Advances, Again

So... the universe is conspiring to kill me again today; which prevents me from sleeping. As such, I have continued my modding of Skyrim, while I decide what to do with FNV -- and whether to bother telling anyone when I do it.

Firstly, I got Em-Jole working:



Turns out it was a voice issue. I had left it set to copy the original's, and the original Mjoll uses a voice that isn't valid for companions. Shame, as none of the valid ones have that accent that is so a part of her character. A switch of voices later, and she works fine.

You can see there the Grimsever Clone I have her start with; created mainly because I was bored that night.


While tinkering deep in my textures folder, I found that I had indeed installed an "improved" lip tintmask set. Deleted that, and lo' and behold! Lip colorations reappeared on NPCs. Annoyingly, I had to re-export all the facegen texture sets to get the NPCs to show the new colored lips in-game -- apparently the texture generated by the SuCK is exactly what you see in the preview window, regardless of what the actual settings are -- but once that was done, it was a marked improvement:









I had to take the extra of Maeva. I just love those sidelong glances she's always giving me. I can just hear her...

"What the hell are you doing over there...?"

The base game's lip mask isn't as sharp or precisely rendered as the replacer I had installed... but it works; which is more than I can say for the one I deleted.

Also reworked the non-clone 'lesser' companions a bit. Farun got red lipstick, Katheryn got black. Skadi got a lighter red intended to look natural and not cosmetic; and Raven similarly got a medium-blue that looked like a natural lip coloring to go with her skin tone.

No screenshots at the moment, as they were naked at the time (set to no default outfit to keep them from refusing to equip what I give them) and I was too lazy to have them follow me to get armor to equip for SFW screens. I'll get around to it eventually.

Advances in Skyrim Characters

Skyrim is not an easy game to make attractive characters in. As usual, Bethsoft really half-assed the textures, and whoever does their face work needs to go back to admiring Picasso and get the hell out of the gaming field.

I was still running old replacers -- stuff left over from a month or two after the game was released -- so I decided to go through and update to newer, more refined beautifyin' products.

Namely: UNP (by Dimon99; who is not only a hell of a body modder, but a hell of a nice person to boot), the "Blessed" UNP revision (I like my women with curves, what can I say?), and Coverwomen (seamless-for-UNP #4 specifically -- the one with no makeup).

Sadly, I still haven't gotten lipstick to work with anyone but the player; but the other colors -- around the eyes, cheeks, nose, forehead, and neck -- all work well.

Through some trial and error, and reading others' travails it seems that the main issues with Skyrim's faces are that by default the eyes are too close together, the nose too long and low, mouth too high, and chin too long. Even with everything moved, the nose where the bridge meets the brow up between the eyes is oversized and looks like they hired one of Roddenberry's alien designers. I haven't tried a new head mesh since the frontrunners I've looked at over on the Nexus look like crap. I can deal with spot at the top of the nose to keep all my avatars and NPCs from looking quite that surreal, thanks.

And now, for the screens:



This was one of the player characters I sadly lost to corruption before learning about the SPF console command. I wish I had known about it; because I haven't been able to recreate her despite a couple attempts.



While it wasn't intentional, after creating her I got to looking and noticed she looked an awful lot like Milla Jovovich -- albeit with some extra meat on her.



I'm not much on long hair on warrior women (as you may have already guessed) but when I saw this one in the chargen I just had to use it. It just looked so... right on her. Plus, I think a Nord archer woman constantly bitching about how hard it is to take care of that hair in the rough conditions would be so cute...






This is my latest character; whose saves will hopefully not corrupt and die. If they do, though, I've already saved her face for creating a preset NPC out of.

Toyed a bit with the "me" face preset some too... but as in previous games there just isn't much in the way of quality male textures or meshes. Plus I'm not all that attractive, so no character based on me is going to end up in the running for "Sexiest man alive" in the first place. Nope, working with female characters is so much easier.


Haven't really been resting on my laurels where my girls are concerned, either:







I'm still trying to work out a balance on their skin that has them properly pale without being neon... but I think I've worked out the facial features considerably better than in previous attempts. Though the difference in head meshes in games continues to make it all but impossible to directly copy their previous looks.




This was less a screenshot of Maeva; and more my amusement at the notion that as much as we all hate Skyrim shadows and their jaggy looks and performance destroying tendencies... they managed to properly cast her horns. But not her hair, for some damned reason. Oh well, take what you can get and all that, right?

Also, I love the way that Dragonscale crown clips with Natasha's hair. It just looks amazing and dare I say? Realistic. Or at least, insofar as an object made of something that doesn't exist can be realistic.

Now if I could just work out getting their lips the correct colors again.


When my saves started pooching regularly, I got into the habit of trying to create followers from the player characters -- since I rarely create the same character twice in chargen, but liked several of my PCs enough to have them hanging around my home(s) in subsequent games.

Thus was Nos' Lesser Skyrim Followers.esp born...



This was my attempt to recreate the above Milla look-alike player character from those handful of screenshots. Sadly, not only did it not go real well, but I found that that NPCs in the game can't be readily given scars like the player can. This screwed up the character some, since in the original draft she had scars on the right side of her face, but wore her hair long in the front and over that side to try to hide them from plain view. It also looks like I screwed up the eye makeup. May have to take another stab at that some time...

Granted, Skadi is a bit shorter than default player height; but this last shot also illustrates once again just how freaking big Maeva is (canonically, 6'6"; but it tends to vary a bit based on the exact game engine that's rendering her at the time).

Skadi is a light armor/archery build with a minor in one-handed weapons and sneaking. Pretty standard character build for me, since death-from-afar-while-hiding is my SOP in most of these games.




This is pretty much what you think it is. I didn't really like the default Aela's follower behavior, nor having to go through the Companions' questline to get access to her as a follower. So... I cloned her.

Also, I appear to have installed a replacer that makes Draugr armor see-through on women. Don't recall having done that... but it sounds like something I would do, yeah.

Aela's Evil Clone is essentially Aela, just stuck into the EFF/XFL system that I'm going to have to do a writeup on someday, as it's a very nice system that I like quite a bit. Anyway, she's still Aela -- same voice, same combat style, same inventory; just without the quest-related dialogue, and the training ability (which I was too lazy to put in as it requires writing new dialogue -- there's no generic trainer dialogue in the game; it's all NPC specific). Even kept the same athletic body type.




This is Raven, another salvaged PC. I had decided I wanted to play a dark elf for some reason, but used the ridiculously long hair of the Milla build, 'cuz hey; elf. Elves are supposed to have long pretty hair, or something. After the amount of time I spent de-uglying her face in the chargen, I had to make her a follower when the saves went kerflooie. She was supposed to have scars, too.

She's a similar build to Skadi above; but with more sneaky sneaky and less melee. I may have also thrown in some low-level destruction; I can't remember and I'm not firing up the SuCK to check.




I always have to have at least one vampire follower in any fantasy game, and here she is. I reached waaay back into my brief teenage association with the Goth scene (you think I'm bad now? should have known me back then...) and named her Katheryn. I resisted the urge to tack on "Darkemoon" as a family name for maximum cheese.

She's a dual-wield assassin type, with a minor in archery. I did cheat a bit and remove the sun-damage trait from her vampirism, just for playability sake. She is also short and slim.








This is a bit of a break for me; as this character is not an original design of mine, nor a salvaged player character.

There's a slightly silly (and very adult) flash-based game called Slave Maker 3 that I found some years ago, which revolves around training characters to be proper slaves for later sale and whatnot. It uses pictures collected from around the interwebz to display the characters, and so nearly all the possible "slaves" are in fact video game or anime characters. It's one of those games that makes me feel I may have more mental issues than I generally give myself credit for... but the stat-training and min/maxing nature is engaging when I'm feeling micromanagery.

Anyhow. In said game, there's a courtier you can run into by the name of Lady Farun; who is one of the more prominent nobles in the kingdom. While an original character as far as I know, all the art that depicts Farun is actually of a character from an old console fighting game -- I can't remember offhand if it was King of Fighters or the first DoA. After a bout of play that apparently lasted too long and too late, I began to think one night that Farun was the sort of character who would be fun to have in Skyrim; so I threw one together and put her in the Blue Palace for recruitment.

Since the various artists of the collected artwork used in the game never came to a consensus on details like which side her hair parts on, and whether her eyes are blue or green; I just based the companion roughly on the art, and filled in the blanks from my own aesthetics -- going with the hair that I thought looked best in the preview window, and blue eyes (not a huge fan of green eyes, personally); some heavier eyeliner as seems to be perennially popular in royal courts.

I have to say... the result was far better than I expected; and while maybe not "stunning", she certainly did turn out damned nicely as far as Skyrim goes.

The Lady Farun character in the game wasn't really a combat character, so the class was left completely up to me. I decided that a courtier in Solitude would most likely do things the Imperial way -- heavy armor, sword and shield. I was mostly planning on using her as eyecandy around one or another of my player houses, so the class wasn't all that important... but I hate making companions that can't be used if necessary.


Lastly, there's also a Mjoll Evil Clone... but she doesn't work. I'm not sure whether I selected an incorrect voice type or what, but she won't speak to the player at all. I spent last night's play time fighting with mods and play-testing to see whether their removal broke anything or improved anything; so haven't really had a chance to pop back into the SuCK to try and fix her. It's a shame, really -- I gave her a copy of Grimsever and everything.

I'll probably regret it (I usually do) but I'm strongly considering actually releasing the 'lesser companions' plugin once I get Evil!Mjoll working right.

...Also, it's been a couple hours and I've been reading TES generals in another tab off and on long enough that now that I'm out of screenshots, my train of thought is completely destroyed. So I think I'll just shut up now.

Vacationing in Skyrim

So... you may have noticed (or not) that I randomly went dark before actually finishing my series of posts on the greatest FNV mod you'll never get to play (never miss an opportunity to twist that knife, Kiddies!).

To the considerable chagrin of several people, I didn't die. After nine odd weeks of heavy modding, I was just burning out on FNV something fierce.

About a month or five weeks ago I decided to pick Skyrim back up. I got to play it for all of about a week on 1.5, which worked beautifully... before Bethsoft "upgraded" to 1.6 (and Steam helpfully auto-updated it despite being told not to); which is a steaming pile of shit, and just goes to prove the notion many of us have that their patch team either hate our guts, or are the most incompetent bunch of fucks to ever be employed in the software field. How they managed to break something that was already fixed is beyond me... but hey! We have mounted combat now! Sometimes, sorta, with most races; for people who ride horses in the game. I don't, so it's a total waste to me; but I'm sure some mid-level manager considers it an accomplishment. Personally, I'd rather have a construction set that worked worth half a shit... but that may just be me.

Since upgrading to 1.6, though... the game experience went to hell. I've lost five sets of saves now to corruption (average save-game life is about ten to fifteen hours' play time). Framerates dropped from an uninspiring but playable 20 - 25 to five to ten; and there was about a twenty percent chance of BSoD on every cell change.

I've since begun a purge on my data folder. Dropped from over fifty mods to thirty-five; and aggressively removed anything and everything not actively required to run my game with the mods I kept. The big kicker seems to have been scripts; which are a clusterfuck in Skyrim. Rather than being contained inside the esps as in previous games, scripts are now separate objects that sit in their own folder. Between the mods that "improve" scripts they shouldn't, and the ones that are just plain badly written; that script folder seems to be the lion's share of my issues. I've cleaned out what I could; but since most people don't care enough to tag their custom content to make it easier to identify which plugin it belongs to... I've got to now go through each archive in my downloads folder, and check each one for scripts -- then delete any scripts not found to be contained within said archives.

My initial purge included removal of Deadlier Dragons and Jaysus Swords. With just those two gone, FPS have returned to over 20 and last night I managed over eighty minutes of play before the game hit an infinite loading bug on fast travel and had to be manually killed via Windows task manager. Which sounds bad... but is an immense improvement over five minutes of stuttering followed by a BSoD or hard lock. I'm hoping when I work up the giveafuck level required to finish the purge, it'll return things to the three-hours-at-a-time play I used to have. Not holding my breath; as 1.6 seems to be a horribly buggy patch... but anything will be an improvement over last week.

Heard an interesting note on Skyrim performance several days ago, too. The theory was professed that shadows in the game are so problematic for framerates and reliability in general because to make it console-friendly, Beth hard-coded the engine to run all shadows through the CPU, rather than GPU. So not only do shadow-heavy areas tend to cause CPU clogging, but when you hit an area with more shadows active than your CPU can render all by its lonesome, it just says fuck it and refuses to try. Sadly, the refusal to try does not end in shadows simply not being rendered -- it tends to result in more sinister things and then profane yelling from my direction.

Not something I have the resources to run down and verify; but it certainly fits the symptoms my PC has been experiencing since day one trying to run the game -- and would also explain why my craptastic little eMachine here will handle other higher-drain games with aplomb; but crashes and burns with regularity where Skyrim is involved even at low settings. Rather a hope-killer if true; since combined with its piss-poor multi-core and large RAM support, that means you effectively cannot upgrade a computer enough to provide good, stable performance with the game.

After finding out about the shadows, I hit on an idea. Disable them. I don't mean through that hand-holding kiddie-shit launcher and its sliders that may or may not actually do anything; I went into the ini files and disabled all shadows -- set all distances to zero, all radii to zero.

And... it worked. FPS through the roof; no more stutter; load times were fast, and no crashing. Well, at least during my limited play-test session -- crashing would probably have resumed eventually; it seems to mostly be a matter of when the game fills up my cache, so no shadows should equal slower filling.

Sliiiight down side that it also killed most lights. Not quite sure which setting labeled 'shadow' affects dynamic lights... so I reverted the ini files to backups (see? this is why we always make backups before editing ini files...) until I have time to go through setting by setting and see which caused the issue. Considering that even with the mods purged, the engine itself still has Beth's trademark memory leak... checking all those settings one by one will take awhile.

But since I know none of you come here for my pseudo-philosophical prattle, have some screenshot posts...

Random Companion Musing #1344C

No, this still isn't the post detailing all the neat new stuffs I've learned to do with companions during the latest modding binge. Deal with it.

While playing yesterday, I had cause to pick up Cass and Veronica (via the Unlimited Companions mod available on the Nexus) to test an ancillary feature of another mod I was playing with (a non-game breaking one, as far as I can tell).

I already had Veronica, but needed more points in speech or barter to successfully get Cass, and so dropped into Vault 11 (which we happened to be near to) to get in some kills and get another level. I had Veronica kitted out with Brotherhood T-51b recovered from Repconn HQ, and one of the GRA unique energy weapons; I forget now whether it was the Gatling laser or the plasma caster.

I had left Natasha at home to cut down on system load spikes and general traffic jams, but still had Mystery-chan and Maeva in party to keep us an even fire team.

When we got into the Vault, I was floored by the difference in performance between Veronica and my two redheads.

As soon as the red marks appeared on the HUD, my girls went hunting. They generally go full-on search & destroy whenever the AI registers an enemy trying to find and/or attack me, and this time was no different. They saddled up and took off in a team, clearing every enemy they could detect.

Leaving them to their fun (and knowing full well I'd not manage to get a single XP out of the deal even if I did tag along) I headed on for the reactor room.

Along the way I was amused to hear several shots from a riot gun, followed by "You like that?!" Never a dull day with that demon around...

Veronica, apparently not being the type to run off on a killing spree, stayed with me. Moving through, I had the odd mantis to deal with myself. I had put away my M14 and was using a marksman carbine loaded with .223 -- since I'm not going to waste my good ammo on bugs and rats -- and after capping a couple, I was amazed to turn around and find Veronica... hiding. Crouched behind a corner, didn't even try to engage the enemy.

Conversely, a couple days ago we happened to be cleaning out another area with rats; and one got the jump on me. Natasha -- the least aggressive of my girls by a wide margin -- still put eight rounds into the rat, even though I turned and capped it from the hip with my BFR. I guess she wanted to be sure it was dead.

Later, when heading into the diner area, I was shooting mantises out around the furniture... to, y'know, avoid setting off the boobytraps and all. What should I hear from behind me? "For the Brotherhood!"

Oh, Gods, she's not going to...

...and about that time, a power-armored brunette blasts past me into the diner, setting off the explosives.

Fortunately, I'm quick on the uptake and ran like hell for cover as soon as I realized what she was doing. The explosion blew her clear across the room (would have killed her, if not for the little edit I made to her essential flag -- case in point as to why it's important, "realism" or no) and even as far away as I got, crippled both my legs and took me below 20% health. Well, there goes a doctor's bag and hydra I didn't want to spend...

So, let's tally score:

*Refuses to engage in normal combat, when I am being attacked.

*Charges in and sets off traps when I'm trying to fight from a distance and not in immediate danger.

*Defaults to nigh-useless melee combat style; can not engage in proper ranged combat without mods.

...and people wonder why I create my own companions...

Shortly after that, the sadistic duo caught up with us, just in time to brush the debris off of me. I like to imagine there would have been some vehement recriminations in Veronica's general direction if they were able.

On the rest of the way through the Vault, I found that sure enough -- they had killed everything they could find. All that remained standing was a few bugs that had been behind locked doors; and of course the robots in the basement.

You don't want to know what the M14-equipped redheads did to those poor combat droids... In that fight, Veronica even managed to get off one or two shots; while the rest of us were going for broke.

Did learn a new method for screwing over that trap, too. Laid a pair of pulse mines on one of the walls where it opened up to let the robots kill me; and as soon as the wall opened I shot the mine. Its explosion triggered the second mine, and the two pulse waves knocked out a couple of the combat sentries or whatever the big 'bots are called on that side; just leaving the turrets to clean up. While I was doing that, my girls handled the protectrons on the other side, and the whole fight lasted all of about seven seconds; with no injuries on our side.

Once acquiring Cass' services, I found she was little better. For all her talk, she's not very aggressive; and won't range far looking for an enemy. I suppose that could be considered a good thing, since it means she and Veronica stay near the player... I guess I'm just too used to my companions; who very much have a "lead, follow, or get out of my way" thing going on when a fight breaks out.

I'm still tempted to try rewriting their behavior into an actual squad dynamic -- that is, staying with the player even when combat breaks out -- but previous attempts haven't gone well. Before I tried an actual formation: each person having a specific spot in the stack, and staying where they're supposed to... but it broke the game. While they'd fall into formation correctly, for some reason it precluded their actually entering combat. Never did figure out why. That was in FO3, though; it may be less bad in FNV (though I doubt it).

Failing that, I'm also thinking of a behavior setting -- similar to NCCS' follow distance, except it'll swap them to a different follow package that has 'continue during combat' checked, rather than a different distance. 'Continue during combat' for those of you who don't do AI packages, when used on a follow package has the NPC stay close to the player even when a fight breaks out. They try to stay at the specified distance from the follow-ee, and rather than running off to attack, will only engage enemies as they come into range on their own. Given the relative lack of medical care in the wasteland, and just how nasty most of the beasties are, I'd think sticking together would be the better option anyway.

...Damn it, now I want to script that up; but I still haven't finished unfucking the game, itself yet...

Up The Wall

...Or, Making me second guess myself.

I've gotta confess, FNV is driving me insane, lately. Well, more-so than I normally am, anyway.

There for awhile, I had it working more or less well; and could play mostly crash free. That game is apparently gone. Played most of yesterday, and it's back to its old standby of crashing completely at random. Can be two minutes in, can be two hours; and every third or fourth loading screen results in either crash or lockup. I've gotten quite habitual at tapping the quick save key.

Far as I can tell, it's all memory-related. The game crashes when loading, as in loading screens; but almost every play-time crash is when it's either loading in new terrain/buildings, or activating spawns to "pop in" the 3d models of actors/creatures. With the occasional crash during the start of combat -- but I've ranted more than once over the memory drain of companions when combat starts. I don't know what they're doing, but the game uses a massive amount of memory for about ten seconds and then goes back to normal. If the memory leak that Bethsoft could never be bothered to fix already has the cache in a sad state when that massive draw hits... well, imagine the noise Wile E. makes as he heads for the desert floor.

It's actually gotten to the point that it's made me doubt my PC here. Granted, the eMachine here would turn the stomach of most "serious gamers"; but for the relative pittance I paid for it back in 2007, it's given one hell of a term of service even if it pooches tomorrow. All the crashing, the BSoDs, performance problems; it's all made me think at various times that I had a virus, my RAM was going bad, and the GPU had fried/was in the process of frying (long-time readers may recall that I had a GPU pooch in 2009, taking me out of FO3 for a couple weeks; so I'm a bit paranoid about it happening again).

And of course, the problems are near identical in Skyrim. Random crashes (mostly on loading new cells or assets); and BSoDs if I'm not careful about keeping Firefox reined in before trying to play (Flash has a happyfuntime memory leak, too). So naturally, it's my PC, right?

Well...

Occasionally, I feel the need to put things into perspective; or just to play something different. From time to time, I'll abandon my usual haunts in favor or enacting death and destruction on much larger scales -- strategy games. Anyone who's played it can tell you Sins of a Solar Empire is no slouch in the system hardware drain arena, and a while back when frustrated beyond my tolerance by Skyrim, I played an entire medium-large campaign in one sitting. To the tune of seven hours and change; straight. Not only did it not crash, but when done it unloaded from Windows memory without incident (though it took about five minutes to fully clear... yowch) and I was able to continue computing normally.

Huh, so that's what happens when you have an engine written by people who actually play games, instead of people just looking for a paycheck. Between Bethsoft and EA fucking me over every chance they get, I sometimes forget companies like Stardock exist. Shame they don't do sandbox FPS/RPG hybrids. Probably wouldn't have any asinine DRM, either...

Anyway, what got me thinking about all this was yesterday morning I was browsing around a Fallout forum and happened to be linked to Slof's site; where I saw her notation that Fallout 3 and NV were too crash-happy for her and had been abandoned.

It really sucks, because I love FNV and Skyrim in concept. It's just that in execution... Trying to get either game working worth a damn is rather like pulling teeth prior to the advent of anesthetic -- all you can really do is take a big drink of something high-proof, grip the chair arm tightly, and hope for the best. And much like pulling teeth, at the end of the day you usually wish you had spent it doing something else.

On an interesting note: despite being nominally the same engine as the other three (they can say what they want; Skyrim is still absofuckinglutely Gamebryo; just with a more annoying scripting format shoehorned in), Oblivion is pretty stable. I can play it three or four hours; with only the odd (once? twice a week, maybe) crash caused by some less than ideal scripting in some converted Japanese mods I won't go into the exact nature of here. It also at least partially destroys the "it's my PC" theory as well; since the way I have it set up Oblivion is more of an overall memory drain than FNV -- I've installed entirely too many HGEC bodies and armors; and the amount of drain that game can rack up is astounding, even at the relatively low graphics settings I run. Still, the memory leak wasn't as bad in that iteration of the engine, so it takes longer for the game to crash and burn.

Still, I'm not sure what I'm going to do about FNV. It would figure that right after I get my estate finished the damned thing stops working right. Probably has something to do with some mods I installed last month in an attempt to "make the game more interesting". Populated wasteland and casinos, angel park, a world of pain, the monster mod, and a few others...

They fucked my game so bad it's worthy of a Lifetime daytime movie about the evils of rape. I resisted ranting about them at the time because I try hard not to step on other modders' toes; especially when I don't know exactly what went wrong where... and "momod" broke my game so fucking bad I never got a chance to run down exactly what did it. It's MMM all over again. The others were varying levels of suck, fail, and pointless.

I cleared all the stuff out, of course... but not all at once. I had some foolish notions of being able to salvage some of the mods, and kept them active into the early stages of the game I'm currently playing. This, obviously, was a mistake. Judging by how much bigger each save file I make is than the previous one, it looks like there may be some bloat in there someplace. Probably doesn't help that I've modified my load order multiple times, and had to fix the master listing in two WME plugins to get them to behave -- savegames tend not to like having stuff like that changed.

So, it's looking like much as I don't want to -- especially being thirty-four hours in now -- I'm going to have to dump this set of saves; wipe them all, and start an entirely new game, since somehow my "clean save" ended up with Armor By Race in it (don't ask how -- I turned that stupid thing off at least a dozen times, and it would never shut down; I ended up having to delete the piece of shit to make it go away). After, of course, going through my data directory with a fine toothed comb and purging out every mesh and texture that isn't supposed to be there anymore.

I realize they weren't as moddable; but sometimes I miss the old days of gaming. You kids in the audience may not know this, but before the internet became ubiquitous, companies had to put out games that worked reasonably well at release. "Patching" involved disks (yes, with a K) and could be very expensive business. Of course, I don't have to memorize the IRQ, DMA, and Hex address of my game port and sound card for modern games... so there is that up side.

You know, I spent an hour or so yesterday morning working on my 1911's here at the desk while waiting on FNV to stop being stupid, and I have to confess: the older I get, the more I prefer that sort of stuff. I swear, games just get more and more unreliable and randomly coded every year... but steel will always be steel; and will always obey physics. Now if I could just figure out how to get that damned leather to stop squeaking... or failing that, I suppose I could break down and buy my own kydex forming table...

Mojave, Nos' Style - Armor

Another part of last night/this morning's modding binge was armor.

One of the things I did in my revamp of my personal companions plugin was raid my mod archives for armor and clothing I liked. Plugins were irrelevant -- I only needed meshes and textures. Found some interesting stuffs; mainly things for the girls to wear around the house when not adventuring (and I spent more than a bit of time rewriting their companionscripts to automatically switch between said outfits depending on what cell they were in at the time).

The problem is, as any long-time reader of the window into my insanity will know, I don't like dressing my companions like whores to go adventurin'. I like practical armor -- stuff that actually offers protection, both from attacks and from sun and wind.

This is an issue because good and practical armor in these games is few and far between. Men get jack and shit as a rule, and most of the well done female armor borders on pornographic -- some does way more than border.

I generally use Dragonskin Tactical Outfits for me and the girls, but those have the twin disadvantages of being obscenely expensive (the DTO bonus pack-added Multicam outfit runs upwards of 18k caps, as I recall) rendering it mid-late game before I can afford four sets; and there's also the matter that it isn't cut for the larger T3 bodies. Look, I know good tactical gear doesn't leave tits hanging out... but when you're packing DDs? They don't make enough sports bra to completely flatten that chest-bulge.

Base game armors come converted (many, at least) but are almost universally terrible. Leather armor is decent; but suffers from low DT, and a pronounced lack of bullet-resistance. Metal armor looks like something from Mad Max. The so-called "combat armor" leaves the arms and hands totally exposed -- I can only surmise Bethsoft's modelers have never ventured far from their offices, and thus have no idea that things like long sleeves, gloves, and elbow pads are all very handy when rolling around in the desert and/or working your way through brush. I tell you, I only had to go down into one pile of what I thought was sand but actually turned out to have rocks and glass in it before I learned the value of a good set of knee and elbow pads. We won't even talk about how much fun it is running your elbow into a doorframe without pads on -- don't worry though, the damage does eventually heal... usually.

Anyhow, I was downloading some Type3M converted armors awhile back, and glancing through the meshes in Nifscope.

I quite like the Cass' Outfit rework -- even if it isn't field-worthy -- but what got my attention more was the converted Stealth Armor from OWB. Good stats, nice sneak effect, the armor covered plenty of skin and actually had gloves... It would have to be added directly to my plugin, since the set in OWB is singular (and a pain in the butt to get, as I recall) but aside from that it wouldn't be bad...



...Oh, right. Now I remember why I didn't like the Stealth Armor. Where in the hell do these texture makers hang out, that black with a day-glow white racing stripe is considered stealthy?

Well, I wasn't going to let that little detail stop me. To the GIMP we go!




Left-to-right we have original, black (which ended up not -- in-game it looks bright gray), desert, Multicam, and olive drab.

I couldn't decide which would work best in NV.




Here we have the OD in the closet. Those fluoros don't do the stealthiness any favors, either...

So, taking it outside under more natural lighting, we have the desert colored stealth suit:




Multicam:






And all three:














I decided right off that the green just wasn't going to work. It was just too artificial looking. Which left it between the MC and desert. After careful consideration, and wandering around half the northern wastes, we decided desert won out. MultiCam had better versatility -- doing sand, forest, and indoors equally well -- but desert was just too much better outdoors, especially with so little of the Mojave being greenery.






And of course, you can see the male version there in that last one, since I was hardly going to be left out of our new team uniform.

The metal parts ended up a little... orange; but with the normal map it is impossible to get those pieces to not shine, short of masking the entire thing with 100% opacity camouflage (which I didn't think would look good).

You'll also notice if you look in the last several shots that the Alexscorpion thigh holster I mercilessly ripped from Ling's got a retexture from black to multicam. Yeah, I know, I use it a lot; but it's one of the few patterns that can be applied at 20 - 30% opacity and look decent while still letting you see underlying details to make it look like less of a hack job.


Edit: also, just realized that the third screenshot in this post marked my 500th screenshot since installing FNV. Wow, that's a lot of screenshots for mods no one even likes.

Mojave, Nos' Style - Updated Estate

So, this isn't actually what post #4 was supposed to be. Post #4 was going to be companions. I have the un-posted-post sitting in my drafts list and everything.

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.