Talk:Data File

What an ESL is called.

When esl was first introduced Bethesda staff documented the ESL name as "Light Master" yet the CK user interface referred to them as "Light Plugin". Because of this, the documents here were changed to "Light Plugin". With the recent CK updates it appears they changed the name of ESL files in the CK "Light Master". Now in the documentation an ESL file is referred to as a mix between "Light Master" and "Light Plugin". Lets settle this. I say its called what the CK calls it. ESL equals "Light Master". Scrivener07 (talk) 2017-09-14T06:33:52 (EDT)

Contributions, Thank You

Thanks for all the contribution from everyone (bethesda staff included), the back and forth, and eye for accuracy. This is how the entire wiki is supposed to work. Lets keep it up. If your reading this than Welcome to the Wiki, its only as good as we make it. Scrivener07 (talk) 2017-10-09T16:48:15 (EDT)

Variable number of ESLs

The page currently says that "A maximum of 4096 .esl files can be loaded by the engine at once, more Form IDs in an .esl file means that less .esl files can be loaded. Using .esl files that each have 2048 Form IDs, the limit drops to about 300 loaded .esl files."

That doesn't really make sense to me. The edit from the previous version dropping the number of usable records from 4096 to 2048 makes sense because the game reserves all of the forms from 0x000 to 0x7FF for hard-coded forms. Which leaves just 2048 items per file using ids in the 0x000800-0x000FFF range. But with the ESLs all loaded into slot 0xFE that still leaves the remaining three hex digits which cleanly handles exactly 4096 files.

So by my count shouldn't that simply be "The engine can load a maximum of 4096 .esl files that each have mo more than 2048 Form IDs." instead? Cdcooley (talk) 2017-10-15T06:10:12 (EDT)