PSA: Custom Player Races

I started playing with another new game.

Didn't axe my last new one, but I felt like trying something different. Different character spec, and... female.

I'm not normally one for cross-dressing in video games, but let's face it: there are two really cool outfits for males in these games: Jack and Shit. I mean seriously. What do we get? A Dante outfit, some crummy T shirts, Slof's chippendales outfits, and that naked-except-for-a-necktie-and-dress-socks "outfit"... which is just creepy.

Don't get me wrong, Slof's work is outstanding from a technical standpoint. Beautiful modeling, really. I'm just not into looking at mostly naked guys covered in piercings and body jewelry.

So, yeah. It was time to have my cadre of gorgeous redheads with guns led by... another redhead with a gun.

I'm still me, what can I say?

Anyway.

Decided to have some fun with this one. Since I don't own Broken Steel and have no plans to purchase its bug-ridden ass, I saw no issues with setting up a custom race for my new avatar to add my new glowing eyes and some nice hairs.

Set up a custom race, decided to use the glow-y red eyes, as I like them better than the white, green, or gold. Set it up to use Dimon99's Cali body, and covered that lovely curvy form in one of my reworks of his textures. Added Ling's as a master to get the hair styles, and threw the ones I was interested in onto the race. Cheated, created an NPC and set up her face, hair, and eyes and set her to be a facial template. This, for the record, is much easier than working with the in-game interface, that's quite primitive by comparison.

Got the game started, AS-R'd my way into the wasteland. Immediately noticed a problem. The hands showed as bright, neon purple. Also known as "Hey moron, your texture's missing!". I figured it was an issue with the pip-boy glove not liking the custom texture. Threw together a plugin that made the pip-boy and glove removable items, and tried removing it. This helped... in that it let the outfit's full-fingered gloves take over and not show the skin.

Tried cutting to third person, removing all clothing... nothing. The hands still showed as missing textures.

This vexed me. I've been using custom textures on companions for a year now, and have never had such a problem crop up. I knew the textures were there - two of my three "special" companions use it, and their hands looked fine.

Switched for the game-wide replacer I use, and it showed up fine. This told me there was something wrong. So I got to looking.

I happen to notice that there's an extra set of textures in the textures\characters\female directory.

handfemale_1st.dds, along with the _n and _sk supporting textures. This, I think, may be it, since I vaguely recall those being used for the first person view in Oblivion. Not sure why it would affect the third person view as well... but this fucking game has never made sense before, why would it start now?

Fortunately, the *1st textures are simply renamed copies of the standard hand textures. A quick copy, rename, and move back into the directory with the main textures was all that was required.

Fired it up, and sure enough, all is well now.

Normally, this wouldn't have warranted a PSA on my part. Problem is, I searched both Nexus and Bethsoft forums for hours, and found nothing even remotely similar. I swear, that forum software has the shittiest search engine I've ever seen. It makes Google look all-knowing and easy to use.

So I figured I'd do everyone a minor solid, and upload my experience. If you're having such issues, this may help, and if not you can always file the information away in your mental FUBAR database for later use, should it ever come up.

Now, because I'm sure at least some of you are curious what my work will have turned in, in the form of player character...

(warning: before you click the link for full-size, bear in mind this is a biggy, weighing in just shy of a megabyte even in .jpg form)





You can see us here, after clearing out the Super Duper mart. We holed-up inside for the night, and struck out for Megaton after dawn. Decided to catch the sunrise before leaving, even the digital me never goes anywhere without a pair of tinted lenses handy.

For the record, the outfit is: Wasteland Charmer with no stockings, vambraces from metal armor, a set of Raider Painspike shoulder and hip guards, a Vault 101 security armored vest, and a set of Lucky Shades.

It kind of sucks having to start again, when I just managed level nine with my other new "me", but I've been wanting to play a new build.

I normally play my characters based on my real skills. Small guns, repair, and sneak as tags, with minors in lockpicking and barter.

Miss Caridwen here is more a tough customer. Tags Small Guns, Big Guns, and Medicine. No speechcraft, no barter, CHA5. She pretty much just hurts people and breaks things... and knows how to stim an injury quite expertly.

I'd try something completely out there like a non-combat oriented character... but there's just no way around combat in Fallout 3. Not taking at least one weapon class as a tag skill seems like it would just be making things harder on yourself than it needs be.