madmongo

I would be interested in knowing exactly how much memory you can save by doing this. In my experience, the only place where you really need to be careful with memory is with texture sizes. This is especially true since the game's texture caching system is known to leak memory. I use lower quality texture settings in the game and avoid high resolution texture mods, and I can play for many hours without running out of memory and crashing, even with mods that add a lot of things to a lot of different areas. If I change to high quality textures, the game will crash, usually within 15 minutes to half an hour with my current mod setup. The other area where I have run into issues is running too many mods that add too many things. In my particular case, issues show up when I try to run TTW in addition to a mod that I am working on which adds multiple worldspaces and a lot of stuff. From what I've been able to determine, it's a problem with save file corruption when you have too much stuff. So in total, the two areas I try to keep under control are texture sizes and save game bloat, and that is enough to keep my game stable. It would take a huge amount of references to chew up as much memory as a single 4k texture. This is what makes me wonder about the effectiveness of using esm files to save memory. I personally have never measured the memory usage though to see if I'm correct or not. If anyone has detailed numbers, I'd like to see them.

I don't use the GECK extender, but from what I read in its documentation, it basically doesn't work with Version Control Technically you can make it work, but you have to disable all of the things in the GECK extender that make it useful, and if you do that, then what's the point of using it? If you are creating a worldspace, you really need to be using Version Control. Basically you create an esm, then make changes in esp files that you then check in to your esm, slowly building up your esm. When you check things in, the GECK stores things differently than when you use the GECK in single user mode. This avoids the 16MB bug that will totally destroy your mod and crash the GECK. Using Version Control also uses less memory, since you edit smaller esp files and check things in a little bit at a time. This avoids a lot of GECK crashes due to memory issues. This link has the details for how to set up Version Control for both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas (there are only a couple of minor differences between the two). https://geckwiki.com/index.php/Version_Control I personally keep two copies of my ini files, one for the GECK in "normal" mode and the other for the GECK in networked mode using Version Control. That way I can easily switch between the two by simply copying the correct set of ini files into my FNV folder in documents. Just be aware that worldspace stuff gets you into the buggiest parts of the GECK. Save often. There is a quick navmesh tool that claims to navmesh entire regions. Don't ever use it. I've only had it work successfully once. More often than not, it locks up the GECK with a repeating pop-up that says "Get Jean" (Jean was apparently the developer in charge of navmeshing and pathing). Close the pop-up and it immediately pops up again. The only way out at that point is to use the task manager to kill the GECK. Navmeshing cell by cell is a lot slower, but it's the only method that actually works. Keep all of your landscape above 14,000 or so in height, otherwise you can end up with floating trees in your LOD. Another known crash occurs when you define your worldspace and immediately go into the height map editor. To avoid it, define your worldspace first, then save and exit the GECK, restart, and then go into the height map editor. If you fail to do that, the GECK will crash and you'll have to restart it anyway.

How are you creating your texture? Are you using a new texture in the GECK or are you creating a new nif? Are you generating a new normal map or are you using the existing normal map? Did you generate mipmaps when you created your new texture? Some graphics editors like Paint.Net will automatically generate mipmaps. I don't use photoshop but I think you might need to specify that when you export the texture as dds. If you are using GIMP then generating mipmaps is one of the options when you export. Your texture needs to be somewhere in the textures folder in the game. Also, while this won't cause the issue you are seeing, make sure you use relative texture paths and not an absolute path. In other words, don't use c:\whatever, your path should start with textures\ in the path name.

You have some slight differences in versions from what I'm using, but otherwise I don't see anything wrong with the Blender side of things. I don't know why your version doesn't work.

Your collision mesh looks ok. I probably would have tried to get a little closer around the wheels instead of just using simple blocks, but what you have should work. Any chance we can get a screen shot of what options you used when creating the collision mesh (havoc material, bounds, etc) and a screen shot of what your export options were?

There are a few minor changes, but they are very similar overall. If you are used to the FNV GECK you won't have any difficulty with the FO3 GECK. The changes are more significant if you go back to the Oblivion Construction Set. Navmeshing is completely different. Things have an upper body and a lower body (they eliminated the lower body which is why everything in FO3/FNV uses upper body). Navigating around is a bit more clunky. There's no filtering, so if you are looking for a specific weapon or piece of clothing or armor, you have to scroll through the entire list. If you only have experience with the FNV GECK, the Oblivion Construction Set will seem clunky and limited, but while some things like navmeshing might confuse you, you'll mostly be able to get around and do whatever you want to do. And if you go forward to the Skyrim Creation Kit, there are a LOT more changes there. They didn't create a whole new game engine for Skyrim, but they did make so many changes to it that you'll have a lot to learn if all you are familiar with is the FNV GECK. Going from Skyrim to Fallout 4 isn't too difficult though.

FYI - The use item package isn't all that reliable in my experience. Using a travel package is much more reliable.

Pffft. I've never worked on a team and I mostly make mods for myself. To be fair, I am a hardware and software design engineer in real life, so I'm very familiar with the concept of using a repository and checking changes into that. But I don't think version control is all that difficult. In a real team environment your repository will be on a server somewhere on the network. The instructions I linked to basically fake out your computer with a local shared folder so that the GECK thinks it is checking things in to a network share, when in reality it's just checking things in to a local folder on your PC. You absolutely do not need to be part of a team in order to use version control. I will admit though that it is a step up from noob level. Version control is an absolute necessity if you are creating a larger mod (i.e. anything that involves a new worldspace). It's the only way to avoid the dreaded 16MB bug that will completely brick your mod if you aren't aware of it. Don't completely discount it. Version control is a good thing to learn if you ever want to create worldspaces or create more complex mods. You will limit yourself if you never use it.

NPCs tend to misbehave if you let them sandbox. If you aren't in the cell she will go right through the cell door and may end up wandering all around where she shouldn't be. Changing the door ownership won't help you. Locking the door won't help you. The game engine is a bit buggy when it comes to NPCs that are "off screen" in cells where the player isn't present. If you have two rooms in the same interior cell that aren't connected to each other (each has a separate door to the outside) and there's no navmesh linking the two separate rooms, the NPC can even jump between rooms just because they are in the same cell. Giving the NPC a travel package to a furniture marker of some sort works well. You can have them sit in a chair in the cell. You can put a sit on ledge marker on the bed and have them sit on the cell's bed. There are several different floor sit markers. There is even a captive marker where they'll kneel with their hands in front of them like they are tied up. Fallout 3 used this marker a lot for prisoners captured by super mutants. I don't know how familiar you are with AI packages and conditions. If you need help setting that up let us know. If you want an example to look at, Deputy Beagle ("PrimmDeputy" in the GECK) uses a captive marker when he is imprisoned by the escaped prisoners in the Bison Steve Hotel. PrimmDeputyCaptured is the AI package he runs while he is captive. Speaking to him to free him sets the conditions to make that package stop running.

In Fallout 3, they are DLC weapons. There are two of them: DLC03GhoulGrenade DLC04GhoulGrenade They are both 1 handed thrown weapons, but they are under DLC03 and DLC04 respectively in the GECK since they are DLC weapons. I don't see them anywhere in the Fallout New Vegas GECK. They aren't in either the DLC03 or DLC04 weapons. I don't know if the assets are in the BSA files or not. Feral ghoul reavers in FNV don't have the weapon. They are basically nerfed so that they aren't significantly different than regular feral ghouls.

Since the goal is to make an esm anyway, you might try using version control instead of fiddling with the esm flag. The GECK stores things differently when you check things in using version control. Take your existing mod that works and convert it back to an esp, then check that in to create a new esm. Then make your new changes with an esp and check those in to your new esm. If you are not familiar with version control, instructions can be found here: https://geckwiki.com/index.php/Version_Control I personally keep a backup folder with my original ini files and a folder with my modified version control ini files, and I just copy whichever version I want to use into my documents folder to switch between normal mode and networked version control mode.

Are the stairs physically wide enough for the deathclaw to fit? And are the stairs properly navmeshed?

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.