Silver Lining

Well, things are rapidly going into soap opera territory on the Nexus.

Now I'm having meaning assigned to my words where none was stated by me. Fun stuff. I guess some people still haven't figured out I mean what I say by and large - incidents of eloquently calling someone's lineage into question notwithstanding.

But, my Saturday is looking up. Got awoken this morning from my favorite DD pillows by the delivery of a box from Abilene, Texas. Inside was ten, twenty round carbine mags. (caught a hell of a sale - some days I love the internet)

Twenty rounds, of course, being the proper capacity for an autoloading rifle or carbine mag. Thirties are just too damned long; and the twenties have the added bonus of catering to my OCD. One box of ammo = one magazine. Win and more win. Don't even get me started on forties, drums, and those new Surefire quad-stack monstrosities.

Almost makes it worth getting woken up. Almost. Since now I'm no longer in sleepy-land where I can pretend to be dead for awhile.

Copyright: Silence Means Yes?

Mildly annoyed this evening.

Went to see True Grit (which would have been decent enough, except for the douchebag a few seats down who had to comment on every action, scene, line of dialog, and event). Get home, get the hot water for my dinner nuking, and open my email box.

I have a Nexus PM. A few days ago, I got PM'd by someone asking to translate NCCS into Russian. I've been busy, and haven't replied yet.

Today, I get this:

"I asked you for permission to publish your fashion on Russian resources, but not received an answer. I was sure that your excellent work will be popular with Russian gamers, so I took it upon myself to make it available on our website: (URL removed to not front traffic to them)"

So... I have the audacity to not spend my every waking moment answering PMs... and silence means acquiescence?

Oh, how I do so love the fucking internet.

Worst part: I was going to say yes, because when he said translate, I thought Nexus. Nowhere that I can recall was a totally different web site mentioned.

Now, I'm less inclined. But, of course, this is the internet; so if I say no they'll just rip it off anyway.

Edit: I just checked the original PM, and it came yesterday. Apparently twenty-four hours is the limit of copyright. My bad.

Colourwheel

Avid watchers of the TESNexus may have noticed that the lady is back; and working on mods again both old and new.

I have to say, I've been a fan of hers for some four years now, and run about a dozen of her plugins at any given time in my game.

Recently, she released a new, all-in-one type collection; that also includes more "humanized" beast races. The main aim is basically to put the female sexy into Oblivion as much as possible; without going to the extreme (and laughably so) of such over the top things as DMRA.

This new mod is titled Colourwheel's Sexy Oblivion Overhaul. If you have a thing for sexy ladies, and aren't too uptight about your "lore-friendliness", you should seriously try it out.

I have it downloading as I type this. Install will likely be a bit complex for me; since I've overwritten many of Colourwheel's modified armor and clothing meshes with new ones that have BBB support. Still, I'm confident it'll be worth my time to install this one anyway. The new collection will also consolidate her other mods into one esp; for those of you who run entirely too many mods and are beginning to have issues with the number of plugins in your data directory.


Update: I've played a bit on 2.6 now, and the overhaul officially rocks. Had one incompatibility issue with Elaborate Eyes, which took me all of five minutes to fix myself in the CS. The new Khajiit girls are ridiculously cute. Anime-catgirl-esque stuff.

Other than the humanized beast girls, it's pretty much business as usual; save that it's all collected into one handy-dandy esp now. Wish it was an esm so I could make companions on the new races, though.

NCCS - V0.3 Uploaded

I finished off 0.3 this morning, and went ahead and uploaded it.

I had been holding off, hoping to come up with some way to not include a GREETING... but I couldn't do it. This debacle with wardminator aside; I still get two to three "bug reports" a week from people who use voices that have no greeting in the base game. There's also the issue with the NV Shojo's child voices not working right...

New Vegas is basically a mess, where voices are concerned. I really wish players would have simply learned not to use these voices; not just to keep from having to include extra dialog myself; but because a lot of the game's voices really are pretty poorly put together.

In testing, I found most of the voices that don't have greetings also don't have goodbyes. They don't have the lines that the NPC yells when the player knocks something over, or muzzles them with a weapon. I didn't test far enough to see if they have combat dialog.

Really... it's a pretty half-assed production on Bethesda's part.

There's only the one greeting at the moment. A simple "Yes?" that should be generic enough to work for the time being. Eventually, I will add some more to become a random listing of greetings, but I want to make sure the stuff works, first.

There may well not be any voicing coming, either. By the look of it, most voices in the game don't have a generic greeting. This means that they may well likely not have a generic greeting voice file, either. Beyond that, there are simply a slew of voices, now. Twelve for female adult, alone - not counting uniques. This is going to lead to a staggering number of voice files, and I'm quite frankly not inclined to go sifting through twenty or thirty thousand voice files to pick out fifty to set up for greetings.

Setting up voicing for one, lone companion is an annoyance. Doing it for an entire system that can use any voice type in the game... that's a full-time job for a couple weeks, at least - maybe longer. I hate to be a mercenary about this, but you people don't pay me. At all. So I can't say as I'm thrilled at the prospect of jumping into that workload.

I also tossed in the code to remove dead companions from the system; so they don't get teleported after you. I still can't figure out the fascination with killing off your companions... but I will confess that this was an oversight on my part, yes. An oversight which I apologize for.

I'm also more than a bit curious how you people keep getting your companions killed. Granted, it may have something to do with the combat style I use for them, but my girls don't get taken down. I put them in decent armor, and keep them supplied with stimpaks, and they thank me by kicking the holy living shit out of anyone we come across who's dumb enough to start trouble. Then again, I tend to treat my companions as I would members of a real fireteam I was in charge of. I make sure they've got medical supplies, decent armor, a good weapon, and plenty of ammunition. To the point that I'll actually take lesser equipment myself; to kit them out better. The point, boys and girls, is to be a team; and not to have several disposable people following you around. A leader looks out for his crew; be they flesh and blood or ones and zeros.

From here, I think we're nearing non-beta status. There isn't really much more to add to the system. Stability seems to be good (as good as can be, considering the sorry state of the game engine, anyway). There will likely be some expansion of dialog to include more randomized responses just to give extra personality, but aside from that and another combat style or two, I can't think of much more that the mod needs.

New Look

You probably noticed, I added a banner image for the blog; as well as updated my avatars here and on the Nexus.

Well, the Nexus you may not notice; since it hasn't propagated through their system yet or something. Who knows how long that change will take to show up.

Anyway; The banner's a bit taller than I wanted, but I couldn't figure out a way to get it short and wide and still look cool. Just hard to show me and three NPCs in a wide format, I suppose.

Bit pretentious, I know; but I like it.

A smaller version of the banner will be going up to my uploaded mods on the Nexus soon; and added to the NCCS companion creation tutorial, too.

More Flaws

I'm cooled off from yesterday. Well, mostly.

I still think wardminator is a complete jerkoff... but until they give us the ability to choke the holy living shit out of someone across the intarwebz, what're y'gonna do, y'know?

Anyway. Had another report this morning of dialog issues.

I'm not even annoyed at the players for not understanding the concept that NCCS doesn't include any greetings. I'm just... amazed.

It seems like every other mod released now, the author has monkeyed with the GREETING topic and not cleaned his plugin properly (or you know... at all).

I don't remember the influx of new modders we got when FO3 won GotY being this stupid and inattentive. I really don't.

Regardless... much as I hate to do this, we're rapidly approaching the point where I'm left little choice but to write in an NCCS-specific greeting that will override all others for the companions. It'll fix a myriad of complaints, it's true... but it'll also be unvoiced - because I'm not sorting through twenty thousand voice files anytime soon - and I like my companions having a voiced greeting. I'm sure someone will bitch in my general direction about that, too... but I think those bitches will be fewer in frequency than the "HALP MY DIALOG R NO WERK!" ones I'm getting three times a week, now.

Well... it worked well enough for CM, didn't it?

Flaws

People create unnamed mod that adds a "modern penthouse" for the player attached to Gomorrah.

Whoopsie, gave you enough information to search out the mod there, didn't I?

One of the authors of said penthouse comes to me, says NCCS is flawed, because it uses a greeting that isn't directed at any npc; and so conflicts with his mod because it doesn't include any dialog at all.

Yeah, I know; it doesn't make sense to me either.

So... apparently, my mod is flawed in that I choose to use the base game's GREETING dialog topics to preserve voiced greetings without adding a bunch of voice files.

So now I have a two page PM detailing to me how I'm so wrong, and that I should really fix it because most players aren't expert modders like he is, and thus cannot fix it themselves.

Despite the fact that our latest malcontent was too much of a chickenshit to name his mod so I could look at the problem myself (I guess I'm just supposed to accept his word?) I easily found it by checking his posting habits on the NVNexus. They didn't even spell Gomorrah correctly. "gammarah"? Really? I swear, if the US public schools get any fucking worse we're going to be living out Idiocracy...

I see also that said author posted his maligning of NCCS in the comments of his mod.

In any event, I downloaded the latest version of the penthouse and the update. Tested, and it does cause companions to be unspeak-to-able. Ran it through FNVEdit.

Lo' and behold, tell it from the fucking mountaintop! An edit to one of the base game's GREETING topics; deleting its dialog and leaving it an empty entry.



"My mod contains no dialog yet" my pallid white ass.

Deleted his edit that ostensibly didn't exist? NCCS works perfectly again.

This, boys and girls, is a perfect example of why you should get your shit straight before you call someone out.

...And it's about to be an example of why it's a bad idea to malign someone else's work in a public forum when you're blatantly wrong...


"@wardminator:

It took me a few seconds to find your mod, since you weren't kind enough to tell me the name so I could have a look at the issues myself; but I downloaded a copy and had a look anyway.

I tried NCCS and the penthouse here at the same time, and did indeed encounter an inability to speak to companions.

If you actually did inspect your penthouse in FNVEdit, you're not much on detail. It took about twelve seconds to find an edit someone made to one of the base game's GREETING dialog topics, as seen in this handy dandy screenshot, taken of v1.1 in FNVEdit. As you can see, you deleted the infos from the 'What do you need?' greeting. This is the one that most commonly comes up for NPCs without a dedicated greeting - regardless of voice type, so naturally it causes problems. The green color of the dialog topic name, for the record, indicates an override.

Sure enough, I deleted the edit from your plugin, and NCCS works perfectly again.

Also for the record: the reason there is no greeting dialog assigned to the NCCS dialog container quest is because there is no greeting topic included in NCCS to begin with. While there are plans to add one at a later date to accommodate the number of voice types that Obsidian didn't see fit to give us one for, it hasn't been enough of an issue thus far to warrant overriding all greetings in the game for companions.

There is no flaw in my dialog that I'm aware of; save perhaps my writing style and adherence to grammar structures that aren't as widely accepted as they once were.

The flaw, I fear, is in people who edit things unintentionally, and don't take the time to clean their plugins.

Further, it would be greatly appreciated if you would get your facts straight before maligning someone's work in public like this.

Have a nice day, and a happy new year."

Yep. I posted his actual Nexus username. Fuck him, his mod, and the horse that brought 'em both to market.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go do something else now and try to suppress the urge to delete all my uploaded mods to save me the trouble of being constantly harangued by you morons.