obfuscate

So I've beaten the game (tehcnically) and pretty much just wander around to see what I might have missed now. I find this generator on the side of the quarry junction office building, and seems I can effect it, using skill to repair it, or permanently sabotage it. This concept floats around the back of my head for a while until later I'm in the gas station at the bottom of the hill between Nipton and the outpost, thinking "this would make a good store, if there weren't so many broken shelves." So, idea 1 occurs to me.... -broken metal shelf as an acitvator -calls to script, checks repair skill -pass skill check, consume a hammer and let's say 3 scrap metal -disable broken metal shelf and activate a non broken one it its place The same feature/functions could be used on wooden display shelving too I guess. Just assume you scavenged, or rearranged wood on teh shelf itself, account the metal as nails/screws, and do the same swap out. Being in my brain, this idea quickly spirals out of control. Strength checks to clear piles of rubble/tires outside. Check for a crowbar to pry the door of the other building open and get to the "new" interior cell(an idea that can be repeated in LOTS of places). Crowbar idea sprouting from shovels to open graves. Stick enough scattered supplies in that other building for additional restoration, and maybe some living space like a cot in a back room the workers used to take naps on, and some lockers. Give access to a workbench and reloading bench, either by just placing them inside, or clearing out the garage and placing them inside there, Novac style. Somewhere around the gas station, mimic that genrator trick, restoring power to both buildings, which turns on interior lighting, powers a nuka cola/sunset sasparilla vending machine, etc... If NPC's actually shopped, I'd keep going and say make it possible to find someone to staff the place, a vendor that worked in the already accessible building, selling just about everything, from food, to armor, to guns and ammo. Let the other building act as living space, complete with a schedule for workers to have store hours, and maybe a second one to works the garage area doing repairs. A sillier idea that cropped up was the ability for the player to just come by and drop stuff in the vendor's container without it being viewed as a crime, but the simpler form of that would just be having the vendor's caps restock and sell them stuff the normal way. Now I'm still working on basic scripting myself, and even the basest idea here (the shelf repair) goes well beyond what I know how to do. I just wanted to babble some of the ideas out, so maybe my brain would quit gnawing on them and move onto something else.

Yup, tried different versions of the readius, uninstalled the muscle girl, just about everything short of completely reinstalling new vegas. Edit: Fixed.. I guess.. Continuing efforts I somehow managed to grab the largest part of the mesh and rotate it even further backwards. This was in game, while attemtpting to click the data button. Long story short, loaded a previous save, and now the pipboy's fine in all saves. I have no clue how it happened in the first place, but it's fixed now at least.

Had a wierd bug crop up on me All this time it's been working fine. I installed the muscle girl mod and it was still working fine. Played for hours in Big MT with no troubles. Next time I play, my pipboy readius is titled back 90 degrees. My hand is where it should be, the readius is in the place it should be, but tilted back lile it's between my fingers. All the buttons function, if I can aim at them carefully enough, but obviously it's very hard to read. I've already gone through deactivating and reinstalling tons of things, but the rotated readius persists. Does anyone know how I can force it to rotate forward again, so I can actually read it, and click all the buttons again? I'm not the nest with nifscope, but can figure things out with some patience and persistance. I can't select muliple nodes, or find a way to grab all the components and rotate them in unison, and this seems like the wrong approach anyway.

When you examine a weapon in GECK and the "has scope" box is checked, that mean when you go to the zoomed view (right mouse button) you are not looking at the weapon itself anymore, but rather an entirely separate NIF, most of which are big screen obscuring black walls, with a hole in the middle where the shapes and textures forming the actual "scope view" go. If you want to change the way the scope looks in that view, you need to change that file/direct it to use a different one in the GECK. Some scopes are nothing more than a textured plane, some are the plane and several layers of discs for the lens and reticule. Exactly what to change, depends on the specific scope you're trying to alter. scopes are in their own place(textures too), just like the gun NIF and textures are each in their own place. Locate the proper locations of the one you wish to alter, and start from there.

Okay, 4 pages in and and I can't find a topic for this. I'm trying to figure out how to make a weapons laser sight(the actual beam) disappear when the weapon is not drawn (i.e. holstered or dropped). Or only show when the weapon is in the drawn and ready state, depending on which side you look at it from. The USP mod does this (though apparently sometimes buggy, but no idea if that's the mod itself or something else throwing it off occasionally) and I've seen how there's a visibility controller built into the NIF itself, but can't mentally break down the functions of that controller, to be able to use/replicate it, in another gun. Specifically this would be the FiveseveN for my Fabrique Nationale Armoury mod. The LAM is added via modkit, so this controller trick that USP uses has to be the way it's done. There's no separate world model per modkit space in the GECK. I need some help understanding how that visibility controller works/is constructed.

First version released, bugged, and updated. FiveseveNs for all! or at least.. some Vipers, and whoever loots em off their still warm corpses.. Go get em!

Okay, seemed kind of pointless to upload images twice, so I'm just gonna get this packaged up and upload a full mod. I'll name it something that lets me add the p90 in later. For now, I've got it set up to place a briefcase in victor's cabin, Jean's Sky Diving, and present a chance for Vipers to carry them, and even have mod kits lootable. I'll make updates later, to add the p90 as well. There will doubtlessly be bugs, but hey, aren't there always? Anyway, gimme a lil bit, and it should appear in the new files section. aaaaand it's up. go, download, test.. call me a moron for forgetting crap :tongue:

just a quick update before work..... NIF work's done. Iron Sights tuned as best I could. I'll post some pics and start on the ammo in the ESP when I get home from work.

Had an unexpectedly busy week. barely saw my house, let alone sat down in front of the computer. I'll jump back on this a.s.a.p.

Personally I like the look of most handguns with extended magazines in them. I'm just going tot take into account the amount increasing and not pull the magazine out quite so far when I redo the models. The ESP is pretty much set up, just need the additional ammo types and crafting for em put in. I also had the idea of porting the P90 over so they could share ammunition. I've only seen one version of the P90 in Fallout3 mods though, and it was just bare, no addons for it. I'll have to examine it sometime in nifscope and see what the potential for mods on that one are. 50rd magazine on those, don't see any reason to extend that. Maybe... extended barrel, suppressor, custom springs? In order, lower spread, silencer, increase RoF. A holographic sight would be nice, but tinkering with the Dan Wesson revolver to make that support mod,. I think adding the scope graphics for that would be a bit overly ambitious of me, when I haven't even got the FiveseveN working with pre-existing artwork yet. If anyone knows where I can get models for the P90 that are suitable for the same sort of conversions, I'd be willing to give it a go, after I sort out the FiveseveN. I can tweak(with lots of trial and error as it seems) pre-existing NIF's but I don't think I could rig one up from a different format just yet. Maybe one day after I've had enough practice with this. On the subject of accuracy/spread.. I set that fairly low I think something like 0.5 base, with the LAM stripping off 0.4 of that. I did my research on full size handguns with low recoil, considering getting one for real, for home security. FiveseveN was on my list, but eliminated for price and uncommon ammo. Now, as far as world placement.. There was the briefcase in the Lucky38 cocktail lounge with the explosives in it. It seems some sort of espionage was taking place there. I can see perhaps sneaking a FiveseveN and some rounds into that briefcase as well. maybe even toss the silencer kit in too. Anyone got ideas for other potential locations? I don't think the secret service maintains field offices, but the FBI does. Anyone know a world space location where I could sneak one in? Other than that... the air port is a candidate for dropping a couple briefcases, especially the mostly useless airport. Um... abandoned BoS bunker? Maybe give them to Viper Gunslinger bosses, so they're lootable? A supply crate in the east mine that seems to be a viper base? Hmm... maybe if I give em to the Vipers, the bosses could carry the occasional P90? I'm just brainstorming here. I like the idea of putting the Vipers to work, as something more than an occasional random spawn hassle. Ah ha! Jean's Sky Diving, there's another spot I could drop a briefcase, some agent planning to drop in somewhere.. could put the extended magazine and LAM mods in that one, or heck a full kit and decent chunk of ammo. Okay, so.. Lucky38, Jean's Sky Diving office, make Vipers start carrying them occasionally to get loot drops for additional ammo? Sounds like a plan to me. If we can find a suitable P90 to work with, can make this a FN armory mod, instead of just a port of the FiveseveN. Edit: I just went and checked the Fallout 3 mods containing the P90. it looks good enough, has the rail, but no scope/sights and only the single version existing. I wouldn't seem too difficult to paste a silencer onto the end of the barrel, but can't be sure until I get around to trying. So maybe, suppressor, springs for RoF, Receiver for a durability boost? Think they're already carbon fiber construction, so weight reduction via mod kit seems kind of redundant, and yes, I'm using real life weights, with a rough guess at additional weight of ammunition for the FiveseveN stats.

I forget exact numbers at the moment, but a real FiveseveN has a standard magazine of 20. Reading up a little I placed it in between the 10mm and 12.7, performance-wise. I left some spread on it, otherwise what's the laser sight for? Still, it's a durable gun, with less openings to dust and whatnot to get into than the 9mm(internal hammer machanism) so I made it reasonably durable. There's gotta be a reason they're favored by the U.S. secret service, right? They can't just want all those extra bullets because their aim sucks. and speaking of extra bullets... if the standard magazine is 20.. is 30 really that much of an improvement? Honestly, emptying clips to evaluate the spread on it 30 felt like "did I leave god mode on? no.. I just loaded this game, it can't be on... that bullet decal looks like a fish.. hey I finally reloaded!" which seems a bit excessive for a handgun. Now as far as what ammo it will use. I gave it actual ammo of the gun, using the mesh for 22plinking ammo as the world model. I like how ammo selection has effect in new vegas, so I fully intend to have recipes for crafting various ammo types for it. I've poked at vendors before, and really don't want to screw around with adding these to vendors, or really, even loot tables. by the time I sor tthe rest of this out, I'm probably just going to leave the briefcase somewhere and set it to respawn.

okay, was tinkering around a little more, and got the slide animation to work again. I also added an iron sights node to it. Though slightly too low in testing, that's easily remedied. The textures are still annoying me though. I'm guessing if I just leave the paths alone(i.e. just drag the folder over to New Vegas in the same place it sits in Fallout3) it should work fine. I'll try that when I go to rebuild the meshes again. I've discovered I need to leave the dang collision box alone and just let it use a copy pasted 10mm pistol collision box. About the laser? Well if I leave it alone, it's still visible when the gun's holstered, and that bugs me. My immediate thought is to make a 1st person version of all the laser sighted ones, and have the laser visible on those, but not on the 3rd person version. The toggling trick on the USP seems to be built into the NIF itself, and that, honestly, is beyond me, on how to do. I could attempt to copy paste that node from the USP to the FiveseveN, then turn it from blue, back to red. We'll see how that works later, when I get time to tinker at that depth again.

Well, the texture of the two planes that make up the laser bream have it already set at red but it would be a fairly simple matter to make new green ones. I was playing with blender a little, trying to get the textures sorted and fit the collision box better around the actual gun, instead of it being a copy-paste of the 10mm collision box. At this point it's looking like I'lll need to scrap my model ports and start over. I've tweaked this and that and lost track of it all. At any rate, I've got a fairly busy weekend, so probably be Tuesday before I get back to poking at this.

Okay, texture sets are not working, I need to get the nifs pointing to the new vegas directory instead of the fallout 3 directory and that should fix the images, but I also found another thing to sort out.. the laser sight... I guess I'll need some sort of script that turns the actual laser invisible when it holsters, and visible when you draw it? No clue there. I'll poke around in the USP match ESP and see if they figured that trick out.

I rigged it for extended mags, LAM and silencer as the three possible mods. I didn't think about ammo crafting for it, so for my test, that I'm about to run, I just placed a buttload of ammo and mod kits in a briefcase. I also don't know how to add an iron sights node to the NIF's, if it turns out to need one. after testing... well the textures are all screwy and the slide doesn't animate properly, but I got the mod kits to swap the model like they should. iron sights are also low, needs that extra node I suppose. I'll see if I can't get the textures fixed at least. Think that's enough of a first try for tonight. Probably going to need help adding the iron sights node and figuring out where I broke the slide animation.

okay, just checked the Fallout3 mod permissions and HZ says do whatever you want with it, just give mention. I personally want to see this one done as well, and just got Blender working with NIF's. I know how to handle all the GECK side of things already, from tinkering with the Dan Wesson PPC 357, and making that work with mod kits in game. I need a time passer project, and I think this just volounteered. Someone said the NIF for HZ's Beretta M92 was all sorts of wierd, hopefully that isn't true for the fiveseven. It will take me a little while to get used to the NIF editting part, since each modded up version of the gun needs a NIF to reference. I.E. There needs to be a NIF with no attachments, one with the silencer attached, one with the LAM attached, and one with both silencer and LAM attached. plus three more, one of each version with the extended MAG. I've exported them as object files to work with in onther programs before, but never brought them back into NIFscope before. No promises here, but I'll certainly give it a try.

Locate the mod for altered handgun animations. He changed the handgun holster animation to have it line up with the holster. Same principle here. You need to A build your sheath/scabbard to fit the existing animation, or B create a sheath/scabbard and alter the animation to line up properly. He actually used the holster from someone else's mod. The holsters are a clothing item, with 3 different types, each using a different body slot. The holster is shaped in such a way that nearly all handguns, and most SMG's fit into it fairly convincingly.

If you look at the image in Photoshop, or whatever you're using(open one of the ones extracted from the BSA) and locate the channels(not sure exactly where to tell you to look in GIMP, I use photoshop and they're right in front of my face) There will be red, green, blue, and a 4th called alpha. The alpha channel is basically a black and white map, that tells whatever program is reading it what is opaque, and what is transparent (gray scale applies too in some cases, I'm just simplifying for explanation purposes). Lack of this channel says "everything is completely opaque". BadPenney's copy paste method would be the simpler way, but you can edit, or create your own alpha channel if you want the tears and tatters to be different from vanilla posters. Additionally, we have normal maps in Fallout3(usually called "texturename"_n, which.. you could also call them bump maps, though it's technically different than a bump map. They do specularity(shininess/highlighting to simplify) too. You're also going to want those to line up. Whatever your final method, I recommend opening one of the vanilla posters, and at least studying how those channels are laid out.

Yes the position can be changed, via the animation. Kenkuro has done so here. Swapping the animation around on the fly? Probably not even a good idea, given how the game engine chokes on certain things.

There is a way, I did it once, yet haven't found how to replicate it, to turn a light directional, i.e. a spotlight. It may only be certain types of light that can do that. I remember when I did it, the marker turned into a blue speaker looking thing, like sounds have a green speaker looking thing. That may be easier to manipulate, than your chain of point lights. If you've tried out the drivable motorcycle, you've seen how the weapon attachments lag behind a bit, so your chained together lights, might end up moving more like a whip than a cone. Now that I've reminded myself of that, I need to go play with the geck and see if I can figure out how to do it again. A little while later..... Okay, I'm on crack or something. The only directional settings are if you set a light to cast a shadow, then it's a blue pyramid, not a speaker icon. Additional poking around though, some things you may want to try dissecting, to see how they work, and what tricks you can apply, are the drivable motorcycle, and the pipboy light. The motorcycle, you may even be able to just shoot the author a PM and get his direct help.

Probably still need packages added to them, to navigate said markers. Don't ask me how to do those though, I'm still trying to figure that part out myself. Is the next step in learning to make my own NPC's

They will intercept bullets for you, yes, but actually hiding, as in not seen, or viewed as behind cover, so the attacking NPC moves to try and get a shot at you, no. That is handled by the navmesh, which has to have specific edges marked as cover. Those are what the ai takes into account for that stuff.

Just reading through.. have you examined car and electrical box explosions? Those don't appear to assign "blame" even if they kill someone.

The way they explain it (in the notes found on the SatCom array computer) there's still power on the electrical grid, probably a few barely functional hydro-electric and/or nuclear power stations, you just have to know where to find it and tap into it. I think a fuelled generator would work for some smaller, or more remote home, like say the converted shell of a bus, or a trailer way out in the wasteland. but something large/functional enough to have all the usual amenities though, I don't see a constantly maintained thing being more than a short term amusement. Eventually you get tired of the maintainence routine and just use one of the other homes. Now, for your portable generators, it would be relatively simple. I say that, but I couldn't do it myself(yet) You have a(non functional) generator, you add a script for refueling it, which removes X amount of flamer fuel, or whiskey/other alcohol. The generator then enters the "on" state, and enables the lights, disables the static(non-working) other functional items, and enables their working counterparts. That part is the basic light switch setup, single x marker control node, the brokens are "set enable state opposite parent". It also kicks on a timer, for how long to run off the provided fuel. For a larger/more complex home, use the electrical box, having it start in the blown up state, and requiring repair, before it can start siphoning power off the grid, and into your home. You'll need X number of scrap metal, X number of conductors, sensor modules, etc, and of course a certain amount of science and repair skills. Once you repair it, it enables an electrical switch(same deal, script-wise, the non working gets disabled, and the working enabled in the same location) then it's back to the light switch function and controller node like the other setup. In both cases you could add a smaller maintainence factor, a random event timer, that the generator/transformer breaks down, and require part x and blah blah skill, to repair. This puts some realism, and upkeep in, without it getting totally monotonous. I can half see all the scripting required for this, in my head, but I know I'd have some epic fail of the syntax variety if I tried to write them myself. You can even get more fancy with it, and have maybe a molerat spawn that walks over to said object, and is supposed to have inflicted said damage.

I actually have plans for them as well. I have a very big project brewing in my head, that will include overhauling every one of those broadcast locations, to form a network for a new slaver faction. There is no ETA on mine, as I'm going to take it one step at a time, to make sure I can actually pull it off. Oh, and one of the radio locations, has the explosives bobblehead.