madmongo

Try changing your graphics options to use lower quality textures. If the game runs a lot longer, then it's just a known bug in the game itself that is causing the crash. The game's texture caching system is known to leak memory. The higher quality textures you use, the faster the game leaks memory and the faster the game crashes. Since the bug is within the game code itself, it can't be fixed by mods. Unfortunately, it leaves most players with a choice. You either use better textures and have better looking graphcis but less long term stability in the game, or you use crappy textures that don't look as good but have a more stable game. It's one or the other though. You can't have good graphics and stability both. Choose one. If you want good long-term stability in your game, turn your graphics option down to lower settings and don't ever use high resolution graphics mods. Also, if you haven't done so already, install the 4GB patch. Fallout New Vegas is a 32 bit game, which means that the most it can access is 2GB of memory. It doesn't matter if you have 32 GB or more RAM in your system, the game can only use 2GB of it. With the patch you can double that to 4GB, but that's as far as you can ever go (2 to the 32 power is 4GB, so that's a hard limit). The game is still going to leak memory, but if you have more memory available to the game, it will take the game longer to completely fill it up and crash. FYI - 1.2 GB is fairly normal memory usage for the game. Once it loads in the game data and loads up all of the graphics textures for anything visible on the screen, and loads LOD and everything else that it needs to load, that can very easily take up 1.2 GB of RAM.

Fallout New Vegas has esm and esp files, which are edited using the GECK (or FNVEdit for more limited changes). Assets in the game have textures (dds files) and meshes (nif files). Textures need an image editor capable of handing dds files, which limits you to Photoshop, GIMP, and Paint.Net. Photoshop costs money, and it is not cheap. GIMP is more powerful than Paint.Net, but Paint.Net is more intuitive and easier for beginners to use. GIMP is the most popular among modders. Meshes require a 3d modeling program of some sort to edit, typically either 3ds Max (which costs money) or Blender (which is free). Most modders use Blender due to the cost issue. Outfit Studio can edit outfit meshes, but Outfit Studio was created long after Fallout New Vegas came out, and while Outfit Studio is the standard editor for outfits for Skyrim, it doesn't get much use among Fallout New Vegas modders. There is a program called NifSkope which can edit certain things in nif meshes, but it's not a mesh editor. You can use NifSkope to assign different textures to meshes, but you can't edit the actual mesh 3d data with NifSkope. Mods also have sound, which is usually edited using Audacity. When an NPC speaks, there is a sound file but there is also a lip file, which controls their lip movements. The lip file is created in the GECK, but since the GECK is really an evil Vault-Tec experiment designed to test modder's frustration levels, they didn't bother including the lip generator in the GECK. You can copy the lip generator over from Skyrim or Oblivion, or if all else fails, someone has a lip generator mod that you can just download and install from the Nexus. If you are generating terrain, you'll need to generate LOD, which is the low-res graphics for things at a distance. While the GECK can generate LOD, most folks use FNVLODGEN to create it. The point of all of this is that you need more than just the GECK to make mods. There are a lot of tools that you need to learn how to use. If you are creating a new set of power armor, you are going to need to use a texture editor (probably GIMP) and a 3d modeling program (most likely Blender, but you might be able to use Outfit Studio depending on what you are doing). This will create your dds and your nif files. You will create the actual power armor in the GECK, where you will edit all of the stats and will assign the nif file to the armor. If you are modifying an existing type of armor, you can skip the GECK part, since your dds and nif files will just act as replacers for the ones that the armor already uses. If all you want is a retexture, you'll need to extract the existing nif and dds files from the bsa archives. Rename your nif file and create a new dds file using GIMP (or Paint.Net). Then edit your new nif in NifSkope so that it uses your new dds texture. Then go into the GECK and create a copy of the power armor, modify the stats of it if you want, and change that new copy of the power armor so that it uses your new nif/dds files (which dds files it uses are defined in the nif, not in the GECK). Retexturing is very simple to do, but it does require you to learn how to do a lot of things first. You can't just do it all in the GECK. Any tutorial that you find for either Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas can give you more details.

The euonymus bush and wasteland shrub are "speed trees". It's software that Bethesda/Obsidian licensed for New Vegas. The idea is that the game engine can render lots of these very quickly. The euonymus bush doesn't get a huge amount of use in the game, but they have thousands of the wasteland shrubs in the game. They are great for landscaping objects since they put a lot less of a load on the game engine than static objects. The downside is that you can't rotate them. I don't know enough about how SpeedTree software works to say why you can't rotate them. All I know is that it's just part of how they work. It's also why SpeedTrees are .spt files and not .nif files. You can probably google "speed trees" and get a lot more details. It's licensed software, so it's not unique to Fallout.

You can use xVASynth so that the mod voices match the vanilla game voices (as much as the AI can manage). So that part is at least do-able. But I agree. It would be a lot of work.

I ran into similar issues a couple of years ago. I have a very large mod that I have been working on for a very long time (and will probably never finish). That mod combined with TTW is enough to cause my game to go wonky. My solution since then has been to break the game up into parts. I have one character for FNV. I have another character for TTW. And I have a third character for my own mod. This keeps the memory usage and save game bloat down to a manageable level and prevents the game from self-destructing. I also used separate characters for different playthroughs (NCR, House, Yes Man, etc). Splitting the game's quests up between different characters allows you to experience the entire game without overwhelming your game saves. I also use lower texture settings to reduce memory usage. FNV is an old 32 bit game, so it can only use 2 GB of RAM (4 GB with the patch), regardless of how much RAM your system has. Your system might have 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM or whatever, doesn't matter. The game can't use it. The game's texture caching system tends to leak memory, so using better quality textures tends to make the game run low on memory, especially the longer you play it during a session. Saving your game periodically and exiting out of the game and starting it again will clear out the leaked memory. Unfortunately, that's a tradeoff that you have to make. You can have a prettier game with better textures that is less stable, or you can have lower quality graphics and a game that is more stable. You can't have high quality and stability together. It's one or the other. Splitting the game between different characters to reduce save game bloat might not be for you, but it is something to consider if you want a more stable game.

Hmmm... you're telling me a 15-year old game written by a company known for buggy software has issues when you stress it to the limit with far more mods than it was realistically designed to support? Next you're going to tell me that bears poop in the woods. I understand the frustration. I don't understand acting like this is a major announcement of some new discovery. It's pretty well known that if you push this game to its limits that it tends to break in all kinds of ways.

Nifskope can't edit meshes. You can edit meshes fairly easily in Blender (or 3ds Max). But if you're not familiar with that software then that's a whole new software package you'll have to learn how to use. It's probably worth learning in the long term (in my opinion) but it may be more time than you are wanting to spend at the moment.

It's a copyright violation. You can't use them.

Adding a shield to the forearm is easy, though as noted it will probably interfere with the PipBoy. It's not going to function as a shield though. The best you can do is have it affect your armor stats. Actually making the shield functional is a whole different ballgame.

Can you actually use the shields in that mod or are they just armor/clothing bits that attach to the forearm?

How did you create your nif? It is very very very wrong. You have two SceneRoots, one a child under the other. You should probably be using a BSFadeNodeRoot anyway, not a SceneRoot. You are missing the BSXFlags. You don't have a collision mesh. You don't have a BSShaderPPLightingProperty. Your texture should be a BSShaderTextureSet under your BSShaderPPLightingProperty, not a NiSourceTexture. You have a hard coded texture path in your texture (C:\Steam... etc). You should use a relative path instead, otherwise your nif will never work for anyone who has their game installed somewhere else (mine is on my D drive). Usually when I see a nif that is so completely borked as this one, it is because someone tried to use a newer version of Blender with the newer nif tools and found out the hard way that this usually doesn't work. Use Blender 2.49b if you want things to actually work. There is a copy of Blender 2.49b under the Oblivion part of the Nexus that has all of the correct tools and all of the proper versions that work together. Just make sure you follow the installation instructions. You can run the older version of Blender and the newer version on the same PC. They won't interfere with each other. If you need to port files from the newer version of Blender back to the older version, export them as obj. Do not try to export it as a legacy blend. That doesn't work.

I don't think the game engine for FNV supports shields. Bethesda could probably add support for shields fairly easily if they wanted to (just copy the code from Oblivion or Skyrim) but so far they haven't. I've never looked into it, but I suspect that it could be done, though it would probably be approximately the same level of difficulty as creating kNVSE. You would also have to change a LOT of animations. Personally I think it would be a good feature, but I don't see it happening any time soon. I'm guessing that it would require a skill level beyond most modders and also would just be a heck of a lot of work, especially on the animation side of things.

Begin OnAdd Player if xGlobalDoOnce != 1 set xGlobal to 1 set xGlobalDoOnce to 1 endif End

What does the navmesh in that area look like? Were you trying to coc to an area that doesn't have a valid navmesh?

How are you creating your esm? If you are editing the esm in the GECK using the GECK powerup or the GECK extender then you can lose certain types of records. Create your mod as an esp and then change it to an esm when you are done using FNVEdit to prevent this from happening. If you need to edit it again, convert it back to an esp (or keep a copy of the esp around for editing) then change it back to an esm when you are done. The most common symptom of this is that the changes you make to existing items and cells in the worldspace get lost. I'm guessing that this is the reason that your cell ID doesn't show up in-game. Alternately, you can use the GECK in networked mode and use version control to check in esp changes into your esm. This method doesn't lose records.