted as loose files and installed as a standalone mod. After doing that for both the creature and the spell (textures were indicated in the ESP) textures the crashes stopped. I could get away with only doing the creature textures if I didn't allow your effects to be used by patching the esp to take them off Karstaag and his summon, but since I wanted the effects too I did both.
Yes the crashes were repeatable within 10 seconds of loading the game after a COC riverwood. TIming of the crash only varied by 1-2 seconds any give time - I could tell because a courier would run up to me immediatley after loading in and before his dialog finished it would crash. Trust me I did that ALOT (dozens of times) trying to figure out what was causing the crashes, making small tweaks to the ESP, what other recent mods I had loaded, what loose files I installed, etc. I actually did not suspect your mod at first since I use tons of similar mods, many of which don't include textures and just use the vanilla ones (and all work fine). I spent quite a bit of time playing with combinations of the 5 or 6 other mods and custom ESP changes I had made recently till I finally narrowed down the crashes to your mod being enabled.
When I said "no crash" that meant I could make it all the way to the companions scripted fight scene with the giant without a crash. I usually didn't test much beyond that since the crashes were so consistent. I still need to actually test with karstaag in game, but i'm hopeful there won't be any issues now that i've stopped the immediate crashing.
I'm leaning toward this being some kind of issue with my mod setup or ini files, not an issue with your mod, but wanted to relay the experience in case anyone else has the same issue or if there is something with your mod that could be adjusted to fix it.
At this point the issue seems to be resolved with the loose textures workaround, but I'd love to figure out what caused the problem in the first place.
So as a followup - I started getting crashes again, and they are still happening even after totally uninstalling this mod so at least this time (and possibly also before) it seems like this mod is not the issue.
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What textures is it using???
I "think" I know how to edit a graphic...!
I do have an update for this in the pipeline but I lost steam on it so who knows when it'll actually come out ?
(That said, I play in VR, so ESL doesn't matter for me personally as long as this can be merged :-)
It certainly looks as though they might.
Karstaag | Frost Giant
Is this compatible with Real Bosses mod ?
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/18183
Karstaag does not have a crown in Bloodmoon.
A made a texture for him, but I didn't include it because it is not visible at all given that he's a ghost in Skyrim. Though I do have an update in the works to make his texture visible as a pulsing animation.
Thank you.
I'll probably try merging. It seems safe since there aren't many mods that change his model plus preference for this one.
Endorsed.
I'm getting game CTD within 10 seconds of loading in after a "coc riverwood" from the load screen to do a new game test.
Eliminated everything I had changed recently except for installing this mod. Crash is reproducible. Tried experimenting with a few things and found a way to stop the crashes.
Installing the mod as is (downloaded straight with vortex), verified no conflicts in xedit with the ESP and no conflicts with any of the meshes or textures provided by the mod. - crash
Totally disabling the mod - no crash
Installing the mod but disabling the ESP - crash
Installing the mod, disabling the ESP, and installing loose vanilla textures for the boss - no crash
Installing the mod, enabling the esp, and installing loose vanilla textures for the boss - crash
Installing the mod, enabling the esp, installing loose vanilla textures for the boss model, making a second dummy esp patch to overwrite all vanilla records changed by the mod back to vanilla (didn't touch any new records created but they weren't being used) - no crash.
One record at a time tried forwarding the mod's changes to my dummy patch so they were active.
* Summon spell - no crash
* Karstaag NPC record - crash
Seems to be something with the effects based on the testing, since they don't show up until I enable the Karstaag NPC record that references them.
If I extract the 2 effect textures used from the vanilla BSAs and install them as loose files, lo and behold no crash.
I'm not sure why my game is having trouble loading the vanilla textures from the vanilla BSAs for this mod......
I'd welcome any thoughts from the author or the community on what might be the issue or other tests I can try.
1) What version did you install (which Fomod settings)?
2) What textures? The mod has meshes, are you referring to those?
3) Did you repeat these tests to confirm that the crashes aren't occurring randomly rather than based on the conditions you listed?
I looked at your mod mesh and the ESP, saw which textures the new creature model and effect were pointing to, found the vanilla BSA that had those textures in it, extracted as loose files and installed as a standalone mod. After doing that for both the creature and the spell (textures were indicated in the ESP) textures the crashes stopped. I could get away with only doing the creature textures if I didn't allow your effects to be used by patching the esp to take them off Karstaag and his summon, but since I wanted the effects too I did both.
Yes the crashes were repeatable within 10 seconds of loading the game after a COC riverwood. TIming of the crash only varied by 1-2 seconds any give time - I could tell because a courier would run up to me immediatley after loading in and before his dialog finished it would crash. Trust me I did that ALOT (dozens of times) trying to figure out what was causing the crashes, making small tweaks to the ESP, what other recent mods I had loaded, what loose files I installed, etc.
I actually did not suspect your mod at first since I use tons of similar mods, many of which don't include textures and just use the vanilla ones (and all work fine). I spent quite a bit of time playing with combinations of the 5 or 6 other mods and custom ESP changes I had made recently till I finally narrowed down the crashes to your mod being enabled.
When I said "no crash" that meant I could make it all the way to the companions scripted fight scene with the giant without a crash. I usually didn't test much beyond that since the crashes were so consistent. I still need to actually test with karstaag in game, but i'm hopeful there won't be any issues now that i've stopped the immediate crashing.
I'm leaning toward this being some kind of issue with my mod setup or ini files, not an issue with your mod, but wanted to relay the experience in case anyone else has the same issue or if there is something with your mod that could be adjusted to fix it.
At this point the issue seems to be resolved with the loose textures workaround, but I'd love to figure out what caused the problem in the first place.
Thanks for the great mod!