Archived from groups: alt.games.morrowind (
More info?)
DeAnn wrote:
> I gather TESTool is part of the toolkit for modders that
> Bethesda has on their site?
No, TESTool is a third-party program, not related to Bethedsa at all.
<rant>
TESTool offers some fundamental abilities which should have already been
included in the construction set by Bethedsa, but was not. Instead some
kind soul writes this sort of thing, doing the work Bethedsa should have
done.
</rant>
TESTool is absolutely helpful for modding, but also quite good for
non-modders, if you are running lots of mods. It can merge levelled
lists (other tools can do that as well) and merge objects, which is an
extremely cool feature:
Consider some light item. Original game sets certain values to the light
object, like brightness, radius etc etc. Now Necessities of Morrowind
modifies this light item and attaches a script to it (it has no script
in unmodded Morrowind), but doesn't change the values of the light. Now
Light300 takes the original light and modifies the values, but doesn't
attach a script to it. Now we got a conflict.
Original light
NOM light - same values as original light plus script
Light300 - modified values, no script
If you load Light300 after NOM, then you get the new lights but no
script. If you load NOM after Light300, you get the script but no
modified values. So you couldn't run both mods.
Now comes TESTool: It merges the original light, the NOM light (which
only adds the script) and the Light300 light (which only modifies some
values) into a final object which got the new values *and* the NOM
script. Thus, you now can run both mods at the same time.
If this isn't a useful feature, I don't know what is.
![:) :)]()
Quite essential
to be able to run conflicting mods, though don't expect miracles.
> Is it intuitive to use?
Yes, I'd say so. But read the included documentation first, before you
randomly click the buttons. You get the tool over at
http://thelys.org
> I've tried opening mods with the elderscrolls construction
> kit and found it a confusing, uninformative mess.
It is...
<more rant, getting worse>
I've started modding a bit a couple of months ago but quickly gave up
because the construction kit is a major pain to work with. The Morrowind
script language is one of the dumbest languages I've seen, and I've seen
and worked with a lot of programming languages. Even C64 BASIC had more
features and better debugging facilities.
</more rant>
Peter