BadPenney

I haven't downloaded FOSE yet, and have not made its use a requirement for RTSS. Ideally, I wanted RTSS to be usable without needing any other programs than Fallout 3, although ArchiveInvalidationInvalidated! is needed, like most mods.

Because most intelligent people would rather see strangers (to whom they don't owe a bloody thing) pay for their games like good boys and girls, than to risk causing problems for the people who operate this site (to whom they should owe at least a sense of gratitude). There is enough free stuff here already, don't you think?

No, they are not. I ran into problems early with that box checked so I deselected it from all of my NPCs. I had 2 followers waiting back in my Megaton house. I wouldn't have a problem with the NPCs stopping while I'm gone, as long as they get moving again when I come back, but they wouldn't move. The NPCs that are placed outdoors in the GECK seem to be the most affected, like the sentry bot, the town dog and the tower guards. They sometimes get relocated to odd places and stalled, NPCs that originate within interior cells and travel outside just get stuck in transit. The Caravan quest is actually pretty simple. The caravan boss has a patrol to follow, and the caravan guard and brahmin just have AI packages to follow her. As long as the player doesn't get more than 3000 units away and out of Line of Sight of the boss he stays on the payroll. If the boss doesn't die and you get all the way to her patrol termination trigger without going AWOL then you succeed with the quest. I've written a script that makes vulnerable NPCs evaluate their AI packages and moves the exterior NPCs to places where their patrols originate before evp, when the player gets within 5000 units of the town center marker. It also resets the doOnce type condition when the player gets more than 5000 away from the center as long as he is still in an exterior cell. That seems to be working for me. I don't know if I have too many scripts and packages running in too small an area to maintain. That may be a possibility. But then Rivet City has a lot going on too. Probably more. At one point I got frustrated by finding NPCs hanging around in areas long after their packages should have told them to go elsewhere, so I made a sort of 24 hour clock quest that would give NPCs an evp nudge right after their packages had changed. It seemed to have helped. I stopped finding folks hanging out in the bar at 6 am (rotten bludgers) but I may have stressed the program by doing it. Right now it seems that things are running relatively smoothly though. I'll try the bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=1 method, though I assume that will not transfer to the mod, so any users would have to do the same thing. It seems that making the .esp into a masterfile will cure the NPC moontan for the mod itself. Anyway, just bought a new laptop with a nice 1Gb graphics card and 6Gb RAM. I'm going to pack up all my mod files, master the latest .esp and load them onto the new comp and see how it plays.

Tested again by travelling to the area of the Reclining Resort Rest Homes southeast of Shady Sands during a point in the mod when none of my quests were running and it still seems to affect my NPCs. Particularly the ones who are in the exterior Wasteland worldspace get wonky. Not only do they come to a dead stop, but some are relocated into locations that their patrols don't even take them. I don't understand how I could have modded in this glitch and I'm wondering if is known whether vanilla Random Encounter triggers can cause this sort of havoc with mod NPCs. Unless there is a patch that cures this effect, the only thing I can think of to remedy it is to write a script that repositions NPCs and resets their AI whenever the player gets within a certain range of town. Hopefully that would put them back on track. Players need to move though this area for the Far Go Trader quest and the Caravan Guard quest. Any knowledgeable suggestions would be appreciated.

Good luck with that. It is tedious, but doable. Just requires a methodical process of elimination. Saves a large chunk of memory though.

There is another bug that I am wrestling with and I think that I've narrowed its occurance down, but I am at a loss as to what is causing it. In the second main quest an NPC gives the player information that advances the quest to the next stage. While still in town everything looks okay, but somewhere along the path that the player has to take outside of town an event or events occur that cause some NPCs back in town to lose their AI packages and just stand around. I really don't have a clue what is going on at this point, since the player is just moving through vanilla terrain when it seems to be happening. It doesn't seem to matter what time of day the player travels. I may have to back up to see if it happens in the same area at earlier quest stages. There are random encounter triggers in the area, though I don't know why they would have any effect. Making this mod has turned into a bigger mystery than playing it.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but are you sure that it is gone from the data folder and not just deselected from the datafiles at game startup?

Finally got to the bottom of the NPC dialogue glitch. :D It was self-inflicted. In trying to exclude one NPC from shared dialogue by setting a quest variable after a certain incident, I ended up restricting nearly all of the NPCs from the shared Greetings. Removed that restrictive condition from the Greetings and everybody can access the custom dialogue again. Quite a relief. That was one of my major roadblocks to uploading.

Thanks for the offer. I'll let you know when I make it available for testing. If anyone else that is following this thread would like to help test it, please send me a pm. I could especially use input from folks with good knowledge of scripts and AI packages. Right now I'm testing it again without unofficial patches; just the official 1.6, updated GECK and unmastered .esp. Watching closely for errors that might trigger failures. Sometimes it seems that NPCs lose sight of their AI packages but then recover, other times it seems that one NPC stalls on its package and either causes a cascade failure or is a symptom of the beginning of one. I've included some evaluate package commands in scripts to help jumpstart NPCs that get confused. Hope I haven't overdone it with that. I'm a little unclear about the difference between evp and resetai. Resetai seems more drastic, so I haven't made much use of it. Currently on this test, things are looking good. If I can make it to the end without anything serious happening, then it would seem ready for testing. Don't see much point in an upload for testing if the mod is obvious glitched, unless the testers are really good mod doctors who might see something I have missed. Even to my eyes my processes can seem convoluted, involving an interplay between scripts, packages and result scipts of dialogue to keep the thing moving along. It would probably be a challenge for anyone not as familiar with its build as I am to see the flow and spot the interruptions. Hopefully I already have them sorted out.

If you open an edit window for one of your room pieces you can adjust the position of it to extremely high precision, down to 4 decimal places. You have X. Y. and Z coordinates for both position and rotation. Also, if you change your first key piece from Position coordinates like ( x = 2099.4111, y = 2030.7562, z = 6759.5210 ) a little bit, to something more like ( x = 2100.0000, y = 2030.0000, z = 6760.0000 ) then your snap to grid functions will have a much easier time aligning other pieces to it. Same thing goes for Rotation coordinates.

I used an infrared mouse and keyboard with my computer when I played Oblivion, and they prevented me from using the console commands. If you are using infrared peripherals then maybe that is a problem for Fallout 3, too.

Thanks for the schooling. Cipscis. I cleaned a number of my scripts of unnecessary references. I get the impression that my mod is running a bit more quickly and smoothly as a result.

That worked perfectly, thanks much. I could havoc them, lift them and havoc them again until a got a pose that looked good, too. Nice to see these little jigsaw pieces finally coming together. Kudos to you.

Since I only have 2 .esp files in my data directory, enabling only the one that I wanted to turn into a masterfile was not a problem. If I recall correctly, the FO3Edit method has some advantages. At least I remember TGBlank recommending it, so I took that option. BTW, while play testing my mod again today I saw Enclave Soldiers show up near the front gate of Shady Sands for the first time. It was the first totally random real test of the town defenses that I have seen. The gate turrets and guard wasted them, but poor Lars was close to death when it was over. If he dies then 2 of the main quests cannot be completed. I guess I should give him an after combat health regen protocol like companions have. It gave me a perverse sort of pleasure knowing that a player could possibly fail a quest through no fault of their own, though. I like the arbitrary nature of it; sort of like real life. But then, that is why you have savegemes, unlike real life.

True, updating distant LOD data command doesn't give you a successful message like generating trees does. Since you deleted the hi-rez trees there apparently isn't anything for the treeLODs to update to, otherwise they would be repositioned to match placement again. That's one of the reasons not to delete vanilla stuff, just get them out of sight. You can undelete things though, and then it should update. When you start a GECK session and open the data window to select your .esp for editing, you can see a button titled Details... right next to the Set as Active File button. Click the Details... button and you will see a long list of units in your mod. If a D appears in the Deleted column it means that you deleted a default unit. You can undelete the trees there and then deal with them in the GECK. I always forget the exact undelete command, since I don't delete stuff anymore, but someone asked about it recently and I remembered then. Maybe try searching for Undelete to find that thread if you get stuck.

Interesting. I thought that running the generate LOD process would have created the mesh folder if you hadn't had one already. I had a folder named meshes already because I had unpacked NIFs from the meshes bsa, but the \Landscape\LOD\Wasteland subdirectories were created within it by the process.

Make a copy of FO3Edit.exe and rename the copy as FO3masterUpdate.exe. Run FO3masterUpdate. There a more detailed instructions available, but it is very simple really.

There are dead NPCs in vanilla FO3 that look like this, even in the GECK: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/images/1103832-1248705258.jpg But when I set an NPCs health to zero and place it, it is standing. Even if I copy and paste one of the dead vanilla NPCs like the one in the pic. I have to add a script that includes KillActor to get them to lie down. Sometimes if I load a savegame with the dead NPC in view it will be standing straight up, headless, until I shoot it or something. Does anyone know how to get dead NPCs to lie down like they are actually dead? Bethesda has done it so I think that I must be missing something.

Did you look for: ..\Data\meshes\Landscape\LOD\Wasteland

If I am unclear about what you say it is most likely because of my own lack of familiarity with the terminology that you use. Implicit and explicit references is something that I will need to study, for instance. It seems that you are saying that I included nonessential wording in the bottomless container script, but not that doing so would cause CTDs or melted motherboards. That's a relief. I substituted GetContainer in the place of GetSelf. Both seem to have the same result. Is there an advantage to GetContainer in this instance? Or are you saying that both are unnecessary? Would this then be sufficient? scn BottomlessAmmoBoxSCRIPT Begin OnActivate Activate if GetItemCount Ammo308Caliber <= 0 AddItem Ammo308Caliber 1000 endif End Apparently so. I just tried out the above cleaner script and it worked just the same. I'm all for minimalism. Keep it simple. Thanks.

I used FO3Edit to make a masterfile just as an experiment, then reverted to using an .esp so that I could continue to edit with the GECK. So there should be no conflict between FO3Edit and the FakePatch at this point. I was only prepared to use the masterfile method to get rid of the skintone problem. Maybe I should wait until patch 1.7 is available before releasing RTSS, since Mothership Zeta is supposed to be released about the same time as I had anticipated uploading anyway. Maybe 1.7 will fix the flesh issue, making the masterfile thing unnecessary. Interest in mods may flag about the time a new DLC is released, as well. Others are recommending the Unofficial Patch, so I will experiment with that. You may be right about the clean save. I'll need to start all the quests over again (sigh). I might be interested in using Beta testers if anyone would volunteer. Not sure how to get all the files needed to anyone without using the Nexus datafile system, unless there is a betatest section that has download access restricted to certain testers.

If I am wrong then mea maxima culpa, but can you explain why I am wrong and how is the above different than this script from your tutorial: Also, here is an unedited script from vanilla FO3: scn VintageRadioStartOnSCRIPT short init ref mySelf ;********************************** Begin onLoad if (init == 0) set mySelf to getSelf activate mySelf set init to 1 endif End ;********************************** Begin onActivate activate End ;********************************** So, why must this never be done and what are the consequences of doing it, please?

So I'm getting my mod ready for upload and trying to prepare it for the cold, cruel world away from home. I updated my game to patch 1.6, found some new problems that I've dealt with. Then I patched my GECK to 1.5 and noticed that my NPCs who use default FO3 voices would no longer speak the custom lines of dialogue I made for them. Reading the notes for the GECK upgrade I saw that some "improvements" to dialogue handling had been included. Uh oh. Applying the FakePatch 1.5 seems to have returned their custom dialogue. So now I am wondering what is the recommended group of official and unofficial patches that I should list in my readme and mod description page for users to have loaded on their computers in order to optimize the reliability and performance of their copy of my mod when they play it. Right now, I only am using the FakePatch. Are there other user created patches available that make mods more stable without causing conflicts between the patches?

Yes, there is. I selected an ammo box from the object list: LootAmmoBox308Calliber. I renamed it as: BottomlessAmmoBox308Calliber, to make it into a unique item so that I could add this script to it: scn BottomlessAmmoBoxSCRIPT ref myself Begin OnActivate Activate set myself to GetSelf if (myself.GetItemCount Ammo308Caliber <= 0 ) myself.AddItem Ammo308Caliber 1000 endif End This uses the GetSelf function rather than a reference ID, so that this box can be selected from the object list and placed anywhere multiple times. If you want the box to deliver more than just 308 ammo, then copy the if thru endif argument and paste it below the first if/endif sequence inside the Begin/End notations, and change the item type and/or amount for each sequence. If you want different boxes to dispense different items then you would need variations of the script for the different boxes. One caveat: since I placed the box ingame with no starting inventory it shows that it is empty when you look at it, It is never empty though when you open it. If you close it without emptying it completely then it doesn't read empty anymore. Tested ingame, works for me.

Just 2 days ago I backed up all of the necessary files (plus a few backups .esps) onto a CD-R and it was less than 500Mb uncompressed, so I may be able to compress it all and get the whole lot under the 300Mb max upload size with one zip file. If not, then 2 files should be enough. I patched my GECK to 1.5 and didn't see any real difference. It didn't get rid of the treeLOD problem, I had to drop the weird trees and put new ones in their place. Tested FO3Edit's masterfile updater and it got rid of the white fleshed NPCs alright. I was finally able to regenerate new object LODs for the monorail tracks and rocks that I moved about. Had to create a bunch of TGA files to do it, but I'm happier with the look of the town now. As you approach the town big objects don't suddenly move around anymore. I don't think that I will have to include the TGAs with the upload now that the LODs have been regenerated but I'll have to test to make certain. Have a new issue wherein all my NPCs that use default dialogue have stopped using their custom dialogue. Can't figure that one out so far. Sometimes when I make changes to the .esp while I am playtesting it seems to buggerup the savegames in strange ways, so I'm going to try a fresh cycle and see if it helps. I turned off the FakePatch too so that might be part of it. Oblivion just seemed so much easier to work with than Fallout. Patch 1.7 already? Need to check that out.