Jigain

While brainstorming a bit, I had an idea for a mod that would be ideal for me (and people like me). Let me give you a little bit of background first. My problem is that I'm a loot hoarder. Even more so in Fallout 4 as almost everything, even if they're old coffee cups or ash trays, has a use. A typical gameplay session for me is starting at my settlement in Sanctuary and moving out, finding undiscovered interiors, and looting them bare. Within ten minutes, I'm already overencumbered. Once I've hit about 1500-2000 encumbrance, I'll slowly walk my way back to Sanctuary (a walk of between 20-50 minutes of doing nothing but walking) to drop off the junk and salvage all the weapons and armor I've "liberated" along the way. This is not an enjoyable process, but it is one that I simply cannot rid myself of because of the gnawing thought in the back of my head going "you know you'll never remember to come back here again, and what if you end up missing just that one piece of fiber optics that you need? Better grab it all... you know you want to..." So, my problem is that I want the stuff, but without having to be overencumbered. Sure, I know I could cheat with toggle god mode or modify my carry weight, but I still like the game being realistic. And so, I had an idea. What if you could assign someone at your settlement to do the hauling for you? Then all you'd need to do is clear out the area (make "[CLEARED]" appear on the map icon), loot everything you felt you needed from it immediately, then when you return to the settlement you'd speak to someone assigned to the duty and send them off. Over time they'd bring all the stuff back to the settlement, put all the junk items directly into the workshop "stash", maybe put useable items like aid, apparel and weapons in a designated footlocker or something, all without breaking the immersion. Of course, so that it doesn't seem like cheating or breaking the immersion, there should be limitations to it to make it a bit of a trade-off to take this route rather than doing it yourself. Here's a few thoughts: * Bringing everything back takes several days. An idea is to take the settler's carry weight into consideration and bring one or two full inventories' worth of weight back per day. * Chance to miss loot. Maybe a 2-3% chance to miss any given item - still clearing the place out pretty effectively, but not perfectly. * Chance to be attacked. Preferably increased by distance traveled - further away means higher chance to be attacked. Chance to kill the settler. Equipped gear improves chances of survival. I realize this is a pretty big project, and will probably have to wait until Bethesda decides to officially support modding for the game, but with any luck I'll have enticed someone with experience in modding Bethesda games and might make this a reality in the future. Let me know what you think.

Well, I've been wrestling for this for a while now and I'm at my wit's end. I love modding games. Normally I'll play a game through without any mods, then I'll find one or two, and then it'll spiral out of control and I'll have 200-400 mods installed, some small, some huge. So, too, with Skyrim - though I only have a group of 50-75 favorites right now. However, recently the game's desire to freeze my system has been vexing me. Worth noting is that for my entire post, the term "freeze" means the screen will still show whatever's being shown (whether that's a black screen from loading or running through the wilderness), no audio plays, keyboard is unresponsive, and the only solution is rebooting. It started a couple of months back, when my system would freeze on the loading screen while entering Riften. That was very specific, and I didn't think much of it because at the time, my primary harddrive was corrupting and I was waiting for a replacement. Figured the Riften exterior was corrupted somehow, and forgot about the game for a few months. Then a couple of weeks ago (one and a half months ago, I seem to recall), after having reinstalled Windows on a new disk, another game started misbehaving. Civilization V. After two weeks of fiddling, AMD finally released a beta driver that didn't cause a BSOD on boot on my system (long story), so with that driver I was able to fix Civ. Been running that driver ever since. A couple of days ago, I decided to start playing Skyrim again. So I installed it, made sure my mods were where they should be and updated where applicable, and started playing. Game freezes when entering Riften (using one of the alternate starts of Live Another Life). So I figure sure, must be one of my mods messing with Riften then. But I don't have any mods that, to my knowledge, alters Riften or any NPCs populating it. After much umming and arring, I decide I just want to have fun for a while, no need to actually be able to finish the main storyline, I can run around without ever going to Riften. So using the same mod, I start in Solitude instead. Do some looting, leave through the front door... game freezes. At this point my stubbornness kicks in, and after the ritualistic reboot I pick the same options and start in Solitude. Run straight for the door and it properly loads me into Solitude exterior. Fun times, I thought, and headed for the city gates, stopping to watch the event by the gates because I do love that one (you know which one I'm talking about). No problem going through the gates, so I start running down the road... and freeze halfway to the stables. I do some research on how to prevent freezes and crashes, and stumble across this modification, which I promptly adopt. Trying it yet again, leaving Solitude without looking at the event, and run around for a while outside. I do get further than before, but it's hard to say whether it's further than I would've gotten if I skipped the event the first time. Needless to say, freeze once more. So I disable all mods (and I do mean all, including the DLCs, update.esm, the high resolution texture pack, and the unofficial patches), run a fresh character through the all-too-often-seen vanilla opening, until the part where I'm finally free to go wherever I want. Save the game (the character is most originally named TestChar01), exit, enable all mods again, and start running down the road to see if the freeze happens here as well. It does, I get almost all the way to Whiterun but it does freeze. Next attempt, disable all mods that add meshes, even remove all the meshes from the data folder entirely. At the crossroads by Whiterun, I take a right towards Riften, and make it a ways beyond the bandit-infested towers afore it freezes again. So at this point I decide it'd probably be quicker if I enable only some mods at a time rather than deactivating a few at a time, so I disable every single mod again, again including texture packs and DLC and all that jazz, load up my clean save and start running. Don't even get to the towers this time before it freezes. So that's where I am right now. With only Skyrim.esm loaded, my game freezes after a while, so far confirmed on exteriors and loading screens to exteriors. The usual steps have been taken, cache has been validated by Steam, full uninstall and reinstall, no scripts caused the freeze according to the Papyrus log, Event Viewer didn't record anything at the time of the freeze, every other game on my system works just fine. I'm not necessarily looking for a fix as much as I'm looking for a plausible reason. My first instinct is that it's because I'm running beta graphics drivers, but sadly I cannot reliably check this as the latest functioning graphics drivers prior to this beta is from a year ago, give or take (12.10). If this is the case I would be happy just knowing that, so I can try again when either Skyrim or the drivers get an update. Any other plausible explanations for it? Looking forward to hearing the thoughts of those more knowledgeable than me.

I'm no coder, but I do believe that damage decreases when the target is further away (with the exception of sniper rifles), which is then further amplified by the range attribute; a weapon with shorter range will have greater falloff on the damage for any given distance to the target.

Actually, it's one to three - while three seems most common, I've seen one and two innumerable times. I wouldn't mind up to six as long as it's reasonable, I would not be happy going up against six cyberdisks. :P Not sure if it's possible to have different types sharing the same spawn zone, but if it is, I want it.

That gets me thinking - would it somehow be possible to have your Aim (stat, not ability) decrease with the amount of moves you take? Potentially buff initial Aim to balance it. Something like: Sniper fires a shot without moving: 100% of Aim stat applied. Support uses one turn to move, then fires: 70% of Aim stat applied. Assault uses Run & Gun to use both turns to move, then fires: 40% of Aim stat applied. This can of course (later, when/if we learn more about modding the game) be offset with weapons and/or perks - such as Assault's Aggression also reducing the Aim penalty from Run & Gun by half, or a laser shotgun doing the same. Sorry for the offtopic, but when my brainstorming starts, few things can stop it. :P

Exactly. I was not implying otherwise ; that's why I wrote I was not shocked (I see how that could have been misunderstood though). There's no reason whatsoever to be up in arms about this. All I'm saying is, the curious types might find some "exclusive" information by pulling on this thread ^^ Yeah, I didn't mean to suggest you were - just that whenever something like this appears, it's only a matter of time before people start throwing around accusations of greed and/or laziness because "the dev team should be fixing bugs rather than adding new content" or "it's clearly already in the game, why shouldn't we have had access to it at release?"

It does seem like it's more likely soldiers are from "bigger" countries. Out of all my playthroughs, I'd wager at least 80% of my soldiers was from one of these four countries: the United States, Nigeria, Germany, and Japan. Consequently, I've seen a grand total of two recruits from Sweden, one from Norway, three from France and one from Greece.

Before anyone starts jumping to conclusions, I feel it's prudent to point out that in the development cycle of almost all games, as the game approaches release all art assets are already completed, which typically leads to the art team having nothing to do as the coders try to get everything running as it should. It's common that the art team then start working on art that's going to be needed further down the line, such as in DLC or patches. If it's done before launch, it may be shipped with the game to reduce the download size and time for respective patches and DLC's. This does not mean anything but the art assets are in the game files until further notice.

Think of it like this: You just bought a car, you got the cheaper model even though you knew the more expensive model is more powerful. One day you find a simple switch under the hood saying "Extra power". Are you a criminal if you turn the switch? If a company sells people games that include content that can be enabled with a "turn of a switch" it's their problem. Don't want people to have the content? Don't give them the code. Make it ***DOWNLOADABLE*** content. Not quite an applicable analogy, because when you buy a car, you get unrestricted ownership of everything about the car. When you buy a game, you don't get unrestricted ownership to everything the game was made of. I don't think anyone in their right mind can say that Firaxis wants us to mess with their game as it stands now, considering the actions they've taken to actively prevent it. That said, some cars can actually make you a criminal if you do things they're able to do, but by design are restricted from doing. Tractors are by design restricted to a very slow speed, but through some easy modifications can allow for more than triple or quadruple the speed. This modification makes you a criminal. That's a bit offtopic though. Perraine echo my feelings on this topic perfectly. Firaxis are a bit dickish by trying to charge $5 for setting two values in a configuration file to "true". It doesn't really affect myself, as I got it as part of the pre-ordering deal, but it's a douche thing to do nonetheless. However, they made the game, not us. If it comes down to either letting them charge $5 for two values, or them not supporting modding at all for the game because modders are nothing but people who'd jump at the chance of "stealing" potential revenue from them... I'd much rather let them have their $5.

In related news, I think I recall someone from Firaxis talking about "adding deco and tint for ghost and psi armor" in either a patch or a DLC. Don't remember where it was, though, so maintain critical thinking.

If you want people to test this (which I'm sure people will volunteer to do; I'm considering it myself), why not make a very quick juryrigged "proof of concept" edition that switches the very first talent around? Like give Assaults Headshot, give Heavies Run & Gun, give Snipers Smoke Screen and Support Fire Rocket? That way we can pretty much instantly say "yeah, that works" rather than (possibly) "doesn't work with old saves" or "have to play through a lot of the game before I can tell".

...wow, I think this might be why Firaxis is so intent on stopping modding, for now. This is, what, 95% of the content of the first $5 DLC?

That's certainly an interesting thought. I'd also say it's somewhat fitting for a sniper role (who would traditionally be acting as a spotter and keep track on where the enemies are, and thus be more aware of their attacks), but might potentially be a little bit overpowered.

It would be awesome if someone were to take all this information and make a simple program to let users with little to no experience in editing files move talents and perks around. I, for example, like that the Battle Scanner is on the support (as it feels like more of a support thing to use), but would much rather switch places of Headshot and Squadsight, as I feel Squadsight seems like an integral part of being a sniper (making long-ranged shots with a sniper rifle, duh), and Headshot vs Snapshot makes a much more interesting and difficult choice (move and fire, or extra crit chance on demand? Hmm). I'm sure I'm not the only one with a sense of "if this was like this, it would be awesome in my opinion". :P Also, I find Gunslinger all-around useless and would love to replace it with something more useful.

First, I'm not sure whether running two rebalancing mods at the same time is viable. They may conflict, with gods know what results. Now, to run a modded copy of XCOM, you'll need to do one (no need to do all) of these three things, organized in order of easiest to hardest. Run Steam in Offline mode. Find the .ini file talked about here, and delete all but the first line. Use a software firewall to block XComGame.exe from accessing the internet.