madmongo

Do you want a new worldspace?

The GECK is a miserable toolset. I've often said that I think it was created by Vault-Tec as an experiment designed to monitor modder's frustration levels. Once you get the hang of it, it's not too bad, but a lot of things aren't very intuitive in it. For example, when you first start modding, you expect to do a file->open or some such, the way you would for any Windows program for, say, the last couple of decades, rigth? Wrong. In the GECK, you click on file->data. This brings up a list of esm and esp files. You can click on files to load them in your GECK session, but here's another thing that isn't at all obvious. If you click on esm files, they will be included in your mod. But, if you click on esp files, they will get loaded, but they won't be included in your mod. If you modify something that is in an esp, then a local copy of it will be saved in your mod. However, since the entire esp isn't included in your mod, if the thing that you modified relies on something else in that esp, you've just screwed yourself over. It won't work. So basically, only click on esm files. And here is yet another thing that isn't at all intuitive. When you want to create a new mod, you don't create a new mod. You click on some esm files to select them, start up the GECK, then make some changes, and then save. And then it asks you for a file name and you create your mod. Now that you see the GECK's weird way of doing things, now you can create your simple mod. Click on file->data and check the box for fallout.esm (any fallout mod will need that). Click ok and the GECK will load with just the basic fallout vanilla stuff included. If you want to include dlc content you have to check those boxes as well, but since Boone is in the vanilla game you don't need that (note that by default, some versions of the game that have all of the dlc installed will automatically select those dlc files when you start the GECK). So now you've got your vanilla game loaded in the GECK. There's a list down the left side of stuff. Quests and NPC packages and stuff is all up towards the top, and as you scroll down you'll see NPCs. Click on that and you'll get a list of NPCs next to it. There's a little search box you can use to find Boone. Hopefully they put "boone" somewhere in his ID tag. Most NPCs will have their name in their tag, but some don't. Boone could be something like nvcompanionsniper or something like that, you never know. But search for boone first (or the name of any other NPC you want to modify). Once you find Boone, you can double click on him to edit his stats. Boone is an NPC, so changing him to another type of NPC is fairly easy. Just select his race on the first tab. You can change him into a child or a ghoul easily enough. Changing him into a creature gets to be a lot more difficult, as that's a creature and not an NPC, which is an entirely different category in the GECK. Briefly, you will probably need to delete the NPC version and create a creature version in his place, which will involve editing an awful lot of scripts and dialog entries. Let's say that you changed Boone into a little girl. Now click ok on the NPC window to close it, and click on file->save in the GECK. Now it should ask you for a name for your mod. Enter the name and the file will save. Exit the GECK, and go into FOMM or Fallout New Vegas (whichever you use to configure your mods) and click on the check box so that your mod will load. Go into the game, and voila, Boone should be changed. Welcome to the world of the GECK. Some things you should know: Character skins don't display properly for characters created in esp files. If you want the body and head skins to match, you need to create the character in an esm file. An easy way to create an esm file is to create it first as an esp, then go into FOMM and select tools->TesSnip and load your esp, and use that to convert it to an esm. Dialog is very, very, very, very unintuitive. There isn't just one dialog option for each character. Instead, dialog is organized by topics and is mixed in with quests and all kinds of stuff. It makes a lot of sense if you remember that the game engine evolved out of Morrowind, where everything was text based and multiple NPCs could all say the same thing based on topics and what area they were in, etc. The point is, you change Boone into a little girl, and he still talks like a caucasion guy, and changing all of his dialog to match means searching through tons and tons of different quests looking for anything that Boone might say. It is much easier to create your own NPC and keep all of his or her dialog in one quest. The GECK also doesn't contain the files necessary for lip file creation. You can pull the necessary files from the Oblivion version of the GECK (google for details) if you want to add voice to your NPCs. lip files are what makes the NPCs lips move while they talk. There are a bunch of ini settings you may need to muck with to get your version of the GECK to work properly. The GECK assumes that you need to spellcheck everything, then doesn't include the dictionary to make it work. This means that every single word you type in dialog will fail the spell check. Download the GECK powerup so that you can disable the spell check, and instead the GECK powerup will give you fourteen thousand warnings for all kinds of little things that you don't care about. If you are editing dialog, though, the powerup warnings are a lot less annoying than the constant spellcheck fails. Generally speaking, making something like a new NPC or a house is relatively easy in the GECK. Adding quests and dialog is a bit harder, and making a new worldspace with a proper heightmap requires you to be a massochist who really gets a lot of enjoyment out of pain and misery. Good luck!

There are a lot of tutorials out there for Blender. A good one to start with is called Blender from Noob to Pro (or something like that). If you do a google search you'll also find tutorials for how to import and export nifs. I don't know if there's a tutorial out there for nifskope. As for cutting off parts, you can look at the nif in nifskope first. If, for example, the fire hydrant is two pieces, the pipe and the top, then you can just cut off the pipe by removing that branch in nifskope. If it's all one mesh (which is pretty likely for the fire hydrant) then import it into Blender, chop off the part you don't want, and export it as a nif. It's probably easiest to delete the collision and rebuild it then too. Otherwise it will still have collision for the pipe that is no longer there, which will be kinda weird. Collision in Blender is actually pretty easy. Using your fire hydrant example again, just duplicate the modified hydrant mesh (without the pipe) and use that duplicated mesh as a triangle mesh collision type. Again, if you google search you can find step by step instructions on how to do this.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but you don't want your game world to be too realistic. If you want to know why, take a walk through your town. I mean literally, walk through your entire town. What you'll find is that you walk and walk and walk and walk and walk and most of what you walk past isn't interesting. What you want to do when you take a real place and put it into the GECK is make a compressed version of the real place that captures the essence of the place without actually capturing all of the detail. You don't want every single street and house. Compare Goodsprings in the GECK with the actual Goodsprings on google maps (or google earth). Notice how much smaller the game version is.

New Vegas uses .nif format. To put models into the game, just load the model into Blender and export it as a nif. This isn't always as easy as it sounds. First of all, the nif scripts you will need work with Blender 2.49. If you want to be able to create nifs, you need to download Blender 2.49 and all of the tools from the Nexus. That way you get all of the versions of tools and scripts that all work together. If you download them from elsewhere, you will likely end up with versions that are all incompatible with each other and you'll never get it to work. Now that you have an old version of Blender, what you'll find is that a lot of the free models out there are in a format that it can't import correctly (because it's old). But you can't upgrade to a newer version of Blender because then the nif scripts won't work and you won't be able to create nifs, which is the whole point of the exercise. You will be able to find some models that you can use, though. Then you'll find out that the model doesn't have collision data so you have to add that yourself (in other words, you need to know how to use Blender to make models - this isn't a simple file import). And you'll have to fiddle with your nif in NifSkope because there are some things that Blender doesn't do right (like add an entry for the normal map for the textures). But basically, any model that Blender can import can be turned into a nif. Check the licenses on your models. You can't upload them on the Nexus unless the license for the model gives you permission to do so. So look for models that are free to use or free as long as you credit the author, that sort of thing. So it's not as simple as just downloading the correct file format, but if you can model in Blender it's not that difficult.

I don't understand what you are doing. If you are using assets from the game and the dlc, just use it in the GECK. You don't need to extract it. If you are modifying assets from the game, then you can extract them to your own folder and modify them there. You can generally put meshes and textures wherever you like, but if you want to make it easier on people who use your mod and maybe delete it later, it helps to put all of the meshes in a folder under meshes that has the same name as the mod or is otherwise easily identifiable. Same for the textures. In other words, if your mod is named MyMod.esp then put your modified and newly created meshes in \data\meshes\MyMod and put your modified and newly created textures in data\textures\MyMod. If you just want to extract assets from the game, then many assets will have the same name, and if you don't preserve the directory structure when you unpack the BSAs then you'll end up overwriting files. I don't know if you are new to modding or not. Your questions make me think that you are. Try something simpler before creating a whole new worldspace. Creating a worldspace is one of the buggiest, most un-intuitive, and difficult things to do in the GECK.

I believe ares uses a custom body mesh. You will need to edit the bunny suit mesh to get rid of the default type 3 mesh and use the ares mesh instead.

If you want to save yourself a LOT of time and headaches, use Blender 2.49b. You can get it and a lot of the associated tools that you will need with it (including Nifskope), all with versions that work together, from here: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/30/? You don't need a specific version of GIMP. You do however need the dds plugin, so make sure you use a version of GIMP that has a working dds plugin available. Tutorial for creating armor/clothing: http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Creating_an_armour_for_Fallout._Part_1 Most things will port from Fallout 3 to New Vegas without requiring any changes to models or textures. The ESP and ESM files will not port directly. Note that you cannot upload ported assets without the original author's permission, and you cannot upload anything that uses assets from the Fallout 3 game itself unless those assets are also in New Vegas.

Let's start with the basics. Did you finish the navmesh (click on the check mark)? Did you make this door yourself? Why are you using a door? Why not just use a script to move the npc? MyNpcREF.moveto MyXmarkerREF

I've made skinnies and fatties for my own use. I've got the basic bodies done, though the male skinny body definitely needs some major work. The others aren't too bad, I think (then again, I'm no professional modeler by any stretch of the imagination). I figured the only place you'd find fatties are in the casinos, and they would be the few people wealthy enough to gorge themselves on food. Skinnies should be much more common, especially out in the wastes where food is hard to find and in places like Freeside and North Vegas Square. Fiends should be skinny and have a sickly skin texture. Just my opinion, though. I don't have the time to make this into a usable mod. I've only got a couple of outfits that are done so the mod needs a lot of work. I also wanted to make some outfits that were much more ragged. Folks starving to death in Freeside shouldn't be so nicely dressed. Where'd they get the caps for those kinds of clothes? And for that matter, even if they had the caps, where'd they get the clothes? Stuff should be 200 years old and rotted and full of holes.

You can click on world -> landscape editing, although that gets a bit painful if you want to dig out anything larger than a small pond. You can select the size of the tool but it only goes up to 15 max, which isn't very big for lake sized things. Left mouse lets you drag the landscape up and down and right mouse textures the landscape with whatever texture you have selected. As with many things in the GECK, this is a bit buggy. It will often leave visual artifacts on the landscape in the form of big black squares just outside of the area that you were editing. You can double click to another area then double click back there to reload the textures and make the big black squares go away, but simply scrolling away from the area and scrolling back won't clear them. Be warned, if you do any texture editing on the landscape. I've also had it hork up the landscape texture so bad that there was literally no way to fix it in the GECK and I had to reload my mod from an earlier save. Make backup copies often. It also completely lacks any of the tools that you have in the heightmap editor. You get up and down and texture and that's it. So basically your tools are the heightmap editor which is kinda like trying to do delicate surgery with a chain saw, and the landscape editor which is kinda like trying to carve out Mt. Rushmore with a hand pick. Neither tool is well suited to making a lake in an established landscape.

Look in Speedy's Resources.

No, I haven't generated terrain meshes. I'm still a bit of a newbie at this and I haven't quite figured out the LOD stuff yet. The mod is playable without it so I wasn't planning on adding that until near the end. What I have so far is the worldspace I described, which is basically the area just north of Vegas up to Tonopah, a second worldspace that covers the "Big Circle", for which I am using the area from around Lake Tahoe up to Klamath Falls, and soon I will be adding a third worldspace to fill in the gap between the two areas. I originally wasn't going to have the third area but I was poking around on google maps and found a lot of things that I think I can turn into interesting game locations. So basically I started out wanting to do the area around New Reno and got carried away with it. When I'm done you'll basically be able to go from New Vegas all the way up to Gecko and Klamath and everywhere in between. The exterior of the first area is pretty much done. All of the buildings, roads, and structures are in place. I still have to add landscape objects like trees, etc. and add clutter, and do the navmeshing. I had the Big Circle area done, but I didn't like the way parts of it came out so I'm currently re-doing that. Once that's done I'll do the third worldspace and then move on to interiors, quests, etc. I also have an incomplete Mohave Valley area, which is basically the area south of Searchlight in FNV. I am going to concentrate on the above areas first, but eventually I'd like to add the Mohave Valley and some areas west of FNV like the Hub and Junktown.

Here's how I do it. I just finished the area from Indian Springs (just north of Las Vegas) to Tonopah, so I'll use that for an example. The first thing I did was look at the area using google maps, looking at the roads and also at the satellite view. Once I had a rough idea of the terrain and figured out what I would be placing in my map, I went into the heightmap editor and just did a rough pass of where the mountain parts were And this is why I prefer this method over your more realistic method of using actual height data. If you look at the area north of Indian Springs, there are a lot of mountainous areas and then you eventually get to a flat area around where the Groom Lake facility (aka Area 51) is located. But if you try to lay all that out realistically in the GECK, it doesn't fit into a single world space. So what I instead did was put a smaller mountainous region north of Indian Springs and then a proportionally larger flat area around Area 51, so that in-game it makes Area 51 feel more isolated from the rest of the world. Is it accurate compared to the real world? No. But it's playable as a game, and it has the basic feel of the area correct. I've got Amagosa Valley, Beatty, Goldfield, and Tonopah all along a fairly simple roadway that isn't anywhere near as complex as the real road system, but it gets the point across. It took me a bit of fiddling (basically scrapping the heightmap and starting over about 3 times) to get everything in the right place. Then I made the mountains taller, added some noise to make it look more realistic, and done. Are the elevations for each town correct? No. Do the mountain peaks match the real mountain peaks in Nevada? No. What I have is a compact representation of the area designed for a game. It's much less accurate than your method, but much more playable in my opinion. All of that fiddling with the heightmap took me about 3 or 4 hours in one evening. Adding the roads, towns, etc. of course takes much longer. I imagine you can do your data conversions much faster than it takes me to create a heightmap.

If you are doing the UK, you've really got your work cut out for you. I just took a look at the UK on google maps and the first thing that struck me is how dense everything is. I've been working on areas of Nevada and California where the population densitiy is much smaller and civilized areas are limited to small pockets spaced widely apart. The UK is just littered with tiny little towns all over the space with very little empty space between them. London and its immediate surrounding area would probably be one map all on its own, kinda like Fallout 3 and the DC area and wasteland. If you look into Fallout 3 one thing you'll find is that their original DC area was much bigger, but players found it to be too confusing so they downsized it quite a bit. You would have to do the same thing with London. You don't want to recreate London. What you want to do is create a small area that captures the feel of London. When you get outside of the big cities, you are going to have small towns and villages all over the place. Your best bet would probably be to make most of them ruins, otherwise you are going to have about a billion interior cells to make. One problem I have run into is that there is a size limit for mods. This is apparently due to them using one byte (2 hex digits) for the mod number and 3 byes for the file offset to describe objects. Your maximum file offset for objects in each file is then 00FFFFFF hex, which works out to 16,277,215 bytes (roughly 16 MB). If you go beyond this, the file won't load in the GECK any more. What I have had to do for my more complex world spaces is have one esm that just has the heightmap, roads, and basic exterior objects like building and roads (things that affect the heightmap as you are laying them out). Then have a second file which adds landscape objects (trees, rocks, etc) and navmeshes. Depending on how large and complex your world space is, you may need to split off interior cells into a third file. Good luck!

I've been making some FNV equivalents of real areas lately. While you can do what TrickyVein posted, I personally wouldn't recommend it. The game uses kind of a compressed landscape combined with an increased time scale. This helps to draw things closer together so that players don't feel so much like they are just walking and walking and walking and walking to get from one place to the next. What I have been doing is going to google maps and clicking on satellite view to get a rough idea of the terrain, then creating a rough compressed version of that using the heightmap editor. It's more art than science, as you want things like airport runways to be close to full size so they look right in-game, but then they end up taking up more space on the terrain map (percentage-wise) than they do in real life so sometimes you need to move things around, etc. Go to Google Maps and compare the real areas of Goodsprings and Las Vegas to what is in game and you'll see what I mean by how much they compress and use smaller versions of things to make them game-able. The real Goodsprings has about 4 times as many streets and buildings and Las Vegas is huge compared to what is in-game. Your map area in-game is limited to 64x64 cells (-32 to +32 in the X and Y directions). Trying to map real terrain in real life size onto that isn't going to fit much.

If you want to actually do it from a terminal it's the same basic idea as what Hemingway308 posted. You create the items and give them a unique reference. You also need to check the persistent reference in the item properties (same general area where you check the initially disabled box). Then for your terminal entry, you do the script functions: MyCauldronREF.enable MyBroomstickREF.enable You can also add lights, again with a unique REF name, initially disabled, persistent reference, etc. Then you can have the terminal control the lights by having an entry for "turn on lights" that just does MyLightREF.enable and "turn off lights" with MyLightREF.disable. Or you can add an OnActivate script to a light switch. If you have clutter (trash) that you want to "clean up" via the terminal it's the same basic idea, except that the items are enabled initially and you use MyTrashItemREF.disable to get rid of it via the terminal entry.

Do you just need an example to look at? When you first enter the Repconn test site, the player triggers the NPC Chris to speak over the nearby loudspeaker. BTW, my personal theory is that the GECK is a Vault-Tec experiment designed to test the limits of modder's frustrations.

FNV mods cannot be used in F3, and F3 mods cannot be used in FNV. Some mods can be ported fairly easily from one game to the other. Other mods can't. The two most popular hair packs are Mikato's and Ling's.

Colt 1847 Walker http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/54117/? Colt 1848 Dragoon http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/54101/? Colt 1849 Pocket http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/47858/? The Man with No Name Revolver http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/36350/?

If your landscape is too low, it crashes the GECK. I dunno why. It's incredibly stupid considering that the default is to start out with the landscape low. It's like whoever made the GECK wanted it to crash when you tried it. The basic procedure that I've come up with is that I create the world space, go into the heightmap editor and give it just a little bit of randomness, and (this is VERY IMPORTANT) set the minimum height to something like 6000. I let that generate, and it will create a mostly flat map. At that point I save the entire thing, because the GECK crashes so often. Then, I begin to edit the map, adding mountains and such. I generally start from the lowest terrain and go upwards, as too low of terrain causes the GECK to crash. Use a fairly low intensity when editing the landscape. Too high of an intensity and you'll create landscape tears and other weird things and you'll end up with landscape bugs that the GECK can't fix. Once I have the mountains and valleys all laid out, I then go back to the random noise generator. Unlike before where I gave it a minimum height, this time I make it additive and use a fairly small height (maybe 100 or so). And then I crank up the frequency to a few thousand and let it generate noise. This last part takes the landscape from being flat and unnatural looking and makes it bumpy enough that it looks real. I've never tried to import a hightmap. With all of the weird quirks of the GECK, once I found something that worked I stuck with it.

This mod has a shiv as well as several other scrap weapons like a junk sword and pipe rifle (and others) www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/39438/?

Make sure your NPC has a greeting, as was already mentioned, and make sure that greeting has at least one condition. At the very least you'll probably want to check that the ID is your npc, so that's usually enough. Also, make sure the quest has enabled at startup checked (or whatever it's called - I'm going from memory here - it's on the first tab of the quest where the quest name and ID are).

Scripts are for anything that isn't a part of the GECK and the game engine. For example, the GECK doesn't include any sort of companion state, like whether the companion should be following you or waiting or dancing like a stripper or whatever else you want your companion to do. A fairly basic companion really only needs one script, and that script usually doesn't do much other than declare variables which are used to tell the game what the companion should be doing and then initializes those variables. That's about as simple as a script can get. You also have scripts inside the dialog and quests. For a fairly simple companion, all those scripts will do is set the variables that you declared in the companion script. For example, your companion script could have an int FollowMe (an integer variable named FollowMe). The companion script initially sets this to 0 because you have to meet and recruit the NPC. When you meet them, in the dialog for joining you, you then make a script that sets that integer to 1. You then make an AI package that will make the NPC follow you whenever the FollowMe integer is set to 1. When you want the NPC to wait, you set the FollowMe to 0 and set some wait veriable (whatever you choose to name it) to 1 and you make a wait AI package that activates when that variable is set. The companion tutorials should go into a lot more detail about this, but that's the basic idea behind it. You use script variables to turn different AI packages on and off to determine the NPC's behavior. Scripts in the dialog and quests are also used to initiate, advance, and complete the quests. These are usually short scripts done within the quests themselves, not separate scripts like the one you need to make for your companion. I have no idea why you have a clone. Might be a leftover from a save. Try disabling your mod completely (uncheck it in FOMM or the Fallout setup screen or whatever you are using to control your mods), loading the game, saving the game (still without your mod enabled) and then exit, re-enable your mod, and load that saved game. Dialog options need to either be options to other dialog options or they need to have the "top level" box checked. They also need to have at least one condition defined, which at the very least you usually want to check that the ID is your NPC (you don't want other NPCs saying your NPC's lines). This is a good companion tutorial. http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/45278/? While you can make a simple companion with just a couple of variables and a couple of dialog options, if you want a fully functional companion wheel you need to add in specific dialog options to your companion's dialog/quest. That tutorial goes step by step through the process and shows you everything that you need to do. One important tip - Fallout only applies the correct skin textures to characters in esm files. You can define your character's appearance in an esm and then do all of the quests and everything else in an esp, but if you do everything in an esp then your character will end up with the default white body no matter what (which looks really weird if your NPC is African-American). Another important tip - The GECK's LIP generator is missing. If you search on google you can find how to copy the missing files over from the Oblivion or Skyrim toolkits.

I am currently working on a mod for the "Big Circle" which is New Reno, Broken Hills, Vault City, Gecko, Modoc, and The Den. I am including a few other areas as well such as Klamath and Arroyo. Vault 8 / Vault City is included. I am NOT recreating Fallout 2. My mod is basically this area advanced to the timeline of New Vegas. Vault City is under NCR control (although some in Vault CIty aren't too happy about that - how's that for a quest hint). Some areas that weren't in Fallout 2 are included, such as a completely nuked Carson City and Lake Tahoe. Basically I'm aiming more for the Nevada landscape as done in FNV but with Fallout 2 areas included as best as I can interpret them. I currently have most of the exterior work done. I haven't done any interiors yet or any NPCs or quests. So I've got a ways to go.