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About this mod
Adds a display for every named, player-usable weapon and armor in every mod you have installed. Yes, even that one. Yes, that one, too.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
So you played through the game once, and enjoyed yourself a lot. "Gee!" you said, "I wish that there was something to do with all those neat weapons and armors that I found through the game instead of sticking them in a chest somewhere!" And then you discovered Legacy of the Dragonborn. And you played through with LOTD and had the time of your life, but that collection itch demanded to be scratched, so you went back and looked for some displays. And you played through once more with those displays and decided to go back and do ALL the displays. But it still wasn't enough. "MORE DISPLAYS" your brain demanded. "NEED MORE DOPAMINE HITS."
This mod is for you, good sir/madam. It is going to utterly break you. While you simultaneously thank me for doing so :D
Wanted to put this up towards the top: This script is making the game (and Legacy of the Dragonborn) do things they were never designed to do. Dead serious, while I was making this and testing things out, I discovered things like that if you have a sufficient number of references in an internal cell, collision fails. Like, I literally would be running around and all of a sudden would just fall through the floor. Similarly, the Legacy of the Dragonborn team NEVER INTENDED for anything this absurd to be made (in fact, I suspect they never even thought that anyone would be stupid enough to do so :P ), and due to this, while I'm using many of the API features they have helpfully provided, the internals of what all this may or may not be doing is going to be something they know nothing about, so any questions should absolutely not be directed at them. If people bug them too much, I will take this page down to preserve their sanity. So please, don't do so.
So once more, for clarity:
Which dovetails into the next main disclaimer: unlike most plugins/mods you download on this site, this is a script which will be generating a completely unique plugin for your load order, with all the problems that entail. I, as the person who made this script, have no idea what is inside the plugin which is created when you run the script. I am more than happy to help teach you how to debug things on your end (within the capacity that I am able, from this side of the monitor), but ultimately it's going to be a case of individual users having to debug their own errors when they run into them because regenerating an identical plugin is nigh-on impossible. Them's the breaks. :) Want to go nuts? Welcome to the asylum. Here's your bed, enjoy running into the walls.
Also, it should go without saying that trying to edit this mid-game will utterly break your save. Not in a "whoops this bed is in the wall" break. In a "well, this floor thinks it's an activator which if you turn it on will make that light try to equip this mannequin and immediately crashes your game" break (also that's not hyperbole, if you somehow manage to run this script on a save which already had a plugin which had this script run on it, that is literally a thing that can happen. I have explicitly put in a hook to prevent you from running the script on a plugin which already has once, but you folks who think you're clever and edit and/or work around that? It was for your own good. You get one shot per playthrough with this thing).
And finally, this thing can be a bit resource intensive. On massive load orders, the script can take upwards on 45 minutes to get through everything (TYPICAL load orders will process much faster, and should be no longer than 5-10 minutes at the high end, I'd expect). When running, although it does use occlusion planes, on full cells (41 hallways with lots of items) you might notice some FPS drop (particularly if you use a lot of physics-enabled clothing - realize that ALL of those are going to be doing their collision at the same time. You're gonna be chugging without a doubt, and it could cause the game to freeze from the sheer number of them).
Put simply, the Hall of Insanity is an xEdit script which analyzes your personal load order, finds every weapon or armor which does not already have a Legacy of the Dragonborn display, generates those displays dynamically, and hooks them into all the features of LOTD that we know and love (auto-sort, display checklist, etc). Yes, seriously.
And beyond that, within the displays themselves, there are a number of additional features.
And then of course there's implicit stuff in those (SkyUI for the MCM in the first place, MoreHUD for TCC, etc) but we won't dive into those.
....honestly, that's it? If any of the above doesn't make sense to you, there's an article here which details the steps with screenshots.
How does this even work?
Very carefully.
No, really. It's a joke, but that's the truth - this took a lot of trial and error, and a lot of work went into it. I've got an article on the hows/whys for folks who want to do a deep dive (and once more, I apologize for the code), but its extremely methodical and takes advantage of the fact that LOTD has a standard script API to hook into.
Where is it located?
Trapdoor to enter is below the player's bed in the Safehouse.
Wait, but isn't there a room directly below that in the safehouse already?
We're dealing with a magical hallway which resizes itself to have exactly the number of alcoves and items which there are in the world based off your mod load order. It doesn't matter WHERE I stuck it, it'd be jutting out of the solitude cliffside regardless. So I opted to go for TARDIS logic and convenience. Deal with it. :P
Why only one armor piece per mannequin? Can't you display armor sets?
Honestly, I originally didn't intend for it to be mannequins at all, but that ended up being the only thing that would actually work. So this is going to be a long-winded answer, but it should hopefully address this question and a few others you might have. So armor, like most things in the game, has meshes. But you might have noticed that the meshes of an armor out in the worldspace might be different from how the armor looks on a person might be different from the armor that appears in the inventory/crafting menu. These are frequently different things! And some of them have like....stuff which makes gravity effect them or various other effects. Most of the displays you see in LOTD (both vanilla and official and unofficial display patches) utilize ground meshes and create new statics to do their displays. Everything is hand-placed and curated: more work goes into these things than you might have originally thought, and every display is worthy of praise :) Make sure to give a thanks to the next one you download, by the by.
Anyway, the core goal of this mod/script WASN'T to make fancy nice looking displays for everything: it was to be extensible to allow for displaying ofeverything*. And that means handling every single poorly-coded or optimized armor/weapon out there. Things with missing meshes. Things which don't define everything they should. And then consider those mods that have like...20 armors all with different colors but a single set of bracers: do I somehow make a display for each of those armors and then 20 displays for the same bracers? How do I tell that? The answer is actually in the game - the concept of "outfits." But once more, not every mod bothers to make outfits for their sets of armor. And that's not even TOUCHING the problem of like...non-standard body slots. Mod A uses this slot to add wings while mod B adds a septum piercing and mod C adds 6 arms while mod D makes a glowy light that floats 6 feet above the characters' head. Where the hell should I put the activator for that display so it works for all of them and doesn't overlap with standard body slot locations? You get the idea.
So ultimately, it's best to think of this not as a replacement for curated displays, but as a supplement where none exists. There's simply not enough information out there to be able to dynamically generate things with the level of quality that a person can put in the effort to make.
*Technically not everything is displayed. Things which are flagged as non-playable so the player can't pick them up, things which don't have a name (so the display and MCM would just have blank text), things which are made to display only on races which don't overlap with the mannequin race, and things which don't contain any meshes (read: armor mods with like....invisible helmets and such) aren't made into displays
Aren't you a little worried that people might be getting tired of you teeing up questions this way to answer what might not be common questions, but rather are the things you WANT to answer?
Well NOW I am. Thanks a lot, asshole!
You're welcome.
That wasn't a question.
I know. So anyway, why aren't there any replicas?
Tell you what. You give me an algorithm which can take any weapon or armor that might be out there, the majority of which don't have keywords, and that also might not even have crafting recipes THEMSELVES, and make logical replica crafting recipes, and I'll go ahead and add that to the script.
Can I flag this as ESL?
Before running: absolutely not. After running: check with your normal script to see if it can. I intentionally have the formids iterating from 800 so if it's POSSIBLE to flag, you CAN, but the number of references this adds is going to very, very rapidly go out of the ESL-flagging range (and you'll hit an error if you try to run it while it's flagged as ESL and don't fit completely in that range). So plan on it taking up a load order slot, run it, and maybe (if you've got a small load order, or are choosing to ignore a bunch of things) you'll get lucky.
I ran this once but then I found this neat new armor mod that just released and I want to add it. How do I?
You don't.
But I really want to
That's nice. I'm very happy for you. Answer is still no.
I ignored you and now my game is crashing, help!
You're screwed. Start the game over. You probably can't even go back to an earlier save because you overwrote the plugin which was generated. Like seriously, I can't emphasize this enough. Don't change your load order mid-playthrough, and for those of you who are going to ignore the advice and do it anyway, you do you, but for the love of God DON'T try to re-generate this thing mid-playthrough. It. Won't. Work.
So I've auto-sorted but a few of the armor pieces aren't appearing. Any idea?
Could be one of a couple things. In a few cases in my testing, it was actually that the armor mesh itself was missing from the mod: nothing I can do about that, you'll need to contact the original mod owner regarding that. Alternatively, sometimes it has to do with some wonkiness that simply seems to arise from there being too damn many mannequins in the given cell. Try swapping the mannequins' type back and forth a couple times, then removing and then displaying the armor again. Sometimes that shakes it out.
Also, the mannequin body shapes are vanilla, so if you use something else (UNP, CBBE, HIMBO, etc) depending on your bodyslides some of the armors may be clipping/not appearing in the mannequin quite right. Once more, that's not really something I can solve.
Part of the mannequin is invisible with this display. Help!
So this could be one of a couple things. First off, most likely, you just need to swap the mannequin type. When generating the layout, I attempt to detect if there's a display mesh for either type and if only one is present, the display is that one, but if something got swapped somewhere and a given armor only has female parts and your mannequin is male, the part of the mannequin will disappear. Secondly, it could be something where the shape of the body part is changed and/or expected to be covered (this is somewhat common in things like high heels or robe armors - parts of the calves will be invisible due to the foot shape change, or legs will be invisible because the robe is open and you can see where the leg armor would go up to). Once more, not really something that can be handled by this mod. Sorry!
Does this work with foreign languages?
Honestly....I don't know. I'm sorry. I've had a couple people run into problems with my Sinister Seven display in other languages, and I've never been able to figure out why (nor even how to test it). A significant portion of the script itself is based off of looking things up based off of the EDID, so it's very plausible it could run into problems.
Does this work with Hall of Forgotten/Hall of Wonders?
Due to the fact that I'm already going in and futzing with stuff via xEdit anyway, the room name is added via a different means from the standard API. This means it shouldn't run into any problems (and actually should be able to handle Odyssey when it comes in even if it alters the museum quest), but it doesn't do anything to help with the "out of rooms" problem that other ones may have when working together. And I'm guessing with those cases it wouldn't work on an existing save to show up in the MCM. Best to start with a new game.
Can you add displays for misc items too?
Anything else we should know about?
I did testing with SMP-enabled clothing but ran into a couple cases where it froze when some of the armor was long enough that it clipped with the floor? I don't know - I'm not super familiar with physics-enabled clothing/armor, so I guess buyer beware that it might be a problem. Just a heads up. But because I'm unfamiliar with it, that could potentially cause a problem.
Bethesda for Skyrim Special Edition and the Creation Kit
ElminsterAU for SSEEdit
icecreamassassin and the LOTD team for Legacy of the Dragonborn
icecreamassassin for Mannequin Management
powerofthree for powerofthree's Papyrus Extender
Multiple folks on Discord for putting up with my spamming complaining about problems I have, but particularly gutmaw, Jelidity, and ra2phoenix for tossing suggestions for stuff
This mod is for you, good sir/madam. It is going to utterly break you. While you simultaneously thank me for doing so :D
Wanted to put this up towards the top: This script is making the game (and Legacy of the Dragonborn) do things they were never designed to do. Dead serious, while I was making this and testing things out, I discovered things like that if you have a sufficient number of references in an internal cell, collision fails. Like, I literally would be running around and all of a sudden would just fall through the floor. Similarly, the Legacy of the Dragonborn team NEVER INTENDED for anything this absurd to be made (in fact, I suspect they never even thought that anyone would be stupid enough to do so :P ), and due to this, while I'm using many of the API features they have helpfully provided, the internals of what all this may or may not be doing is going to be something they know nothing about, so any questions should absolutely not be directed at them. If people bug them too much, I will take this page down to preserve their sanity. So please, don't do so.
So once more, for clarity:
This is not an officially supported add-on to Legacy of the Dragonborn. Bug me, not them.
Which dovetails into the next main disclaimer: unlike most plugins/mods you download on this site, this is a script which will be generating a completely unique plugin for your load order, with all the problems that entail. I, as the person who made this script, have no idea what is inside the plugin which is created when you run the script. I am more than happy to help teach you how to debug things on your end (within the capacity that I am able, from this side of the monitor), but ultimately it's going to be a case of individual users having to debug their own errors when they run into them because regenerating an identical plugin is nigh-on impossible. Them's the breaks. :) Want to go nuts? Welcome to the asylum. Here's your bed, enjoy running into the walls.
Also, it should go without saying that trying to edit this mid-game will utterly break your save. Not in a "whoops this bed is in the wall" break. In a "well, this floor thinks it's an activator which if you turn it on will make that light try to equip this mannequin and immediately crashes your game" break (also that's not hyperbole, if you somehow manage to run this script on a save which already had a plugin which had this script run on it, that is literally a thing that can happen. I have explicitly put in a hook to prevent you from running the script on a plugin which already has once, but you folks who think you're clever and edit and/or work around that? It was for your own good. You get one shot per playthrough with this thing).
And finally, this thing can be a bit resource intensive. On massive load orders, the script can take upwards on 45 minutes to get through everything (TYPICAL load orders will process much faster, and should be no longer than 5-10 minutes at the high end, I'd expect). When running, although it does use occlusion planes, on full cells (41 hallways with lots of items) you might notice some FPS drop (particularly if you use a lot of physics-enabled clothing - realize that ALL of those are going to be doing their collision at the same time. You're gonna be chugging without a doubt, and it could cause the game to freeze from the sheer number of them).
Put simply, the Hall of Insanity is an xEdit script which analyzes your personal load order, finds every weapon or armor which does not already have a Legacy of the Dragonborn display, generates those displays dynamically, and hooks them into all the features of LOTD that we know and love (auto-sort, display checklist, etc). Yes, seriously.
ALL THE DISPLAYS
And beyond that, within the displays themselves, there are a number of additional features.
Controllable mannequin types
Dynamically change the mannequin type for any armor to be the version you prefer with a button on the base
Controllable mannequin orientation
Rotate mannequins to see the side or back if more interesting for your viewing pleasure! (Note: resets when you enter a cell)
Controllable weapon orientation
Rotate in all three axes to find the orientation you prefer for weapon display (X is to the left, Y is to the right, Z is directly below the item)
Dynamic adjustment of all armors to become mannequin-displayable if possible
If an armor addon has races which would permit a mannequin display, but does not include the mannequin race, it adds one.
Ability to filter mods included via a simple text file
Comes pre-packaged with text file containing all official and unofficial displays, as well as an optional one for only the official ones. Users can add/remove what they want, modlist creators can upload their own filters for their modlists. (Automatic sorting for *DBM* and *LOTD* is hardcoded, as is "Summermyst" abed "Thaumaturgy" because they add so many thousands of armors that....tbh, it felt excessive and took too long to process :P )
Auto-sort
MCM tracking
Curators' Companion support
The ability to cause any Object-Oriented Programmer's head to explode from looking at the terribly optimized pascal script!
Nah, but seriously, it's got a bad case of copy/paste. If/when I re-do things to have a dynamic number of cells instead of a fixed one, I'm going to be reorganizing it to do proper function calls for EVERYTHING, but in testing, being able to tweak things individually was a LIFESAVER and....well, it works?
Dynamically change the mannequin type for any armor to be the version you prefer with a button on the base
Controllable mannequin orientation
Rotate mannequins to see the side or back if more interesting for your viewing pleasure! (Note: resets when you enter a cell)
Controllable weapon orientation
Rotate in all three axes to find the orientation you prefer for weapon display (X is to the left, Y is to the right, Z is directly below the item)
Dynamic adjustment of all armors to become mannequin-displayable if possible
If an armor addon has races which would permit a mannequin display, but does not include the mannequin race, it adds one.
Ability to filter mods included via a simple text file
Comes pre-packaged with text file containing all official and unofficial displays, as well as an optional one for only the official ones. Users can add/remove what they want, modlist creators can upload their own filters for their modlists. (Automatic sorting for *DBM* and *LOTD* is hardcoded, as is "Summermyst" abed "Thaumaturgy" because they add so many thousands of armors that....tbh, it felt excessive and took too long to process :P )
Auto-sort
MCM tracking
Curators' Companion support
The ability to cause any Object-Oriented Programmer's head to explode from looking at the terribly optimized pascal script!
Nah, but seriously, it's got a bad case of copy/paste. If/when I re-do things to have a dynamic number of cells instead of a fixed one, I'm going to be reorganizing it to do proper function calls for EVERYTHING, but in testing, being able to tweak things individually was a LIFESAVER and....well, it works?
- Legacy of the Dragonborn - should go without saying, but this mod would be literally impossible without this foundation to build upon
- SSEEdit - The script is an xEdit script, you absolutely 100% need this in order to get stuff working.
- powerofthree's Papyrus Extender - needed for the mannequin swapping
- Address Library for SKSE Plugins and SKSE itself - both needed for the aforementioned papyrus extender
- Quest and Reward Delay for Legacy of the Dragonborn - Not a hard requirement, but come on. You're going to be adding HOW many more displays? Space this stuff out. Like, depending on how much you add, we may need to have some extended version of that thing which stretches stuff out further.
- The Curator's Companion - Only needed if using the TCC patch
And then of course there's implicit stuff in those (SkyUI for the MCM in the first place, MoreHUD for TCC, etc) but we won't dive into those.
- Install like normal using your favorite mod manager. If you're not using a mod manager, honestly, it's probably better not to install. Sorry
- Copy the contents of the "Edit Scripts" folder into the Edit Scripts folder in your xEdit installation
- Open your load order with DBM_HallofInsanity.esp loaded below anything which has a weapon/armor record, with any synthesis patches which might impact them disabled
- Run the hallofinsanity.pas script
- Re-run your synthesis patches
....honestly, that's it? If any of the above doesn't make sense to you, there's an article here which details the steps with screenshots.
How does this even work?
Very carefully.
No, really. It's a joke, but that's the truth - this took a lot of trial and error, and a lot of work went into it. I've got an article on the hows/whys for folks who want to do a deep dive (and once more, I apologize for the code), but its extremely methodical and takes advantage of the fact that LOTD has a standard script API to hook into.
Where is it located?
Trapdoor to enter is below the player's bed in the Safehouse.
Wait, but isn't there a room directly below that in the safehouse already?
We're dealing with a magical hallway which resizes itself to have exactly the number of alcoves and items which there are in the world based off your mod load order. It doesn't matter WHERE I stuck it, it'd be jutting out of the solitude cliffside regardless. So I opted to go for TARDIS logic and convenience. Deal with it. :P
Why only one armor piece per mannequin? Can't you display armor sets?
Honestly, I originally didn't intend for it to be mannequins at all, but that ended up being the only thing that would actually work. So this is going to be a long-winded answer, but it should hopefully address this question and a few others you might have. So armor, like most things in the game, has meshes. But you might have noticed that the meshes of an armor out in the worldspace might be different from how the armor looks on a person might be different from the armor that appears in the inventory/crafting menu. These are frequently different things! And some of them have like....stuff which makes gravity effect them or various other effects. Most of the displays you see in LOTD (both vanilla and official and unofficial display patches) utilize ground meshes and create new statics to do their displays. Everything is hand-placed and curated: more work goes into these things than you might have originally thought, and every display is worthy of praise :) Make sure to give a thanks to the next one you download, by the by.
Anyway, the core goal of this mod/script WASN'T to make fancy nice looking displays for everything: it was to be extensible to allow for displaying ofeverything*. And that means handling every single poorly-coded or optimized armor/weapon out there. Things with missing meshes. Things which don't define everything they should. And then consider those mods that have like...20 armors all with different colors but a single set of bracers: do I somehow make a display for each of those armors and then 20 displays for the same bracers? How do I tell that? The answer is actually in the game - the concept of "outfits." But once more, not every mod bothers to make outfits for their sets of armor. And that's not even TOUCHING the problem of like...non-standard body slots. Mod A uses this slot to add wings while mod B adds a septum piercing and mod C adds 6 arms while mod D makes a glowy light that floats 6 feet above the characters' head. Where the hell should I put the activator for that display so it works for all of them and doesn't overlap with standard body slot locations? You get the idea.
So ultimately, it's best to think of this not as a replacement for curated displays, but as a supplement where none exists. There's simply not enough information out there to be able to dynamically generate things with the level of quality that a person can put in the effort to make.
*Technically not everything is displayed. Things which are flagged as non-playable so the player can't pick them up, things which don't have a name (so the display and MCM would just have blank text), things which are made to display only on races which don't overlap with the mannequin race, and things which don't contain any meshes (read: armor mods with like....invisible helmets and such) aren't made into displays
Aren't you a little worried that people might be getting tired of you teeing up questions this way to answer what might not be common questions, but rather are the things you WANT to answer?
Well NOW I am. Thanks a lot, asshole!
You're welcome.
That wasn't a question.
I know. So anyway, why aren't there any replicas?
Tell you what. You give me an algorithm which can take any weapon or armor that might be out there, the majority of which don't have keywords, and that also might not even have crafting recipes THEMSELVES, and make logical replica crafting recipes, and I'll go ahead and add that to the script.
Can I flag this as ESL?
Before running: absolutely not. After running: check with your normal script to see if it can. I intentionally have the formids iterating from 800 so if it's POSSIBLE to flag, you CAN, but the number of references this adds is going to very, very rapidly go out of the ESL-flagging range (and you'll hit an error if you try to run it while it's flagged as ESL and don't fit completely in that range). So plan on it taking up a load order slot, run it, and maybe (if you've got a small load order, or are choosing to ignore a bunch of things) you'll get lucky.
I ran this once but then I found this neat new armor mod that just released and I want to add it. How do I?
You don't.
But I really want to
That's nice. I'm very happy for you. Answer is still no.
I ignored you and now my game is crashing, help!
You're screwed. Start the game over. You probably can't even go back to an earlier save because you overwrote the plugin which was generated. Like seriously, I can't emphasize this enough. Don't change your load order mid-playthrough, and for those of you who are going to ignore the advice and do it anyway, you do you, but for the love of God DON'T try to re-generate this thing mid-playthrough. It. Won't. Work.
So I've auto-sorted but a few of the armor pieces aren't appearing. Any idea?
Could be one of a couple things. In a few cases in my testing, it was actually that the armor mesh itself was missing from the mod: nothing I can do about that, you'll need to contact the original mod owner regarding that. Alternatively, sometimes it has to do with some wonkiness that simply seems to arise from there being too damn many mannequins in the given cell. Try swapping the mannequins' type back and forth a couple times, then removing and then displaying the armor again. Sometimes that shakes it out.
Also, the mannequin body shapes are vanilla, so if you use something else (UNP, CBBE, HIMBO, etc) depending on your bodyslides some of the armors may be clipping/not appearing in the mannequin quite right. Once more, that's not really something I can solve.
Part of the mannequin is invisible with this display. Help!
So this could be one of a couple things. First off, most likely, you just need to swap the mannequin type. When generating the layout, I attempt to detect if there's a display mesh for either type and if only one is present, the display is that one, but if something got swapped somewhere and a given armor only has female parts and your mannequin is male, the part of the mannequin will disappear. Secondly, it could be something where the shape of the body part is changed and/or expected to be covered (this is somewhat common in things like high heels or robe armors - parts of the calves will be invisible due to the foot shape change, or legs will be invisible because the robe is open and you can see where the leg armor would go up to). Once more, not really something that can be handled by this mod. Sorry!
Does this work with foreign languages?
Honestly....I don't know. I'm sorry. I've had a couple people run into problems with my Sinister Seven display in other languages, and I've never been able to figure out why (nor even how to test it). A significant portion of the script itself is based off of looking things up based off of the EDID, so it's very plausible it could run into problems.
Does this work with Hall of Forgotten/Hall of Wonders?
Due to the fact that I'm already going in and futzing with stuff via xEdit anyway, the room name is added via a different means from the standard API. This means it shouldn't run into any problems (and actually should be able to handle Odyssey when it comes in even if it alters the museum quest), but it doesn't do anything to help with the "out of rooms" problem that other ones may have when working together. And I'm guessing with those cases it wouldn't work on an existing save to show up in the MCM. Best to start with a new game.
Can you add displays for misc items too?
Anything else we should know about?
I did testing with SMP-enabled clothing but ran into a couple cases where it froze when some of the armor was long enough that it clipped with the floor? I don't know - I'm not super familiar with physics-enabled clothing/armor, so I guess buyer beware that it might be a problem. Just a heads up. But because I'm unfamiliar with it, that could potentially cause a problem.
Bethesda for Skyrim Special Edition and the Creation Kit
ElminsterAU for SSEEdit
icecreamassassin and the LOTD team for Legacy of the Dragonborn
icecreamassassin for Mannequin Management
powerofthree for powerofthree's Papyrus Extender
Multiple folks on Discord for putting up with my spamming complaining about problems I have, but particularly gutmaw, Jelidity, and ra2phoenix for tossing suggestions for stuff