2010

I had a post typed out. Gains and losses; thoughts for the future.

You know what? I'm just not feeling it; and ultimately I doubt it matters.

So I'll just send the same empty "hope" for "change" that everyone else blithely spouts tonight.

Radar.

You people have it, I swear.

A guy tries to take a couple days off, to wade through all the crap involved in getting Lovers running in an Oblivion install (a mod that I am so not linking here, by the way) to see if it's actually as good as people are always going on about. Complex, pain in the ass in general; lots of readmes in Japanese, translated into a form of English that bears no semblance to the real thing. Rather like the old Babelfish translations, now that I think of it...

Anyway. While I was playing with silly adult mods, malcontents have started in again.

A new modder going by badreaper001 has kindly released a new NCCS package with about a half dozen companions. Hampered at the moment by a player who decried that the mod needs the wheel. When pointed to ttomwv's wheel addon for NCCS, he now complains that the wheel conflicts with some other companion mod.

Fucking duh.

Tarrant predicted this about a week after NV went gold; and I've been telling it to people for weeks. No one listens. The problem is the "wheel" buttons don't do anything directly. They're like shortcuts to dialog commands. Trouble is, these shortcuts are hard-coded to be read from only one dialog topic; and the game only allows one override to any given topic. Any further changes simply override the previous override. This means that you get ONE companion mod that will work with the wheel.

I can't fix it. Don't ask. There is no way to code out around it that I'm aware of.

If you people would pick a freaking mod and be done with it, it wouldn't be an issue; but everyone has to have eighteen different companion mods running at any given time.

This is why I won't add the wheel to NCCS by default. I said it before, I'll say it again: conflicts. When and if I can make it reliably selectable, then maybe - but for now I'm not willing to compromise compatibility for the legions of indecisive players who don't read the manual but love posting derisive comments.

The one and only fix I'm aware of to the situation would be to create a sort of merged patch. Problem is, the auto-patch creators that are so favored by the community won't do it. They can't combine multiple edits into one, as far as I'm aware - they only allow you to select which of the combined plugins' edits you want to make dominant. The fix would be to combine all plugins (or at least make one plugin that references all companion master files you use), and manually write in the dialog commands for each companion (or system) into a single edit of the pertinent quest.

Doable? Absolutely; but not on my end. There are simply too many companion mods out there; too many permutations and combinations and options. I could write a hundred merge patches and not cover the possibilities.

And considering that I don't even use NCCS, my odds of spending a week or six writing compatibility plugins for NCCS and every other companion I can find are somewhere akin to the odds of Mars slamming into the Earth next week.

Malcontent #2 is from my RR Companions Pack for FO3. He thinks my eye textures look bad. To which I reply: fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You don't like them? Upload better, or sit down and shut up. I do not take shit about the quality of my mods off of people with eight posts, no kudos, and no uploaded files.

Malcontent #3 actually brought me to a dead stop. As far as I could discern from the PM, the issues revolves around the fact that he is for some reason using Notepad++ to edit a companions plugin for RR, and this is resulting in the script not staying set on the companion. I got an email with an rtf file attached (rich text? Really? What, did I stumble into the wayback machine and end up in 1999?) that when opened was full of encoded game data, master file lists, and resource paths for what looked like a custom race. I offered what advice I could without invoking profanity... but I haven't read the reply PM yet. I did receive another email though that claims to have a copy of the esp file attached... which I also haven't read yet. I'll get around to it; I just need ample time to zen-ize my mind to prepare.

I was telling Herculine the other day that I'm thinking about giving up modding as a hobby. I'm considering taking up something more relaxing... like defusing old Soviet mines in Africa. Anyone know how to say "I need QuikClot!" in Kirundi...?

VICTORY!

You may remember some time ago when I expressed frustration at the hair problems inherent in NV.

I had posited a theory at the time that the issue had to do with bsa files. Since hair worked perfectly from Ling's, but not when I extracted the very same meshes to use stand-alone.

Most people would simply use Ling's or Mikoto's beauty pack in all their companions and other mods.

One look over the 'My Mods' folders on my hard drive will tell you I'm not most people.

I tried creating a bsa file of my own, which was a dismal failure. Rather than fix the issue, it simply removed all the meshes.

Whoopsie.

I shelved the idea for the time, since having messed up hair is better than none at all.

Flash forward to this afternoon. I was trawling the Bethsoft forums, looking for patch information; when the thought occurred to see if there had been any new developments in the bsa area.

Got to reading, and find out that the problem before was with FOMM's bsa creator, and not the game specifically. It seems that bsa creator doesn't correctly include a 'data' folder in the tree inside the archive; so it throws the whole tree off, and the game can't find any of the resources.

Followed some posted advice, set up a special directory tree outside the FONV install for the express purpose of bsa packing - with a setup that allowed for simply selecting 'data' and taking the whole tree (something you can't do in your install directory for obvious reasons).

Sure enough, it worked.

My cosmetic resource works correctly; I fixed my girls' hair - even managed to give Natasha back her correct 'do.












Even fixed my character's ability to wear hats without the hair clipping through:




It's a small victory, granted; but these days I takes what I can gets. Seeing hair styles correctly makes the game less frustrating on the whole, and will actually let me release a 'ported' cosmetic resource.

It also makes my personal mods easier to keep track of. I can pack all the needed resources into one bsa, and not have to deal with directory structures.

Even took the opportunity to get Maeva back up and running with her personal body textures.

Seems the issue at hand was that Obsidian fucked up yet another part of the game engine, which now won't read the egt and egm files for hair unless they're packed into an archive. Without these files, there's nothing to tell the game where to place the hair on the head - so you get the now-prolific off center hairs, bald spots, and mis-sized hair styles when you set an NPC's scale to anything other than 1.

It still amazes the hell out of me that any of these people remain employed.

Frustrations

Had another idea today, to potentially improve companions' combat performance. Unfortunately, it flopped totally.

Not much point going into great detail. Suffice to say that it involved a 'follow' package and a 'combat' package that were scripted to switch out at appropriate times.

Switch worked fine; but it seems that the guard packages don't function the same as they did in FO3. Yet another thing Obsidian fucked up in their mad quest for the "Largest number of flaws in a video game ever" trophy.

Scripting reverted, the damage has been rectified and they operate normally again; so at least I didn't lose ground.

Being back in Fallout after my Dragon Age hiatus is different. I really missed guns. Yeah, being able to cast fireball is neat and all... but it just doesn't compare with shooting someone in the face with a 44 Magnum.

I'd like to see how well one of those damned Revenants stands up to a shotgun barrage, oh yes.

What I didn't miss was the buggy ass companion behavior. They're still freezing up regularly after combat. Compared to DAO where my party did what the hell it was told, it feels like taking a big step back.

Then again, my not having to script in the mutant offspring of C++ buys anything using the Gamebryo engine a lot of leeway with me, so I'm willing to overlook the freezing for the time being.

And they still surprise me. I had ditched my NCCS companions since testing was over with for the time being, and returned to my suite to collect my personal companions. It was after 2200, so I decided to get some sleep and then we'd set out in the morning.

Two of the companions were in bed; with the third roaming the suite.

Flash through twelve hours of sleep. As I get up, so do the two formerly sleeping companions. The third comes in, and climbs into the just-vacated bed.

...They posted a watch for the night...

Testing that the combat behavior was indeed fixed was interesting, as well. Ran through Vault 3, and my girls were looting weapons from Fiends they had killed. [CENSORED] had had her Multiplas damaged beyond use in the fighting outside, and so just randomly decided to loot a laser rifle to supplant the varmint rifle that she apparently really hated using.

I tell ya, Kiddies, if I could just get 'em to do this shit on command instead of on their own whims, my companion system would be the best ever.

Oh, and also? I'm so going to hell:

NCCS - Beta 0.3 Upcoming

So, after one of those lovely panic attacks about 0100 local, I gave up on sleeping tonight; and decided to work on the master a bit.

Dragon Age is beginning to grate on my nerves.

Decided I should tackle the warping dead, since some of you for reasons I will never fathom insist on killing your companions.

Seems I mis-projected the size of the edit required. It ended up being eighty new lines of code; and not fifty. Not a huge deal. Once I set my mind to it, it ended up being a ten minute job - twenty if you count testing.

Killed off three companions, changed cells five times. No dead bodies followed me. The damned thing actually worked on the first try.

I know - I'm amazed, too.

It was good, too; since my first efforts this morning didn't go so well. I had it in my head to add some... new features to my personal companions. Specifically, stripper dancing on command. The NVGECK continues to be a piece of shit, though. Markers wouldn't move, items wouldn't add on script command, idles don't play correctly on command. It's a mess through and through.

Although I did manage to get them to break into dance whenever the follow package was active but we weren't moving:




I, uh... won't be releasing that one into NCCS, however. Issues of considerable silliness aside, it doesn't work quite right. The dancing animation doesn't stop playing when you start moving again; so they follow you while the animation keeps playing. Kind of creepy, really; and I figured people would bitch left, right, and center about the strange idles so it got tabled.

Anyway.

Before releasing 0.3, I think I'm also going to tackle that greeting issue, to stop the deluge of PMs I'm getting (averaging two a day now) from people who skim the guide instead of reading it, and miss that bit about only using voices one through four because the others don't have a motherfucking greeting.

I also added a message that lets you know when one of your companions has died. Unfortunately it can't let you know by name, but a quick head count should narrow down which one bought the farm.

Beyond that... I think we're nearing a 1.0 non-beta, stable release. Everything appears to be working fine if one takes the time to RTFM, so with the system death-friendly, and greetings for the voice types that don't have one in the base game, that should be about the extent of useful without getting cluttered.

I had a couple of other ideas, but really I don't know how badly I want to embark on a quest to add anything that's that much trouble; just to be further accused of breaking games and writing bad guides.

Case. In. Point.

This, this is the shit I'm talking about.

I get up this morning, still slightly miffed that I missed an eclipse on the solstice and the darkest night in four centuries because of the stupid weather and fourteen million giant nightlights for the cowards here in the asshole of the free world.

Open my gmail box to check for comments, then pop over to the NVNexus to check on NCCS... and what do I find in an NCCS comment?

"this has made it where my game has to be reinstaled my game crashes no matter what now and i had alot done ingame with a bunch of other mods that worked fine the SCC for FO3 worked fine but this is a no go now i cqant even play the game "

What? Seriously? If this isn't a joke, someone out there in the universe obviously still hates my guts.

Let's see. We've got: no punctuation, no grammar, no capitalization, no description of the problem, a reference to how many unnamed mods work, and a note that a companion system in another game is better.

Not only that, but the person edited the comment twenty minutes after posting. That was his revised comment! The improved MKII model!

I'm kind of sorry I missed the original. It must have been glorious in its craptacularness.

Note To Self:

7'8" ceilings are not tall enough for a 5'11" man to make an overhead swing with a 34" bladed bastard sword.

Strike low, reverse direction; come around for a strike where the neck meets the shoulder...

*scraping sound*

Fuck!

Oh, how I miss my old house. Vaulted ceilings, it had. Fifteen feet high at the center. There was a beautiful spot of dead space where the hall ended in an empty spot between the living room and dining room. Not much; about fifteen feet square.

Fifteen cubic feet may not a dojo make, but as long as you kept combinations to two or three strokes, you could swing a sword around in there with impunity.

Hate this damned apartment. Nowhere to shoot within forty miles of here, can't even run a sword drill...

*sigh*

Where'd I leave that tube of plaster patch...