madmongo

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.

You have to make it an esm.

There are at least two revolver rifle mods that I'm aware of: http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/50702/? http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/58045/? By the way, in the real world, revolver rifles were well known for two things: (1) Spraying small bits of lead and powder residue at extremely high velocity into your left forearm as you fired it, and (2) chain firing (firing all cylinders at once) if you didn't keep them spotlessly clean (a problem many revolver pistols also had in that era). In a chain fire, the entire cylinder pretty much goes off like a grenade right next to your left wrist. There's a reason that these weapons never caught on in the real world. But they do look cool. And I use modified versions of both of the above mods on my game.

Creating a new worldspace is one of the most painful things that you can do in the GECK. It's not very intuitive, and if you just dive in and try to figure it out without knowing a lot of the tricks to it, the GECK will just crash on you. Even if you do everything right, the GECK will still often crash on you. Worldspace creation is extremely time consuming and buggy. A few tips that I learned along the way: First, create your new worldspace in the GECK (click on world at the top, then world spaces), and as soon as you have created it, save your file, because the GECK will probably crash at the next step. Now, create a simple heightmap. If you use the default height of 0 and just raise and lower things as you'd expect, the GECK will crash. You have to offset everything by 5000 or so. What I do is use the random noise feature with a frequency of 100, an amplitude of 50, and an offset of 6000. Click on generate and this will create an almost flat worldspace. Save at this point, though the GECK still might crash on you. Then, edit the heightmap again and put in all of the hills and mountains and dig down a bit for water areas (like the Delaware River in your case). Now you have an extremely unrealistically smooth world that at least has the rough heights on it. A topographic map of Philadelphia might help, but you don't want to follow it too closely. Instead, what you want to do is create a mini-Philadelphia that captures the essence of the city without actually duplicating the city. Save your work often. The GECK likes to crash a lot. Next, go back into the heightmap editor and again use the randomizer, this time with a higher frequency like 2000, a larger amplitude like 200, a base offset of 0, and click on addative and subtractive, and hit the random button again. This will add a lot of bumpiness to your landscape and will make it look a lot more realistic. Here's an important note. A worldspace goes from -32 to +32 cells in the X and Y directions, for a total of 4096 cells. If you use a large portion of that worldspace, you will have to navmesh all of the parts that you use. There's an automatic navmesh generator in the GECK that is supposed to make this easy for you. You just tell it what area, and it will automatically navmesh those cells. The problem is, IT DOESN'T WORK. More often that not, it will lock up the GECK with a repeating popup error that says simple "Get Jean!". Occasionally it will attempt to navmesh outside of the area that you selected, completely screwing up any other navmeshing you might have done in the area that it stomps all over. DO NOT USE THE AUTOMATIC NAVMESH GENERATOR. It will totally hose your mod. This means that you have to manually navmesh every cell. If you can navmesh on average one cell per minute, navmeshing 4096 cells will take you 4096 minutes, which is just shy of about 70 hours. If you work on it for 2 hours per night, it will take you about a month. And that's only for the navmeshing, and the only way you'll average a cell per minute is if you us the navmesh generator tool for most cells. Be forwarned that this will also often lock up the GECK. Do not use the navmesh generator tool (the little question mark thingy when you click on navmesh and bring up the navmesh toolbar) on cells that contain things like cave entrances or SCOLs. Needless to say, this is extremely painful, but this is what is required to make a city similar to the DC ruins in Fallout 3. And that doesn't include adding all of your buildings and objects before you do the navmeshing. What a lot of people do is they cheat. They don't make the huge DC wasteland style worldspace. Instead, they create a flat worldspace and just do the inside of the city, sticking to the downtown area so that you can use buildings to take up most of the space (much less navmeshing) and you can put rubble in between the buildings to further narrow down the usable portion of the worldspace. If you want to create a huge DC style area, then be prepared to spend many months doing so, especially since there will be some learning time required to figure this stuff out in the GECK. If you don't want to commit that much time to the project, then consider using the cheater mini-city method instead. Speedy's resources has building parts that can really help you create downtown areas, and there are some buildings in the GECK that you can use too. Anything that you can't find you'll have to create yourself, and that requires learning how to use Blender and nifscope and all of those fun things. Good luck!

You can make new worldspaces in the GECK. It is extremely difficult to learn how to do, rather unintuitive in parts (like much of the GECK), uses some of the buggier parts of the GECK and will crash often, and is extremely time consuming to do properly. There's a reason that you don't see many mods with new worldspaces in them, and those that do often have extremely simple and unrealistic flat land worldspaces. To make new things like furniture, armor, weapons, etc. you need the GECK, some sort of 3d modeling tool (I use Blender since it's free), nif tools that work with your 3d modeling tool so that you can import and export models in the nif format that fallout requires, something that can generate and edit dds textures and normal maps (GIMP can do both, paint.net can do the textures but not the normal maps), and nifscope. You can find Blender, the nifscripts that are required, and nifscope bundled together using versions that all play nice together on the nexus (might be under fallout 3).

I've made plenty of my own for my own characters. The first thing you want to do is create a custom race by copying one of the vanilla races in the GECK. Copy the body textures to your own custom directory, and then point the body textures in the GECK to them. If you do it this way, then the scars only affect your character and not evey other NPC in the game. Now you just need to edit the textures. You can use either paint.net or gimp. You'll need to install the dds plugin for whichever one you choose. I personally use paint.net for most things like this and only use gimp for things that paint.net doesn't support. What I usually do is I add another layer on top of the image. Then I find a nice scar or bruise image from a google image search and use the lasso tool to copy just the parts I want. Then I paste that onto my new layer, and then resize and move it around (this is why I like putting it on its own layer) and maybe adjust the hue and saturation etc. until it looks the way I want. Then merge the layer down and save as a dds. Most of the time that works fine. Sometimes I need to load the image in gimp afterwards and use the smudge tool so that the edges of the scar or bruise look better.

I've never used 3dsmax but blender often ends up screwing up the BSShaderFlags. Just look at the old nif and the new one you created to look for any differences. There are also different settings in the nif tools in blender that you have to set correctly when importing and exporting. I assume that the 3dsmax versions of the nif tools have similar settings. You may need to adjust those.

Fallout doesn't have weight for characters like Skyrim has. The only thing you can change is your character's height, which as already mentioned is done via setscale. Typing "player.setscale 0.92" in the console will make you short, for example.

I use remote control companions and it works fine for me. I don't know why you are having trouble with it, unless you've installed a mod that affects beds or sleeping. Companions will seek out the closest bed (which sometimes gets a little weird because they go by physical distance not walking distance) but if there's no bed available they won't take out a bedroll.

It would be cool but the game really isn't set up for it. Fallout is kinda weird in that it has bodies and it has outfits, but the outfits include body parts. If, for example, you put on an outfit with a T shirt, your arms are visible, but those aren't the arms from the body model. Those arms are included in the outfit model. This means that for every option you want (missing arm, missing legs, whatever) you would need not only separate body models for each of these, but separate clothing meshes for every single piece of clothing, both male and female, with the same options. And then since Fallout isn't designed for this, you need to do some fancy scripts to handle all of the transitions. What happens, for example, if you blow the leg off of a raider and he crawls away and dies later, leaving one boot (and the attached leg) a couple of miles behind him, and then you take his outfit? Are you now missing a boot with that outfit? Now you need even more models. Also, there's no crawling animation that I'm aware of. I would love it if someone would do this, but the amount of work involved is staggering.

If you have too many mods installed, one of the symptoms is that you can end up with these weird low-res blurry ground textures all over the place. Merging some of your mods so that you have fewer in total seems to fix it for a lot of folks.

There's a few ways you can screw it up, but one of the easiest is that you exported it using the wrong options in Blender. There's an option off on the right side of the window when you export the nif called something like Use BSF node something or other and you toggle that one way for static objects like buildings and such and the other way for things like clothing and armor. Off the top of my head I can't remember which way is which, but I think it needs to be de-selected for armor. If you get it wrong, it tends to crash the GECK exactly like you describe. There are other things that can crash the GECK too but that's an easy one to screw up. Did you fiddle with parenting to skeletons or anything like that, or did you add any new meshes and maybe forgot to parent them?

I have made dozens of companions and I have never once put a b in front of any variables. It can't be too important. Really, it's just computer programming shorthand to indicate that you are using it as a binary variable, i.e. you only care if it is 1 or 0 (even though technically it's created as a short integer). If you want to make a companion, at the bare minimum you need a companion script. You don't need a quest script. A very simple script would be something like this: scn MyCompanionScript short DoOnce short Following short Waiting Begin GameMode if(DoOnce!=1) Set Waiting to 1 Set Following to 0 Set DoOnce to 1 Endif End Once you have created the script, when you create your NPC, select this script (under the name and Editor ID on the left). Now put your NPC somewhere, and once he/she/it is there, double click on them and give them a reference name (i.e. MyCompanionREF). Now create two packages, one called MyCompanionFollow and the other called MyCompanionWait. The MyCompanionFollow is a package type of follow, select the player for the reference to follow, give it a follow distance of say 200 or so, and under conditions add a condition to check the script variable for MyCompanionREF and select the variable Following == 1. For the wait, you can use either a guard or a sandbox package. With the sandbox the NPC will move around and do stuff more. Set the sandbox location to the current location, set the distance to something like 500. Again make a condition, and this time check against the script variable of Waiting (again check == with a value of 1). Open up your NPC and add those two packages to their package list. Now create a quest. You'll need to make 4 topics for it. You'll need to add in a GREETING, then make 3 custom topics called something like MyCompanionFollowOption, MyCompanionWaitOption, and MyCompanionNevermind. These 3 will be top level and all will have the goodbye flag set. All of them will CheckID against your companion under the conditions. The nevermind doesn't do anything except allows you to exit without changing anything. The follow option has a simple 2 line script that sets Follow to 1 and sets Wait to 0, followed by a MyCompanionREF.evp (to re-evaluate its AI package). The wait option also has a simple 3 line script that sets follow to 0, wait to 1, and again the evp. And that's it. That's all it takes to make a companion. The companion wheel will not work and you can't access the companion's inventory, but that is a bare minimum companion. If you want a working companion wheel, there's a lot more you have to do, and you have to use specific variables and dialog options instead of just making your own like the above. The above is just to show you what is the absolute minimum required to make a companion work. Also, if you want there to be a quest for your companion to be hired, or maybe you want your companion to have a quest after you've hired them, that can be done by adding a quest script and another quest or whatever you want. You can get much, much fancier. If you want a working companion wheel, invetory access, etc. this tutorial goes step by step through the process, and even has a couple of extras like a "relax" option, which I generally use also. http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/45278/? If you go through the tutorial, you'll see that there are a few more steps other than the ones I listed above, but it's not much more complicated than that. Note - the above is all from memory and I'm not at my gaming computer so I may have whiffed a couple of things - if you really want to make a companion use the tutorial I linked to. I just wanted to show you what the absolute mininum was for a companion so you'll understand how the companion system works. You don't really want to make a companion that way since it won't have a working companion wheel or inventory access.

If you want it to be at all realistic, take the toz-66 with the sawed off stock and the sawed off barrel, and make it SMALLER. Not bigger. A weapon like the OP describes would do almost as much damage to the person shooting it as it would to the person or object they are shooting at. A weapon that small with so little mass to absorb the recoil would kick harder than an FEV infected super-mutatant mule. If you don't care about realisim, then do whatever you want. There's no shortage of silly weapons on the nexus.

Howdah pistols may have large caliber size barrels, but they fired round musket balls. The pistols themselves are much smaller than a double-barrel shotgun (even a very short sawed off shotgun), and even though it fires a .50 cal round ball, that packs nowhere near the same amount of energy as a modern .50 cal bullet or even a 20 gauge shell. Damage-wise, they are probably equivalent to a .357 pistol at best, and probably more like the 9mm for your typical howdah. Yeah, they fired a big hunk of lead, but the short barrel and the round shape of the bullet and the relatively small powder load meant that it didn't have a huge amount of force behidn it. The older flintlock versions were usually smooth bore, and couldn't hit the broad side of a barn beyond about 25 yards or so. Later percussion cap models were sometimes rifled and were a bit more accurate. Their intent was usually to be used at close range, though, like when a tiger is jumping up on your cart. They weren't just for hunters. They were also used for personal protection, and not just against animals. Damage should be much, much smaller than what you suggested. If you are doing a smooth bore flintlock, the weapon spread will be horrible. If you are doing a more modern rifled version, the weapon spread will be about equal to a typical low-quality pistol. There's a flintlock pistol here: http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/49079/? If the author will let you use the assets, what you want to do is basically make a copy of it, flip it so that the flintlock is on the other side, then mush the two together so that there's only one stock and hand grip. That's all a howdah pistol is, two (or more) regular flintlock pistols shoved together. Most howdah pistols had two barrels, but I've seen some with three or even four barrels. Early howdah pistols were all muzzle loaded. Later ones were sometimes breach loaders and often were break-action, which means you could probably use the shotgun animation for reloading. The flintlock versions were prone to accidentally firing both barrels if you didn't keep the weapon clean (the sparks from one flint going off would ignite powder residue on the surface of the weapon, often igniting the other pan and making that barrel fire as well).

I never had much of a problem with Skyrim crashing. New Vegas Anti-Crash (NVAC) helps a lot. FNV does crash though. Save often. One common crash is running out of memory. Setting your textures to a lower quality level helps reduce memory usage. With some mods though the custom textures don't work properly at the lower resolutions (which you can fix yourself if you know how to edit dds textures, just open them up and save them properly).

I'm working on a rather huge mod that basically includes much of western Nevada and parts of California. There are two world spaces. The first starts at Indian Springs (just NW of New Vegas) and goes up to the area just above Tonopah, NV. This area includes Shady Sands, Vaults 13 and 15, and a bunch of towns like Lone Pine, Independence, Big Pine, Bishop, and Benton Hot Springs. The second world space is just north of this, and includes Lake Tahoe, Carson City, New Reno, and the "Big Circle", which is Broken Hills, Gecko, Modoc, the Den, and Reading. Some other towns south of Reading are also included, as is Klamath Falls. I still have a long way to go. Don't expect it to be released any time soon. I will finish it and release it though.

If I get some time, I might make up some world spaces for people to use as a modder's resource. If I were to do that, what sort of landscape are you looking for, anything in particular?