Tuesday, March 29, 2011

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.

9 comments:

  1. An optional plug-in for the companion system to allow the recruiting of any NPC in the game? I think it sounds worth a try, and I'm sure fans of such systems would absolutely love it. Personally, I don't use such things when I'm running a "serious campaign" because I hate having to keep track of "OMG! If I recruit this character it will bork the whole game!" but it certainly sounds like something that would be fun to play around with.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds like it has potential. I've never had the chance to use EZ Companions much before I started having some conflict issues that drove me crazy. I've been a SCC user mostly, but that's irrelevant. Having a plug-in that behaved like EZ/SCC and then allowed NPCs to function like RR Companions would be nice to have. It would make controlling my horde of companions easier. Just wish I wasn't having issues with Herculine's Scouts :(

    Druuler

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Druuler:

    What issues?

    Post details in the mod's comments. Perhaps I can help and it would in turn help somebody else.

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Herculine:

    *nods* I will do so in the next couple of days. To tired to think straight enough to compose properly right now.

    Druuler

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm kind of curious, myself on the Scouts issue.

    Granted, I never ran them extensively; but I did keep them active in my game for quite awhile, and don't recall seeing much in the way of odd behavior.

    Is it a Scouts-only thing, or some new issue in RR?

    I know I bitch a lot; but seriously: if it is an RR issue, I'll at least try to fix it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. The "issue" cropped up a couple of months back. I'm not saying that the Scout mods are the root of the problem, but there is a conflict somewhere that only seems to stop once I deactivate both Scout mods. I don't think its an RR problem either, as it has run great for me since I started using it last summer.

    Since this is rather off-topic for Nos's post, I will endevour to explain better on the Scouts' comment page, later today (hopefully).

    ReplyDelete
  7. Well, it may not be technically on-topic for this post; but Herculine's part of NosCo, so as far as I'm concerned problems with her mods are fair game on the blog, just like any of mine.

    Still, if you'd rather detail it over on the appropriate Nexus file entry, I'll be sure to check over there.

    I'm sure whatever it is, between us all we can get it worked out.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Ditto.

    I didn't mean for it to sound like I thought any issues with my mods would be objectionable to discuss here; after all, with the exception of my Oblivion works, everything else I've done in the realm of Gamebryo has been based on NosCo systems anyway.

    I just thought that if the problem is being experienced by other players and we post a solution, it might be most widely viewed in the mod's comments section.

    Of course that's not to say that I think this blog is forlorn or anything; it's bound to have more viewers than my blogs about games from 20 years ago...

    ReplyDelete
  9. On that note, I think I still have a copy or two of the original Doom :)

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.