Yukichigai

VO files have to be extracted from the BSA files with something like FOArchive or similar. Once extracted you'll have a set of ogg files and matching lip files. At that point, assuming you just want to reuse existing voices, you need to create the dialog options in the geck, then check what file name the new dialog is pointing at and copy the old dialog to that file. That renamed file will need to be included in the distribution package for the mod. No, there is no way to change what file the dialog points at. Yes, that is a horrible system. Anyway, that's just a brIef rundown. There are more detailed tutorials to be found elsewhere.

It's a common bug that happens with both ED-E and Rex. For some reason in enclosed areas they set off the "trespass" alarm for whatever faction owns the area. No idea why, it just happens. Usually if you leave and come back it stops, and sometimes it goes away on its own.

Deathclaws are a definite "long-range sniper solution" enemy. Going in with a weapon that's anything less than 45 damage per hit is basically ensuring your death. Fortunately Boone's Hunting Rifle fits the bill: until I get something like an Anti-Materiele rifle I can give to my companions he's who I take into Deathclaw territory. When I'm dealing with large groups though I don't mess around. I headed across the river to the Deathclaw Promontory and proceeded to get the entire "Day Tripper" perk right then and there. Jet, Ultrajet, Rocket, Steady, Slasher, Med-X, Psycho, Rebound, Nuka-Cola Victory and a box of Sugar Bombs to start, then more Jet and Psycho (mostly) as I made my way through the area, and STILL things were incredibly close. Deathclaws really live up to their name this game. They are murder on legs. I'm still wary of them... without copious amounts of chems to back me up anyway.

No, it's just a bug. The hooker is set to respawn when she shouldn't be. It's the same reason why some of the guys around Nipton (Oliver Swanick, Boxcars, etc.) come back from the dead or change clothing.

Okay, so the note actually describes a good tactic, just poorly. Let me 'splain. First, by "northwest houses" it means the ruins of the houses immediately to the left when you enter via the road. They don't look like very much, just a bit of wall looking like a stiff breeze will blow them over, but they're what the note means. Second, you want to run to the "northeast corner" of the house, i.e. the tallest section of wall, closest to the road through town, blocking view of you from the AFB. Once you're there you need to stay until the bombs stop dropping, then start running immediately when they stop. Third, wear light armor or no armor. Speed is more important than protection here, especially because no amount of DT will really protect you if you screw this up. That all said, here's how to do it step by step: 1) Enter from the road, not the railroad. The minute you can see a clear path to the nearest ruin of a house, do. 2) Run straight for the northeast corner of the house. This will be the side closest to the AFB proper, nearest the road through the bombed-out town. You want to wind up jammed in the corner with the wall blocking your view of Nellis. 3) Wait in the corner until the bombs stop dropping. DO NOT MOVE UNTIL THEY STOP. 4) As soon as the bombs stop run through the gap in the north side of the wall (just to the west of where you were waiting) and make a beeline for the AFB fence. The fence is due north, just over the rise of the hill. 5) Once you reach the rise you should be okay, even if they've started bombardment again. Just run until you physically touch the fence, then follow it east-is towards the entrance. And that's it. That should do it. If you're still having trouble, two doses of Turbo (one after the other runs out, not both at once) should get you through if you head due north straight to the fence.

Cass is The Companion for New Vegas just like Fawkes was The Companion for Fallout 3. Well... maybe not as strongly. Boone's default, infinite-ammo weapon is incredibly powerful for when you're liable to first run across him. Having him with you pretty much guarantees you won't be killed by Cazadors so long as you keep your distance. On the other hand, when she gets the Calm Heart perk Cass has the second-highest health out of any of the human-ish companions. When she gets Hand of Vengeance... well NOBODY else has a perk that directly modifies firearms damage like that. An extra 15% damage really stacks up when the weapon she's using is something insane like an Anti-Materiel Rifle. And then there's her companion perk, which turns Whiskey into "Med-X Lite". DT +2 isn't bad at all, but that bonus is affected by your Survival skill: at 100 it becomes DT +6. Compare that to the other companion perks and the closest in terms of usefulness is Boone's Spotter perk. The rest? Eh. Raw damage reduction is WAY better. Also, frankly, Cass is the most charming and has the most consistently enjoyable dialogue. Arcade has some funnier one-liners, but Cass is just more likeable. She's a drunk, she has strong ethics and firm opinions, and is up front with all of these things. What's not to like? Finally, when the Birds of a Feather quest came to that point it didn't even enter my mind to let Cass get shot. I gave Jean-Baptiste a .308 JSP facial with my Sniper Rifle and hacked Gloria's arm off with a Fire Axe just because the Whiskey got me onery and I wanted to hurt something. Cass, of course, took out half the guards on her own while I was doing that. No fading flower, that one. In short, Cass = win.

That's sort of overkill, and may actually cause more issues with crashing. It would be far more simple to click the "Data Files" option in the launcher and uncheck all of those files instead, leaving only the main FalloutNV.esm file checked.

Yes, this is a bug. You can do the same thing by intentionally losing a hand or two to replenish the caps they have and then win it all back, doubled, over and over and over. I generally try not to exploit the bug. I've already made enough money otherwise that there's no point to doing it anyway.

A few tips I'd like to add that haven't been covered: - The Survival skill basically is the counter to the Medicine skill. With a high survival skill you'll craft so many high-healing food items you will never use stimpaks. It takes constant gathering and harvesting, but it'll net you things that (for example) heal 16 HP/s for 15 seconds. - Weapons you give to companions don't degrade nearly as fast as they do when you use them. Surplus ammo is great for companions because of this, since the increased weapon degredation doesn't kill the weapon anywhere near as quick as it should. I usually give my companions something like a Marksman Carbine and 1500+ rounds of Surplus 5.56mm, which turns them into the best backup you could ask for. - IF YOU EVER SEE .45-70 GOV'T NON-HOLLOW POINT ROUNDS BUY THEM IMMEDIATELY. The ammunition is incredibly rare, even at high levels, and it's used by the most powerful bullet-based handgun in the entire game. You will thank yourself for buying them once you finally get the weapon. And here are a crap-ton of tips about money: - Caravan is ridiculously easy to win at right now because you can play "modifier" cards on your opponent's cards. Opponent close to winning? Remove a high-value card with a Jack, or double one with a King. - With the Repair skill you can make a good deal of money repairing weapons and selling them. The break-even point varies by weapon, but above 65 it generally becomes very profitable to repair weapons instead of selling them individually. Add in the Jury Rigging perk and you can rake in the cash repairing (example) 2000-cap value 10mm SMGs with 100-cap value 9mm pistols. - With the Science skill you can craft Weapon Repair Kits using commonly found materials. Even if you have to buy the items you're looking at only 30-90 caps worth of material. When you use that Weapon Repair Kit on something like a Tri-Beam Laser Rifle, boosting its value by 1,500+ caps, that's money well spent. If you decide to go this route keep an eye out for wrenches, duct tape, and scrap electronics, which are the parts I occasionally run low on (wrenches in particular). - The Survival skill lets you tan Gecko Hides (of varying types) which you can sell for a tidy sum. Unfortunately you'll usually be running low on White Horsenettle but have tons of everything else needed. The amount of money you can make doing this isn't much compared to the other methods, but a Tanned Golden Gecko Hide is still valued at 500 caps. - Remember that there are three forms of currency in the game. NCR and Legion money IS NOT affected by your Barter skill; $100 NCR is always worth 40 caps, a Legion Denarius always worth 4 caps, etc. If you're running low on caps make sure that you don't have 20-some-odd $20 NCR bills sitting in your inventory waiting to be spent.

I think with the NCR what people are saying is right: Shunned isn't enough for them to shoot on sight. Still, the bug you're talking about does exist. My current playthrough has that bug with the Legion. I am Villified, but no matter how many of them I kill they only stay hostile so long as I'm in combat with them. It's an interesting bug, one I have no idea how I produced.

Why would he mention that? Does he ever? If we aren't talking about a line of dialogue that already exists then it isn't going to happen. There's no way to get the voice actor to record new lines.

Do you mean the t-45b or the t-51d? If you mean the 45, the armor is available... sort of. The old "Army Medic Prototype Armor" is still lurking in New Vegas' resources, just lacking the scripts that made it dispense Med-X automatically. You can spawn it using console commands; it has the same BaseID as it did in Fallout 3. I may get around to making a mod that restores it legitimately.

Ice Cold Nuka-Cola can be made with the Nuka Chemist perk, at the rate of 3 regular Nukas to 2 Ice Cold. Making them "craftable" using the fridge would sort of defeat the purpose of that recipe... but it would make sense. Of course, it would also make sense if they also "defrosted" after being out for long enough. Both are doable.

I've been meaning to do this, I just haven't gotten around to it yet. I already have a mod out that lets you use the bottlecap press to print caps, I just need to add or tweak things to allow for a different ending to the quest.

I've been intrigued by this idea for a while, ever since I found the unused quest finish option in the geck. In all honesty it would fit better with the characterization of House: a businessman first and foremost. If the Brotherhood could offer something substantial to his benefit, in this case adding an extra layer of protection between him and the land-gobbling NCR, then he would take the deal. The fact that it isn't even offered as an option to discuss with the Brotherhood is telling. My guess is that Obsidian ran out of time. Regardless, the option is salvageable, provided nobody minds some reused dialog. I'm going to root around and make sure that unused voice files aren't hiding somewhere, but as best I can tell the unused quest completion option is all that's left of this. On a side note, for some reason I think siding with House would be a Hardin move more than a McNamara one. McNamara is willing to bury the hatchet with the NCR; Hardin is more the "hatchet you in the back" type. Give him a chance to settle some old scores, backed by someone with high tech or not, and he'd jump at the chance.

Nevermind, found it. Didn't realize FOMM had auto-sorted my load order to crap.

Okay, new problem: every time I try to load my esp in FO3edit I get the following error: Background Loader: Fatal: <Exception: "Zeta.esm" requires master "Fallout3.esm" to be loaded before it.> I've tried varying what boxes I check, what order I check them, every possible combination and I've come up with bupkis.

So somehow, some way I'm not clear on, I managed to change some single topic in a conversation file that I didn't want to. Of course I neglected to notice this before I saved, which if I'm using the GECK seems to leave me with two options: deal with the changed conversation file, or start over from scratch. The issue is that I'm making a mod which has DLC-specific packages which I want to load completely separately, without being dependent on a core mod package. The conversation I've modified is already modified by the "core" package; loading the DLC-specific mod seems to overwrite this change. What I'm looking for is a tool to completely strip out the section of my ESP file that says "oh hey this dialog has been modified". I know someone has made it, or it's a feature of some other editor, but I've had no luck tracking it down.

Well balls, that wasn't the answer I was hoping for. Oh well, I'll just save the tedious work of remaking that dialog for later. At least I know what I have to do, and for now the dialog works... just with no sound. I'll have to fix it eventually... but not now. :P

Another basic question: what happens if I have two mods which modify the same dialog? I have a few options I can think of, but specifically I can point to the oft-referenced (by me anyway) Protector Casdin conversation tree. I'd like to add options to turn in equipment from some of the DLCs, but I'd like the packages to be separate for each DLC. What happens when two of them modify the same dialog entry, say for example when the package for Operation Anchorage adds an entry for the Gauss Rifle, while Mothership Zeta adds an option for... well basically every weapon from that DLC? No other changes, just more options in terms of replies. What happens then?

Yes. I did all of that. I have the ogg and the lip file (actually, I have all of them, I just extracted all the BSAs to save time), and I put it in the exact location the dialog points to. When that didn't work, I tried the same location except I replaced "fallout3.esm" with my mod patch package's name. None of those worked. Now what I need to emphasize here, what I want to make VERY clear is that somehow, some way, the new dialog I made points to the EXACT SAME location for the voice files that the old dialog points to. No, I don't know how I pulled that off, but there ya go. I'm really hoping I don't have to recreate the dialog option from scratch to fix this, since I've already got it integrated into the dialog tree pretty well and I'm really not looking forward to doing that again.

No I do not

Short and to the point: what controls the items that merchants sell? Some of it is inventory, true, but as much of it as I can find seems to just magically appear. I have no idea, for example, what generates the sales inventory for the Caravan merchants at all, much less for when they've been invested in.

Okay, so I did ALL of that and it still didn't work. The only thing I can figure is that the new reply I made lists the voice as being located in the EXACT same location as the old reply, e.g. Data\Sound\Voice\Fallout3.esm\blahblahblah. Is this something I'm missing, or am I just going to have to re-make the dialog entirely?

So I've dived headlong into tinkering with GECK and so far, so good. I've done some fairly innocuous things that have gone well, but when it comes to dialog I seem to get hosed. Case in point, Protector Casdin and the "Outcast Collection Agent" unmarked quest. It always irked me that he wouldn't take Tesla Helmets, especially since it meant I couldn't recover them at full repair off of his dead/frozen/paralyzed/whatever body later. Anyway, I decided to do what I thought would be a fairly simple fix. I copied the option used for Enclave Power Helmets, changed the conditions, changed the script, changed the Lone Wanderer's prompt text, then added the new dialog option to the main "collection" menu (both of them). When I loaded up the game it went fine, the option worked like a charm and he took the Tesla Helmet with no issues, EXCEPT that there was no voice. None! When I went back into my plugin package and checked the voice entry for his reply it APPEARED to be pointing to the right sound name and the right path, but later I noticed that instead of ending in ",ogg" it ended in ".mp3". There's no way I can find to edit that, and the only options available allow me to re-record the audio. Is this even my problem? What am I missing here?