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I reckon what has happened here, is that one of your mods changed the item, this could be just using the unpacked version of the mesh, not really changing anything, but depending on the install/build of fallout 3 which the person did that you can end up with a edit to an item that uses Meshes/DLC05/Clutter/AlienApoxie.nif (just a guess) But in their data folder it's path is spelled different meshes/dlc05/clutter/alienapoxie.nif Very simple mistake, you see the mesh has lower case in the name, an this might also happen from the folders themselfs, maybe, idk. The other cause would be a semi-glitch of the archive invalidation invalidated set up we use, for one reason or another from time to time certian items get bugged or glitched, thus missing, when in fact they are there inside either the .BSA or loose folders. The fix for both or any other reason for a missing mesh big red blucko ! triangle error, are the same. First you need to find out the name of the missing mesh. If it's something in a NPC inventory then use a mod like groovatron which has many tool like uses besides being able to allow you to view inside a NPC's inventory. Once you have the name, then just open the load order with FO3edit. We know you are looking for the Epoxy, so the fastest way for you to find that an also find any other mod using that refrence would be to look inside the Zeta.esm for it. The reason you load up the whole load order is because even though you know it's a Zeta item, it could be the case that one other mod or many mods are making small edits to this refrence or entry whatever you like to call it. Once the whole thing loads up, yah wait for it to say finished before you start any work. Open the + next to the Zeta.esm, then open the + next to ingestable (what what what, who's going to eat Epoxy it's ridiculouz) yah they just mean consumeable as in the item gets used up when activated. Now often when you get to this point you are looking at 654 different things, so in practice it's a good idea to orgainize those items A-Z or Z-A by either the editor ID or Name, this is done by clicking those tabs at the top that say Form ID, Editor ID, Name, it gives a arrow depending on which direction. Form ID is the Hex number for the item, Editor ID is the name fallout uses for the refrence, then the name is the In-game name, note that by default FO3edit uses whatever order things are loader or were created in for the Form ID, so to switch back after your A-Z just click on the Form ID, then the load order goes back to the default view. Okay so you found Epoxy which was easy, there's only 4-5 items in ingestables in that .esm. Click on the Epoxy, this puts it in the view tab, meaning you can now view the data, It should just be a single entry, by that I mean it's in white, all white, an the only mod listed in the view window is Zeta.esm, FO3edit will display other mods if they are making changes to the same refrences in different colors depending on the situation which it creates. What you are looking for here is just the path to the model, and also you are looking to see if any of your other mods have made changes to this item. You now at least know the name for the mesh it's using, so write that down or copy it an paste it into a temp notepad file. First go to the data folder then follow the path down an see if you have a file there, which you shouldn't, there's no reason for you to have the Epoxy mesh unpacked, no reason for anyone else either, but we are all idiots modding things. If you don't find a mesh there by that name then you should probably use FOMM (the tools tab) an BSA unpacker to unpack a version of the mesh from the Zeta.BSA For safety reasons I usually just unpack things straght to the desktop, you can type in the name which will filter out entrys in the FOMM .BSA unpacker, you can also open the + sign an look at the folder paths to narrow things down, it will arange files by folder or other options too. If you pick two files at one time to be unpacked to your desktop at the same time, then FOMM will also create the folders following the folder path for the item based off what it was in the .BSA, this helps because you don't have to think once you move it to the actual data folder. Just delete the file you unpacked just to get the folders unpacked too, then only that file you needed is in there, so drag an drop that to your data folder. Which if you have spent any amount of time modding fallout 3 then you probably already have a shortcut to the data folder you created from right clicking on the actual data folder, then moving that shortcut to the desktop, this way when you want to install things there, you just drag the files or folders to that shortcut you placed on the desktop. Quick easy, an without the need for a brainpower. Since we are on the subject of the desktop, there's no need to keep any actual data there. Main reason why is because too much data on the desktop will crash your applications when they exit, thus having to reload into the windows shell, with the desktop being a part of that data, so if there's too much data there, you end up with a crash an crash report dialog anytime you exit a application, but certianly each time you exit fallout 3. That being said, keep your desktop as small as possible, this is done by only placing shortcuts to data on the desktop rather than actual data. Some of the shortcuts I use are, current mod projects, FO3 Data, FOMM, Toolz, GECK, FOSE Edit, FO3edit, Downloads, plus temporary files, and finally the fake data folder which is basicly a current projects folder for meshes an textures, you know because Nifscope will only look in folders named data for textures, I only put stuff I'm going to work on in there, then if I'm done with it, then it gets deleted, thus keeping the desktop clean. Get into the down and dirty work already...

A good weapon is going to have many seperate good parts that end up making it great. It should only take a few months before you are creating stuff you would never have thought you could. That first learning part isn't easy though. 1. Great sound both 2D an 3D, 3D is mono one channel thus allowing it to be placed directionaly in the game world, then 2D is stereo two channel so it's like the player charicter fired it. Pretty much 2D an 3D are the same sound, however the 3D mono version is a bit softer or more quiet than the 2D version. For this you need a .WAV editor, once you figure out that, pretty much steal sounds from other mods or other games, then change them in ways to make it work for fallout 3. It doesn't hurt to balance the volume to vanilla sounds, normalized, ect, anything too loud is going to cause distortion and get on our nerves if you upload the mod. 2. Great shell cases, I mean really great ones. Dark brass or light brass works, but also silver. These mostly use the Shells01 an Shells02 texture, something like that, but you can make small edits here that actually make a big difference. You don't notice the shell cases when they hit the ground so much, but when they are flying thru the air in a VATS camera slow motion, they really pop, an you're like zomg that's nice. 3. Projectiles, great textures, as well as meshes that were matched to the size of the actual barrel of the weapon, (you know rather than that same 7.62 rilfe projectile that gets used over an over in vanilla) Inside a projectile mesh it won't hurt nothing if you totally remove the branch which has the tracer in it. You need good projectile settings in GECK too, stuff like the muzzle flash, tracer chance, impact force. 4. Great mesh an textures, pretty much you need to be or become a texture & mesh god, at least one of them anyway, then work on the other. 5. Great settings for the weapon in the .Esp or .Esm, this can be done with GECK or with FO3edit. http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/SMGBISH.jpg Basicly above is the "Pimp my desert eagle" textures only applied to a SMG, basicly taking the vanilla SMG mesh, then taking the super cool "pimp my desert eagle" textures, an mixing the two together, which required a whole lot of texture editing plus UV edits in the mesh to get it to look somewhat useable... Then the fun part, pick a cool or silly name for it... http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/bigbarrel.jpg In the above picture we have your basic "pimp my desert eagle" version of the 10mm pistol, only I changed it up a bit. Took off the .50 or 10mm embosing (stamped name) on the slide, so there isn't any words on the weapon. From there I copied the shape that is the very end of the lincolns rifle, you know the part that flips open so that you can load the rifle, that end barrel part, I pasted that as a second part of the 10mmpistol, the non-animated part of the pistol is named 10mmpistol:0, to add a second part you use the same name only with a number at the end, so the part I added was 10mmpistol:1, an would follow in 2 3 4 5 depending on how many parts I added, this is to keep the semi auto fire rate working as well as the vanila. From there I moved the barrel where I wanted it, then scaled the verts on it, (changed the size) so that it was the biggest size the 10mm pistol frame would allow, then later I took a projectile an matched the barrel hole to a size based off the 9mm, it was twice the size of a 9mm so I knew this was a 18mm pistol. Then I changed the UV, so that the part I added has a compensator cut in the side, just like the vanilla 10 mm pistol, you know those 3 funny looking things at the end, those are compensators (as a way to lower the recoil) Also a round disc like shape was placed inside the barrel as to cover up the vanilla barrel via using a black texture for the disc. http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/buster.jpg Easton bats, zomg such a good idea, the most fun I had on a project, geez it's just so American, I just had to do it. You can have a field day with this idea, there are so many nice bats out there. This uses the vanilla baseball bat, but it's scaled up a bit maybe, plus the mesh was adjusted, moved up so that the player holds it more near the very end of the handle, which also meant I had to adjust the reach setting in the GECK, which sets how close they get when a VATS camera animation plays out. From there it was basicly stealing pictures of bats from the Easton website, then using parts of those textures, in the vanilla texture, then fill the gaps with a plug in for paintnet called "fill gaps" yah you got it. Then added some tribal like tatoos to the Rampage kind of like the real world version. On the silver one I used part of the stainless steel block vanilla texture, certianly the normal map for it, which gives it that brushed aluminum look, details on both like the grip or end caps, the hardest part is that the mesh has a line right in the middle of the bat, So I pretty much had to deal with a few really hard core seams. Never finished the mod so nobody but meh has it right now. Great work though... http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/plainjane.jpg Ah Nickel Jane, remember me saying funny names... This one ended up being named Plain Jane, and Nickle Jane. Plain Jane was pretty much the very basic parts of the Resident Evil pistol, you know all the fancy parts of the mesh removed, then the texture cleaned up a bit. The barrel was a seperate piece on that weapon, so I also changed it so that it was .45 rather than 9mm, this was done basicly scaling the verts on the barrel an moving it around until it was the biggest size that would fit in the frame, then edit the texture an UV so that the actual hole of the barrel is round an looks like what a .45 would. Then I put in a custom trigger from the old FOOK 1.6 Colt .45 auto pistol. Nickle Jane came into play wanting to make a very basic looking version of Romeo's pistol in the movie. It was very plain with a little gold trim. First I changed the weapon to have a Nickle coating, somewhat anyway from a process I developed using Paintnet to auto-adjust (guess) on the colors, sometimes this turns things crome looking. Did that then cleaned it up a bit. Then added gold trim. I adjusted the weapon to have a more noticeable pin too, see the slide runs on a metal pin that sticks out the end, in most automatic pistols anyway. I use the barrel an the pin in many meshes to create new stuff. Also installed a different clip shape as to keep the weapon more clean looking. http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/45L.jpg This is the M92 or M96 beretta pistol from 20th century weapons, sort of, anyway. Scaled the verts on the clip first off, because this is a full auto weapon. It has the .45 barrel an pin from the "Plain Jane" weapon, only stretched out really long as it's a extended barrel version (as to keep the weapon spread down, you know more accuracy) Also one of the parts that makes up the extended barrel of that Resident evil pistol is put on the end, to make it look mean, plus that is kind of a brace for the extended barrel, this was based off pictures of some of those fancy guns in movies, but in this configuration it doesn't act like a compensator which would lower the fire rate from lowering some of the exploding gases inside the barrel. Basicly it's a Pinned an extended barrel full auto M-92 beretta, but only it's .45 cal Just a basic idea I never finished it. Seemed to work better as a semi auto than full auto, but that's just cause finding a full auto sound for .45 that doesn't make you go deaf is kind of hard. http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/GECK2010-02-1509-50-41-85.jpg Above we have the "Pace maker" ha ha funny name, it's a colt peace maker, get it? Pace maker cause it's fallout 3 we do funny stuff. This is a very hard mesh to work with, the revolver that is. Anyhow found a really nice Nickle plated colt with etched art work in the plating. This took a whole lot of UV editing just to get it to look as crappy as it does. Haven't worked on it much after that long spell of just getting it this good. The barrel an handle need work I guess. Above that is "Tina Jones Desert Storm" An yah you guessed it, the black version of the weapon is just named "tina jones" you know rather than very boring "M4A2" First off it's based off the photo realistic M4A2, version, however that mod uses textures which have a overall raw data size of something like 16Mb, used my texture godlikeness to shrink that same texture down (what bethesda would do on it) so that it only uses 600k, so instead of it using 16,000k of video card memory, it would only use 600k like most bethesda created weapons. Once that was done I pretty much had the black version done. Then I took those textures, added a layer, then pasted a desert camo pattern in that later which was moved above the gun textures, from there I edited the settings for the camo layer so that it was partially see thru (transparent) this was done by changing the alpha on that layer, once it was see thru, the details of the weapon started bleeding thru, an I then merged the camo layer down on top of the gun layer. Now there was only one layer, which I then took parts that are just black from the base version, you know so the screws an little details here an there would be black, an not the whole thing camo. Which turned out nice. A nice way to Camo something, basicly just put a see thru camo texture on top of it. You can only have one layer in a .DDS which is why it got merged down.

If it were me I'd use their settings, but anytime I noticed one that was a bit off, I'd go fix them, or fix them in sessions of 20-30 at a time, spread out the workload, seperated by game play. Plus you know it's your system, don't listen to us, but maybe what we say can help you formulate your basic damage table used when you pick settings. I mean personally I developed mine over about 1.5 years messing with an creating weapons, most of that is based off stuff I read at Wiki, but it can't be an exact match for real world because it's fallout it's a game. Using GAU 19 settings an fire rates of 3000-6000 a minute would cause really bad Frame rate drop, same thing for full auto shotguns using over 9 projectiles each shot. Your most important factor for a fire rate is the sound the weapon uses, the fire rate needs to allow the sound to work properly an sound good, which isn't going to be a number that matches the real world fire rates. Changing a weapon without testing it is totally counter productive... To get good semi auto fire rates, most people have to use FO3edit to get it, where the GECK is limited in settings, you can pretty much use whatever you want in FO3edit. Each of the base weapons have the algo for (attack multi = so many shots per second.) An example the 10mm pistol uses 1.0 = 6, so when using the geck keep it on the zero, 1.0=6, 2.0=12, 3.0=18. When you change this the fire rate both in VATS an outside of VATS will increase. Some meshes just won't have performance like other meshes, so your very mild 2.0=12 setting when in NPC's hands will fire 12 times a second (seeming full auto like) but it takes that 2.0=12 setting to get the weapon to fire correctly either in VATS or outside of VATS. This suggests that we need two seperate versions for any one weapon. Which wouldn't be easy to do. One version for the player and another for the NPC's, I'm not sure how it could be done. Most of the mods just add the weapons to leveled items list, which the NPC's use. But you have weapons like charons shotgun, totally custom for that NPC. Maybe those weapons with the wild settings just to get normal like semi-auto double taps need to be flagged player only, thus kicking them off the table when the AI is looking for a better weapon, you know anytime you notice a NPC with the weapon that's getting full auto like fire from a semi-auto weapon. The only difference from using FO3edit to do it is that it might be more easy to edit a bunch of weapons at once, plus if you open a weapon which got it's settings from FO3edit in order to provide more realistic fire rates, with the GECK then the GECK will default it back to the base settings, meaning you just lost the testing the creator did to get that perfect fire rate. This comes into play because sometimes the mesh will not get good performance simply using the GECK's fire rate Algo whatever you call it. 1.0 = 6 shots per second which works well in many pistols, but it could need 1.0 = 12, 1.0 = 12, 1.0 = 18, or even 1.0 = 30 yah some meshes are that dirty. Anything over a 1.0 = 30 you are starting to get into a crash causing situation, primarly caused by the lack of quality inside the mesh when it was made. As I've spent more time with this stuff, anytime I'm about to put a weapon in a mod first thing I paste it into a known good vanilla mesh for the same weapon type it is. Keeping it looking as vanilla as possible in the block list. Most of the time this will allow the mesh to have good performance when using the GECK 1.0 = 6 or 2.0 = 12. You would need to have perfected creating "hacked meshes" with nifscope though in order to do so. After it's done there is no more problems of laggy fire while in combat, thus why I use my own weapons I created most of the time. Semi-Auto delay, is a min max setting, squishy trigger effect best sums it up. However as far as real world effects that mirror that one, the only thing that comes to mind is the old muskets, muzzle loaderz, you know the old flint locks, basicly there was a delay from when the flint created a spark, which ignited the powder in the trap, leading to the charge. Basicly you pull the trigger, then wait for it to fire. This only would seem useable in the fallout world if we also used missfires, which we don't. So when using modern brand name weapons it's kind of silly. Follow vanilla settings for old stuff like hunting fifles or poor condition weapons, then on the newer stuff I'd use either 0.0000 for both min or max or 0.0100 min 0.1000 max This only comes into play when actually testing weapons the player might end up using. Critical damage, meh I just follow vanilla settings, you can't ever go wrong if you first see what Bethesda set things at. Somehow I took the stance of using whatever the base damage rate is for critical damage, an multiply that by 1, it's different from weapon to weapon. It's important, but if I miss one here or there it's not going to kill meh. Wait a second it might kill meh, zomg... lol Shotguns are a different story, basicly there's no guide for those to tell how much DPS you get, pretty much throwing our normal balance practices out the window. I reckon I use the vanilla settings for shotguns which is around 50. But the key factor with a shotgun as far as how well it's going to work is it's spread settings. For this you need to understand the difference between full choke, half choke, zero choke. On the end of a shotgun barrel you have a plug that screws in, or they have put the barrel in a special clamp, so the very end of the barrel is a smaller partial cone shape. Full Choke pretty much allows the shot to stay together longer before spreading out, so you get a effective range of 40 yards or more, then Zero choke would only be good for 20 yards (half that or less) Wiki it Shotguns (2) So you have to ask yourselfs how can fallout use these chokes. The terible shotgun has the highest choke it's terible alright, at distance that is. Basicly that's your zero choke spread settings, with the vanilla combat shotgun being more of a medium choke or so. It doesn't exactly carry over into our game world in practice. Keep in mind you only need Zero choke (cylinder choke) Medium choke (modified) Full choke ( " " ) For shotguns that are sporting versions, I.E. not sawed off (zero choke) Then it makes since that you could have 3 different versions made instead of just one, this also allows better testing as to which one will be better in the fallout combat. Your first version would be the zero choke basicly the same spread settings as the terible shotgun, second version half the settings for spread so modified choke, Then half those settings again for a full choke version. Give or take a few points as you get combat testing with the weapon in-game. Shotguns (3) The load comes into play too. Shotgun Slug, not much more dangerous than that. I think I took the mesh for the ball, then shrunk it down to the size of the shotgun barrel on a M3-M4, then gave it the stainless steel texture, used the dark part of the texture, an then set the spread to near zero, plus only one projectile, and bam, instant shotgun slug. Also the simple way to do it, same ammo type, and no fancy script in order to do so. The actual shot is a bit smaller than 00 Buckshot if you ask me, so you can scale up the BB mesh a bit, to make a more 00 Buck version. For fallout 3 we only really need 00 Buckshot and Birdshot (basicly BB's) maybe 9 projectiles for buck an 18 or more for bird. There is such a thing as 000 buckshot, so that's on the table if you ask meh... It should be noted that for any shotgun projectile you need to remove the "FX bullet wiz" from the projectile this is because it will play out 9 at a time or 18 at a time depending on how many you set for the weapon, this ruins the game when you shoot the weapon, so a quick edit an bam. Uh... I reckon this is the basic matching the projectile to the barrel hole process, ou when I say process it sounds so fancy. Anyhow, a good weapon is going to have great sound, great shell cases, great projectiles, Great settings, and we haven't even got to the base texture, normal map, mesh part yet. It's a very long process just making one weapon. About halfway thru making a new weapon mod, you become so much better at making them that the mod you just made is useless an now you have to start over. But it's worth it because the quality is much better. That might be a better plan to have than making edits to mods already created which have 100's of weapons in them. Making the edit you end up with a different version of the mod which balances your game, but who's to say that mod was any good. Maybe you would be better off being a weapon maker yourself even if it's just making higher quality versions of already created weapons. Basicly you copy the branch of the projectile, paste that into the weapon mesh, move it to the right spot, then scale the verts so that it matches the hole, remember the settings you used to scale it, then open the projectile mesh an apply what you learned to scale the verts in that one. I.E. Scaling up the X an Y to 2.345 matched the barrel so I use that, which could take a few times to figure out. http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/NifSkope2010-07-1703-01-05-84.jpg

I use a base weapon rate. This is the 10mm pistol, which is basicly .40 cal, however because 9mm is so close I treat them the same. Your vanilla setting for this is like 7 damage, once you set the difficulty on max, plus add in MMM an even Point lookout, 7 damage is a bb gun. So most modders use rates for the base weapon .40 or 9mm of 30-40 damage, more recently I just use whatever size bullet it is. .40 cal is 40 damage, nice an simple. .45 ACP yay 45 damage... .50 cal pistol 50 damage, .38 special woo hoo 38 damage, and such Certianly there are some reasons a weapon would have more punch, for example Nato rounds are miltary cases, which are thicker brass, thus a little more punch. Same thing goes for high velocity rounds such as found in many rifles. Different loads might factor into it, but mostly the mass an velocity of the projectile. Which would add a bit to the base rate. Like 7.62, yah it's smaller than the 9mm but has a lot more velocity. Full Auto fire is factored differently. The reason you would give a 10mm SMG a lower damage rate than a 10mm pistol is pretty much balance. If a 10mm SMG had 40 damage, plus it's full auto fire rate, you end up with God like instant death when fighting with the weapon, hence you bring those numbers down about half. So a 10mm SMG with 20 damage will not be such a instant death when used. Give or take depending on the quality of the weapon an projecitle. Also in cases where weapons are added to NPC's such as with 20th century alive, the high settings for fire rates (basicly higher than the minigun) 22, 24, 26, 28 are a performance issue FPS wise if not all weapons with settings above 12-14 shots per second, so when used with mods like MMM those rates would need to be lowered closer to the 8 to 12 range. Barrel length factors into spread more than anything else. Longer the barrel, the less spread you end up with. Sniper rifles would have almost zero spread, then geez a full auto glock 18 would have more spread than even the vanilla assault rifle. Same for a mac 10, geez the military quit using it because they had to add supressors or they couldn't hit anything with it. Even the wildest spread settings on full auto weapons come back into play once the charicter has some skill from leveling up. A lot of people just null the spread, which ruins the game if you ask me. The impact force also factors into these base rates, for that I use the .32 hunting rifle projectile which uses impact force of 16 or so, this being a very high velocity impact, 9mm might only be half that amount, then shotguns you would have to factor in how many projectiles, like if it shot out 16 at a time then a impact force of 1 for each, an most of the time you won't fly NPC's off into the distant LOD from the impact. It's Important to have some impact force otherwise they just fall right over when shot, rather than fall back, depending on how hard they got hit. http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/ScreenShot21.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/ScreenShot11.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/ScreenShot16.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/ScreenShot20.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/ScreenShot19.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/ScreenShot18.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-07-1204-03-40-32.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-07-1204-05-17-26.jpg

Yah like you didn't have enough problems already. :D who doesn't? 1.That's a object effect I reckon, this being added in the spot for effects in the edit page for the victory rifle, meaning that it could be added to any weapon. Effects are kind of a funny area, there's base effects, actor effects, effects you might need all 3 or a script even in order to create a new effect. For example you might need a base effect which refrences a script created to play the knockdown animation, then in order to add that to a weapon you need a object effect that refrences the base effect referencing the script, so like I said it's kind of funny. Actually I think that the easy way to do this is to pick the victory rifle effect but don't check the upon death flag which sets it for critical activation only I think, idk... 1.1 There's no real reason to edit the Victory rifle effect, it's just more easy to add it to weapons which pack a lot of punch, I wasn't aware that it only works on critical attacks, for example I have charicters with a very low luck stat, an pretty much it victory rifle effects just about every hit, which it would be silly if it did it every single time, an break up combat, so you can save yourself some time just testing out a weapon which you have added this effect to it. Also it's a touchy subject for example when you shoot some very huge creatures it knocks them down or into the air even, which it totally drunktarded. I never check the upon death flag when I add it, so that might make it non-critical activation. 2. Everything you need to make your own stuff pretty much centers around the GECK main page, this page in particular but also you need to have the GECk main page in your favorites, because you go there pretty much anytime you see something an don't know what it is It's all there, but you might have to look forever to find what you were looking for. 2.1 I use GECK 1.5, FO3edit, Nifscope, Paint.net, GIMP, for the most part anyway, I have blender, but never can get it to work besides not being able to figure out how to use it which takes some time. Nifscope you can figure out yourself over a few months. Tutorials would fill the gap if you really wanted to start making things. I wasn't to into reading an learning so I just figured out how to do it from messing up 1000 times. I can only really make "hacked" meshes, meaning the original was cut an pasted, or hacked up, in order to produce something. That being said if you perfect that method there's no reason why you couldn't create "hacked meshes" which are cleaner than the original versions. Keep in mind though your performance of the weapon is directly related to how clean the mesh is, you can compare anything to a vanilla mesh, make them look the same which gives you good performance, Semi-automatic fire in particular is quite touchy, then full auto you can pretty much mess it all up an it still works. 3. The bottle cap mine already has a explosion set up with the debris of bottle caps, however you can't really see the bottle caps because they move so fast, somewhat acting like a claymore mine, I reckon even grenades have somewhat of debris which is ejected when they go boom, these would be the fragments of the frag grenade, who knows what mesh they are set up to use. You could create a mesh for a grenade which has bottle caps added around it, but you would need to know how to create clean "hacked meshes" You could also just set up the grenade to use the bottle cap mine explosion, or change the debris from the grenade explosion to use bottle caps as debris. 4. Yah sure, all you do is copy the branch for the junk an paste it into a projectile mesh. Probalby want to remove the tracer from the mesh, an shoot you might could even just open a projectile in the GECK, an change it so that it uses your junk mesh. But there are settings inside the Mesh for static, havok an such so I figured you would need to paste your junk into a projectile mesh. 4.1 teddy bears have ragdoll data, meaning the arms an legs move around from havok physics, so I can't say it's a good idea to use that as a projectile, it kinds of needs to be a static, so you would first have to edit that teddy bear mesh so that it's a one piece thing, which is basicly assembling the shapes one at a time into a static mesh, for example the static cinder block, git rid of the cinderblock shape, then paste in the seperate parts of the teddy bear, naming them in order, Projectile:0, Projectile:1, Projectile:2, Projectile:3 or whatever the name ends up being once you paste those branches into the projectile mesh.

Well I run XP 32 home, I remember there being the RAM issue, so I ended up using 2Gb of actual ram, then 1Gb of RAM on the video card, maxing it out to the 3Gb. But if I were to say look at my system discription it would only say 2Gb. So it's only rumor that your video card memory comes into play. However XP only uses about 300k or 400k at idle, then Fallout 3 is only going to use 700k to 1.2Gb of the actual RAM. So it's not like you'll fill it up an be maxed out. Besides there is still the page file, which windows says, or the gamer rule of thumb, being 2X the amount of actual ram you have. You set that up in control panel/system/advanced I reckon. I normally just use what windows says, but not a system managed size. It has min an max settings, so initially it's like 2046 an maxed at 4092, something like that. A page file if you were wondering is the system cache, otherwise known as virtual memory. Basicly areas set up on the hard-drive that are used like memory. Windows XP defaults to a system managed size on the hard-drive which has the O/S installed. You see this as the Green area that can't be moved when you defragment. You could look into it. I end up putting a page file on both hard-drives, custom size, Initial size 2046 Max size 4092. It recommended 3069, so I might be better off in the long run setting up by that rather than the "rule of thumb" but it doesn't make that much difference. Loose DIMM can cause BSOD, yah they get hot an work their way out over time, that's why there are those little locks on them. I'd say use 2Gb or 3Gb or memory, but be sure to check each DIMM. Basicly you turn off the computer, then unplug it, turn the switch on the power supply off if it has one, then once that is done, press an hold the powerbutton, then open the case, touch a metal screwdriver every few seconds or as much as possible to avoid static, then unlock the DIMM grab with both hands an pull it straght out. maybe give it a wiggle, but like they said, be real careful. Same thing when you install them, touch metal before you start working, then put the DIMM in pressing on the two ends with yer monkey like thumbs, might even have to wiggle just a tiny amount, but not too hard, just enough to get the locks to engauge. Might as well address your future heat issues while you are in there, basicly clean the dust off all the things in there, make sure you have lots of airflow around the Grapics card in particular, maybe install more fans, then use filters on the fans as a way to avoid having to clean it every month. Some folks will go as far as to clean the heat spreaders, in any of the hardware, the grapics card in particular, which isn't always easy to get to that part, as it's covered with a fancy cover. Cleaning a PC is just as risky as not cleaning it, if you don't clean it then it doesn't deal with heat as well, but if you clean it you very well could break something in the process, best to weigh that option before you go digging around in there with your monkey hands, ou ou ah ah, yah I don't worry about it until I have to because of that.

What is it that you are trying to do, because you have lost us. Fallout3.esm ThePitt.esm Anchorage.esm BrokenSteel.esm PointLookout.esm Zeta.esm Unofficial Fallout 3 Patch.esm CALIBR.esm xCALIBR.esm 20th Century Weapons.esm ARSENAL MOD.esm Mart's Mutant Mod.esm EnclaveCommander-OA-Pitt-Steel.esm DCInteriors_ComboEdition.esm StreetLights.esm Enhanced Weather - Rain and Snow.esm RI_Core.esm Project Beauty.esm Sharing and Caring Companions.esm Lings.esm LingsFinerThings.esm LingsDLC.esm EnhancedChildren.esm Shojo Race.esm RRCompanionVault.esm Nos' Cosmetic Resource.esm Herculine's RR Scouts.esm UF3P DLC Merged.esp EVE.esp EVE Operation Anchorage.esp F3UmpaAnimation.esp The Groovatron.esp The Groovatron_DLC_Anch_Addon.esp The Groovatron_DLC_Pitt_Addon.esp The Groovatron_DLC_PL_Addon.esp UPP - Original Perks.esp UPP - Pack 1.esp UPP - Pack 2.esp UPP - Beverage Perks.esp UPP - Quest Perks.esp UPP - Experience Perks.esp GalaxyNewsRadio100[M].esp CALIBRxMerchant.esp DK_BulletTime.esp VATS - MCE.esp VatsLongerDistance.esp Precision_AutoAim_6000.esp KaBOOM.esp LessBouncyGrenades.esp ShellRain.esp VendorCapsIncreased50X.esp Unlimited Death Reload Time.esp Modern weapons.esp HZ_Glock.esp FullAutoPistolsV1.0med.esp FullAutoPistolsV20test.esp AzarGypsyOutfits.esp AzarGypsyOutfits_Malika.esp Tailor Maid.esp Tailor Maid Black Retex.esp Tailor Maid PITT.esp Tailor Maid Anchorage.esp Tailor Maid Brokensteel.esp Tailor Maid ZETA.esp TalonExtraArmor-RE-Dub.esp Books02.esp MothershipOmega.esp Banks of the Wasteland.esp Megaton Tweaks 1.28 (no podium).esp Water_Tower_Hideout_byOrophin.esp GG_WaterTowerHideout_v1_22_Alt.esp StreetLights - Wasteland.esp Kaza's NorthwestSeneca.esp WIP_BigTown.esp CanterburyCommonsInteriors.esp CEI - CaesarrulezExcessiveInteriorsEN.esp Republic of Dave Expansion Merged.esp YevicsUrbanTownhome.esp DCInteriors_ComboEdition GD Plug in.esp DCInteriors_DLC_Collectables.esp Not alone in the Wasteland anymore.esp CrowdedCities_v2.esp FalloutFood.esp ShadsCoffaMatic.esp Bottle That Water.esp UsableCigarettes.esp Inebriation-FOSE.esp RI_Base3.esp RI_PNeeds2S.esp RI_FOSE.esp RI_DoctorCost.esp RI_CrippledEffects.esp RI_Alcohol.esp RI_LootTableRI.esp RI_LootTablePN.esp RI_PNAnchorage.esp DarNifiedUIF3.esp RI_PrimaryNeeds_DUI_Plugin.esp Rivens_Eyescapes.esp PlayerOnlyJGRetexture.esp Fellout-Full.esp Fellout-BrokenSteel.esp Fellout-PointLookout.esp Fellout-Zeta.esp Enhanced Weather - Rain and Snow in Fallout.esp Enhanced Weather - Weather Sounds in Interiors.esp Fellout-pipboylight.esp 20th Century V5 ALIVE Merged.esp S.T.A.L.K.E.R. MOD.esp ARSENAL MOD.esp Mart's Mutant Mod.esp Mart's Mutant Mod - Zones Respawn.esp Mart's Mutant Mod - Tougher Traders.esp Mart's Mutant Mod - Natural Selection.esp Mart's Mutant Mod - DLC The Pitt.esp Mart's Mutant Mod - DLC Anchorage.esp Mart's Mutant Mod - DLC Broken Steel.esp Mart's Mutant Mod - DLC Point Lookout.esp Mart's Mutant Mod - DLC Zeta.esp RI_PNMMM.esp MMZombieCemetery-Merged.esp Project Beauty_Plug in Bietch!.esp Project Beauty- Point Lookout.esp Project Beauty- Broken Steel.esp SCC - Talk to Anyone.esp T_R_A_S_C_H.esp SCC 187GURLZ.esp LingsFinerThings.esp RRWastelandPosters.esp RR Companion Vault 20thCW Supply.esp Nos' Vault 1 Remodel.esp RRUmpaDance.esp All RR Companions Merged an Plugged.esp Herculine's RR Scouts DLC in a GD plug in.esp Herculine's Shojo Companions in a GD plug in.esp Polarbear's Companions in a GD plug in.esp TOADS PEOPLE_Merged.esp dD-Larger Blood.esp dD-Reduced Ragdoll Force.esp Hideouts731.esp sc_slaves_stick_around_original_mezz_chance.esp FullAutoPistolsReapingBuster.esp Override-Drugs.esp Override-Dialog.esp Override-Scripts.esp Override-DLC.esp Override-EVE.esp OverRide_NPC.esp MergePatch.esp

Well first FO3 doesn't even really need AA, turn that off, an you just nulled half the issues you might run into. System tax in times of chaos, like combat for example, AA just drags things down, this promotes coruption from that same system tax. This is further backed up from many games AA an HDR post processing effect directly conflicting, but that only potentialy fries you grapics card, as fallout 3 is somewhat designed to run AA an HDR, that don't make it right though. The AA settings might only be there for people using bloom or no lighting, this is all a mute point as you don't really need AA in the first place for FO3. There's certian conditions where AA will help, but these are pretty rare. It's pretty hard to determine the difference when viewing a side by side of a 32XQ SLI FO3 image, an one with zero AA. After you turn off AA for a while you end up not missing it. Then Fallout 3 was designed to run on high settings on a 8000 nvida card. Most people use the wrong settings. Our friend here just proved that VATS lag is locked inside the save game somehow, just like opening container lag is. This backs up the already known fact that some game starts go better than others. Which boils down to how clean the install is, more messy with a messy install, more clean with a clean install/build. That all depends on how much the person has worked with this stuff, plus the longer you end up working with fallout 3, the better choices you make, from them being based on experience. For example use simple mods so that you only end up dealing with simple problems. AF is a different story, you can live without the AA yah, but turning off AF means you would have to replace most of the textures in the game, because they are pretty poopy looking. 2X AF will clean this up, but that's subjective. Maybe you want more or can get by with none, which would be ideal if you ask me. However using AF is much better performance without having to switch to a global texture pack, like say for things like landscape textures. There's methods to shrink those HD textures down to the vanilla size, you know as to make them have the same performance, but it's a lot of extra work to do so, so AF seems to fit in nicely. SLI unless you set it up to do otherwise will render content on one card, then control physics on the 2nd card. Which is pretty much the same set up as a Non-SLI, only in Non-SLI Nvida's PhysX puts load on the CPU, how much of that ends up even being a issue is subjective. You don't really even notice much performance gain from using physX or not using it, I kind of think it's going to load the CPU either way. But Fallout 3 is one of the games that has added support for SLI systems. So you would get a boost from it. However fallout 3 flags the configs for SLI when you first install, you could set it up manually from editing it, but most people would just backup then delete their my documents/games/fallout 3 folder, then launch the default launcher to get that "auto-detecting game settings" which creates those config files

14,000 watts, it's got 16 fans, 32 cold cath flicker lights, an it comes with a cigarette lighter on the side! woo hoo, got a light? Ha ha ha, nice to see yall, take care...

Stutter fix, yah okay. It said you needed FOSE to run it. But I mean who said you needed that Stutter fix. Even if it were the case that you would need it, I seariously doubt the person that made that fix was running fallout 3 on a Phenom X4 & 5850, besides the many other ways your system an their system are different. Geez what if that person was using Intel an Nvida dealing with Intel an Nvida problems. You got to tink about these things! IT'S YOUR DUTY! ha ha ha Nah man I'm just kidding... Okay so you probably don't need these fancy hacks to get fallout 3 to work, and there's no way we can rule them out as a cause. Pretty much you need to start with a vanilla game untouched in any way. Then dupicate the problem to see if you still have VATS lag. Many settings once you pick them or change them, certianly things which the stutter fix .dll's are dealing with, thanks to FOSE, would end up getting locked inside the save game. Hence start a new game when you run your tests. Now you wouldn't need a new one each time you test, just each time you test after you have changed something. Stutter, seariously... I'd bet the farm, what most people are viewing as stutter is just over taxed Cell buffers full of useless data. Most noted as you first enter the wasteland then running around for 30 minutes an now the performance is really bad. That's because the data from the cells you just ran across is trapped in the cell buffer. But gawd don't go off running to get another fancy hacker crap version of a mod to fix it, there's plenty of ways to deal with either stutter or cell buffer issues which are already built into the game engine. "in so many words" guide might help you come up with a plan. If you wanted to, you could just fly solo an go to the tweek guide an try stuff, but you won't really get results until you understand what the tweek guide is talking about, you know what all those fancy settings actually do, which the tweekguide is old, so some of is outdated info, but you can't go wrong listening to the tweekguide. "In So Many Words" guide TweekGuide Exerpt, is that what you call it, taken from ISMW guide found in "the 12 pages you skipped" section, but I don't feel like writing this out. 1. Install the vanilla game in it's own folder on the hard drive. C:/bethesda softworks or D:/bethesda softworks, not the default C:/program files/bethesda softworks. It might not even do anything at this point, but it's a good way to honor the old ways... 2. Download an run the 1.7 patch. If you have GOTY edition, download an run the 1.7 patch anyway. GOTY ships with the 1.7 patch build into it, but some users have cleared up issues from running the 1.7 patch on the GOTY edition, hence patch it! 3. Install FOMM, FOSE, GECK, GECK update, and FO3edit, which all go to C:/bethesda softworks/fallout 3. From now on anytime you launch fallout 3 it's done with FOMM, so have a short cut on the desktop for FOMM, FOMM will auto detect FOSE if installed, and it should say "Launch FOSE" on one of those fancy FOMM buttons. 4. Now what you want to do is provide a subjective test phase for the vanilla game. Don't change anything else yet. What you want to do is launch fallout 3 via FOMM, then create RAOTW (random a**hole of the wastes) charicters, yes more than one. Then run around in the game creating chaos, an trying to make it crash. Basicly do stuff you would never do. This will provide you with a baseline of how fallout 3 will run on your system. Plus the more game play the better. DON'T INSTALL OR LOAD YOUR DLC'S YET. 5. Read the tweek guide, yah the whole fraking thing to advanced tweeks 3. It's pretty dead on accurate, however Teh tweek guide downplays 3 settings which are pretty important later on, once you add mods, if not inportant even in vanilla fallout. The first one is subjective, bUseBackgroundFileLoader=0, if it's changed to a 1 it's enabled. I use it but like I said it's subjective. TG says it cause problems for some players computer systems in oblivion, but that isn't saying anything other than rumor an isn't even relivant to the fallout 3 game. What I do is if I have a problem I duplicate it first, only I go to my fallout.ini an turn the BackgroundFileLoader off, then if the problem happens again it's not related to background file loading, hence why it's activated on my fallout 3 game. -----5.1 The 2nd an 3rd settings the TG downplays are not subjective. This will make things better on any build of fallout on any computer in the long run. These settings are "bSeletivePurgeUnusedOnFastTravel=0" and "bPreemptivelyUnloadCells=0" If set to a 1 they are enabled. These two settings will get rid of about 90% of the manual Cell buffer purges that a player would need to do as maintenance once in-game. Which is a huge drag, you have to open the console an type in commands like a programer when you should just be playing the game putting heads on posts out in the desert. There are mods that center around purging the cell buffer on so many actions by the player, opening 6 doors, fast traveling 4 times, but these mods are known to cause crashes from conflicts with other mods if not the fallout 3 game engine, so don't use them. ----5.2 Sometimes you still need a manual PCB. Say you are running across the actual wasteland, an the framerate is starting to stutter. The wasteland is made up of about a 2-3 square mile area on a 10 square mile map of land. This area is broken down into cells with each cell being 192 feet by 192 feet, then the cells further grouped into what's called a quad, something like 16x16 cells. BURP! It's filled with all kinds of stuff, so you might want to open the console when the frame rate drops, an type in "PCB" this will purge the poopy data in the cell buffer. Thus improving performance as well as avoiding coruption. However this is very dangerous, the PCB you just did can cause a crash, but thankfully not everytime. If it is crashing when you PCB like this you need to try the safe way below ----5.3 The only near 100% safe way to PCB I know of besides the two settings which set the fallout 3 game engine to automaticly purge. Are from walking thru a door, then PCB, then spin around an walk out the door, which forces a reload of the cell only with a clean cell buffer. The other way is from the Groovatron mod, which if you press X will allow you to place a teliport marker anywhere, press X again you can teliport to the all black room, PCB, Press X teliport to the white room, spin the camera around, press X again an teliport back into the place you put the teliport marker, however this will also reset your weather, so you need to exit a door that goes into the actual wasteland, such as the megaton door, which will reload the current lighting an weather settings. The spin around in the white room is to avoid missing normal maps an gloss on objects once you go back. But as it's been updated Groovatron doesn't do this as much anymore. 6. Holly cow I never thought I'd get to #6!!!! At this point you want to run another subjective test phase on your fallout 3 build only after tweeking it. Focus on minimizing the stutter, and check for microstutter, which are two different things. Stutter happens as you run across the wasteland, an between the Quads 16X16 cells, the LOD (level of detail draw distance) is loading an culling (fading) what's being rendered. It's important to focus on because the TG goes over ways to reduce it. As you run fast in certian points it will start skipping frames, an apears as stutter, this is grapical lag from the system catching up. Micro stutter is caused from mouse lag an if you have it then you have bigger problems than the microstutter. Really it depends on how much Video card RAM you have. 512Mb I had stutter, but could reduce it, an anytime that it happened I would stop running an let the system catch up (as to avoid it causing a crash) But now with a 1Gb video card I hardly have any stutter at all. -----6.1 Fallout 3 is rendering 4 times as much on screen at any given point in time over privious games. Hence setting your draw distances at 1/4 is just like a normal game. Meaning 1/2 or max you will end up having problems, short of you having a $10,000 computer. This also will tax your system meaning you half-life your hardware an fry stuff. Not a good idea. I use "let the 3D application decide" as global setting for my grapics card driver control panel. In the long run this is a safe bet to make the hardware last longer. ----6.2 I disable shadows, it's only on the 6 nearest people or creature, which change, so 5 shadows will come on an off depending, with one always on the player charicter. All of the world shadows are hidden inside the normal maps alpha channel, something like that, and HDR takes care of the rest, so I disable the silly people shadows. I disable depth of field because it's only active when you are in a dialog with a npc, I set blur effect on low, because it should look like crap anyway. The rest I use, like high settings for water, which is a better trade off. That first part of the tweekguide covers all of this, an should be read an you should experiment. 7. Now that you have fallout running smooth. Install the DLC's then repeat the tests. It's still subjective up to this point based off how many times you have made installs an how much time you are willing to put into your tests. This one in particular is important. You want to at least create a whole butt load of chaos. Open the console an enter TMM 1 which will turn on all your map markers, fast travel around killing bunchs of stuff, quickly. Also at least try to gain entry to some of your DLC's. Still use RAOTW charicters though an new games starts as to save time. 8. Up to this point everything you did was only to rule out your vanilla game and computer system as a cause to any future problem that you might face. What you have here is a "known good" fallout 3 install. Which is why it's subjective. You don't have to rule it out 100%. The tests you do after this point are very systematic an very deeply tested over longer periods of time.

If it were me I'd try to clean it first which might get rid of the reason it's set as a master. The first part of "in so many words" guide covers cleaning http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13100 Also you could use the totally awesome "webensized FO3edit guide" by CSB http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=9616 which is a super clean HTML version of the old 200 page FO3edit guide. Basicly you load up your mod, apply a filter, remove identical to master records, Set deleted to disabled, remove the filter, clean masters, sort masters. Then if your mod still is using this other mod as a master, there is something which you changed that is going to lock that in even though you cleaned it. This means that you have to find out what the data is an we hope remove it safely. So you should be sure what kind of data it is before you remove it. If you didn't then there's no telling what might happen, an it could totally land mine causing coruption an conflicts across the whole load order. It's probably benign, which all you really do to change that is change the header data inside the mod with FO3edit. To be sure though you should clean it, which if it really is benign will produce a version of the mod that doesn't require the master. Then don't get yourself into these situations, start backing up your mods that you make, if not using the whole backup method to avoid stuff. I.E. I don't know what I'm about to do, I've never done it before, I better create a back up copy before I totally ruin it.

/bump Can you discribe it? Can you duplicate it in new game starts? Can you duplicate it in the vanilla game? I reckon tell us the hardware you use an which mods you use in what order if any... You might find something in Bethesda support, heck even UF3P might say something about it (unoffical fallout 3 patch) you know in the read me, it's a pretty discriptive list of issues. Performance loss from the cell buffer can cause many performance issues. I won't go into it, you can find the discription if you look around or look in "in so many words" guide somewhere. http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13100 it's around 5ish It will lag a little bit if there is a combat situation going on in the background. Background as in, that in many cases at any one point in the wasteland there's fights going on which don't involve the PC. This is culled most times (not rendered) but it's still happening even when you can't see it. There's been times that it's happening even in my distant LOD which is like 200-300 yards away. You get the same effect with just a lot of things going on, like maybe the AI sandbox data is figuring out what the NPC wants to do or something, only it's a mass of data because there's tons of sandboxed NPC's, or like creatures on patrol. Even say a lot of data being thrown into the video card memory, basicly system tax. The VATS lag should only really be noticed durring times like these above. I reckon you could see how it works while inside, and if it's still doing it. Then maybe it's a problem with your system build, hardware or software. Maintenance comes in too if it didn't always do this laggy thing. Defraging drives, cleaning the registry, deleting you internet history an temp files, and heck maybe even purge the windows prefetch folder if you roll like that. Most of this stuff gets taken care of from viral protection software, besides the obvious benifits from opting to use one. You still need to purge your trash bin though. Settings come into play. Fallout 3 was designed to run on high settings on 8000 series Nvida cards. But depending on your prefs, you might want one thing over another, so you need to make a trade off in order to do so. It could be the case that on your system you need to reduce the draw distances or heck even use Tweeks based off the current problem you have. http://www.tweakguid...Fallout3_1.html Like for example I don't use shadows I turn it off even though I use a 9800 GT card, the reason why is because it's stupid. It will only produce shadows on charicters, and only then on the set amount that are closest to the Player, so you end up seeing shadows that disapear an come back as things move around. Depth of field is only active when you are in a dialog menu with a NPC, so it seems kind of silly to use it. It might effect VATS to, as when you zoom in on a NPC when in dialog the game gets paused the same kind of way as when you VATS. Then the radial blur effect's whole purpose is to make things look like crap, so why bother using high quality crap. Hardware is pretty simple if you don't have enough then start turning things down acordingly an back up the changes with tests. Software on the other hand is quite a complex diagnosis plus each persons computer is going to have different amounts an kinds of foundation software, on top of being different O/S. Pretty much each time I install a O/S it turns out different, better or worse. They only last about 6 months before it's a mess again as far as PC gamers view it. This last build of windows XP 32 home I made, I pretty much installed it, then installed the grapics driver that came with my video card, the drivers for my motherboard chipset (internet), and my soundcard stuff. After that everything else I got from Microsoft updates. Just go to the web-page for it, then install the active X, it scans you O/S then offers High priority updates. I don't really read much into the High priority updates, but I will look at optionals an open the + sign an read them to see if I need it. I made sure I got the whole family of .net framework (dot net framework) which is like 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 or something like that. I also have a copy of Visual C++ 2005 redist and Direct X which was updated via the high priority updates. Some Cats say that un-installing either Visual C++ or .Net framework has cleared up issues in Fallout 3. Then you have dirty mods that come into play. This is just because there's no way for a modder to create a mod that is going to work with all the other mods. Then the end user comes up with their own custom load order. Which is for the most part un-tested. There's tons of crashing an coruption which directly links to how well the load order was made to work together. This developed as fallout 3 players progessed over the last year, to where now most people have custom version of each mod from opening it with FO3edit an making edits to this an that so it all works together. There's no way to avoid the testing part though, which takes many hours on top of the build of fallout, and fixing of fallout. For example I have about 40 hours just fixing what I have installed, it took a while to install it too, but now it's pretty much just test, then as things come up, I go fix it.

Ever contact bethesda support, I sure wouldn't listen to anyone else until I did that. Geez, go to set program access an defaults, un-install the whole .net framework family, and Visual C++ if you have it, or any other 3rd party software you are not sure of that you use, then go to microsoft auto updates an get a scan. Be sure to get the . net framework family an whatever Visual C++ it says you need. Idk worth a shot to mess with foundation software, some folks swear by it. From there the BSOD boils down to either the infinate loop bug in drivers or MOBO or your grapics card is about to die. So you could try updating you BIOS, using different drivers. Basicly look into the issue which starts with a blue screen reader (in order to read the mini-dump created when it BSOD) to point the finger, Then you either search an look into the things I mentioned or wait for your grapics card to die an get a new one. However your best bet would be to contact bethesda support an wait till they hit you back. I totally agree with all three of you crazy rascalz. You make a valid point, good luck with that. Seems like editing content in order to provide vanilla like performance when using a MMM 4-8 spawn rate in order to get median 6 spawns is more fun though. Just because I've never done it. This basicly boils down to having optimized textures for the NPC's then have vanilla fire rates for any player made fully automatic weapon that might be in their leveled item list. It's pretty fun to play, like the 20-30 or so BOS that spawn in the mall after you get the dish, pretty much all get killed, even though I help them, and I get killed too, I reckon about 9 out of 10 times, everyone in the mall dies. Which is totally awesome. I'll probably never reach that point, but it seems to me, after I have downloaded, installed, fixed, tested so that I get rid of crashes an coruption. Then tested again for a good long while, working out performance issues. That it might be a good idea to unpack my .BSA, drop my crappy loose files over that, then combine the whole thing into new .BSA that replace the vanilla ones. But like I said, I'll never reach that point where the only option I have to gain performance is to deal with the loose files. It sure would be nice if I did. I kind of feel like I'd get bored with the load order an start over before that point, but we'll see. Wait, I have a high end system? Seariously I just keep this thing running until the next gen technology gets cheaper. I still use windows XP home 32, an a 8 year old pentium 4 550 HT, true it has a ASUS P5N-D, but only one grapics card, and it's using DDR2 800 because of the old CPU. The thing that seemed to make the most difference was going to a video card with 1Gb of onboard memory, which I think is DDR3 memory Idk It's a PNY 9800 GT energy saver. I mean you say high end system to me, and I think either the Intel I3, I5, I7, especially the 5 and 7 from their abilty to hyperthread on each single multi core, or the AMD insane FSB speeds you get when using their very cheap duel an quad core extreme chips, DDR3 RAM, 64 bit O/S an the ability to use Direct X 10, Geez the insane amount of pipes you get with a 200 series card, or ATI's new take on where the video cards are going that blew things out of the water, KABOOM, Those fancy new raptor drives, RAID. That's the high end stuff I reckon. I just use cheap stuff, and it's in 1600X1200 native so that's very taxing on what little power I have. I pretty much built it to play games on, idk if that makes it high end. I guess if you compare it to the stuff you buy that's already put together. Ever hear of bUseBackgroundFileLoader=1 ?????

Ha! Maybe I'm totally wrong. Idk look at this insanity. Makes me want to scream "STOP THIS MADNESS" An adopt Phalanx21's mindset... http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-06-2823-19-49-54.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-06-2821-15-46-93.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-07-1204-07-13-60.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-07-1203-51-32-64.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-07-1203-56-36-60.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-07-1203-57-08-75.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-07-1203-57-15-76.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-07-1204-03-40-32.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/Fallout32010-07-1204-05-17-26.jpg

"You might want to rethink your mindset, unless you are using a computer over 5 years old right now. It's just a thought, and I don't mean to step on your toes if I have. But from what you have said you pretty much have stepped on the toes of the whole PC gamer community, as well as spewing forth information which the end user of mods doesn't want to hear here, while also missing out on quite a bit of awesome stuff, yourself, from just being too scared to get your hands dirty. That being said, I'll say it's an interesting perspective, I'll give you that... Please allow meh to retort :D Thank you drive thru..." What year were you in before you stepped out of the time machine? I'm sorry, you're all wrong. I don't know where you picked up this mindset. Makes me want to ask you who fed you that line? You're basicly ignoring a entire branch of technology developed over the last 30 years to allow the further development of gaming. I mean Geez the current technology is 4 times faster than we even need, with the next gen tech being 4-8 times faster. You might get a computer science major, network person, or programer to agree with you. But no PC gamer is going to adopt that way of thinking, in fact they go the opposite way, to their own death if needed. I reckon that's what makes us customers. Cheers... If you ask me, the whole .BSA turd thing, is just a way to save disk space. There's almost zero raw performance gain from using them, certianly when you start modding things. In either case it's a primary cause for many issues. Then the ideal situation for creating mods you would have every file already unpacked "loose", as the GECK ships out with near zero usable content included in the application. That's kind of a drag if you ask me. Anyway folks that have unpacked their entire .BSA library won't notice any performance drop in the game. I'm sure there is one, but it's not something you will notice. At some point you have to consider things as counting beans, just because some performance gains are very small while others are very large. Which is beside the point, as you very well could download every mod, then optimize that, and pack it into new .BSA's eventually replacing the vanilla ones an archive invalidation invalidated. Which is also very silly as there are plenty of games which use completely unpacked "loose" files My fallout 3 folder is over 14Gb in raw data size. The actual size I end up with isn't even a factor in the performance aspect. If the content is created following the rules for the technology we use then there isn't a problem going up to 30Gb. I'll never be able to max out SATA 3.0, never. This all breaks down into the 192ft by 192ft cells of the worldspace which we can not change, move the things in each cell around, yes, as to balance it. Then indoors keeping the cells overall size limited by linking it to other cells, spliting up the loading times, which the primary performance would be set based off room ports culling, how many lights are in the cell, and the actual size of data placed in the cell. Anything over 100Mb adds to the loading time of around 23mS, but there's many vanilla cells both in the worldpspace and indoors in the 100Mb-200Mb range, mind you that the GECK will turn the border of the screen red for anything over 100Mb suggesting that it be balanced. Spliting up that content by spreading it out in the vast almost never ending amount of game space. Then your secondary factors basicly follow suit in the form of chaos from AI an physics, with global performance effecting both from the raw content, meshes, textures, sounds, and the rules for them. All it does when it boots is create the file path library, it doesn't actually load that until you enter an area of the game space which has it. If that were the case fallout 3 would take 5 minutes to boot up even running a vanilla game. Then the .Esp an .Esm are very small parts of the big picture, you can load up a whole list of 150 mods with FO3edit in about 1 minute. 45-60 FPS isn't even noticeable with the human eye, then when you go to the new age of screen resolution such as 1600X1200 or vista's weird 1400X1200 an such, most displays max out on 30FPS Vsync, then if one were to opt to disable that, which some would argue isn't even possible. You'll find that in times of great chaos, that physics data is put on hold thus to allow the frame rate to catch up which is even a worse situation. Something like that, I'll admit I don't fully grasp it, because basicly the effects of going to great measures to get more than the human eye can detect as far as frame rates seem nulled by the issues it could cause, pfft so I ignored it. Fallout was designed to run on Vsync, so I never have to attempt to get anything more than 30 FPS using 1600X1200 native. I guess you could use a non-native resolution, trading off detail for better physics, seems like a better idea to use SLI an have physics on a second card thus keeping the native resolution, but that's only if there were performance issues with running high native resolutions with your 8000 an 9000 series cards. This load order I only notice long loading times if it's a cell with a vast amount of content in it. Think 40,000 items and 8 or more lights, or 80 weapons with 8 lights using 1024 sized maps. If I were to notice that, it's totally fixable, just spread that stuff out, or heck disable some of that bulk... What you have said is true for your personal computer and fallout 3 build/install. That's as far as it will ever go. I think you'll find that most people will see it as a rather close minded viewpoint. I think it's interesting, but I can't say it's helpful, unless you told it to someone that was using the same computer hardware that you use.

You have done a heck of a job so far, after seeing what you have to work with.

Yah I know, Here is two simple examples. MMM feral ghoul rampage is 5X feral ghouls, but the mod also uses 1024 or 2048 texture maps for feral ghouls. But the whole idea for feral ghouls is to make them look like crap, plus they run very fast. When you take a 2048 map an shrink it in 96 pixels a inch or more in super sampling best quality, so that it's now 1024, you actually gain sharpness, you loose maybe 1% of detail (but that's only if you are standing next to it looking at it with a sniper rifle scope) If there isn't transparency (alpha) then you can also encode this texture in DXT-1 (which ignores alpha) giving it 8:1 compression. So that 5,000k of data which was the 2048 map becomes 500k of data, also you now know for sure it has mip-maps encoded into it as well. This would mean that you could now set a feral ghoul rampage spawn setting that is 10 times higher and get the same performance as the default. You know give or take a bit on the numbers. I've never tried it myself too busy, but I do use 512 sized maps for the feral ghouls with the default spawn rate, eventually I'll hammer out all these performance issues on my system an be able to run more chaos. Another example is the HD texture packs, you could get the largest detailed maps available. Then they would be something like 4096 sized maps, an could have sizes of 16,000k or more, shrink that in steps of 50% 4096 to 2048, save it, 2048 to 1024, save it, 1024 to 512, save it, open it one last time an 512 to 256, and now it's the same size meaning the same performance of the vanilla textures for landscape or whatever, only 75% of that detail from the HD texture would still be there. I've never done it, but I reckon you would get better results from testing which actually works an how much performance it has. It could be that the largest detailed maps only need to be shrunk to 1024 or 512 in order to provide a balance of detail an performance (in the 90% original detail range) , which would depend on how much of a texture god the original creator was, meaning did they encode to the correct DXT language with the mip-maps in there too. Anything you do in this department gives you very large performance gains, meaning you can now create more chaos without dropping FPS performance. But it's important to test an back up, so that you don't lose any detail. Also it wouldn't be possible without the very huge HD detail maps that were created, so tanks to those folks for making them. *EDIT* OH SORRY the default size of landscape textures is 512, I forgeted, so that's plenty of room for detail, an using a 1024 might work well for it, but I kind of think 512 would be best *EDIT*

You need a custom race. For that you need a face gen preset. The easy way to get that would be to have a NPC created which uses the FaceGen you shoplifted from TES mod. Then just set the NPC to be a facegen preset, and have it use the new race. Something like that. If it were me I would launch GECK, duplicate a race, then save that. Open it with FO3edit, find a NPC in fallout.esm then copy as new entry into (my new race mod) once that's done go to the race mod, find the NPC, check the flag "is facegen preset which is hidden in flags I think, then also switch that NPC to the custom race (you know the one you duplicated) From there you would need to shoplift the facegen data however that's done so that the NPC you just created uses that data. I'd pick a body first, or shoplift the body that TES mod used, because it said in the discription it uses such an such. That very well could be the accesory parts which make her look so nice. So start there. If it don't work like that then you would need to pick bits an pieces from the fallout 3 mods, as an example using the BABE body, or creating a duplicate version of one of the lings races (as to get parts like eyelashes) She's a frankenstine IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE I SAY! I'm going to look into it some more, maybe I can help. I reckon just see what you can get done an holla back at meh. *EDIT* Pee UUU that TES stuff looks nasty, I don't think any of that is even useable in fallout 3 *EDIT* I think it looks very good in TES but heh after viewing the content I don't think it will ever work in fallout 3. It's not a big deal. You have to ask yourself how much of that facegen do you think is going to carry over into fallout 3. I mean it's pretty obvious the content used to create it in TES would never work well for fallout 3. Not a big deal just use the stuff we have created for fallout 3, for example the fallout bodies even the vanilla one, head hands body, then mods like Lings that combine properties from beauty mods into races we can actually use. From there you just make edits to make it look like her. I use tools I created to match body head an hands. Basicly it's a hacked mesh, take the body mesh, then paste branches of the head an hands (which you removed the dismemberment from before you copied) Then you have head an hands correctly placed inside the body mesh, save it, then point it to use certian custom named textures in a fake data folder you use for current projects, which nifscope looks for textures in. Then you can quickly make edits to each part, head hands body, an test them just open the mesh an look, real quick, you don't even close the texture, save your edit an open the mesh, this way if the edit makes it worse, you can just Ctrl Z (undo) an save that again an your back at square one. If you could get me a copy of what you have so far, I might could help you with it a bit, from having experience messing with this stuff, then send you back a copy that's got more groundwork put down. I pretty much think you should just start from scratch an make a fallout version. I've kind of been thinking about merging the good parts of the type 3 body textures with the BABE textures, to make a better body texture. Which is hard because the meshes are totally different, just like the BABE an Type 3 are different from the vanilla, an such the textures are different too, but all 3 have good parts...

1. You made a mistake in GECK when you created it, this from the wierd lighting we get in there. OR 2. You are saying that the GECK somehow bugs out, an glitches sometimes so that the floors/walls/static structures get knocked off the grid. In either case it's the same answer, fix issues as you see them come up. Heck because of the lighting certian things you miss even when you totally focus on them. Then the GECK gets mods dirty with un-needed data all the time, just from clicking here or clicking there. There's plenty of quirks about the GECK when it comes to people an their clicking here and there. The only answer you are going to find is to keep using GECK until you get really good at building. Even then you are still subject to GECK quirkyness. We can't even say that "we didn't make a mistake" because the mistake is there obviously. You can say it wasn't there before, because you checked it, but it's a waste of time, it's there now for one reason or another. So fix it an move on. It shouldn't happen everytime you build something. If someone told me that I'd say re-install the GECK an install the GECK 1.5 update with it... Personally I'm not against duplicating entire cells, or even re-using the nav-mesh. Most times I'll delete all the junk in it or markers, but keep the walls an lights or anything neat. Then I use a 8-16 grid most of the time. I also use 64 an 128 grids when it's something large. Sometimes I have to use a 1 grid just to keep things on the .0000, which is why I end up using the 16 grid the most I can just change one number an it's on the 1 grid again. I'm lazy, and yeah making a new nav-mesh is ideal, but like I said I'm not against re-using it.

I tend to take the stance of, if I only need a viewing distance of 100 feet, why do I need max settings. Pfft all max settings is going to give you is decreased hardware lifespan, which ends with having no computer an a fat bill at the end. Allz I'm saying is if you don't need max settings then the more adult thing to do would be to pick settings based off what looks good or is needed. There's a reason for things like culling or LOD, Distant LOD, but from person to person, it's subjective, an opinion. I mean if someone said to me, I have to have Max settings in order to feel like I'm actually in the game I'd probably call them a moron. Pfft it's true, I mean you are basicly trading off smooth frame rates for suttering, grapical lag, an decreased lifespan of the system. Another example would be stupid effects, like depth of field in fallout 3, heh it only works when you are talking to someone in a active dialog menu. Pfft don't need that, or Screen blur, why would you need high quality blur when the whole idea it to make it look like crap. Geez buggy charicter shadows, there's tons of silly trade offs like this. You spend enough time around computers eventually the "throw stability out the window" which most PC gamers follow will mature a little into something more along the lines of how a programer would be thinking. You know "the big picture" I reckon anyway. I mean can you tell which of the above images are 16XQ SLI AA, an which are 0 AA, no you can't... I'm pretty sure one of them was 16XQ SLI, then another was probably 4X, the rest are zero. At a glance though in either games it was pretty much the same thing.

Tell us about your computer system. We don't need a dxdiag or anything, just how old it is, what kind of parts, an then how much you use it. Nexus has a bit of info on the BSOD nowdays, just search blue screen or BSOD. Bethesda takes the stance that drivers cause it, so roll back, personally I use whatever driver came in the box with the card. Updating your drivers was only good when it couldn't get you into more trouble than you are already in, which isn't the case nowdays. Then I take the stance that it's a symtom showing that your grapics card has already fried, and that in the next few weeks it will eventually fail, ending with your computer screen looking like a bunch of jibber jabber coruption. Thank you drive thru please... :D Oh something is fried, you just don't know it yet, P/S, V-card, MOBO, something took a hit, because the chance of software causing this is pretty slim. EDIT-WARNING-EDIT-WARNING-EDIT-WARNING-EDIT-WARNING-EDIT-WARNING-EDIT-WARNING-EDIT-WARNING-EDIT-WARNING-SYSTEM SHUTING DOWN... I just looked at your load order. Geez, I hate to tell ya this. Pretty much you have most of the worst mods when it comes to correctly set up textures. Correctly as in, set up in a high performance way. See bethesda knew this when it was created, and it serves as the guide when considering the issue. That why you see certian textures small an others big, there's no set amount of detail across the board. Rather it's been somewhat balanced, to provide rich detail with super fast/easy performance. Shoot you would have to have a pretty top of the line card to even run this content together without it dragging FPS wise, that being said there's still the issues of FWE, WMK, an FOOK2 causing 90% of the problems you see in the Nexus posts. I guess it must have worked pretty good if you were using it though. For example when FOOK was made, it probalby wasn't tested in a game that also had MMM in it, Same thing for MMM wasn't built or tested in a game that also had FOOK2, Not just those mods, you can pretty much point the finger at all of them (and in the end yourself for not looking) FWE probably has a bit of what I"m talking about, so does EVE for the matter, Cube, Calibr an X, even project beauty. Okay so 1. you have those incorrectly set up textures in either global class overhawls and even tiny mods too. 2. MMM makes matters worse in more ways than one 3. FOOK2 also makes matters worse in more ways than one 4. FWE it could be argued that it makes things worse, but only to a degree (what MMM an FOOK were doing is about X10 worse) Basicly we are talking about system tax, used in the context of "what it is actually that you are asking your computer to do for you" These mods used together Nvidia or Ati would have no problem calling it "flat out abuse" Such as it's rendering it's ugly head in the form of a symtom of a fried video card. I'm not saying anything one way or the other, fact is that we don't have enough information to provide a diagnosis yet... But if I were to put money on it, I'd bet on fried card, which we'll know for sure in the next month. This is the very same reason I don't use the next gen hardware currently. Pretty much I use a old dusty Pentium 4 HT 550 CPU (LMAO simulated duel core, what's that even mean) Then P4 centers around a LGA 775 socket, so a after market ASUS MOBO (ASUS is tough stuff) It's a cheap entry level SLI MOBO still using DDR2 RAM, DDR2 is cheap enough I got some overclocked RAM (just for the heat spreaders) The rest of the system is pretty run of the mill, 500Watt P/S, old Raptor drives, Old sound card. I'll keep using this set up until they stop making good 9000 series video cards. Any of these parts you can pretty much get for around $50 or $100. Heck I still use Windows XP home 32. It's simple an cheap. THE SYSTEM USES 8 FANS EACH RUNNING A MINIMUM 3000 RPM But nowdays folks use less fans only larger ones as to move more air, or that fancy water cooled crap. The MOBO an CPU get hot yah, but any CPU made after the P4 generation has auto heat protection, it actually slows the CPU way way down if it gets hot, which is why they last so long. Also grapics cards to a big chunk of the load off teh CPU, in fact you don't even need a very powerful CPU to run games anymore because of this. The big powerful CPU's come into play when you are doing large tasks like video editing, but you could argue that people creating mods for fallout 3 could use a little more power in the CPU department. This brings us to the video card. I used 8800 GT's in SLI for a year and a half with fallout 3. I played long hours like 4-8 hours a day in games. This lasted only a year and a half, the reason why, is from heat abuse. I ran the same kind of fallout 3 build you are using, but also at the time I was using AA an AF with HDR, which is a big no no in the game world. I such have learned that Fallout 3 doesn't even need AA, but it does need AF, In some games HDR an AA directly conflict, which will fry your card. You have to pick your battles, what I mean is that eventually something has got to give. In my case I learned the hard way. Since then I only use "Let the 3D application decide" as a global setting for my grapics card driver, then also I turn AA off in the fallout 3 default launcher, but I do use a 2X AF which seems to sharpen the low detail stuff in the vanilla game. (thus avoiding performance robbing texture packs) Okay so I got these BSOD crashes in fallout eventually. A week or two later the grapics card was fried and had failed, wouldn't even boot windows. The way you would link it to your grapics card being damaged/fried currently but not failed yet, would be to read your mini dump that was created from the BSOD, I think "blue screen reader" is a simple program that will read the mini dump. The mini-dump is probably going to say that the video card driver caused the BSOD. So then right there you know what you need to do, go buy a new video card with 1Gb of onboard RAM minimum... It's not a big deal that the card got fried, it's pretty common for a PC gamer. This is because we seem to throw stability out the window. Geez we're not like programers or anything. Try to think of it like a flat tire on your car, just go get a new tire an move on. However this is all elementaryz, bland an so passe, geez it's like old victorian design, so old an un-needed in the new gangstar rap computer age. I ended up sticking with the cheap current technology. Just because it can be replaced for spare change pretty much. Heck you can get P4 chips for like $30 bucks. Eventually I'll move to DDR3, multi core chips, hyperspeed FSB, or heck even HT versions of multicore chips, Even the new 200 series cards or 64 bit. I'm waiting till it's not next gen tech anymore, eventually what I use will just be old tech rather than it being current tech, then next gen stuff now will then become current tech. Both systems can run stuff like fallout 3 about the same performance wise, however the risk is less with the current tech because it's so cheap, plus it's proven... Evga I think it's called, they make good cards, but that's not why people buy them, people buy that brand because it comes with a good warrenty. PNY is the same quality only not so much on the warrenty, this is to make the card cost less. Heck if you wanted to buy the best then buy a Intel video card you could set those on fire an it would still run 6 years later. The key here is to get a grapics card with a minimum of 1Gb of onboard RAM (video RAM) This means you'll need either 8000, 9000, 200 series Nvida cards or the similar ATi versions, $80-$600 something like that. It's pretty silly to put too much money in any one area of the computer system rather than spread it out. Meaning if it's an upgrade, don't just do one big one, you get more performance from small upgrades of the entire system. This RIG started out with Two 8800 GT's in SLI, That pretty much makes it the same as a 9800 GT, but that was only done because 9800 GT's were $300 at the time, when you could get Two 8800's for $200 bucks. However that being said Two 9800 GT's don't make a 200 series, heck 4 9800 GT's wouldn't make a 200 series. 200 series is a totally different ballgame. If you can get a 9000 series with 1Gb of RAM then that's the way to go. I use a PNY 9800 GT 1Gb, I reckon it was $100 bucks or so. The important part is that you learn your lesson... Which in this case is that anytime you see Grapical lag or system tax, deal with that. In your build of fallout 3, many textures were not set up to run in a high performance way. 1. DXT compression is a compression language just for grapics cards. However many foolish modders believe that not encoding textures into DXT form makes the texture have more detail. This is not true, a DXT compressed texture looks exactly the same to us as a non-DXT texture, but to the grapics card a DXT texture looks like 600K of data where a non-DXT texture looks like 5000K of data or more. 2. Mip-maps are a technology developed in the 1990's I reckon, which helped speed games up to where they are nowdays. Basicly it's a preset picture of the image at set distance intervals, I.E. 10 feet away, 20 feet away, 30 feet away, ect. But like I said "foolish modders" well that's just everybody even myself, either by making mistakes or just being a noob, often Mip-maps don't get encoded into the texture, for example Bethesda didn't even encode theirs, they instead made seperate versions. I kind of think it's cooler an better to encode them, that way they are locked into the actual texture (this raises the data size of the texture by 5%) But that's a small price to pay to keep things clean. For example when FOOK2 launched they forgot to encode mip-maps in any of the textures, so the mod had the worst performance in the history of mods. 3. Texture Size- Again more foolish modding. For one reason or another, when things started up we sort of got the wrong idea about how to make HD like detail. This all started from the weapons. Bethesda took the stance of using a 512 sized map for 3rd person weapons, then switch it via geck alternate textures to a 1024 sized map when in 1st person. This is pretty good thinking, but there's better ways to do it. For one there's ways to do it that are less work, kind of the same as encoding your mip-maps into the actual texture. Okay so what happened is that modders just replaced the 512 3rd person maps with the 1024 1st person maps. This made the item look about 16,000 times better. This sort of got people thinking that that way to improve the look of fallout was to use 1024, 2048, 4096 sized texture maps for everything. Which it's true it does make things look HD, however the performance drops to zero for the item. Add enough of this in an pretty soon the whole game is broken. What we should have done at the start was to shrink the 1024 sized 1st person map to 512 but in at least 96 pixels per inch supersampling, which would cut the size of the data in half or more, while keeping 99% of the detail. Same is true for just about every texture that ends up in your textures folder. There's a somewhat hammered out process for this named "chaos performance" because it's a way to use higher detail such as to provide using 5-10 MMM spawn rates or use of HD texture packs, an more @ http://fallout3nexus.com/articles/article.php?id=208 *note* Chaos factors into things here. For example if you increased the spawns of raiders by 10, then the raiders would need more of these performance based textures, rather than detail based textures, because with each spawn, more data is loaded into the RAM. Raiders would need performance textures, then a spawn not increased could use detail ones. It's a balance trade off. The vanilla size would be maybe 1Mb, then a modded size might be 20Mb or more, this is made worse from the endless amount of data going on in the background when out in the wasteland so we are talking about hundreds of Mb However it could also be the case that the spawns were all increased globally by MMM, then a gamer used FOOK2 which adds high detail based textures to raiders, which it's the same result either way, anytime there's a raider nearby performance is impacted, even when the raiders are 150 feet away in the background not even being rendered. But it's more like in one area of the wasteland there's 300 NPC's an 120 of them or so have these poopy textures, an now the thing has grapical lag just walking around, much less combat situations. 4. The end user, yah that's you. There are many many tweeks you can do as far as performance for fallout 3. In the fallout.ini, in the default launcher settings, the in-game settings, and even in FO3edit for all of the mods. Trade offs can be made in order to provide either more room for chaos or more room for detail or a balance of the two. This is second to conflicts an crashing which you would also have to get rid of, hopefully before you got to the point where you needed to optimizeafiy things. http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/ScreenShot3.jpg http://i273.photobucket.com/albums/jj214/sbf69/ScreenShot7.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/yuyu.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/borders.jpg http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o294/eiffU/2-3.jpg

Well first off Converting to or from .DDS is stuptarded. Yah it works but the file size is got a fat unused part, then if you were to open that with a program that directly edits .DDS in some cases the code doesn't line up so only part of the texture gets rendered, the rest is transparent. Oh sure fallout 3 will render it, but there's still the bulky file size, slowing your performance. All that being said I probably could have just said Paint.net an GIMP are free, an directly edit .DDS Geez I can even open you guy's crappy Photoshop .DDS textures and convert it back to true .dds in realtime. Photoshop is quicker anyway, then GIMP does the wicked tricks like turn something into fabric or estimated normal maps that are not stuptarded. Okay so The face an body need to have the same size map for starters, if the body is 2048 then so must the head be. Hands are smaller, so you could get by with 512 or 1024. Hands also have two sets of textures 1st an 3rd person so you might not even need to mess with it. I've seen some folks texture a sort of border color too so that arms an hands blend, idk I like the vanilla. From there you end up with a miss matched body, hands, head. This is usually because the body texture is off, even if it isn't, it's the easyest way to match it. Change one thing rather than changing 1-2 or 3. To match it you pretty much adjust color, you should use a tool that adjusts Hue/saturation/brightness Start with brightness. make a copy as a back up first, then open it apply the change, save it, go in game an look. Inside megaton is a good spot, real bland neutral light there. Repeat... I'd say the kicker for that face in particular was the mesh, meaning it's FaceGen. Idk about that fancy facegen exchange. If it were me I'd input the data by hand, heck it's only Hexidec, least it looks like it. I'm not sure if you can open TES files with FO3edit, I don't see why not. You would have to create a NPC with the data to be able to hand copy it, but you might could get closer. Bash gary would open TES, an might have facegen edit ablity in save games, I know it's got some of that fancy stuff. The eyes stink for your port, the eyebrows are off, the hair stinks too, lips are frowning :( boo hoo so sad. Get rivens eyes, they work well. There's others that are good too, but rivens doesn't have red-eye so much that the mip-map turns the eyes bloodshot 6 feet away. The texture would probably help you out a bit. You don't have to create a new race for it, but if you don't it will replace every female human face in the game. I'm sure that would work well, pfft. Anyhow it's easy to swap out the texture. Just launch GECK, then go to race, duplicate the caucasian race, change the name to queeny gutter skank III, then you'll see there are tabs to edit the model an textures, just point the one for the head to use your custom texture. It's more easy to switch it this way, viewing a race inside FO3edit it's a long long long list of data, with faceGen at the bottom. which is the symetrical shape edits, color, an non-symetrical I think, big long lines of hexidec. I've copy pasted an drag an dropped them though. The whole race interface in GECK is a nightmare, it doesn't work well, a total nightmare, so careful what you click or just practice messing up over an over. You would need a preset for that race or it will crash when you pick the race. I usually open things up with FO3edit, go to NPC's in fallout.esm, then click the name, so it's A-Z, go down to one of the pretty chicks, right click the top, copy as new entry into, then pick a place to put it, or create a new mod/new file. Once it's there just go to that new entry an make it so it's a face gen preset, then also change it to the race you added the texture too. You get more options in the race interface in GECK, but it's so touchy, an there's so many ways to mess it up, it's almost un-useable. You're better off just geting the textures in there, and playing with the in-game face gen.

Got any more details there Mr. putting heads on posts out in the wasteland? If the game works but the loading screen doesn't, some wierd issue with the interface. Idk that could be some of the foundation software which FO3 runs off. Personally I use the grapics card driver that came in the box with the card. Updating your grapics driver was fine when it couldn't get you into more trouble than you were already in, not really the case now, you can actually cause issues from updating it, or burn your card up. You could un-install a bunch of foundation software, via the "set program access an defaults" in the windows start menu. Stuff like Direct X, .Net framework, Visual C++, heck un-install all of it that you know you don't use, particuarly things like the Direct X, .Net framework, Visual C+. Then from that same set program access an defaults menu, click add programs, then windows update, this just launches to the web-page for microsofts auto-update. Install the active X control an it will detect what you need. I pretty much take all the high priority updates, then open the + sign in the optionals an read to see if I need it. Mostly everything you need you get from the high priority updates, but be sure to get the .net framework family... If it's not this, then your grapics card might be about to kick the bucket, or any other hardware piece, but that's a dead reckoning guess because we lack the details about the situation to work on any kind of diagnosis... Thank you drive thru. :D You re-installed huh, you could have a messy registry, something in there, clean it up maybe?

It's gone corupt from you using crappy mods. Start a new game, or start a new build of fallout 3. Only way to learn how. Me poop guide might help. http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13100 There are settings I know of for the worldspace which set the cycles of day night an such, but more than likely you have messed up the Time scale, one way or the other. Like a 1 time scale is 60 seconds to a minute, the default time scale is 30, an it sounds like what you have is a time scale of 90 or way more... There's no reason to really need to speed up the game time. save the game, press W, then wait till the time you wanted to come around, some mods change the interface so that you can wait more than 24 hours if needed, not that you would need to do that. Stuff like that is risky, like in your game going corupt or crashing. Heck I save the game before I even wait just using the vanilla control for that, because it will go corupt an crash even in a vanilla fallout 3 game.

/bump What do you mean? Like a howitzer? Big gun mesh. Or do you mean a scope you look thru to drop artillery on a target, or a UI that allows you to select a target an drop artillery on it. Op anch DLC has some big howitzer like guns, might could find resource meshes sort of like that, or scale up a big two handed gun such as the flak gun, tink the flak gun is in FOOK2 currently, that's like a mini howi. Then there are plenty of air strike sniper rifles, some even shoot the airstrike in from way above the charicter. Enclave commander will allow you to pick targets an drop stuff on them or call vertibirds in on them to either missle, fire bomb, or machine gun, among other things.