Unnamed Post Series: Weapons

Seriously, it's been so long; and my to-post list is so backed up and convoluted that I got nothing as far as concise titles go.

I've been quiet the past couple months; but far from idle. Personal issues have just conspired to leave me in no mood to post for the most part. But, no one gives a flying fuck; so I'll get to the game stuff.

While I don't have the modeling skill to unfuck the sight alignment (seriously, do the modeling people at Bethsoft get paid? 'Cause they screwed up the sights on so many NV weapons that I think some days it was the 3d Studio Max equivalent of open mic night over there...), I've nonetheless kept tinkering with my .44 single action revolver -- including creating totally new normals from scratch. This is the latest draft:





















The base texture I'm mostly happy with (it still needs a touch-up or two around the front of the cylinder flutes); but the normals continue to be annoying. Gamebryo is really, really touchy with normalmaps. I can get it looking good under low light; or bright light -- not both. It's either too shiny in the sun, or not shiny at all indoors. I continue to tinker, but am not expecting to get it perfect at this point.


Still working on the 1911, as well:



























As you can see, the normal has issues; on the side under full sunlight. I've tried cleaning it up on numerous occasions, and it just will not cooperate. On the bottom where the texture wraps also annoys the hell out of me -- the line where the wrap meets makes it look like a fucking airsoft gun. Haven't had much luck getting the seam to disappear; but I'll confess I haven't worked at it real hard.


I've all but abandoned the Ranger Sequoia retexture. The base texture is absolute shit, no one's done a decent high-res replacement, and I don't have the dds skillz to do one up from scratch.

To satisfy my need for an overpowered revolver, I ended up picking up the Rhino. A quick glance over the comments thread will tell you the mod as downloadable is mostly fucked. Sadly, the Rhino has fallen victim to the same status as so many others -- the author uploaded a partially working version; patched it with something that works less well, and then disappeared from the Nexus. Version 2 has mis-aligned parts that result in the revolver not displaying or aiming correctly in game; version three fixed the alignment... but now it crashes the game of more than half the people who use it. Probably most annoying, is that the recolor texture packs for V2 don't work for V3; so even if you don't crashy crashy, you're stuck with that gaudy industrial orange thing.

Well, I've never let a little thing like a b0rked plugin or needing a texture recolor stop me...







Ignoring the uploaded plugin, I took the meshes and textures and reused them in my personal plugin, on a new weapon. I based it on the Ranger Sequoia; with the capacity cut to three rounds. I decided to asspull that the massive barrel was not a useless weight or empty housing, but was instead an integral (non-removable) suppressor. What? You can too suppress a 45-70. It's a reflex-type suppressor, okay? That big barrel housing provides plenty of space for expansion chambers.

Didn't bother with the red-dot or night vision models at all; nor any of the "pieces" from the assembly quest.

I can't speak for the other recolors from V2, but when I decided to recreate the green scheme it turned out to be almost obscenely simple: take the basic orange textures, apply a hue or color balance filter (depending on your editing utility); change the orange and red channels to green, scale the saturation back until you hit the shade of green you think is nondescript enough; save with DXT1 compression. Viola. Just monkeying with the color balance got the resulting texture so close to the original author's recolor that I suspect that's how he did it. I left the safety red; but recolored the Rhino logo to green to match the rest of the gun.

The Weapon Mod Menu allows for adding and removing the scope at any time, which lets you configure the weapon for in close or medium range, as needed.

I also did away with the custom scope reticle, and instead used the three-post design from the vanilla hunting rifle's scope:



Recolored the front sight red, and the rear sights green; amped up the glow by around 50% so that it would glow noticeably.







In all, I haven't had any trouble with it. It uses the normal Ranger Sequoia reload animation perfectly. The speedloader doesn't disappear like it's supposed to (half the revolvers in the game have that problem, though; so it's hardly unique to this weapon), but the author skillfully worked the speedloader into the cylinder; so that you have to look really close to even tell it's there -- it isn't at all like the vanilla 44 with its glaring loader clipping through the rear of the frame.

There's sometimes a bit of lag when the weapon is equipped (it's fairly high-poly; with a high-res texture), but I've yet to have it crash in open sighted or scoped variants -- whether equipped via menu or hot key. I'm tempted to try to recreate a couple of the other color schemes, but in practice I like the green so much that I'm not sure I'd ever use them.

And More Screenshots!

First off, in the AI post I mentioned the ridiculous range the girls had engaged a White Leg at in the last run through Honest Hearts; but like the scatterbrain I am, I forgot to post the screens to go with it. I rectify that now:






If you look closely you can just barely see the corpse in the center of the first shot. Obviously, I couldn't pace it off; and I've never found a rangefinder in NV that actually works... but that's got to be some kind of record. Definitely the longest shot I've ever seen an NPC take.




And as soon as the fight was over, Mystery-chan and Natasha returned to watching Two-Dogs-Fucking or whatever his name is like a hawk. They really didn't like that guy.

You can also see Maeva watching me out of the corner of her eye; just like she does in Skyrim.


Next up, I also mentioned recently messing with my visual settings in an attempt to replicate the improvement I got in Skyrim.










Seems to be a bit of an improvement; but it's not a clearly noticeable thing, either. Performance is down a bit; but not much. The only place I've had a real problem with slowdowns was in Vault 11; when the robots mob you in the sacrificial chamber. But, there's so much VFX flying around then that it caused my FPS to tank even before most times.


Also:



The Powder Gangers never knew what hit 'em.


Lighting in FNV continues to be the biggest hurdle to nice screenshots. It's just... so... bad. Even with Fellout installed, the lighting is just shit. It's either washed out like a bad indie flick, or oversaturated orange. I mean; I suppose technically it's better than the green tint that FO3 has, but still.

One of the things I like about my estate is that I set it up with custom lighting -- when you kick the overheads on, the light is white and clean and with only a couple exceptions produces good lighting for screenshots without lots of glare.


Lastly, I wanted to show off screenshots of the new and improved NosCo 1911-A1; with its spiffy new normals that showed off the slide engraving and all... but it isn't cooperating.

Stupid thing looks like it's been drug two hundred miles behind a jeep. So... I'm having to rework the base texture and then hopefully generate a less shitty normalmap from that. Trouble is, as I have said before I am absolutely not a digital artist; so I'm having to resort to evening the texture's many scratches out with a combination of partial-transparency darkening and the blur tool. It's about half done, and barring any catastrophic fuckups will be ready to show off in another day or two. Would be sooner... but I've got one of those sinus-induced eyestrain headaches tonight that make it hard to focus on what I'm looking at; which is not conducive to good texturing. Nor to typing without having to constantly correct mistakes, as it turns out.

Anyway, the NosCo SBH is being more agreeable, so I thought I'd show it off:










As you can see, I still need to do some smoothing on the... well, smooth parts -- the sides of the hammer, stocks, trigger and trigger guard, and the grip frame above the trigger... but man, do those engravings look nice. One unexpected result was that because of how the normalmaps generated, the engravings came out as relief engravings, rather than standard. I have to confess a bit of a weakness for relief engraving; since it not only looks nice, but requires more technical skill to lay out properly and pull off than traditional engraving.

I also have to say I was surprised at how quick and easy it was to pick up creating normals. I had always assumed it would be a lot more involved than it is. I still think texturing in general would be easier with a tablet, though -- I never have been able to draw with a mouse.

Mojave, Nos' Style - Weapons

A good while ago, I mentioned some work I had been doing on a custom-ish revolver in FNV: a .44 version of the .357 revolver. It's always bugged me that they didn't include one in FNV, since here in the real world Ruger has been building both guns on the same frame since the early '60s. At the time, the results I had to show were somewhat mixed -- normal map issues were obvious, the 'NosCo' logo on the ejector rod housing was reversed, and the silver front/silver rear sight arrangement was hard as hell to see clearly.

Well, I haven't been sitting idle; and have indeed made some more progress. The logo on the ERH is fixed and readable now; I've cleaned up those craptastic engravings in the cylinder flutes; and the normal map has been swapped out for the base .357 revolver map, which makes it look like dinged up wood -- but at least the reflection doesn't show the ace of spades anymore. One of the bigger things I did was 'paint' the sights; so that they actually stand out. This, as seemingly always, has had mixed results:



While the sight is painted correctly on the texture, it's either not wrapped onto the mesh right, or the weapon model doesn't align correctly in first person (like half the other models in the game):





If you look close, you can see that the red front sight isn't perfectly centered in the rear sight. I'm inclined to believe that the model doesn't align correctly, since I've long had accuracy problems with the revolver (and the base game .357 model too) while NPCs have no such problem. That I have the issue and they don't suggests to me it isn't an overall accuracy setting or "cone of fire" issue; but that the weapon isn't aiming straight for me. Since NPCs don't aim based on the alignment of the model, it makes sense that they wouldn't have issues with such things. It may be placebo effect, but once I noted the misalignment, I corrected my aim slightly on the bottles in my target range, and found much better hit rates.

I still have no idea what I'm going to do with this thing.

On the up side, I've also been working on a custom-ish Ranger Sequoia, and have been having better luck with it.



The engravings or whatever they are on the recoil shield look like shit; but it at least took the rosewood stocks well, and the sights line up correctly for the painted sights to work worth a damn.

Red front and white rear is a personal favorite here in the real world, because it shows up beautifully against the widest variety of backgrounds. It's way easier to hit something if you can tell where the hell your gun is pointed.

I was pleased to see that the color scheme works in FNV, as well:





From a cosmetic standpoint, it still needs a lot of work; but in practice, I've found it easy to use this revolver to tag radscorpions from nearly a hundred paces out -- with a Guns skill below fifty, no less. It seems that also like in real life, the 45-70 in FNV is a stupidly powerful cartridge, with killing power far beyond what the numbers say it should have. Not quite the hammer of Thor; but used correctly it'll do for damned near any game on Earth -- including the kind that shoots back. Using the NosCo "BFR" (named after the Magnum Research revolver of the same name and chambering; save that where they claim the acronym stands for "Biggest, Finest Revolver" I use the much more common interpretation: "Big Fucking Revolver") indoors on Raiders and such is hilarious; as even limb hits take people right out. Smacks Nightstalkers down like the hand of an angry God.

Lastly, longtime readers will probably know I'm a fan of the 1911, both here in real life and in video games. Obsidian screwed us in the base game with that stupid "10mm Pistol"; but made up for it in Honest Hearts with the "45 Auto" (seriously, guys; it's okay to name guns! Manufacturers do it all the time). I decided I couldn't let that one sit out of my companion plugin, since my girls loves them some 1911-A1s. So, I ripped the meshes and textures from the HH BSA, edited the meshes to reflect the new texture path, and worked over the textures. I made the weapon in 10mm for the base mod, because I have a policy that my personal plugin has zero masters aside from FNV.esm. A 'DLC plugin' I've since created adds a second version in proper .45acp. Here was the result:






I used the heavy-duty slide and upgraded sights meshes as standard (as is standard form these days on "factory custom" 1911's like my Springfields), and worked over the texture. I didn't fix the beat-up finish, but did switch the stocks to green -- was supposed to be olive drab, but the GIMP didn't cooperate -- changed the trigger to a three-hole lightweight match type, swapped the sights' glow effect from green to red, brightened up the barrel hood (which rubs on the inside of the slide and is impossible to keep blue here in real life), and added a white outline to the rear sight. Lastly, I redid the markings on the slide, and serrated the mainspring housing to keep it from slipping around in the palm, and the hammer spur for easier cocking.






The slide markings are nothing outlandish. The right side says simply: "NosCo Arms", and below that on the frame is a serial number. The left side of the slide says "1911-A1". Normally they also carry a chambering marking, but I decided to leave that out so I could be lazy and use the same textures for all versions of the pistol.

The pistol also has a suppressor mod:



Though it's a custom version of the one from HH made for the pistol, and not simply the existing 10mm pistol suppressor mod. In retrospect, I may need to change that just for simplicity's sake.

I set the girls up to each start with one, and fifty rounds of ammo for it; rather than rolling the dice with random weapon spawns as they used to. I figure hey, we have our own underground compound; why not assume they were carrying decent weapons before I got jumped and shot in the head?

While Mystery-chan's a devout revolver practitioner, Maeva seems much more comfortable with a good auto:



Which she used to great effect on the mantises in Big Mountain State Park, after running dry on ammo for her M14...



I wonder if the Weaver she's using is from the base game, or one of the weapon animation replacers I've installed? I really can't remember at this point. Either way, the bugs were decimated in pretty short order; though keeping three companions and myself in 10mm ammo is hard as hell at level two, straight out of Goodsprings.

The four rounds of ammo you see on my HUD in that last screenshot were for a varmint rifle. After crossing through the pass and dealing with the hordes of cazadores, we were already running low of ammo; and I had switched to the looted peashooter to save the .308 for the Fiends I knew were coming in West Vegas. .308 is inordinately hard to come by as loot at such low levels.

And yes, there are M14's as well; but no real screens since they aren't customed or anything -- just copied to my plugin to ease headaches on adding them to starting inventories, and the girls' case-saving lists. Well, one's going to get worked over minorly -- whoever made the original texture stamped the receiver heel of the sniper variant 'Polytech'. Urg. Chicom "M14". Bad enough here in the real world, but n Fallout, where China is the great red menace? Sacrilege. I also stripped out the select fire NVSE code during the copy over, because that stuff is needless and silly and I don't like NVSE on the best of days anyhow.

Yeah; I know I said I'd get them all in today... and it's 2330PST, but give me a break -- I started this post almost eight hours ago, but had to take off and just got home around an hour ago. Stupid life, interfering.