Complications...

...Or, "Why I hate this fucking game."

So, last night just before packaging up the NCCS 0.8 Alpha for digital-pony-expressing to my partner, I had another idea.

Well, two actually. One was when I saw a script in the base game that alludes to the fact that you don't need NVSE to keep weapon health when adding/removing weapons in NV, which will come in mighty handy for the weapons collection, with all its convertible weaponry...

But the second was the one that is actually pertinent to a companion discussion. My idea was a portable reloading setup. Dialogue accessible. It occurred to me that hell, I have a loading press in the other room that weighs in at a svelte pound; so why in the hell would one not pack such a device, some measuring dippers, and a couple die sets along in any post-society situation. Shit, I can't find ammunition half the time locally now; I hold out little hope of doing so after society implodes.

Anyway. I looked up the pertinent script command, and sure enough, the reloading menu can be brought up via any script or dialogue with little difficulty. So I got that added, and tested it; and it worked.

Then I went to sort my remaining components back into their container... and nothing happened. I had just changed the requirements on the sorting commands, so that they could all be accessed from any companion, so I thought that might have done something. I summoned up Natasha (who the commands were written and originally tagged for) and tried, and still, the script wouldn't run.

Tried switching off NCCS, as despite the fact that they don't openly conflict, sometimes the two systems do cause issues for each other for reasons unknown. Still didn't work.

Finally, just before my last resort of starting a new game, I decided to try cleaning the save; and that did it. For some reason, despite the fact that the dialogue didn't "stick" with the old requirements, it had somehow corrupted itself in the save for the reloading sorter to not function at all.

Strangest dirty save I've ever seen, since normally the issue with saves needing cleaning is that they just stay stuck in the old state and don't reflect updates... but this one just flat didn't work on the back-end. It was like it had shut down or otherwise frozen the quest.

Got that working, but now my newly re-added companions are showing errors in their inventories -- the stimpaks they spawn with aren't there. Since I emptied the contents of the storage containers into my own inventory before switching off their plugin, I have the sneaking suspicion that the inventory bug from Oblivion still exists, it just takes more items to set it off now. Loathe though I am to do it, I may have to institute some sort of weight limit on the containers, just to keep item numbers down. These new containers just let you pack along too much -- especially considering there aren't enough merchants in the wasteland to sell or barter that much stuff at three day reset intervals. I need to either expand their inventories, or increase the reset frequency in my game.

Seems like every step forward in this game results in slamming into a brick wall. I figure out a way around that wall, and promptly meet another...