Trouble was, by the time I got home Saturday night I was eligible for an official death certificate. It is only because the universe hates me so that I continued to exist (and 'lo, did sleep for nearly thirteen hours, only finally arising from my pseudo-death Sunday afternoon).
In said state, I was in no shape nor mood to write a treatise on my beloved companions. I did, however, have a nagging itch to mod.
See, this is why I don't tend to blog about mods when I'm on a bender. This bender is still ongoing (and in week number six straight, I believe), and last night/this morning's section of it completely precluded lording over you all how great my companions are.
To get to the point of the post: I have written an online ammunition and reloading component ordering system:
I don't know that I've mentioned this since 2009-ish, but I hate Fallout 3/NV's terminal system. I truly do. It is such a massive pain in the ass to set up complicated trees that words fail to do the process justice. Once done, though, it's infinitely less error prone than those damned message-based menus.
Anyway. This is how it works: I added a terminal to my bedroom in the estate, without any clear purpose. Yesterday evening, I was lamenting not being able to keep us in .308 ammo for our M14s. Plenty of casings, plenty of powder... no damned primers. Merchants carry next to none -- and I had bought what little there was already for this three-day-respawn cycle -- and nothing in the game uses large rifle primers except .308 and 45-70 ammo -- neither even remotely easy to come by in quantity before level 16 or so. So, I had a thought: mail order. I have to do it here in real life all the time, because my local stores can't be bothered to carry... well, anything. Leaving me to order it in.
I'm the head of an evil multi-national corporation in post-apocalyptia, thinks I, so why can I not make use of that, and have NosCo set up a mail order ammunition business. It's not like I'd need a fucking FFL in the Mojave Wasteland.
Wanted delivery, but nothing so cop-out as the direct-to-a-locker delivery I did in RR. Well, I further think, there are the Mojave Express drop boxes. Why not treat them like a UPS depot? This would work well, since it would also preserve the whole 'secret hideout' schtick I have going on with the estate.
So... I sat down and did it. Rigged up my terminal to connect to NosCo via phone modem, or WiFi, or magical nuclear TCP fairies or whatever you want to think it is; select item and quantity, and have the caps directly removed from my inventory; with the ordered item(s) awaiting me by the time I make it to whatever drop-box I had the order put in.
Tested it with two separate items -- because I wanted to be sure the drop-boxes could handle multiple orders at different times without one clearing the previous or something else stupid Bethsoft might have implemented -- in this case, a thousand large rifle primers and ten thousand units of rifle powder. Humped my ass all the way to the Freeside drop box, and 'lo and beholden, there they were.
Pricing is full retail (100% value as set in the GECK) plus 20% HAZMAT S&H for powder and primers. Ammo will probably be a similar S&H rate since it's heavy as hell.
Ugh. It's a future where I control the world, and I'm still getting raped on shipping for primers...
Regardless, the system isn't finished yet -- I stopped to test with only a couple items working, since I'd hate to go through the hundred or more terminal screens only to find out the method I had planned didn't work and needed to be rewritten or trashed altogether.
Only caveat is that you have to have activated at least two of the drop boxes before you can get into any of them. Apparently you can't just open the container; you have to tell it you want to ship something somewhere else. Annoying, but with one in Goodsprings, it shouldn't be too big a deal to tag another in Primm, Novac, or Freeside.
Primers come in packs of a hundred. You can order one, ten, twenty-five, or fifty packs in a single order. Powder comes in packs of a thousand ("units", as in the 'number of powder' it takes to load a 5.56mm will be 4 units or whatever); and can be obtained in quantities of one, ten, fifty, and a hundred packs per order. Markup/S&H/whatever you want to call it is a flat 20% on either -- or at least what my sleep-deprived brain and the Windows calculator told me was 20%. Sometimes they both lie.
Ammunition will sell in packs of 100, 500, or 1000 per order; and will still sell at full value according to the vanilla game, plus a percentage yet to be determined -- I'm leaning towards ten percent, but may go twenty on ammo, too. NosCo's skilled ammunition technicians will be happy to produce any usable ammo type in the game for you (no companion, robot, or turret ammos); including surplus, specials, bulk, and handloads.
May eventually use this system to sell weapons, too. I figure if the Fallout universe is perpetually in the 1950's, then the GCA won't have happened and I can mail whatever I please in-game.
Being as I do not have a currently uploaded house mod for FNV, I have no idea how this will be implemented for end-users at this time. Also: I fully intend to be a lazy bastard once it's finished, and copy the terminals and notes wholesale from my personal plugin to whatever uploadable plugin it ends up being a part of.
Mail-order munitions; I like it.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if there's any special packaging required for mini-nukes...
"I wonder if there's any special packaging required for mini-nukes..."
DeleteI was thinking a nice label:
"DO NOT WORRY, CITIZEN -- THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING RADIOACTIVE AND/OR NUCLEAR IN THIS PACKAGE. CONTINUE WITH YOUR DELIVERIES AS NORMAL."
Could you mount a NosCo order terminal on a convenient wall, near each Mojave Express dropbox? It wouldn't be tied to any particular house mod, then...
ReplyDeleteMaybe add that to NCCS 0.9?
I am somewhat ashamed to admit I had not considered simply slapping a wall-terminal up next to the boxes.
DeleteI wouldn't think those areas are modded much, so possibility of conflict should be low...
The only thing I wonder is whether it really fits with NCCS. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not being evasive and trying to avoid updating it; I'm just loathe to bloat it up with things that don't pertain to companions.
I suppose if that's what the players want, I wouldn't really be against it, though.
No, it doesn't really fit with NCCS. I only mention NCCS because it's the only mod you
ReplyDeletehave available for public use, apparently. A better fit for this ordering terminal would be as an extension/addition to the NosCo gun shop mod you were working on.
So, how is that project going?
"So, how is that project going?"
DeleteBetter than it was the last time I mentioned it. I learned a few new tricks in building the estate and adding the new weapons that let me fix the lag issues in the sales office; and I think the roombound issues, too.
Also got weapon mods set up for most weapons -- will use the same ones as their base game equivalents, with the exception of the Marksman carbine; it uses the extended magazines mod that is in the base game BSA and ESM but for whatever reason was never implemented.
Only hangup thus far is the convertible weapons. Since they're moddable, I want to see if I can't find some way to have the mod carry over between converted versions. Sadly, I haven't found a way to add or remove mods via script... so I may just have to recommend the Weapon Mod Menu and caution everyone to remove all mods before converting.
Still have to create the night staff, since only the day staff is currently in the plugin; but that's not a huge job by any stretch.
Am also considering axing one of the service rifle mods for my version of the marksman carbine, and replacing it with a different model of ACOG that will use the same model (cop out, I know) but provide different magnification. With the weapon mod menu, you could swap the pistol caliber carbines between 1.5x (default) and a modded version at 4x or so. Intermediate calibers would go between 4x and 6x or so.
This seems like an interesting idea, and might work well incorperated with your gun shop mod. Another idea might be to place the ordering terminals inside the buildings near the Mojave Express drop boxes, instead of outside near the box (assuming that is what you where thinking). Some of the store interiors may have been modded, but I do not know for sure. Cosmetic changes to the stores is not something that I am interested in, so I have not gone looking for mods of that sort.
ReplyDeleteNot sure at the moment. I've been working on AI stuffs again lately, and not doing much with the mail order system.
DeleteLast idea I had about such things involved setting up retextured Nuka cola machines to act as NosCo weapons and ammunition vending machines.
I just keep having visions of Slim Pickens from Blazing Saddles: "We're gonna need a shitload of dimes!"
By the time I stop giggling, I've forgotten I wanted to work on the vending machines and end up messing with the AI some more instead.