Revised my scripts, still no dice.
The companion-sorting script that pulls casings direct from the companions into the reloading container does not run. At all.
The player-sorting script for components now runs until it hits something to transfer, and then stops. It will move one stack of items per run.
Obviously, dialogue resultscripts are even less reliable than object scripts in this fucked up game.
I maintain that Obsidian needs to be unemployed if this is the best they can do.
Regardless, I can do what I've had to do with damned near everything else in the game, and switch to quest scripts. The "sort" command will simply set a quest variable to 1, causing the sorting block to execute the next time the quest script is run.
This, while reliable, produces a new problem. FNV quest scripts don't run every frame like they're supposed to. There's often a delay of up to ten seconds between runs -- the average is about five. So, sorting will not be instantaneous.
This brings me to an issue I was tossing around in my head just a few minutes ago, while looking at some Doug Turnbull revolvers in a catalog, and comparing them to my latest NosCo SBH texture revision.
The issue is this: why am I bothering?
I've spent literally hundreds of hours on NCCS now. Revising, playtesting, adding new features. Fighting the engine every step of the way to make things work.
Do you know what it gets me?
"Your mod isn't easy enough to use."
"Your mod doesn't redefine the engine limitations to make my completely unreasonable companion ideas possible with only a few clicks of my mouse."
"I didn't read the directions, and your mod doesn't work!"
"I fucked with your scripts, and now the mod doesn't work!"
"The RR port that doesn't even work is better."
I actually got a PM earlier in the week from someone bitching me out because I had hidden all the sound files inside the mod esm, and he needed to get to them to add custom dialogue to his companions. I'm not even going to get into how many things are wrong with that one.
NCCS has more than 9800 unique downloaders (25,000 and change total downloads) and 149 endorsements. Assuming my head-math wasn't completely off, that means the roughly one user in seventy-five takes the ten seconds to drop in even a comment-less endorsement.
My files for FO3 and FNV combined are responsible for around a hundred thousand total downloads, if not more. I have eighty-four kudos -- more than half of which are because of the weapon selector scripts I wrote for 20th Century Weapons last year, and not my own files at all.
Why, I ask you, am I banging my fucking head against this construction set, trying to make the companion system better?
The new component recovery section of the companion scripts (a technical accomplishment I'm fairly proud of) won't even be noticed by 95% of players. Of the five percent that do notice, four percent will hate it, and the remaining one percent will like it, but request that I rewrite it to include whatever their favorite game-fucking overhaul is (GAAAAAAAAAAAME FUUUUUUUCKER! Yes, I still find that funny).
The sorters -- provided I ever get them working -- will just be bitched about because I didn't include every item and recipe in existence; and again, there will be the FOOK/FWE assholes wanting it rewritten to include the overhaul's 48,000 unnecessary items.
