BobWyglz1

hey all. so we're all painfully aware why the Strip is so devoid of population; the little engine that could, uhm, can't. even just a slight ("slight" TO ME anyway) increase of predefined NPCs, 20 gamblers, 10 more NCR in uniform, another 10 in civilian clothes dancing in the fountains or behaving drunkenly off-duty, 10 tourists in spiffy new vault 21 jumpsuits, 10 more townsfolk walking to and from work at their casino jobs, 10 more securitrons, etc. it just crushes the poor thing. and these are tiny cells. and if you dare spawn in 200, or worse enemy factions 100 vs 100 where they have to calculate targets and combat, good luck even keeping it running; (though funny and one-sided to spawn 100 gomorrah hookers and 100 rampaging glowing ones all spamming their nuke blasts) it slows down everything, even the texture swapping for the animated lights; iGPUs and underpowered systems on the scale of what was available over a decade back, well... forget about it. even a modern system will dive to 15-20fps, or worse, leave you on the desktop (2 out of 10 tries just bombed out within seconds). and the input latency makes it all but unplayable. sure some of it is threading, some the 32-bit process and it's limitations, whatever... but a game this old, there has to be reference research done by now, what can be done, what's the scripting/package overhead, memory footprint, etc where you know what's safe to add for a given scenario, even if you have to tailor it based on system resources. I would love a spreadsheet table, tested, tried and true, of an "impact study" based on idles, packages, global script load impact, etc. I'm all for the "try it and see" approach but that doesn't help during the conceptualizing and planning phases. my fear is everyone just gets a "feel" for it as they go, without hard numbers, which I loathe. anyway thanks for reading and any links you post!

So trying to make myself some helper scripts to move things along to test what I'm doing... if I type in the console 'if ActorID.getitemcount ObjRefID #>#; cgf "script.function" "value1" "value2"; endif' it functions correctly as expected. I put it in a text file, because I have a stack of things I want to check and perform on that can't possibly fit on one line, and call it with 'bat filename' and it blows a "Mismatched if/else/endif block starting on line 1." Never even get started on line 2, I'm dead in the water. Am I just dumb? Is there a workaround for this? Does invoking 'bat' break conditionals and that's just the way it is? Thanks for reading.

I just want to understand the mechanism they're using, moreso than actually disabling anything... I hate that they don't show up as mods; if SKK is right and they're just auto-enabling everything they find, still doesn't explain why they don't show up, I suspect there's something in the header block that says "this is ours" and I'll investigate that, and sure, moving them is always our best option; having a "disabled" directory under Data\ to hold stuff isn't that big of a deal and a simple enough script. (I'm on linux but .cmd or .sh this is trivial, but thanks anyway for helping others, SKK!) I just want to know what's going on, more than manipulating it, just yet. Treating a lite plugin as if it's just a given you want it enabled, I mean, if so, ugh... I get that they're doing most of it for the console kiddies and we get the "benefit" (quoted for disgust) of these changes whether or not we want them. If it's part of the nexgen recompile, and not something in the mod itself, maybe I can find the code/instruction with a debugger and get Ian or Ryan to add it as a configuration toggle to F4SE or Buffout4 ... things that infuriate me tend to motivate me. That whole "how DARE you!" thing. Thanks for replies!

what did they change that allows this? the UserDownloadedContent.txt doesn't seem to control it, even though it has the same format as Plugins.txt; if you remove the asterisks without making it RO it just puts them back, but even making it read-only they still won't show up in the in-game mod load order browser... if you de-asterisk them in your Plugins.txt, they'll still load, too. how?! is there a flag in the mods that excludes it? How the hell are they doing this? I don't like that I have to move them into a holding directory to make them not load; the papyrus script that triggers their wrapper missions when you exit the vault is simple enough, but they shouldn't be loading in the first place if I've disabled them. What mechanism are they using forcing them to load if they exist? And not show up as standard mods? A vanilla .980 shows no mods installed at all if you look. It's infuriating. I thought at first it was like Skyrim SE, that they integrated them into the base game, but that doesn't seem to be it at all; it's apparently standard modular modding, even the improvised weapons distlist for vendors to sell ammo for the new weapons is a little fragment script in the mod itself... so either it IS like Skyrim, integrated, or there's a trick to it, and I don't know it, and it's bugging the hell me.

Hey all... Need help re: reading up all the game .xml and .lua at once, nothing big! I really thought there'd be subforums like the mod section, so I could post this in the equivalent of "Modders Resources and Tutorials", but maybe there's just not enough of us to justify this 8+ years down the road. Anyway. I need to know if there's actual additional code that's been added, or if it's just tweaking existing variables and rearranging established function calls and such... Let's use a real example: So I think with all the development and various heads we built for D-Walker, it's autonomy is trash. Having it be a slightly-aware turret that returns fire is lame! ol 'Sal can have a world-class A.I. and some corruptible nearby telekinetic kid wreak havoc, the FOB drones can autonomously patrol and engage... D-Walker must be fully autonomous at least 5x as badass as Quiet. I want to make it a "him"... a true companion; Smart AI, far-ranging tactical awareness, targeting and lock-ons, engagement protocol (chase, guard, flee, non-lethal, lethal, or preference), other various bits of logic code (lua additional new code not just editing a value to be higher / lower.) to know when to prefer your Skulls sword to your shock cannon to dual Uzis to running them over, ala steamrolling like Quiet in relocate mode, stunning everyone she runs into. It seems there's very few actual mods that extend the game; they're at best "Infinite Heaven" stuff, that tweaks small things with additional defined variables, but can only be self-referenced since we don't really have engine source; and most it's about changing variables that already exist. I suppose if that's all we can do without someone brilliant giving us a modding framework, that's all we can do then? It's a great learning resource but I want to know what's possible. I've got all the archives blown out with the recursive extract tool, (handy!) and am looking at the code bits, there is a lot. but just extending the range of detection or returning fire isn't what I'm trying to do. Again, much like IH, sure, you can make things much more difficult by having them see you ~120M out and go into active searching mode, or hear your fulton opening a wormhole at ~80M, but those enemies will still perform the same behaviours. I need "real" modding, and I don't know if I can pull it off just with established variable tweaking, and really? I kind of want to know before wasting dozens/hundreds of hours to figure out I can only implement 10% of what I want. Or, can I mix-and-match things from existing code / characters to emulate what I want? I'm thinking Dog is the way to go in investigating, since his lethal, nonlethal, fulton, etc modes are exclusive. There doesn't seem to be a single Walker mod that does - anything different. I am loathe to page people like BobD and Tex who might already know, but they could probably answer in once sentence what I'm up against. :-) Thanks for reading, regardless.

Hey all. Overlays. They seem to be so fragile. Even some graphic drivers have issues with them, in Skyrim/Fallout 4 anyway. I searched on here but there's not much that comes up with the words I'm searching on. "Multiple overlays" "compositing" etc. Sorry if I missed the world's best explanation, please link me! How can we control them individually, or is that possible ? If something is flagged as a strike, ti's got a lifetime assigned, right ? Plus decals have a count and range too in the engine itself. What if I'm making a permanent-damage mod ? You got stabbed. So FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, you will have that mark. By 100 minutes into the game, you're going to have dozens, maybe hundreds of overlays. :-) No the engine wasn't designed for that. So how can we accommodate it ? Or how can we fake it ? Is there anyway in-game to spawn a shell ? I don't think so, but we can call a mod like script extender that will do a lot of heavy lifting if we ask it to. What about taking a texture, overlaying an overlay on an overlay on an overlay, then baking that into the new texture, so that it's permanent, overwriging say basefemalehands_d/s/n ? Possible at all ? What about, I want realistic medieval European peasant experience; not these loverlabs's idea of texturing where every skin is perfect, hair is clean and combed, and the have eye liner and lip gloss FFS! No! I want pox, festering pustules, lice scalp, bug bites, rat bites, bedbug rash dots, various bruising purple-to-yellow, scars, missing or malformed limbs fingers faces. There's Dirt and Blood overlay, what if I want to mix Dirt + Blood overlays with, Enhanced Blood Texture Overlays, with Skin Features Overlays, Wound overlays - and on and on. But it doesn't work that way, does it? Obviously a decade-old game we're not going to get realtime texture editing with bumpmaps and normals for a persistent world for thousands of actors, not just the Player. But even just the Player. If I knew the "at birth" or "after puberty" ones, is there an easy way a non-technical person could composite overlay the base texture with the various .dds files, automatically? Sheogorath knows if I said "my mod is great and you'll love it, oh, but you have to be proficient in blender and gimp before you can use it!" I'm guessing only other modders would d/l it much less try it. So help me out here. What's possible and what's not? I don't mind if you parrot the tutorial stuff, that you're willing to try and help me is what's important. Thanks!