madmongo

If everything was working and now it isn't, check your antivirus to make sure it didn't get a false positive on one of your GECK dll files. I've had that happen before. I had to add an exception in my antivirus so it wouldn't keep deleting the dll.

I haven't looked at it, but I was under the impression that BnB uses a different skeleton. To switch from one to the other you are going to have to unparent the armor from the BnB skeleton, import a regular skeleton, parent the armor to that, then adjust all of the bone weights since Blender never seems to do that right (at least not for me).

Yes, the radiation level gets higher as you get closer to the marker. The number you put in for the radiation is the highest it will get, basically right at the marker. A radius of 1 is very small. I typically use a radius of about 1000 or so if I want to cover a typical room sized area.

Depending on how the weapon's textures are defined, it's possible you didn't copy the textures into the right place. It's also possible that the textures themselves are buggy. I've seen a lot of textures on the nexus that only display properly if you have your texture detail set to high in your video properties (and setting that to high can cause other problems, like running out of memory when you enter the Atomic Wrangler, for example). If setting the detail level to high doesn't work for you, then your only other alternative is to edit the textures to fix them so that they work properly with all video settings.

I played around with cyborg characters for a bit. I even released a cyborg test NPC fairly early on in the process (I was still learning how to model so it's a bit crude) but the response was mostly apathetic or negative so I never bothered releasing anything else after that and just kept them for my own use. I ended up creating several different cyborgs and also a ghoul companion with a wooden leg and a hook for a left hand (he had stepped on a mine and lost both). The one thing you run into is what davinpatterson said. Fallout is kinda funny in that the outfits include body parts. So if your character is wearing a T-shirt for example, visible body parts like your character's arms are not the arms from your character's body model, but instead are a part of the T-shirt model. This means that if you want to wear different outfits, you generally have to make custom versions of each outfit that include your custom robotic limbs.

My time is a bit limted, but I'll help you with whatever I can. Send me a pm with whatever questions you have and I'll try to answer them.

The Atomic Wrangler loads a lot of stuff, so it tends to be one of the first places to break when you run into memory issues. I personally ran into this issue when I added New Vegas Redesigned (I think version 3) and found that a lot of the textures didn't work properly at lower texture resolutions. I switched everything to high resolution textures under my graphics properties, and from then on out every time I entered the Wrangler my game crashed with an out of memory error. The fix for me was to set the graphics back to using low resolution textures, which significantly reduces their memory usage. The difference between lower and higher resolution textures on my machine isn't that noticeable (especially since I don't exactly have the sharpest vision in the world these days), but depending on your system and your graphics settings it might be more noticeable than that. You also are likely to run into the issue that made me switch to higher resolution textures in the first place. There are a lot of folks out there creating textures for mods that only work on the highest texture resolution. My solution for those, since I can't run the game in highest texture resolution or it crashes, was to simply open up the misbehaving textures as I found them using Paint.Net with the dds plugin, and just saving them again. Sometimes I would have to fiddle with the normal maps too, which involves GIMPing since Paint.Net doesn't handle normal maps (or if it does, I don't know how to do it, so someone please tell me).

If you are working in Blender, you should import the pipboy mesh, add in your light bulb mesh, parent it to the same skeleton as the pipboy, adjust the weights so that the bulb moves exactly the same as the pipboy, then export it to nif and use nifscope to clean up the things that don't export properly.

I uploaded a few pics so you guys will know this is a real mod and not just a bunch of big ideas. See the pics section of the nexus. I'll upload some more pics over the next few days.

I'm currently working on a rather huge mod that contains New Reno. I hoped to have it done by this summer but I'm not even close yet, so it will probably be more like fall. The mod covers much of western Nevada and eastern NCR territory, so it has vaults 13 and 15, Shady Sands, New Reno, and the "Big Circle" (Broken Hills, Vault City, the Den, Gecko, etc). This is NOT a port of fallout 1 and 2. I'm basically taking the ideas from fallout 1 and 2 and placing them on top of the "real" landscape, as much as possible, which doesn't always work so well. Not only is there no Gecko in the real Nevada, there's no decent road going east to west in that whole area that would suffice to complete that part of the Big Circle. There's also the issue that if you map things out, Shady Sands ends up actually being in Nevada (so it should be the NNR, New Nevada Republic?). So I shuffled things around a bit to make it fit as best as I could, and I'm putting in a lot of things that were completely absent from Fallout 1 and 2, like all of the towns up through the Owens Valley. Also, I am not porting what's in Fallout 1 and 2. Instead, I am taking the things that were there and I'm imagining what has happened to them in the years since Fallout 1 and 2 happened. So Shady Sands has gotten bigger, and the NCR has expanded all up through the Owens Valley and is pushing up against New Reno, which is still independent. The NCR has managed to take control of Vault City, which is on the other side of New Reno, so in a way the NCR has New Reno somewhat surrounded. What I have done so far is Indian Springs, Amargosa Valley, Beatty, and then you can go left to Shady Sands and up through One Pine (Lone Pine in real life, but President Kimball calls it One Pine in his speech at Hoover Dam), Independence, Big Pine, Bishop, Benton, and a few other ruined towns. Or, you can go north from Beatty and go through the ruins of Goldfield, Tonopah, and Hawthorne. The north route from Beatty is all raider territory. The west to Shady Sands route and up through the Owens Valley is all NCR territory. That ends up being one entire worldspace right there. (there's also some hidden things on the map that I'm not going to spoiler) Going either north from Benton or from Hawthorne will take you into the mod's second worldspace, which contains Lake Tahoe, the ruins of Carson City, New Reno, and a whole bunch of other stuff that's not done yet. The top end of the map is going to be Klamath Falls. The external part of the first world space is completely done. Most of the interiors are done. The landscape of the second world space is done, and some of the settlements are done. I haven't done any interiors for the second world space yet. Only a small portion of the quests and dialog are done so far. So I've still got a long way to go.

It's a proprietary language just for Fallout. It's not a standard language like C++ or java but it uses a lot of similar syntax for certain types of things. It evolved out of the scripting langauge for older games like Morrowind and Oblivion though it has some slight differences. They tweaked it a bit more and gave it the name "papyrus" for Skyrim. I don't think it has an official name in Fallout.

The way rad markers work is you have a maximum radiation level and then a radius, which is how far from the rad marker that your character will receive rads. The radiation level is at its highest right at the radiation marker, then tapers off the farther away you get. So if you only give it a radiation of 2.0 it's going to fairly quickly taper off to 1 throughout most of the radiation marker's radius. Try setting the radiation in the rad marker to 20.0 and give it a radius of at least 1000 and see how that works. You can then make the radius larger or smaller depending on how far away you want the character to receive rads and can set the radiation level higher or lower as desired as well. That's the only two things you need to set, the radiation and the radius under the extra portion of the radiation marker.

What exactly are you doing in the GECK? I've had the .tes file problem. I'm running the GECK powerup, so I don't know if that makes a difference, but I get an error on save, with an error popup, but not a GECK crash. It's fairly rare though, definitely not every time. The way out of it (for me) is to delete the .tes file and then try the save again. If you are creating a new worldspace and you don't raise the entire landscape above some level (I don't remember exactly the height level needed) then the GECK will crash when you save, every single time. What I do when creating a new heightmap is set the randomizer to produce an almost flat terrain with an offset of 6000. Then I save that. After that, then I go in and edit the heightmap to create mountains, dig out rivers and lakes, add noise to make it look realistic, etc. It still crashes on occasion, but definitely not every time. I'm not aware of anything other than the heightmap bug that will crash the GECK consistently as you describe.

You should also check to make sure that the player has enough caps using a dialog condition. Otherwise the above script will still give you the item even if you only have 3 caps in your inventory (it will remove those 3 and leave you with 0).

There is a dds plugin available for photoshop. I don't have any personal experience with it so I can't tell you how well it works, whether or not it can handle normal maps, or how easy it is to get it working. Also, note that paint.net is not the same as ms paint that comes with windows. Paint.net may be downloaded for free.

I personally hate silent mods. I would much rather NPCs have a crappy computer generated voice or a modulated (changed) voice than no voice at all. I always put computer generated voices in my mods if I don't have a voice actor available. However, I know that many people find them annoying, so I also put instructions on what files to delete if they want to get rid of those voices.

Sometimes you get lucky and you can just remove the part with nifscope. That only works when the parts are all separate. If you want to remove a part that is not separate, you have to load the nif into your favorite 3d modeling tool (Blender or 3ds Max), chop off the parts you don't want, then export it back out as a nif. It's fairly simple if you know what you are doing. It's an awful lot to learn if you don't.

You need to understand how dialog works, which is a bit goofy. It makes sense if you think of Morrowind, where multiple NPCs could all give you the same conversation topics. There are generally two places where conversations show up. They are either top level (they are visible right from the NPC's greeting) or they are response options to other conversation topics. If they are top level, then they need to have the top level box checked in the topic quest. [billy Mays]But wait, there's more![/billy Mays] Ok, that's not all of it. There are also generally conditions associated with the topics that have to be met before the topic will be visible. One of the obvious conditions is often that the speaker ID has to match the NPC that you want to speak the line. Then there may be script or quest variables that have to be set. The quest itself may start of disabled and may need to be enabled. It's quests that can make this all very difficult. When I make an NPC, I put all of their converstaions into one quest. That way it's all in one place and it's easy to find. Bethesda doesn't always follow this rule, so conversation options for one NPC might be splattered all through dozens of different quests with little apparent rhyme or reason for it. Cass's dialog is probably the worst. It's an extremely confusing mish-mash in the GECK that is so jumbled and confusing that most modders won't even touch it (she almost never speaks a top level greeting, for example, so whenever you add in top level dialog options they usually don't show up in-game). If you want to re-enable cut content, the first thing you need to do is figure out if the dialog was intended to be top-level or if it was intended to be reached through other conversation options. Then you need to figure out how it was disabled. For example, if it was a top-level thing they may have simpley unchecked the top-level box so that the dialog never shows up.To re-enable that, all you need to do is check the box. If it was intended to be reached through other conversation options, they may have simply removed that dialog option as a choice in an existing dialog topic. You can fix that by adding it back in as a covnersation choice (assuming you can figure out exactly where it was supposed to be added as a choice). If they added a script or quest variable check that can never come true, you may need to modify the conditions check. Or you may just need to enable the quest. There are lots of possibilities. Some of the cut content is voiced, some of it isn't. Some of it is really buggy, which was why it was cut. Simply re-enabling it may not be enough. You may need to sort out the bugs in order to make it work.

What you need in order to do 3d modeling and texturing is some sort of modeling program that has the ability to deal with nif files, and something that can edit dds image files. For modeling, there are only two packages that work that I know of, Blender and 3ds Max. Blender is free. 3ds Max isn't. I use Blender, because of the cost issue. I can't tell you how to set up 3ds Max. For Blender, you need Blender itself, and you also need the nif import and export tools to plug into it. Somewhere on the nexus (might be on the fallout 3 section instead of new vegas) there's a download that has Blender 2.49 with a matching set of nif tools and nifscope all included. It's an older version of Blender, but you just take those files and install them, and everything works together. If you try to use a newer version of Blender, you can run into a lot of trouble finding a set of nif tools that works properly. There's a decent Blender tutorial called from Noob to Pro (or something like that). I recommend starting there. Once you get the basic hang of Blender, then you can look up specific tutorials like how to make Fallout weapons using Blender and how to make Fallout statics and clothing, etc. For editing textures, you can use either Paint.net or Gimp. Each has a dds plugin that you will need to install. Paint.net is simpler and is both easier to learn and easier to use. However, Gimp has more features and can handle normal maps, which Paint.net can't do. To create your own monsters, what you'll definitely want to do at first is start with an existing monster of some sort. That way you can use its basic skeleton and all of its animations. All you need to do in Blender is create your new monster model, parent that model to the monster skeleton, adjust the bone weights (because Blender's defaults never seem to get it right) and export it as a nif, and you're done modeling. Then add the model in the GECK, create any special scripts you may want, add in any special sounds that you want, and you have a monster. Creating a simple static is probably the best place to start. That's about as simple as it gets.

This is my NPC's script: scn zzCrucifiedScript short HasBeenHired short L38 short Relax short CrossState short DoOnce int ConvoState int CombatStyleRanged int CombatStyleMelee int IsFollowingDefault int IsFollowingLong int FollowerSwitchAggressive int Waiting Begin GameMode If(DoOnce != 1) Set HasBeenHired to 0 Set L38 to 0 Set CombatStyleRanged to 1 Set CombatStyleMelee to 0 Set IsFollowingDefault to 0 Set IsFollowingLong to 0 Set FollowerSwitchAggressive to 0 Set Waiting to 0 Set Relax to 0 Set CrossState to 1 Set ConvoState to 0 Set DoOnce to 1 Endif End It's your basic Joe Average NPC script, nothing fancy. The only addition relative to getting them crucified is the addition of the variable short CrossState which is initialized to 1 (they start out on the cross). The NPC is placed in front of the cross where they will be crucified. The cross is just the standard cross static model (NVCrucifix). In front of that is the crucifixion furniture (NVCrucifixFurniture), which I gave a reference of zzCrucFurn1REF. It's fairly easy to line up the furniture with the cross if you line it up where the hands attach to the crossbar. You don't need to give the static cross a ref, only the furniture part. My NPC has a ref of zzCrucified1REF. The crucifixion AI package (which I happened to name zzCrucified1Cross) has a type of travel, with the destination being the crucifixion furniture (zzCrucFurn1REF in my case). Under misc flags, only EnableFalloutBehavior is checked. Under conditions, I have it check GetScriptVariable reference: zzCrucified1REF, CrossState == 1. You don't need to do anything else to the package. You don't need to pick the crucifixion idle in the package. It will automatically pick that idle based on the furniture type. My NPC also has your other typical NPC packages like follow, wait, etc. The script in the dialog quest to free the crucified victim and add them as a follower looks like this: Set zzCrucified1REF.CrossState to 0 Set zzCrucified1REF.Waiting to 0 Set zzCrucified1REF.IsFollowingDefault to 1 Set zzCrucified1REF.HasBeenHired to 1 zzCrucified1REF.SetPlayerTeammate 1 zzCrucified1REF.SetIgnoreFriendlyHits 1 As you can see, most of that is adding them as a follower. There's only the one line setting the CrossState variable which actually frees them. And that's all you need to do. My NPC is actually a bit fancier than that. I have two copies of the NPC, each with a custom race. The race for the crucified version has a skin texture that has them all bloodied and bruised (they really look like they've had the snot beat out of them), and the script to free them also hobbles both of their legs so that once they do get freed, they limp until they get healed. The healing script swaps out the bloodied NPC for the non-bloodied NPC, which is stored in a temporary inaccessible interior holding cell. The conversation options for when they are hanging on the cross (checked by making a conditional off of the CrossState variable) have a greeting where they just weakly say "help me" and the only options while they are on the cross is to either free them or leave them hanging.

I have an NPC that starts out crucified in Nipton, can be freed, and then acts as a follower. When I get home tonight I'll post the details of how I made it. From what I recall, I just created a package for the NPC while crucified, then I just clear the NPC script variable and set the NPC follow variable when freeing them (set through dialog). There's no factions involved.

Don't change terrain in an esm. It won't work properly. Use esm files to add new things (especially NPCs, as skin textures for NPCs added in esp files won't work properly). Use esp files to change existing things and to change terrain and navmeshes. If you are adding new terrain, as in creating a new world space, then add that terrain in an esm. Otherwise, don't do terrain in an esm. You can end up with landscape tears and end up with terrain that isn't modified the way you think it should be. Also, if you use the GECK powerup, your GECK will then be able to edit esm files without needing to convert them to esp files and back again. The GECK powerup will also annoy you a lot with warnings, but hey, nothing's perfect. Edited to add: The weird terrain issue can also be caused by having too many mods or your system running low on available memory. The duster skin issue is because things with skins (NPCs or armor that has exposed skin) need to be added in an esm to work properly.

I started working on a mod a while ago that had fatty and skinny body types. I was going to make some of the NPCs on the strip fat, as that's the only place where food is relatively abundant and people have enough caps to be able to afford to overeat, and I was going to make a lot of folks in the wasteland anorexically skinny due to malnutrition (it always seemed odd to me how healthy some of these folks look while drinking irradiated water and never having enough food to eat). I got the basic body meshes done, though they weren't anything fantastic, and I made a few outfits, but that's as far as I got. I don't know if I'll ever have time to come back to it. The body meshes aren't difficult. It's modifying all of the outfits that is really time consuming.

What exactly are you trying to create? If you are trying to create a static object, then you'll want to add a collision mesh for it in Blender and export it with the use BSA node (or whatever it's called) checked in the Blender Nif export options. And yes, quite often you'll end up with only a couple of nodes for a simple static. Now, if you are trying to create armor or something like that, then you need to parent them to a skeleton in Blender, and when you export that, you'll get a lot more blocks as it will also include the skeleton parts.

The default in FNV is for the right eye and the left eye to both use the same texture, which limits you to each eye being exactly the same color. You can make custom eye colors to your heart's desire, but both eyes end up with the same color. However, there's still hope. There's a mod called Old Ghoul Eye that allows each eye to be a different color (in the mod, the left eye ends up being ghoulified). You can't just plug in your dds file though as the Old Ghoul Eye mod uses a custom texture for the eyes. What you can do, fairly easily, is edit the Old Ghoul Eye textures to match what you want. You'll need either Paint.net or Gimp (Paint.net is easier to learn how to use) and the dds plugin for whichever one you end up using. Then you can just copy and paste and resize your dds onto the Old Ghoul Eye dds and use that. Here's the Old Ghoul Eye mod: http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/40678/? Note that modifications to a mod like this cannot be uploaded back to the Nexus (or released anywhere else for that matter) without the permission of the original mod author, which is why I can't modify Old Ghoul Eye for you.