Status Updates

Apologies for delays on replying to comments and PMs over the weekend; I forgot I'm not superhuman and ended up wrenching some back muscles on Sunday. This of course resulted in no sleep; which of course results in my not wanting to go near the Nexus.

On the up side, in an attempt to keep my back aligned and... you know, not in constant white-hot pain... I reset my chair so that the seat leans back about 30 degrees and locked it in place. Very nice. I think I'll leave it this way; and it did fulfill its intended purpose of keeping everything lined up and relaxed. So, if you pull something in your back and can't figure out how to sit in a computer chair without pain... well, it's worth a try.

Yesterday I got jumped by a wild redhead seeking to alleviate the pain in my back for me... three times. Does help one sleep, I'll say that much.

Anyway. Feeling mostly alive again today, and I've dealt with the latest drama in my PM box.

NCCS updates will probably be delayed for awhile; while my existing saves do still work, I want to get the ability to start new characters back before diving back into modding the game. New characters are an essential testing component for big mods, after all.

I'll confess, I completely welched on my work on the Tower on Sunday. Ended up going out of town; and by the time I got home my back was already complaining. So I skipped. Apologies on that; I'll get around to it eventually.

Fallout 3... don't expect to see my new companions "system" up for download anytime soon. This was more a proof of concept thing to me; to see how I could make one work with no extra baggage. It's not done, anyway. Since I typed the companion scripts out freehand, I ended up getting the timing wrong on a couple of events; which need further tweaking before I'd be willing to call them good.

There seems to be a belief cropping up that I'm going to delete the RR Companions Vault outright. I'm not. I'm not enough of a dick to throw that many players and other modders under the bus.

I bitch... because I'm a perfectionist, and I know I could do it better. It chafes that I can't make it better without destroying so much. It's kind of like scratching the paint on a new car. After a week, you don't even go onto that side of the car anymore, because every time you see the scratch, you hate yourself for doing something so careless and stupid.

I've read tell (since you can't hear over the internet...) that Nexus admins can change the 'uploaded by' entry of a file. I've broached the subject of having RR changed to my name with ttomwv; we'll see what he thinks. Contrary to some beliefs, it's not as much about trying to take credit for everything... as much as I know ttomwv is working hard at work these days, and I feel bad about bothering him with this stuff every time a re-use question comes up. I'm sure it wouldn't revert previously granted permissions, though.

Though yes, I'd be lying if I said it didn't grate more than slightly that I've missed more than a year's worth of AP from downloads on that file entry. What? I'm not a saint, here.

After further consideration, I am thinking I may take one of Herculine's ideas. When I mentioned the NosCo edition of the RR master, she had suggested instead a plugin. Well, that wouldn't do much for the vault, itself... but a more streamlined, NosCo edition of the companion system itself may not be a bad idea. Strip out some superfluous features, clean up the scripts (seriously, they have like a hundred commented out lines that I was too lazy to remove, as it stands), maybe add a couple new companions. Add in the teleporting across cells component of the companion management system, certainly.

On that note: if you're dedicated enough to read my insane rambling this far, I'd like your opinion on something.

Over on the NCCS file entry's page, a player recently brought forward a "clone" mod; wanting to be able to use NCCS to take control of it. Well, both my partner and I had to reply that that isn't possible...

...but then I got to thinking: why isn't it possible? I mean, NCCS is self-contained. It handles all the factions and packages and tokens through dialog. The scripting is set up to handle any NPC, regardless of origin or RefID. The only reason the "Join Me" option doesn't appear for all NPCs in the game is because I've told it not to; and to only show up for members of the NCCSFaction. Strip out that requirement, and it should make every NPC in the game that you can speak to recruitable.

So... how would everyone feel about an EZ-esque plugin for NCCS and RR? Something to allow them to apply to all NPCs in the game?

Naturally, this would cause an amazing amount of trouble with quest-essential NPCs and merchants; but that doesn't seem to slow CSR or EZ down any.

It would be a plugin, naturally; so that people who didn't want such problems didn't have to deal with the wider application of the dialog. The worst the end user would have to do is worry about class and combat style - and wouldja lookit that! Both mods already have the ability to change those on the fly...

I dunno. Just an idea. Probably not practical, but who knows.