Just saw some comments on the xEdit Discord this morning from ElminsterAU, the primary dev for the project. He’s been backwards-engineering Starfield since it came out, tweaking his project to make it work for Starfield. This is important because, as soon as he does, (safe) plugin-based mods become possible, opening up the floodgates for a whole new class of Starfield mods. Only, in its current state, he’s not sure he can make it work. Or, for that matter, that the CK due from BGS “early next year” can make it work, either.
The image I’ve posted is a collection of carefully selected snippets of a much larger discussion, with all the supporting info being excluded for brevity. This is “headline reporting” at its worst, so I encourage anyone tracking this topic to go to the Discord and dive deeper.
Maybe he’s having a bad morning after spending all night attempting to decipher undocumented code that is, literally, legacy built upon legacy built upon even older legacy. But if it’s really this bad, then the modding scene for Starfield is going to have a much harder time getting started than is currently being anticipated.
We will never get another Skyrim again it’s pretty clear. Breaks my heart but that’s just the reality. I wish there were other studios making games like the BGS sandboxes like how other studios are making soulslikes now. They need direct competition.
Maybe just up and ask Bethesda for docs, even if they’re on a best-effort basis and not guaranteed to be complete? I mean, Bethesda derives benefit from the mods. They have, in the past, done at least some limited collaboration with people who build framework tools for modding (like giving early access to releases to the Address Library guy for Fallout 4 to help speed up updating mods). I doubt that they have anything there that could be considered a trade secret or some competitive advantage. And worst they can say is “sorry, but no”.
BGS seems to have some kinda weird “arms-length” relationship with the modding community. Like, they know who the SFSE guys are, but they never coordinate patch releases with them so that they aren’t mad-rushing to modify the extender to keep everyone’s modded games from crashing. I dunno - maybe there are some sort of legal ramifications at work here. Like, if they help the modders, they become responsible for what gets modded. Or something. I’m just speculating.
It’s kinda funny though. Here we are playing one of BGS’s least buggy releases in history, and now it’s just looking like they swept all the code debt under the carpet and plan on fixing it all “next year”.
I’d honestly be willing to bet that it’s some kind of legal thing.
Slightly relevant story: there’s a hat company that I really like that make funky designs each week, so I emailed them with a couple ideas for a theme. Their reply was an immediate no, but with the explanation that if they were to actually take the idea and run with it, then it could open the possibility of getting sued over IP.
Idk, I don’t doubt that they know what they talk about.
However, some counterpoints:
- We already have working esp mods although they shouldn’t be possible at this point. Are they risky to use? Sure, but the ones I use work for me.
- Modding for Starfield before official mod support already feels on a whole different level than it was for previous games.
- Bethesda built Starfield with modding in mind more than any of their previous games. I doubt they did anything to cripple the modding capabilities. Big changes always happened from game to game. There wouldn’t be any progress without those.
I think the key point to take from this is that mod object space is a complete mess and the reason why xEdit has not yet been released is not that it doesn’t work yet, but that it can’t be made to work with the game in its current state.
And, yes, mods are making progress, even with things as they currently stand. But these are generally just texture replacers, command infusion, and configuration tweaks. Nothing is being added. For that to happen, we need these object space issues to be addressed.
object space is a complete mess
Starfield has, what, 1000 planets, and each time you land the engine basically auto-generates a new approx. Skyrim-sized worldspace. The reference system has to have departed significantly from previous games for it to work. Even Skyrim was gently pushing the limits of how many objects can be referenced with the 8-digit refID (roughly 16 billion entries per .esp for all world objects, NPC-s, weapons, armor, outfits, consumables, spells, magic effects, markers, helpers etc etc since absolutely everything has to have a refID).
Of course Starfield is a mess coming from the simple refID scheme of the older games. The reference system in SF must be some sort of convoluted hierarchical system to be able to place probably hundreds of billions of objects over 1000 planets and retain persistency. It won’t be easy to reverse engineer.
Since you posted to this old thread, let me share the latest: As of this morning, ElmisterAU has released the RC of xEdit for Starfield. The caveat is that he isn’t sure how forward compatible it will end up being. That said, we’re already seeing mods built with it hitting the Nexus. Took less than 3 hours.
Missing formids? Without a formid, (assuming it didn’t simply crash), you won’t be able to spawn it, delete it, apply a spell, nothing. Thats assuming it didn’t crash to desktop because thats invalid data.
Fucking Bethesda, what happened?
Fucking Bethesda, what happened?
Speculating, I’m guessing this is a side effect from adopting The Forge for rendering and animation. I’ll bet those missing formids are now stored somewhere else, possibly outside the esp itself. Apparently something similar happens in the NIF format.
I don’t believe the formids are missing or the game wouldn’t run. They’re just stored somewhere a little counter-intuitive.
adopting The Forge for rendering and animation
Interesting. Your comment is the first mention I’ve seen of that. Their page on global illumination is interesting. On the one hand, their little trailer shows the system displaying more detail than Starfield does, but on the other hand in their last screenshot they failed to build the lighting the same way as the reference photo.
They probably have something similar to a null value so when its created its empty and the engine is like “ahh yes this object is made of nothing and has no ID I’ll call you null2 and pretend that didn’t happen, maybe I’ll put you in garbage collection or whatever so you don’t take up memory”