Better? Sort of?

Logged ninety odd minutes on FNV today; tested the sorting scripts and got in some general play.

Updated drivers seem to have helped. When I started the PC up this morning, my desktop was still like it was supposed to be. Inside FNV, "stutter" is reduced considerably, though FPS on the whole haven't improved much. Visually indistinguishable from the old drivers, as far as teh prettehs go. I stopped when it crashed on me. Oddly enough, not a wanderin' the wastes crash, but it crashed on opening a container; which is behavior I've seen plenty of times before in the engine. Not sure what causes it, but it existed in Oblivion and FO3 both.

The sorters themselves continue to be a bit of a work in progress.

They technically work, but the fact is: you give me thirteen hundred lines of text to proof in Wordpad -- 90% of each line being identical to the ones above and below; and it all tends to blur together. Especially after three straight hours of writing the shit. I'm going to make mistakes.

Thus far, the tally of fuckups has been minor:

The reloading sorter somehow escaped having the lines for moving large and small rifle primers copied when I split the scripts into categories; the general sorter was missing some items, and is still missing a few -- since it was originally written as I was glancing down the miscellaneous section of the item tree in the GECK and trying to remember which items were commonly encountered; the dialogue topic for the survival sorter has the wrong prompt (I copied it from the reloading sorter topic, and apparently forgot to change the player's line).

When and if the mess makes it into NCCS (blessedly, all I'll need to do for the scripts is dump them into Wordpad and run a "replace all" on the container name from my special companions plugin to one in the NCCS plugin), stuff will likely need adjustment, as well. At the moment, the items are sorted based on what I do with them. For example, Glass Pitchers and Surgical Tubing go into the survival container because they're used in the recipe for creating purified water. Turpentine goes into the survival container as well, because it's used to tan hides.

If you make Nuka Grenades but don't tan hides, the turpentine sorting will likely irritate you.

Unfortunately, because of the number of potential uses for an item, I'm not sure there is any "right" way to sort them across the board; short of a container for each specific item (not happening). I'm likely going to end up telling several people to learn to mod their damned selves if they don't like the way the script runs.

Other issues I can do little about. There's still the script delay before the quest scripted sorters run. As I feared, the more complex the script, the longer the delay seems to be on average. The Reloading sorter at 170 odd lines runs in just a couple seconds. The first stage of the survival sorter runs up near six hundred lines, though; and takes upwards of five seconds to fire on average. As well, because the survival item list was so blasted long that the script had to be split, there's the delay between the first script finishing, and the second starting.

Another issue is that to make sure the player knows the items are moving, I didn't use the silent flag on the RemoveItem commands, so you get the "4 Beer(s) Removed" or whatever it says exactly. Since each message stays in the corner of your screen for a couple seconds, if you have a full suite of junk in your inventory, it can... take awhile for them all to clear. I had at least one each of probably 75% of the items in the script, and it took something like thirty seconds for them all to clear. It's annoying, but unfortunately it's an all-or-nothing proposition. Since the player isn't guaranteed to have one specific item in their inventory to sort, I have to have multiple ones running non-silent; and if I just do one item in ten or what-have-you, I know people will think that all items aren't being sorted.

Lastly, I did write the survival sorter to not dump everything into the container. It keeps some items for you (again, based on how I play): a few pieces of food, five bottles of purified water, five Sunset Sarsaparilla bottles, ten stimpaks, two super stims, two steadies, a doctor's bag, a hydra, five each Rad-X and Radaway, a mentats, and a med-x. The rest gets filtered into the container, for safe keeping (yes, chems are weightless, but Bethsoft devs love to fuck the player over by stealing all your equipment -- this way, all but your "working stash" will be safely untouchable by DLCs or mods, and retrievable from any companion; yes, I'm an evil bastard who hates being railroaded). As I said, the numbers will probably be off for most people... but that's the sort of thing we can fix in subsequent versions.

On the up side, reverting the plugin to the old (non-NVSE enabled) version did fix the girls' combat behavior; so it must have been something in the NVSE commands that the game didn't like. Although whether it was the GECK itself, NVSE, or the NVSE plugin of the GECK powerup... I have no idea. That will have to be an investigation for another time.

It's a shame though; while NVSE wouldn't have helped at all with the sorter scripts, I was hoping to be able to make the casing-spawner code work with mod-added weapons, as well. One pain in my ass at a time though, I suppose. The sorters are far and away more important to my own game; and since I'm who I'm modding for... you guys get stuck with it, I guess.