Thirdstorm

Wonder how "heavy" that is, scripting wise

1st and 3rd person animations need to be configured differently for many animations as I understand it, I'd check the Race record edits in the mod and see if they added both a 1st and a 3rd person.

As I understand it you can set the Nif up to have an animated sequence and change colors during the cycle, and that's it

Well you have two questions you posed... 1) Can you have effective Radiation Falloff? In theory yes if functioning curve tables can be added and linked 2) Can LoS be a factor, and limit the LoS effect to specific things? Static objects can have keywords added to them, so in theory maybe?

Face Textures and Nif headparts can be a huge pain for Fallout 4, so don't get too frustrated! Question(s): -Custom Race or Vanilla? -Did you add the face textures and headparts to the race record? If you didn't you might need to, and I suggest creating a new race if you need to add them to avoid conflicts, you can make a new race that references humans for all armor records with little trouble. -Did you export the FaceGeometry data for your NPC? If you did, the exported FaceGeometry data does not include Material files, just the hard texture paths and lighting data. Check out your unpacked files (Data\Meshes\Actors\Character\FaceGenData\FaceGeom\Fallout4.esm)

Always better to have multiple "Upgrades" for weapons, makes them more interesting visually, a system for upgrades to make the weapons "Scale" with the players level. Hard to answer, an insane number of Polygons means it will impact system performance, even heavier when in the hands of an NPC. The Vanilla weapons, with all of there mods and nif edits are around 2.2'ish MB +/- (combined nifs in the weapon subfolder when extracted), doubling that isn't a big deal, however having models that are MB's per model will likely hurt the performance on lower end systems Follow the standard x2 multiplier and 1,024 / 2,048 / 4,096 are the standard sizes. Having a weapon that uses multiple 4,096 (or 8,192) textures at the same time will again likely have a negative effect on lower end systems. Using the Combat Shotgun as an example it has 27 different textures for the gun and various parts, but not all of them will be shown at the same time and they range from 512 to 2,048, with a combined size of 74mb (Standard Def) If you can re-use vanilla animations, the only thing not listed are the Material files. As I understand it, most people use either Blender or 3dsMax, but getting licenses for 3ds is not easy (or cheap)

As I understand it, "Damage Falloff" has always been an issue in Fallout 4, for example guns go from doing Max damage to almost no damage at max range to nothing at all just outside that, very sharp change and hard to regulate. However Fallout 76 introduced the wide spread use of "Curve Tables" which link to JSON'S, if someone figured out how to introduce "Curve Tables" via F4SE or some similar method it should be doable in theory.

You only need "None" if you have Scripts or Audio files to add, and then some authors (Kinggath) have found that if you do Standard compression for all of the Materials and Meshes and then change it to none and add the scripts and audio files it will function correctly.

If it's failing to remove a master it's due to a dependency still being rooted in the ESP/ESM.. Sometimes (Rarely) if you've removed all linked files that show up using the script you'll need to restart XEdit before it will allow you to remove the now unneeded master.

Was a little random, which was frustrating.. Some of the Beta testers saw a serious dip in FPS (Don't remember exactly the numbers), others would have textures randomly fail to render (purple, and it was verified the textures were properly archived etc, someone else could use the exact same BA2 re-uploaded by the person it would not work for) and a few people would hang during the load process if the save they tried to load was hitting that specific BA2 heavily.

Speaking from experience you can exceed the 2gb size, the max functional BA2 I put together and tested was close to 4.5gb. That said performance seemed to dip (vs smaller BA2's) and Nexus struggles with Mod downloads of this size.

I made the mistake of making a stupidly large mod and am still working on breaking into several submods, that is really your only option

Late to the party and I saw it's starting again but something to look at / worth mentioning is the "Addon Index" number. Standard Templates are always "-1" with Legendary Templates sequencing numerically from "1" CTD's often occur when editing the Legendary Templates incorrectly in Xedit, if you remove "some" of them leaving either incorrect or incomplete numbering you'll see CTD's..

Sorry for the delay, hectic week. Ok, looking at it more closely I don't see anything that should interfere (projectile etc.) or odd connections. Attacks coming from the ground like that are typically caused by Animations that aren't compatible with the HKX and bone data for the NPC, you can replicate it by linking different attack data to NPC's (aka Feral attack animations on the race record to a normal human) I'm not an expert but it sounds like you'd need to look at the triggering attack HKX and Animation linkages in the Race and see if you've got compatible animations exported.

Off the top of my head without seeing the NPC in action I'd suggest copying the "Larval Spit" as a new weapon and switch it to EitherHand [EQUP:00013F44]. If that doesn't work I'd try adding AltAttackSlot1 [EQUP:00136255] to the race and the weapon and see if it fires. If it still won't fire,I'd look at the original Bloatfly's behaviors and animations and see if that is the issue.