Thaiauxn

I guess we shouldn't own bikes. They just get stolen anyway. We shouldn't paint them either, because you only paint bikes for passion, which it's all about. Otherwise it just ruins everything! If I have to pay to paint my bike, I'll quit painting bikes. Not that I own a bike, because it'd just get stolen anyway. But if I did I'd paint it Artax Black, like the future of mods!

Hahaha! *Godwin fist!* But seriously though. Content packs made by 3rd parties would be amazing. If Zenimax were willing, they would have an application process that can cipher out stat and performance tweaks versus content packs. They would make a tremendous profit, help career folks and beginners learn how to manage a profitable business, and improve the overall quality expected from mods without the assumption of self-entitlement we have now. But a content pack vs a performance tweak should be taken into consideration. Content packs -- add 3D, Texture, Voice, Sound, Video assets to the game. They may also add extra functionality, menus, and quests. Weather mods, flora overhauls, armour, weapons, retextures, ENB, Quests, New lands. Performance tweaks - Adjust ini values alone, rebalance weapon stats, character stats, role playing stats, xp gain, add lots of mini-nukes to an assault rifle, etc. To me, a mod is a performance tweak. That really shouldn't be sold, ever. That's the heart of making a "mod." A content pack made of original 3D assets is not a "mod in the classic sense." That is a content pack. It's a completely separate beast. Semantically, yes, it's a modification of the base software. But by that logic, so is any programme operating in an OS. The Nexus is a mod of PhP. Fallout New Vegas is a mod of Fallout 3, which is a mod of TES. So I think the idea of the user base selling content packs is absolutely a valid idea, and the risks are way overblown. Most mods would still be, probably 95%, free. Those that aren't may be just .99 to 5$.

Getting high quality voice acting is easy! Have you met your local stage actors? There are thousands of them in every city, and a lot of them are really good! Grab a cheap mic, follow this tutorial: Now you want to talk about Quest Programming? Now that is a legendary pain! :p

For those who think it was just too long, I'll say it again: http://www.scriptspot.com/ http://www.videocopilot.net/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/ http://www.creativebloq.com/photoshop/best-photoshop-plugins-912722 These are FOR-PROFIT platforms, many of which cost thousands of dollars to initially purchase, and 95% of all the plugins you see here are free of charge. Plugin, mod, what's the difference? Money will not kill mods, it won't kill the nexus, it won't create unstoppable pay walls, it won't corrupt the process. Look at the evidence in related fields. Maybe we should run an experiment to test this theory.

See, that. I like that. But I'd say that all assets need to be proprietary, and a hex code must check back that all assets are unique upon upload. Stat tweaks need not apply. This is my final line of Thaiauxn Brand Devil Advocacy on the subject: With Unreal, Unity, Cryengine, Source2, all of these excellent engines going free to dev, with a subscription or a "if you make above X, pay us X%" deal, then I don't see why GECK and CK can't go that way too. Just put a tax on paid content. Anything that's released for free, just ignore it like they always have. To be honest, I can't understand the mentality behind the dozens of posts I just read. I hear all this, "money is bad, it corrupts everything." Yeah, it corrupted the professional devs right into releasing tools that inspired you to make mods in the first place. Serial Murder and Piracy are corrupt, and the tickets are free! Look at this: 3DsMax costs 1300$ for the professional version. Most of the top rated plugins are free, or rarely go for 5-25$. There are entire sites dedicated to it: http://www.scriptspot.com/ http://www.creativecrash.com/3dsmax/downloads/scripts-plugins/c/ Look how many of these are free. 95%! I use TexTools every day. Free. I've made thousands of dollars off of it. It's as ubiquitous as a screwdriver to me. Look at World Machine. 90$ to buy the pro version, 225$ for studio. Plugins? All of them are free. AfterEffects, another 900$ piece of software. Plugins are a multi-million dollar market for that software alone: http://www.videocopilot.net/ Andrew Kramer - f***ing genius. Most of his software is free, ALL of his tutorials are free. He puts ILM to shame, and teaches you how to do it too. Photoshop? Look at all that free stuff! Brushes, actions, textures...Red Giant and Quixel are expensive, but they just make something you can do in GIMP for free easier. Quixel's legacy version of DDo and NDo are now FREE. I look at the GECK, the CK, and I see we paid for the base game. 60$ - and all the tools are free. So why can't 3 or 5% of the ultimate best be for-profit? Look at the past examples, now look at the tools we have. Where is the breakdown that I'm not seeing? Most of these tools are still free. Those ARE MODS. In a for-profit ecosystem. And they're still 95% free of charge. Saying the Nexus would be worse off for having "professionals" competing all over would be like saying that Polycount is a den of cess because they are a mix of snobs hammering down the little hobbyist. But you go over there and that's just not true. People are genuinely really helpful, just like they are in the Mod Request or Tech Support forums here. Do you think Millennia is a hobbyist? He's also working on Fractured Space. Does he withhold his knowledge and mods? Hell no! He posts how to videos on his mod pages! What about Faalskar? Alex now works for Bungie on Destiny. Did he abandon us? No, he still regularly checks in. What about me? I own Radian-Helix Media. I'm here all the time. I just spent 5 years on a mod I am releasing for free, with self-proclaimed hobbyists central to our success. There are countless others. Josh Sawyer has a mod on ModDB for gods' sake. He's the lead developer of New Vegas! Not all of us are hobbyists. I like hobbyists, they're awesome, and I owe them my career. But I'm part of a tiny dev minority that takes mods seriously, and right now I feel like our voice doesn't matter in the crowd although our work represents some of the top downloads on the site. People want what we do, but we can't profit off of it, so we do it for free because we want to fill the dream and do what we love despite doing it at a personal loss. Doing our own Original Intellectual Property would require tens of thousands of dollars and just as many hours, but here we can express ourselves much more readily. If the Man says we can make money off that? Hell yeah, let's do it! If not, then we'll still do it for free. But we could do it faster and better if there was a pittance attached. And we'd fail less often. Now remember, this is coming from a guy who is very vocal about never paying for mods: http://www.moddb.com/members/thaiauxn/blogs/history-of-total-conversions-101-with-your-host-blee So I know the rules, I'm still following them, and I'm saying it's a good idea what Steam is doing. Nexus should think about it.

I use modding kind of as a test bed for ideas I can never get by with at work. I also mod for fun, but rarely. I don't see it as a hobby, I see it as a learning experience and practice. I think, for a select few freelancers who want to make this a livable career, then for-profit mods could be a viable solution to escaping from the hell of choosing between chronic unemployment, slavery to The Man, or being forced to go to work outside your vocation to support your art habit. It could also help freelancers and professionals alike by providing a viable solution for experimentation that right now just doesn't exist. If you want to make a really simple gameplay mechanic, or if you have a challenging narrative, or an art piece that you want to test, your options are: 1. Use all your own money to develop a brand new OIP to release for profit and maybe not go bankrupt 2. Get a day job and pay for your experiment time which you conduct at night and release for free as a mod 3. Convince a wealthy patron to support you while you work on a mod or OIP What this is doing is making it so that iteration, exploration, experimentation, and science, are just going out the window. Any R&D is being done at a major personal sacrifice that the corporations then look at and harvest for intelligence. Or at best, it's making experimenting financially in-viable for all but the exceptionally wealthy and their offspring, or strictly for kids living at home. If they're modders now living on their own, they quit the nexus community at about 22-25 because they have class / work and all that experience goes flying out of the forums with them. You don't come back til you're in your later 30s-50s and have spare time. That's classic brain-drain. It's a community killer, and it's because of there being no way to make this passion support itself. To be honest, most career artists I know are begging for a second line of income. If they could get it from mods rather than Starbucks and Michaels, they'd do it. I sure as hell would. If Beth or Valve says that's fine, I'd argue for allowing for-profit mods on the Nexus. Until then, however, I'm fine with the non-profit only clause, because I'd be doing this either way.

I was in your position 5 years ago. 5 Years later, I'm still in your position. :tongue: Take the advise - learn to script. I learned everything else except that, and now I wish I had. It will be ugly, and it'll take many months of struggle, but you'll get there if you believe in it, work hard, and listen to good advise. Great place to start: https://www.youtube.com/user/Seddon4494/videos

That looks outstanding! Custom animations and lots of meshes! Really impressive!

Sweet! Yeah, we can post it here: http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/LOD_Generation_For_New_Vegas_and_Fallout_3 Since I think everyone can edit an article, this is a great idea. I went ahead and gave it a start. Everyone else - pile in. :)

That's a good way to do it. I tried using TESAnnwyn back in the day, but i found it was just too much of a hassle. LOD2 for instance was just, way overbloated with data. but it's other tool kits are great for extracting heightmaps. I haven't been able to get one out of GECK yet that wasn't badly compressed, so the gradient creates deep rings in, say, Mudbox, or World Machine. Maybe TESAnnwyn could do a better job. Anybody that knows TESAnnwyn should pitch in. And you're right about the speed tree thing. It is prohibitively expensive and probably why Obsidian elected not to use it. Let's see if we can't get a Wiki somewhere. If not, I can post it on my website's blog, ore maybe we can get it hosted on the Nexus?

I really feel bad chipping in with the one dimensional character tropes for Bethesda games. Their technology and art are historically at the heart of their world building efforts, but when it comes to writing, that's where it suffers. Beth games are more about creating the opportunity for players to create their own experiences than anything else, and that is why the game survives so well, especially the TES and Fallout games. Obsidian on the other hand are cored by ex- Black Isle guys, and virtually all of them are veteran Role Playing Game writers.They make very rich characters, stories, and atmosphere. Their technical skills, though, only very recently because a core human resources focus, and because of that campaign to re-brand themselves as bug-quashes after New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, KotOR2, and Dungeon Siege III's serious bug trouble. New Vegas, as much as I love it though, they slipped up a little. It was such a wide, vast, almost banal place that the world-space diluted the character driven richness. That may just be Nevada though. :tongue: Deserts are notoriously hard to make rich places, since they're inherently barren outside of little pockets of civilization. Fallout 3 had a story? I thought it had something to do with Liam Neeson trying to get his daughter back from the Enclave and Malcom McDowll...

I'd be down to help contribute my knowledge to a comprehensive guide as well. Ever since I made the switch over to doing environment art for CryEngine I've forgot a lot about GECK, but I'll whip out our old notes and add to it. Especially the map making part. Other than Beyond Boulder Dome, I think F: PB is the only mod with a custom world map for the pip-boy, so I could contribute that tutorial section too. I don't want anyone else to deal with what JoshBadWritter is going through. I know how it feels. Plus, Josh is a nice guy, so I'd like to help. http://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/112/111252/auto/ScreenShot362.jpg This screenshot is using a really old trick to get the GECK to behave using EMH's method from his Alton, IL mod. Basically what we did was use FNV Edit to rip the .esp apart and render it down to 9 Blocks: We then saved 9 copies of this plugin and rendered each Block in the GECK, which took around 2 hours to complete. We then used the original plugin and rendered a 10th time just to get the dlodsettingsfile, and from there it just skipped all the heavy s***, stitched the boarders, and output our final world mesh. But that took DAYS. It wasn't until Freddie arrived with his knowledge that we were able to run it through from start to finish - and that took 14 days, straight. From what Josh says his world is just a little space, so that certainly helps. This method could work, so I'll try to write it up tomorrow. After the world mesh is decimated, it's smooth sailing. HA! No, lol. You still need to render your terrain texture, which is easy. No problem there. Objects, however, just like the lip-sync tool, shipped broken. In order to render objects, you need to export ALL of the .dds textures from the New Vegas BSA, convert them to .TGAs, and save an ALPHA channel for each one, otherwise you get this: http://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/112/111611/auto/ScreenShot477.jpg Chucksteel so graciously made such a conversion for the community that I linked earlier. http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/36693/? But he forget the alphas. :tongue: So our Jedi Master Freddie went ahead and made those for all of the files. I might still have them in dropbox so I can upload them. The last issues are painting the map, which you CAN DO, but it all has to be done by hand. Professional GECK had a tool to combine hand painted textures made in photoshop with GECK terrain. Nowadays this is totally standard fare - every engine can do this on the fly, no rendering required. GECK, however, shipped with this feature broken. If you use the "combine hand painted textures" feature to our non-commercial GECK, it would seize up and die trying to render the LOD. So no matter what, after you have a heightmap, you need to manually paint the landscape one cell at a time. It has no mip-map painting tools, which is incredibly frustrating, and there is no way to import a decimated mesh to GECK, unfortunately. It has to crunch the terrain decimation itself or its coordinates don't match the terrain. After you adjust the heightmap manually, you also have to totally redo your LODs, so you only have one shot to get everything right on the first render. The last button: There are no trees in New Vegas. Trees are handled as objects instead. TrickyVein and ChuckSteel would be good folks to ask to contribute also, but they are both very busy. Miles, I think, has a guide for his DEM -> Heightmap ->GECK somewhere, along with an LOD tutorial. His method uses all free software. A complete guide would have made the process much much better looking and far less painful. The price of ignorance+determination is very steep. :tongue: So a new guide to spare future GECK environment artists that pain would make me happy.

Welcome to the party! :D It gets better all the time, even with the aging engine. This community of moders is the strongest I've seen anywhere. Really amazing folks in the Fallout 3 & New Vegas world.

It took me about 3 hours (lol, I'm bored :tongue:) but I found it! I had to search through about 10 million emails, but i found Freddie's message about his rigg's specs for handling mass scale LOD. There were 195 emails in that thread from 2013! XD "" OH, I spent a couple days getting the beast running, I have bought the wrong cases Antec three hundreds. have 6 of em, but this board spaces the sli at S1 S4 S7 for tri and last card hits the PS, Antec 300 is no way small, but I guess I need a full tower for this board. So tomorrow I try again, or build another 790i E8600 DDr3 SLI, I have two of those left also. And wait on the AsRock Extreme7 Gen 3 2550k till later, still think it will work well on FO3 with only two cores runnin at 4.5ghz. 790i will only do 3.8 on a e8600. freddy "" I also realized that to trim down on the size of Chunks and Blocks, we went int FNVEdit and trimmed down the cell data outside the range manually to ensure that our heightmap was SQUARE, in ^2 iterations. (512, 1024, etc). If the Heightmap is not square, then GECK will not render LOD. You can accidentally create cells just by letting the explorer stray past a cell boundary wile painting terrain or placing objects. So in FNVedit, delete any cells that create fringe outside the boundaries. They will be named something greater than 0,0, 1,0, 01, 1,1, -1 etc...

Lol, beat me to my own post about my own post! XD After you get that txt file, if you want to make Q's life easier, you can import the txt into Excel as a nice clean spreadsheet using this tutorial: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Import-data-using-the-Text-Import-Wizard-40c6d5e6-41b0-4575-a54e-967bbe63a048?CorrelationId=302dd78c-e08f-4c67-b43b-81118d4431f3&ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US That is probably what you heard about for making writing dialog easier. There is also Articy but it doesn't work for GECK. It might for Skyrim, I don't know: http://www.nevigo.com/en/articydraft/overview/ It's also ridiculously expensive.

XD that's awesome! I used google trying to find Freddie's old forum post where he basically ripped the GECK LOD system apart, but I found your site and was like... Well, close enough. :tongue: Freddie has forgotten more about LOD than I will ever know. I'm glad you wrote that up for our Italian modders. They're probably under-served. CENNI SUL LOD - IL SOGNO CHE DIVENTA INCUBO Made me laugh so hard... It's true.

You may also want this when you get it to run: http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/36693/? And this site, although it is in Italian, has points you need to hit. http://falloutthegame.forumfree.it/?t=67880767 I wish Freddie was still around to give you his exact specs. He built a PC out of old parts that were top of the line in 2008, but can be found in the bargain bin these days, to sit and do nothing but render LOD. Ours ran for 14 days, and like was said above, smaller ones take 8-12 hours. For 14 days, it will tell you that "The programme has stopped responding," so just don't touch it, and don't do anything to the PC while it works. Even take it off the internet and just let it run. It might surprise you.

If DarNifiedUINV or another menu mod has hi-res textures, that would cause a nasty hiccup. You could try a patch to lower the resolution of the menu files. EpicXTitan's suggestion may work too, until the cell buffer fills up again.

So much for that creosote bush. :p UNLIKE! Oh well, what can ye do.

Holy s***. Now that is quality modding! If only we could GetActorOnFire to light havoc objects and grass of fire! *sigh*

^Êxactly. And if you need a complete list of those, you can get them quickly here: And if you need .lip files, follow this link: http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/48239/?

Sure! What's the trouble? Just first off the bat: Make sure any wavs are: Wave Mono Sample Rate: 44,100Hz Sample Format: 16-bit File Type: WAV MP3 Mono Sample Rate: 44,100 Hz Bit Rate: constant, 64 kbps File Type: MP3 Make sure all your files are in: %NewVegasDirectory%\Data\Sound\Voice\ModFile.extension\VoiceType\File.extension And finally, make sure all file names are the same as your topic handler Ids.

Looking forward to seeing what you make! Always a cool project from Titus Pollo.

Fallout: Project Brazil Help Wanted Thread In talking with some friends the other night, the topic of Fallout: Project Brazil came up. They asked me if it was finished and I had to say no, no where close. They asked, "why not? You worked your heart out on that thing." I don't know how to write good programming code for advanced storytelling. I do 3D art and textures, level design, and write & link dialog topics. Our team has suffered some burnout, and the continual disappointment of people flaking out on us has been a major obstacle, just like any major mod. But the story is written and in the GECK, without code to forward it between stages. What we need: 1. Quest scripting That's it. What we have finished: Everything else - New characters, levels, worldspace, NPCs, armours, voice actors are ready. Everything you need to have a great game, minus the main quest scripts. Dragbody and Tau34RUS are making some additional custom armours, and I'm doing some level design. RickerHK is handling the main quest's programming architecture now, and needs assistance on the other half of the story. If you played out first installment, you know just how dead serious I am about this project. Google "The Fallout Series," and what do you see listed along with the official canon titles? US. We're going to fight this monster until it is done! I'm not giving up. What needs doing: 1. We need to take the 15 Main Quests and trim them down to just 5. That means we need to rewrite some stuff. 2. Set up the scripting base for the 5 quests. The Raiders are already started, the NCR is not. 3. Our Companions are tentatively taken over by GePaladium, who worked on the Vanessa mod. The Second Installment Chapter 2 -- Chapter 3&4 Download the flowcharts using the links above to get an idea of the scope of the project. Chapter 2 is nearly done. Chapter 3 & 4 are not. If anyone is interested: Contact me here. I'll reply back, and i can hook you up with our dropbox location and email. We'll talk on skype and exchange email email. Cheers.

Hey guys! If anyone here has any experience with the dialogue system in GECK, I could use a hand. We have two programmers that are waiting to jump in, but they both hate setting up dialogue trees. :p I have a huge day job starting in about 3 days, so I won't be able to help much after that. The programmers can both jump in and pound out the scripting while I'm working for the next 3 months, and our brand new sound studio can hammer in the voice acting shortly after. The job we have is real simple. COPY the dialogue & TopicIDs from the documents on page 6, and PASTE them into the GECK: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aBOEpwbK_ikI4gCOkWf1oy2ljlRtB7TYKPcgcB37vY8/edit There are 7000 lines to copy/paste. XD I already managed to get about 800 of them in and set up all the quests and Rick has set up the script architecture. If you know how to set up the chat architecture, then I'd appreciate that too, but I can handle that and all the conditions & scripting. All you'd have to do is literally sit there for like, two days going "highlight Topic ID, CRTL+C... New Topic, CTRL+V... Highlight text line 1, CTRL+C... New Choice, CTRL+V, okay... Highlight text line 2, CTRL+C... right click, new response CTRL+V, okay. (rinse repeat 7000 times) F: PB's second installment will be a huge hit. Let me know if you're down, and I'll even make a tutorial video on how to d it! :D Cheers