I decided to try to fix the issue with the NCCS companions getting shelled at Nellis even when the player has done made friendly like.
Nailed it on the first try, and without touching a single base game object or script. Damn, I'm good sometimes.
However, the game continues to perplex me in ways no other game ever has. It's just so... badly made.
After the test at Nellis, we were walking back out across the bomb range, when the companions crashed. Nose dive into the fucking pavement from thirty thousand feet crash.
Now, I'd chalk this up to some unreported error in my new companion script... except that Veronica was in my party at the time, and she crashed too.
Wouldn't follow, couldn't be talked to... they just stood there.
To the apparent credit of my scripting skills, two of my three NCCS companions recovered on their own after a couple minutes, and began functioning properly again. The third and Veronica never did.
I haven't seen this sort of NPC behavior in a couple patches now. I guess Obsidian really isn't capable of taking a step forward without two back.
Tried waiting, tried fast travel, tried combat; nothing snapped the two statues out of it. Finally, I just closed the game in disgust. Without saving.
I remember in one of the first versions of NCCS, back before FNV had been patched at all, I used to run into similar issues. When it happened, it would infect any subsequent saves; requiring a clean save to fix. Of course, one can not clean save Veronica... so I'm not sure what the fix would be there; short of breaking out the feathered headdress and going looking for a virgin to sacrifice to the Old Ones from beyond the stars.
My game is up over 75 hours now, so all bets are probably off on this sort of thing... but it's still immensely frustrating -- not being able to cleanly separate what's a mod issue that I need to fix, and what's just shitty coding on the part of the slack bastards who got paid to turn out this half-finished game. Fuck, I've played Alpha builds less unstable than this...
About all I can do is fire the game up again, and see if the issue manifests again. If it does, I get to try the new game approach.
Y'know, one of these days I'm going to go apply for an EOD job. At least then there'd be something to look forward to in life.
Sounds like an engine / animation bug randomly converging with the game not running scripts how / when it's supposed to. Probably not a damn thing we can do to prevent it, though I don't understand why restarting the game wouldn't correct it.
ReplyDeleteCongrats on that Nellis bit, though!
Hmm, one of those "Congratulations!/Man that sucks!" sort of posts. I am glad to hear you managed to sort out the Boomer issue on the first try :) I am also hoping that the companion crash was just an infrequent occurrence for you, but knowing how NV loves to be glitchy, I won't hold my breath to long :(
ReplyDelete"Probably not a damn thing we can do to prevent it, though I don't understand why restarting the game wouldn't correct it."
ReplyDeleteNew game/old save before it manifested does fix it. Trouble with new games though, is that they start you over.
With XP sharing turned off, it takes quite awhile to build enough levels to do the DLC without getting slaughtered. Not to mention how many levels you need to build up Speech enough to be able to do half the quests without having to kill everyone involved.
I hate blowing all that time just in prep work to get my character back to where he needs to be to be able to play the game fo' realz, yo.
Oh, right. Now I remember why I had Megaupload open in another tab -- I got pulled away from my desk in the middle of typing the last comment some four hours ago.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone else wants to try out the new alpha build, go for it. This one has the repaired main quest script, revised sorters, and Nellis fix.
I will see what I can squeeze in starting this weekend. I actually made the first trip into Nellis by myself while doing errands for the BoS. I figured while I was in the vicinity getting bombed, I might as well walk up to the gate. The sorters should give me an excuse to dump even more crap into the companions inventory :)
ReplyDeleteDownloaded. Since I only work on the weekends, like Druuler I can't make any promises on how much gaming I'll be able to get to right away...
ReplyDeleteEh, s'not a big deal. I'm not demanding anyone test anything -- I just know that the last alpha I uploaded for you guys had the flawed quest script; so I figured since this one seems to be behaving, I'd release it to get everything working again.
ReplyDeletePossibly, in the process, get extra opinions on whether the new companion script screws the game somehow (still haven't had a chance to fire the game up again myself since the blog post).
If you guys are busy, don't worry about it. I mean, shit; I ignored the mod as far as updates go for five months... it'd be rather disingenuous of me to get all uppity about rushing out a new version now...
I think I'll get to try it out before five months passes...
ReplyDeleteXD
I loaded it up myself earlier this morning (read: about 1 am) and tried another play through. The game had been crashing on me fairly often yesterday, so I got fed up and went to bed. No rush, I know, but I'll get some more time in today and see how things go...
ReplyDelete