madmongo

That's not a bad tutorial, and you should end up with a working vendor at the end of it, but the tutorial is missing a couple of important things. You don't need to copy an existing merchant. You can create an NPC completely from scratch if you want. I usually do. Your vendor NPC has to have a class that allows them to sell items. Since this is completely missing from that tutorial, I'm guessing that maybe the author didn't understand this and that's why they are only copying existing working merchants. The important part is that your NPC's class has to have at least some of the options under auto calc buys/sells checked. If you look at the class form, you'll see that it has check boxes for weapons, armor, alcohol, food, chems, books, and misc. Whichever ones of these are checked, your vendor can sell. If you put items in your vendor's chest and the are of a type that isn't checked, they won't show up in the game. There are a few different vendor classes you can choose from in the GECK, and if you want you can always make your own custom class that has everything checked. Then your vendor can sell anything. Your vendor should have some sort of AI package. For example, they might have a sandbox package that lets them walk around a bit from where they are placed in the editor. Whatever package they have, make sure that "offer services" is checked in the flags section of the package. And of course your vendor needs a dialog quest so that you can talk to them and get them to open up their store. The script command to get them to open up the store is just SHOWBARTERMENU. Place your container somewhere near the NPC. Make sure that the container is locked, otherwise local sandboxing NPCs will try to loot it. Also, make sure that you have persistent reference checked, and that you have given it a reference ID. When you place your NPC, double click on the NPC to bring up their properties, and on the Merchant Container tab, either select your merchant container in the reference window or select it using the drop-down menus. If you forgot to make your container a persistent reference, you won't be able to select it here. Off the top of my head, I think that's it. It sounds like a lot, but it's actually not too hard.

Every picture of the M2 I looked at had it angled. I believe the reason is that a plate that is flat against the ground will want to "walk" backwards more from the recoil forces on the mortar with every shot. An angled plate is going to try to dig more into the ground, and will stay put better. But if you want a flat version, I'll make you a flat version. No biggie. I also didn't see any pictures of the bottom of the plate so I'm not exactly sure what it's supposed to look like underneath. Do you just want a flat plate that is level with the ground and flat on the bottom?

I'm not exactly a professional modeler, but here's my first shot at it. Let me know what you think. http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/60382/? I still need to add the sight onto the side of it and make a desert tan version for you.

Do you want it to actually fire or are you just looking for a static?

You don't mention navmeshing. Is the landscape navmeshed? Was the navmesh finalized? If the navmesh isn't working, the NPCs will just stand there since they can't figure out where they can go. Other then that, all you need are idle markers and an AI sandbox package with a sandbox distance that is large enough that they can get to all of the idle markers from the editor location. Start with a distance of 1024 and see what that gets you.

Nevada Skies does it, but not directly. You click on the item in your pipboy to equip it and when you close the pipboy then the terminal pops up.

That's a pretty vague question. There are two parts to voices in topics, the sound file, which is usually a .wav or a .ogg, and the lip file (.lip). The sound file has the sound (yeah I know, duh, Captain Obvious) and the lip file has the lip movements. Withou the lip file, the NPC's lips won't move as they speak, which is very weird. The GECK as it ships is missing its lip file generator. Bethesda has updated the GECK a couple of times since its first release and still hasn't bothered to put the lip generator in it. They seem to like making things difficult for us. If you poke around online you might be able to find a copy of it. If you also have Oblivion installed on your computer, the same lip generator is in the \sound\processing folder. Just copy that folder to your FNV directory and you're good to go. I believe the Skyrim Creation Kit also has a compatible lip generator installed that you can use (again, just copy it to your FNV folders). Now the question is (since this isn't obvious from your one-line post) where is your sound coming from? If you are going to be speaking into a microphone, just bring up the topic and hit record near the bottom of the window. Don't forget to save it when you are done. If you don't like what you just said or you made a mistake, flubbed the line, whatever, then don't hit save, and instead just hit record and try another take. When you click save it only saves your last take. If you have the lip generator installed, the GECK will automatically create both the wav and lip files. If your sound is coming from a wav file that already exists, it needs to be in the exact location that the GECK expects it to be in and it has to have the exact name that the GECK wants it to have. If you look down near the bottom of the topic, you'll see the file name that it wants, without the wav extension, which will have the topic name in it and will also have what looks like a bunch of random letters and numbers in it (they aren't random). Sometimes the easiest way to make sure your file ends up in the right place is to record a quick 2 second hello or something into the microphone and save it, then go under the \sound folder and find your mod and voice type etc. until you land on the files you just created. If you have to create all of the folders yourself it's very easy to make a mistake. This way you make sure that the folder names are right and everything is in the right place. Then delete the wav and lip that you just generated, and put your wav file that you want to use in its place. You can copy the file name from the topic screen and paste that into the file name of the wav. The file names are too long and contain too many letters and numbers so changing the name by hand isn't recommended. Now you have a wav but no lip. You'll need to close the topic and re-open it, as the topic window doesn't refresh when you change the files. Now you should see a Y under your wav near the bottom, and you should see your wav file listed. Select your wav file, click on from wav and click on generate lip file, and the GECK will create the lip file for you. You can also do this to create lip files from any dialog you may have recorded before realizing that you didn't have a working lip generator.

The easiest thing to do may be to just load your merged mod in the GECK and re-navmesh the area that has the problem so that it works properly.

Nifskope is a bit limited in what it can do (it's not a 3-d modeling program after all) but you can increase the scale and/or move things around using translation. Make it a bit bigger and maybe move it around a bit and you should be able to cover up the ears and any reasonable hair mesh along with it. Hair meshes usually include both a hat and a no-hat version. If you are using a custom hair mesh it might not include a hat version, and the default no-hat hair mesh might clip through a lot of hats and helmets. You'd have to fix the hair mesh in that case.

I used Blender. There's a pre-packaged set somewhere on the nexus (not sure if it's under FNV or FO3) that has Blender 2.49 and all of the nif import/export tools all together using versions that work with each other. It's an older version of Blender but it works well enough. There have been people trying to get the nif tools to work properly with newer versions of Blender. The last time I looked, which admittedly was quite some time ago, there were still a lot of things not working correctly. I'm used to 2.49 and everything works, so even though it's an older version I'm sticking with it. I have GIMP and also have Paint.Net (which is not the same as MS Paint that comes with Windows). Both are free and both have add-ons available to handle dds files and normal maps. I tend to use Paint.Net most often but that's just a personal preference. My personal opinion on it is that GIMP is more powerful but is also a bit harder to use. Both can do the job quite adequately though. Playing around with textures is fairly easy. 3-D modeling using Blender or any other program takes a bit more time to learn.

If you are going to use Blender, you need the nif tools that go with it. The nif tools only work with certain versions of Blender. There's a package that has both Blender 2.49 and the nif tools that work with it somewhere here on the nexus, either in the FNV section or the FO3 section. I've seen posts from people trying to get nif tools working with newer versions of Blender. It seems to be a lot more bother than it's worth to me. If you stick with 2.49 everything just works and it's relatively easy to set up. Once you have the nif tools installed, you can directly import nifs into Blender and export nifs directly as well. You don't need to convert to any other format like obj. Blender will export whatever you have selected, so if you only have the mesh selected it will only export the mesh. So before exporting the nif, make sure you are in object mode and press A to select all, then export the nif. For clothing, uncheck the Use BSFaderNode Root in the nif tools options. I don't know if I'm just doing it wrong, but I've never found the right combination of buttons in the nif export section to make clothes work properly. I always end up editing the nif in nifscope to correct the shader flags. You can look at existing clothing nifs to see what they should be set to (I'm not at my home computer now and I can't remember off the top of my head which flags need to be checked). It's a bit of a pain, but once you get used to it there's usually just two flags that Blender doesn't set properly and they are very quick and easy to fix in nifscope. One's at the top of the list and the other's at the bottom, unless it's a skin part in which case there's the facegen something or other flag that you set instead of the one at the top. So either way it's two clicks and you're done.

It's not just missing blocks, you've basically exported only a mesh that is no longer rigged to the skeleton and the skeleton isn't even present. All of the skeleton bone parts like Bip01 Spine are missing. I can tell you how to do this properly in Blender but I have never used Maya.

Your screen shot shows you importing from the nif not exporting. Did you grab the wrong screen shot? Also, Blender will only export the object(s) you have currently selected, so make sure you go to object mode and select all before exporting your nif. If that isn't your problem, also take a screen shot of your nif export options.

Uncheck Use BSFaderNodeRoot.

If you change Veronica's default combat style from melee to ranged (via the companion wheel or NPC dialog) she'll say something cute like does punching people with my fist count as ranged, but she will switch to the laser pistol instead of the fist. No mod needed, though under some circumstances she may switch back to the fist.

Many NPCs like that are intentionally removed by Bethesda after their quest is done to help cut down on resources used so that the game gets better performance. For example, the winner of the lottery in Nipton actually runs off into the desert, reaches his destination, and promptly dies for no reason (assuming that he isn't killed by radscorpions first). Some NPCs die, others just vanish. Either way, the game doesn't waste any more resources on them. There are two things you need to do to make this work the way you want it to. First, you need to get your NPCs to go to RS Alpha and sandbox there. You might need to make a travel AI package, but I think all you need to do is make a sandbox package for RS Alpha and they'll walk there automatically, assuming that they can figure out a walk path from where they are to their destination. If you aren't familiar with AI packages, you create a sandbox package, make its location your new marker and give it some distance (the distance that you want them to be able to move around away from that marker), and you typically give it a script condition using script variables from the NPC's script. At the end of the Boulder City Showdown quest, you just set the script variable on the NPC and tell the NPC to evaluate their packages (use the evp command in your script). Note that NPCs can sometimes be killed while walking to their destination (they might encounter a deathclaw or something along the way). Bethesda will often move the NPC to their destination instead of letting them walk there to avoid them potentially getting killed. The second thing you need to do is get rid of the NPCs current behavior so that it doesn't interfere with what you want to do. You may need to delete or disable certain AI packages and modify the existing scripts so that they don't make the NPC disappear to Never-Never Land.

Open up the debug console and type player.showinventory. The purified water should be in there even if it doesn't show up in your pipboy. It will be listed with an 8 digit hex code, something like 0804CDEF (not the real code, that's just a number I made up, look for the real code on your screen when you list the inventory). If it says you have 24 of them (again, not a real number, just a made up example) you can type player.removeitem 0804CDEF 24 and it will remove all 24 of them from your inventory (again, replace the example numbers here with the real ones from your computer). The actual item code for an unmodified version of Fallout New Vegas is 000151A3. So in an unmodified FNV: player.additem 000151A3 10 (adds 10 purified waters to your inventory) player.removeitem 000151A3 10 (removes 10 purified waters from your inventory) You probably have a mod installed that turns off the playable item flag in the purified water form. If the purified water has an item code that is something other than 000151A3 then the first two digits of that code will tell you which mod on your system created that version of the purified water. In other words, if the item code is 0804CDEF (my above made-up example) then the 08 part of that is the mod index. You can view the mod indexes in FOMM to see which mod that actually corresponds to. The mod index of 00 corresponds to the original Fallout game.

It's fairly easy to end up with unweighted vertices when parts of your meshes overlap. Vertex weight is a fairly simple concept. Imagine a really simple person with just two arms, two legs, a spine and a head. Now put a pair of pants on him. The left leg of the pants will move with the left leg of the person, so you want to weight all of the vertices on the left leg to the person's left leg of their skeleton. Similarly with the right leg. But what about the pelvis area? You want the top of the pants to move along with the spine, so you weight the vertices along the top of the pants to the spine instead of to either leg. But what about the parts in between the top of the pants and the legs? They will move partially with the spine and partially with the legs. So you weight them 50/50 if they are in the middle, maybe more towards the spine as you get to the top of the pants and more towards each leg as the pants parts get closer to the leg parts. You would not weight any part of the pants to the arms. If you did weight part of the pants to the arms, then those vertices would move along with the arms. The actual Fallout skeletons have a lot more parts than just two arms, two legs, a spine and a head. The spine is segmented into 3 parts for example, and legs are divided into upper and lower parts, etc. But that's the basic concept. Often when you auto generate the weights, Blender ends up weighing parts of your pants to the arms and other stupid things like that, requiring you to manually edit the weights or else parts of your pants move as your arms swing back and forth, which ends up looking really weird. When you have overlapping meshes like that, it's often difficult to get into the mesh and paint some of the vertices. There are different weight paint modes that you can try. You can also select face mode (F) and then select all (A) and then paint all of the vertices in that mesh with the selected bone and weight that you have chosen in Blender. Have a look at the Blender documentation for more details.

Adding a common faction to them will probably stop them from fighting each other, but they may fight anyone else in the area. Uncheck the Aggro Radius Behavior box in the AI Data tab for the NPC.

A few other things I thought of after submitting that. The auto navmesher will often not navmesh across roads. However, it will usually navmesh through fences. So be prepared to hand navmesh any cell that contains a road or a fence. Use the b key in your render window to show cell boundaries. You'll want to arrange buildings and structures and other things so that you can easily do the navmeshing. You wouldn't want a building's door to be straddling a cell boundary, for example. Some folks use things like geological survey data to generate their heightmaps. I've never done it but if you poke around on the forums you'll find the basic procedure for it. There's also an auto generate navmesh button under regions. Don't use it. It is very very very very broken. I've made it work under some circumstances but it is incredibly buggy.

New worldspace creation is pretty much the same from FO3 to FNV so tutorials for FO3 are ok for you to use. I never found any good tutorials. I pieced together bits and pieces from various tutorials and just plugged through it until I figured it out. SKYZOO makes it sound a lot easier than it is. If you are making a very small worldspace, it can be done fairly quickly. But if you are making a larger worldspace, it becomes a very slow and tedious thing. Also, the worldspace parts of the GECK are among the buggiest and most difficult to use parts of the toolset. Save often, and make backup files often just in case the GECK totally hoses your mod and you need to revert to an earlier version. As SKYZOO said, the first step is just creating the world space. Click on world -> world spaces in the GECK, and when that form comes up, just click new on the left hand side give your new region a name, and fill in the blanks. Exit out of that, and save your mod, because the next step will usually crash the GECK. You might be able to avoid the crash if you save the mod, exit the GECK, and restart it. I dunno. The next step is to create a heightmap. A lot of people skip this and make small, completely flat world spaces, and use things like cliff objects to do the majority of their landscaping. That's ok for things like a small base surrounded by mountains or something like that, but if you are trying to create a town or something it looks amateurish. Warning - If you basically default the heightmap, it will crash the GECK. Seriously, sometimes I think the GECK is a Vault-tec experiment designed to test modder frustrations. The reason for this is that the GECK doesn't like it if the landscape is too low. So the first thing I do is create a random landscape that doesn't have much randomness to it, so that what it ends up doing is creating a basically flat landscape. The settings I use under the random generator are a frequency of 100, an amplitude of 50, and a base offset of 6000. The base offset is extremely important since if you don't set it high enough, the GECK crashes. If all is well so far, save your heightmap and save your mod. If you didn't restart the GECK earlier, chances are that right here is where the GECK will crash. The second time through this it usually works. Now re-open your heightmap, and use the editing tools to create your mountains, rivers, lakes, etc. You can play around with the default water settings in your worldspace to get the water to line up with where you want it on your landscape. If you used a base offset of 6000 when creating the heightmap, a water height of about 3500 tends to work fairly well. When you are editing the heightmap, make very small changes. If you make changes that are too drastic, you basically tear the landscape and the GECK can't figure out how to fix it and it ends up with a broken landscape that either crashes the GECK or crashes the game or both. What you probably have at this point is a landscape that has mountains and plains and rivers and lakes and whatever. Save your heightmap and save your mod. If you were to go and look at it though, it will probably be very flat and unrealistic looking. You can add in some randomness to your heightmap to fix that. The settings that I tend to use are a frequency of 2000, an amplitude of 200, a base offset of zero, and this is very important, make sure you click additive and subtractive. If you don't check the additive and subtractive boxes, it will create a new random heightmap instead of just adding a bit of randomness to your existing heightmap. Now you should have something that looks a lot more realistic. Again, save your mod. The GECK likes to crash for no good reason a lot when doing worldspace stuff. Now you can go to your cell view form, and change interiors (where it says world space) and select your new world space. It will put you right in the center of your new world space. And you'll run into yet another GECK bug. If there is nothing on the landscape, and the GECK hasn't ever focused on any kind of object, the GECK will usually display water instead of your landscape, so you end up looking at a big solid grayish-green blob on your render window instead of looking at your landscape. If this happens to you, select interiors in the cell view, double click on some static object, let the render window display that cell, then go back to your new world space. Sometimes just moving around using the arrow keys will get the water blob to go away once you move far enough to change cells. Once you have objects in your new worldspace you won't have this problem any more, as long as you first go to an area that has objects when you select your new worldspace when you start up the GECK. Now you can tweak and paint the landscape to your heart's desire, and add objects and do all of that fun stuff. Unfortunately, you have only two basic tools for editing landscape. You can use the landscape editing function in the render window, which limits you to a maximum brush size of 15, or you can use the heightmap editor. If you are trying to make something the size of a small pond, the landscape editing makes you feel like you are carving out Mount Rushmoor using a hand chisel, and using the heightmap editor makes you feel like you are trying to do brain surgery with a chainsaw. There's nothing in between. The heightmap editor is also a bit quirky. It tends to leave big black square splotches just outside of the view on your render window, and those don't go away when you close out the heightmap editing box. Even if you move away from that area using the arrow keys, the splotches stay there. You can only make them go away by selecting another area from the cell view and then going back to the area where you were. Buggy buggy buggy. That's the GECK. There's an auto navmesher, but that is buggy as all heck. I've found that it works reasonably well on wilderness landscapes containing simple objects like trees and cactuses. It often completely fails when the cell contains SCOLs and doesn't work well at all if there are a lot of complex objects inside the cell. That means that you end up having to hand navmesh a lot of cells. If your new worldspace only has a few usable cells, this isn't a big deal, and you can navmesh all of them in a few hours easily. A worldspace has basically 64x64 cells, which is 4096 total cells. You can auto navmesh three or four cells per minute, and once you get experienced at navmeshing, you can probably finish a fairly complex cell in a few minutes. If you figure an average of one cell per minute (being a mix of hand navmeshed and auto navmeshed), that's 4096 minutes to navmesh the entire worldspace. That works out to a bit over 68 hours. If you navmesh for three hours per day (because you have a job or go to school or do something that takes up the rest of your day) then it will take you roughly 23 days to navmesh the entire worldspace. LOD generation is similar. It's not too bad if you only have a few cells, but for a large worldspace it takes darn near forever. This is why you need to decide ahead of time if you want to create a tiny worldspace that you can finish in a short amount of time, or if you want to create a major sized worldspace that will take you a huge time to complete. There's a reason that you don't see too many mods with worldspaces on the nexus. It's difficult to figure out, and buggy as all heck. It also takes a huge amount of time, which is why the few worldspaces that you do see tend to be small and simple. I've been working for months on a mod that has two huge worldspaces. At the rate I'm going, the mod will be done just after everyone has switched to Fallout 4, so no one but me will ever play it. One other thing. If you do try to make a huge worldspace, you can use the regions to add a lot of landscape items like cactuses and trees. This is a huge time saver, but be forwarned. If you have ever clicked on an object in debug mode, you'll notice that the object has an 8 character ID, something like 4100D236 (a completely made-up number). This is a hexidecimal number. The first two digits will be the number of your mod (41 in this case), aka its mod index. Fallout gets 00, and the different mods are assigned numbers as you add them into your mod list. On my system, dead money is 01, honest hearts is 02, old world blues is 03, etc. You can see the mod index in FOMM if you use that. So if you add another mod and it ends up loading before this one, that 41 could get bumped up to 42, for example. Now here's the important part. That xx00D236 part means that you have a six digit hex number for the ID. This corresponds to the file offset in your mod. The largest 6 digit hex number you can have is FFFFFF, which is 16,777,215. If the size of your mod's file is larger than this number, then any objects added after this length will cause the GECK and the game to crash. The GECK will give you no errors at all when it saves your mod, but when you try to load it again, it will lock up the GECK. That means you can't use the GECK to fix it. If you are making a small worldspace, then you probably don't have to worry about this at all. If you are making a large worldspace and are adding tons of landscape objects (cactuses, trees, etc) then you can run into this limit and it will break your mod. I hope that you find this helpful.

If you made this in Blender and have the use bsFadeNodeRoot (or whatever it's called, something like that) checked when you export the mesh, it will crash the GECK. I've made that mistake in Blender before when editing statics and then editing clothing and forgetting to change the nif export options.

Get the normal map generator for paint.net and create new normal maps (the files with the _n after the name) for the textures. Once you've created a new normal map, go into the layer properties and adjust the opacity down to something like 10 or 20 or so to reduce the shininess.

The easiest way to do this is to load the companion mod but not set it as the active file, then copy one of the race preset characters that happens to be the same race and sex as your NPC. There are copy and past functions in the face generation parts of the GECK that you can then use to copy the NPC's face to your character preset's face. Then just save that as your new mod, create a new character of that race, and the preset should be there. If they are using a custom race you will likely need to copy that custom race over as well, which may get a bit more complicated. But mostly you just copy everything you need into your own mod and use that to create your character preset.

I don't know exactly how some folk are creating their textures, but I've seen messed up textures like this in a lot of mods. They only work when you have your texture detail level set to high under video options. But then setting your texture level to high can cause you to run out of memory in places like the Atomic Wrangler. If this is your problem, you can fix it by loading the texture in something like paint.net and saving it. You may need to regenerate the normal map as well. If that's not the issue, then maybe you somehow installed the textures for the mod in the wrong place.