BadPenney

Happy ending bink for good karma players who save the day.

i wasn't suggesting that you use his mod instead of creating your own. What I was suggesting was that you download his mod, open it in GECK, and check out his script which does for his helmet what it seems that you are asking a script to do for yours. Then you copy his method for your own mod, remove the parts that you don't want and modify the remaining portions to fit your own mod. If you are saying that you don't understand how to do that... well then that is another matter entirely.

This mod does that: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4482 Author might appreciate a mention if you use his script.

Usually mods go in a folder labelled DATA. Most mods should be accompanied by a ReadMe file that explains the installation process. Fallout Mod Manager is a good utility for handling mods as well.

Conditionalize your script. For instance: If player.GetItemCount Caps001 >= (price amount) player.additem 0000000A 1 player.removeitem Caps001 (price amount) else showMessage InsufficientFunds endif You would have to create the message, and you don't really need it, but it would let the player know why the transaction didn't work.

I see that Bethesda has a new patch, but I'm feeling a bit gun shy after the 1.5 patch experience. The only improvement listed is "New achievements for Point Lookout" on the official Fallout 3 site. It is a fresh offering, so there probably isn't much user experience with this patch, but I wonder if any of the souls brave enough to patch their games with 1.6 would be willing to post their opinions of it before I take the plunge. For instance, does it prevent the need to make my .esp into an .esm?

It does usurp another person's thread somewhat, but... you should be able to make the switch an activate parent of the door to make it open. I think there is a setup like that in Casey Smith's Garage that allows the player to open subfloor access to a vault.

If you place a script on the entry door that only allows the player to activate it, you should be able to keep the raiders from getting inside. Something like this variation of the VaultDoor script might do it. The "IsActionRef player" condition should prevent NPCs from opening the door. You might want to add an exception for members of FollowerFaction if you want companions to follow you inside.

Tried that once. It sounded ludicrous. Even if you maintain the time signature so that you don't sound like a chipmunk, you aren't going to fool anyone unless you already have an effeminate voice. Helium, anyone?

No more annoyed than by the fact that "Rock Around The Clock" is not at the top of the Billboard charts. The least original ideas that require the least effort will of course have the most duplicated uploads. Power armor retextures are common as weeds, while new working power armor meshes are few. The reason for that is because the new armors take much more time and skill to create than a simple retex. Apart from outright cloning and taking credit for another person's mod, I see no reason why anyone should avoid pursuing an idea just because someone else has already done something similar. The new result may be better than the older one. What is the oldest argument in the world? "I was here first." If a single mod seems to get lost in the shuffle, it may also be that people just aren't that into it. Even if they are into it, the audience is fickle. You make your mod and you are proud of your work so you upload it. You might get some ego strokes if people like it, but that is about all. No royalty payments will be forthcoming and counting on other people to enjoy and cherish your efforts as much as you have done is setting yourself up for disappointment. At best, mods are an art form that should be done for their own sake. If you upload one, then let it go where it will and move onto another one if you enjoy the process.

After you enter and save dialogue in the RESPONSE BOX, right click on the RESPONSE box again and select NEW. You can enter another line of dialogue that the NPC will speak immediately after the first line (includes associated spoken dialogue). You can apply several strings of response dialogue this way without any further input by the player. Each line can have different emotional content and animations, as well.

Have you tried OnActivate?

Give it a try and see what happens. "Make mistakes, there's nothing wrong with trying." ~ Paul Hewson (a.k.a. Bono)

Idle markers don't need to be enabled and disabled. Just make a sandbox AI package that uses idle markers on the schedule that you want.

Are you using Archive Invalidation Invalidated?

Grayditch is just one more unnoccupied piece of property. Simpler to work in an area that is not so heavily involved in a vanilla quest.

As long as you are insulting everyone, aren't you annoyed by the seam at the wrists? How do you know that there is "NO tech issue"? Have you tried fixing this yourself? I've been working on a retexture just lately, and it is my opinion that there IS a tech issue with the neckline because of the lack of smooth blending of the head mesh with the body mesh. How meshes work in a different game is irrelevent. I would hardly characterize the modders who have created and uploaded their work for our free enjoyment as "lazy". I encourage you to tackle this problem head on, and upload your results when you have perfected them. Keep Fallout Beautiful.

Are you using the same frequency and sampling rate as the original WAV? Yes, you can change the sound. Just went into GECK and selected the assault rifle attack noise under the miniguns art and sound tab. It played that sound in the game, but only sounded once per trigger pull. If you are using a custom sound, I imagine that you will just have to make sure that it is compatible.

The unhappy ending bink for evil players.

I picked a spot just a little south of Oasis that had nothing in it but rocks and scrub a monorail track and a highway overpass. There is now a broken, paved road leading north from the Montgomery County Reservoir which leads to the key locked front gate of Shady Sands. The player will be met and questioned at the gate by a guard to gain entry. I've tried to make that the only way into town. In the event that some persistent soul finds another way in, he will soon find himself a Shady Sands Faction enemy. The town is well fortified. Montgomery County Reservoir is now occupied by the Khan Raider gang and additional interior cells have been added to it. The Khans are led by Gizmo in my version. He doesn't need to depend on bully boys to protect himself anymore. http://www.fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/images/1103832-1244322338.jpg

I keep saying "this month". For the most part, the mod is done. I've spent a great deal of time on the physical setting of my version of East Coast Shady Sands to make it feel like a unique place, but one that still fits within the FO3 universe. I also wanted it to seem like a place where life goes on without the player, and not just an empty setting that the player passes through. So NPCs all have different routines, family arrangements and spoken dialogue (mostly done now, about 97%) and interact in unique ways with the player and with each other. Sometimes all the NPCs seem to drop their AI Packages at the same time, and I'm trying to sort that out along with the rest of the debugging that is necessary. I've tried to keep my version of Fallout 3 as clean as possible while modding, so I'm not running other mods and haven't patched it for some time. That may also be part of the problem, so before I'm finished I want to download the recommended patches and fake patches that people use and see if that helps the overall stability of the mod. Sometimes it is difficult to tell which problems are caused by my own programming and which are caused by Bethesda's. Right now I am doing lots of clean up of the remnants of scripts and quests and objects that were dead ends. I also made the mistake of unpacking NIFs for retextured items and linking to them like you used to have to do for Oblivion. I've had to cull those out and replace them with textureset modified vanilla NIFs, except for the few NIFs that really are unique to minimize the memory size of the final mod. And I am still fleshing out the town. Spent 3 hours today stocking shelves in the Shady Sands Country Store so that it looks like a real store. Things like that can be very time consuming, and not quite as much fun as other parts of modding. Many of the finishing touches are little unrelated segments that I am trying not to overlook. There are 3 main quests that are inspired, but not identical to, quests from Fallout 1. There are also 2 optional mini-quests that don't show up on your PipBoy and could be missed by the player, but will give payoffs if completed. Since I don't want people to jet through, finish the quests and leave; there are a number of easter eggs and sight gags mostly that refer to earlier Fallout games. For instance, in one interior cell that doesn't play a large role in the mod, you can find a Cat's Paw magazine. The way that the player will experience the mod will differ depending on the gender of your character, especially in the final main quest. Let's just say that raiders have more on their minds than robbing and killing. Also, the final quest gives the player the option to be good guy or bad guy. I'm thinking that going the evil route should ultimately cause the destruction of Shady Sands and I would like to have a follow up bink movie to go along with that option. Trouble is, although I have edited videos before, I've never made binks. So I will need to download the software to do that and get started. That may push out the release a bit, but I think that it would be a nice finishing touch for the evil route. If the player is a hero and saves the day, then Shady Sands will survive and the player will be welcome to return. I'm already thinking of a follow up .esp that will give the player a chance to be a caravan guard from Shady Sands to other destinations, but that won't be in this first version. Too time consuming I think. I still need to learn to use FO3edit so that I can make an .esm with this mod and hopefully make it able to withstand Bethesda's patches. I've never made a mod to work with FOMM either, so that is part of my learning curve. So I can't say for certain when I will be able to upload. When it is ready, I want to make sure that it is a complete package, nice and stable, and a good solid platform for follow up quests.

I think that the Fallout series was heavily influenced by Mad Max 2. In the first Fallout it is implied that Dogmeat is Max's blue heeler. It would be great if someone with modelling skills could make a replica of Max's Falcon. This is the best that I could do with what is in the game: http://www.fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/images/1103832-1244261808.jpg BTW, the calendar in the background is Karen Price. The same pic was pasted onto the gyrocopter in MM2.

How about we change it to a picture of the 2277-era president, John Henry Eden? President of America, president... of your heart. http://www.fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/images/1103832-1244229255.jpg Hail to the Chief.

That would be a much appreciated outcome for many. The time consuming and tedious process that I took must prevent people from being as creative with their mods as they could be. The 2 meshes that I ended up with are Wasteland.Level4.X-4.Y24 and Wasteland.Level4.X-8.Y24 and correspond to wilderness cell -4, 25 and wilderness cell -5, 25. I also see that they are viewable with Nifscope and are shown offset from the axis of Nifscope by x-4 and y 24 and x-8 and y 24, respectively. Their blocks straddle the z 0 level, so the level 4 may refer to Z elevation. http://www.fallout3nexus.com/imageshare/images/1103832-1244229409.jpg They could possibly be manually modeled with Blender or 3dsMax and placed back into the game. I picture an LOD city outline that a player can see from a distance, but disappears into the terrain as he gets closer, like a mirage.

Follow up report on regenerating Wasteland LOD for anyone interested: After doing some terraforming in the Wasteland I found that I had dug down far enough that the LOD meshes showed up at close range looking like big blurry lumps, so I used the Generate World LOD function in hopes that I could get rid of them. 8 hours later the process was done. Several new folders had been created in the data directory of my FO3 install, including Meshes/Landscape/LOD/Wasteland. I checked in the game and the blurry lumps were gone and my new terrain level and road looked fine. I happily continued working on my mod. 3 days later I thought to check on the size of the LOD/Wasteland folder and found that the total memory allocation for all the terrain meshes generated for the Wasteland was just over 62 Megabytes. I didn't really want to increase the size of my mod that much for such a minor terrain change that only affected 2 Wasteland cells, and thought of reloading a backup of my mod from before the LOD regeneration. I didn't really want to lose all the changes that I had made in the 3 days since then either. All of the terrain meshes in the LOD/Wasteland folder have names that don't correspond with GECK cell naming methods, like Wasteland.Level4.X-4.Y-4. I experimented a bit and created a new folder, cut half of the terrain NIFs and pasted them into the new folder, then started up FO3 and checked the terraformed area. The old LOD showed up again, so I pasted those NIFs back into the Wasteland folder and moved the rest into the new Hold folder I had made. The old LOD was gone again. Doing this repeatedly with increasingly smaller groups of NIFs allowed me to trim away the NIFs that I didn't need down to just the 2 that actually affected my mod in about 1/2 hour. The total memory allocation for the new LOD has shrunk from 62 Mb down to 85 kilobytes. I can live with that. The point of this story ( other than that I have a hopelessly anal retentive attention to detail and could probably benefit from psychotherapy ) is that if you are considering doing a Wasteland LOD change for your mod because you have changed the land levels, it is possible without an excessive increase in the size of your mod. Just tell the GECK to start the Worldspace LOD regen before you go to bed or something, because it is about as exciting as watching grass grow.