Okay, probably not; but I'm gonna post about it anyway.
Normally when I vanish into the shadows, it's because I'm completely and thoroughly fed up with 'the community' and just want to be left alone for awhile without having to answer any stupid questions.
Well, that wasn't the case this time. This has been a modding binge. An epic modding binge, so encompassing that it's left me without the inclination or the free time to yammer inanely here about shit no one cares about. Well, granted the personal life has been leaving me with much less free time than usual lately, but still.
So, what, you may wonder, have I been working on? Here's a hint:
Yep. 1.29mb, for three companions. At this point, my 'personal companions plugin' is far, far beyond just companions:
(You'll probably have to enlarge that to read it)
Five thousand, seven hundred, eighty-nine total records, sixty-seven scripts, eighty pieces of armor and clothing, nine armor addons, eleven weapons, five weapon mods, fifteen containers, thirty-nine statics, twelve idle markers, five leveled lists, thirty-five form lists, five cells, fourteen quests, more than five hundred and fifty lines of dialogue, and one hundred thirty five separate AI packages.
(...Aaand a paaaartriiiidge in a peeaaar treeeeee...)
...Thank you, Maeva; that was very nice. Just how drunk are you, anyway?
'Bout normal, I'd say. Want some?
It's against my religion -- the First International Church of Ulcer frowns on such things.
Anyway.
It isn't finished, of course. Like many (most?) of what you might call 'prolific modders' -- people who actually have an affinity for it and mod just for its own sake as often as any other reason -- I never really finish my own mods. My personal companion mods are almost constantly getting tweaked or something or other added or improved whenever I play the game they go with.
Already, I've had a couple more ideas for things to add just tonight. I'm going to resist the urge and continue typing out this post that I've already started and abandoned twice before in the last week, but rest assured I'll be getting to it later.
I'm not usually one for 'big' mods. Regular readers may recall I've railed on more than one occasion over the years, against far-reaching mods. I've had associations with several in various games, and they're virtually always more trouble than they're worth. Conflicts galore. It's worse in FNV, where many people seem to think 'clean mods' refer to whether the moderators have bathed recently.
Ironic then that I've let my own mod get so big? Not really. It's precisely the issues that have made me add more and more. At least if I'm in control, I can make plugins that don't conflict; don't break anything, and aren't implemented in a generally retarded fashion.
I had originally planned on running this all into one long post; but after thinking it over a couple more days I've decided to break it up -- since in the past, overly long posts have resulted in comments where people complained that there was just too much to effectively respond to. So, I'm going to split it up into four posts, I think. One for the introduction (which you're reading now), and three more: one for the house section of the mod, one to cover the new weapons I've been messing with, and one for the companions, themselves. Hopefully this will keep it manageable for those of you who have short attention spans. However, being as my estate ended up with seventy-four screenshots... that post is still going to be a biggie. It's coming up on midnight PST, and I plan to get the other three out tonight; but I may well end up not getting it all done until tomorrow. If that happens, please bear with me; I will get to it eventually.
Let me be the first to step forward and ask the question that is on everyone's minds: is this going to be a publicly-released mod?
ReplyDeleteDepends largely on how you mean it.
ReplyDeleteIf you mean wholesale; the entire mod, companions and all? No way in hell.
Even if I were inclined to publicly upload the girls (which I'm not) it would be a copyright nightmare at this point. Some of the weapons and armor are DLC, but have the meshes stripped out and made standalone, and the textures replaced to keep the master dependency off of the plugin, and Bethsoft no rikee when people do that. Other weapons and armor are stuff I've taken from mods and folded into my own plugin to get out around conflicts (and fix horrid spelling errors in some cases). There are three custom bodies; one of which has never been available on the Nexus and that I wouldn't even know where to go looking for permissions...
Hell, the BSA file attached to the mod is over five hundred megabytes at the moment. If I uploaded it to the Nexus, I might last a week before getting my ass banned.
Individually? That could be a different story. As long as I slave it to the proper masters, the base game and DLC weapons should be okay. I've learned a lot about companion scripting during the last month that would be great to fold into a new, standalone companion along with the hardcore code. And the house mod... I've entertained notions of copying it alone into a standalone plugin (since all the modders' resources I used are freely reuploadable) but I'm not 100% on that yet; since as I say in that post, I really don't think it'd go over well as a standalone house mod; so it might need to be folded into the advanced companion mod.
Essentially, it's looking like if I want to do this sort of stuff for public upload, I'm going to have to create an equivalent to my personal plugin; just copyright friendly and with some new characters. As far as I can tell, NCCS just flat can't handle the sort of stuff I've been doing.