vforvic

When you run "Finalize" that is when the green triangle appears as one of the Navmesh triangles close to the door. This green triangle is essentially what tells the NPC's that a "teleporting" door is at that location. Other than that it really has nothing to do with NPC's navigating the area. If you are having issues with NPC's not going into certain rooms and not going up stairs then you have some other issue besides the door. Check the stairs to make sure that the Navmesh is following the incline of the stairs and not below or above it. It can be ever so slightly, but not much. Remember that NPC's want to follow the Red triangles and lines. They will not cross any other color of lines between triangles. If there is even the smallest gap between triangles or the lines between the triangles then it won't work. In other words you cannot make "separate" triangles and then just push them close together. There has to be uninterrupted connected triangles. What can happen is people look at the Navmesh in the Megaton Home as an example and if you look at the doorways it looks like there are gaps because you cannot see the Navmesh because it is below the door frame and hidden. Unless of course you set the view to transparent. Run "Find Cover Edges" before Finalize. Also, on the Navmesh Bar there is a button that says "Test navmesh" that is very helpful in these situations. Click it and then you can right-click 2 places in your cell to see a green line that shows exactly how an NPC would navigate between those 2 spots. If the line is yellow then it will stop at where the issue is that prevents the NPC from proceeding to the finish point. Keep in mind that on stairs you might still see the green line if the Navmesh is well below the stairs, but if you look from the side you will see the green line going between the stairs down to the floor below and back up. In the game this would not work at all, but since the Test does not take into account statics like stairs it gets fooled. This is all as good a place to start as any.

I would not call the touched Cells a dirty edit because technically you are modifying them when you Navmesh the adjacent Cell. This is why you have the Green line between the Cells. When you Finalize it matches up the edges of both Cells so navigation can occur across the Cells and thus both Cells are edited even if to a tiny amount. You can of course do the "Remove Identical to Master records" in FO3Edit to clean up any parts of those adjacent Cells that are not modified, but the edges are part of the Navmesh Finalizing and cannot be avoided...at least to my knowledge. So... 1. No 2. Yes 3. If you don't need to edit and finalize the Navmesh on the exterior Cell then don't do it. Keep in mind though that Companions could get stuck on the outside if the Navmesh is not correctly done.

If you auto generate you will end up doing it anyway yourself. The auto generate does not do a very good job most of the time. When you say "difficuties following me in the house" do you mean sometimes or all the time? Did you follow or read the tutorial on Navmesh? Do you have a green triangle by the door in the Navmesh? Are the 2 doors still linked correctly? Sometimes you might need to actually delete the door completely and relink it. Is your Navmesh at the floors height? Looking at it from above all the time you can miss big height differences. This is especially true with multistory houses. Is the door reference marker, the yellow direction marker, in the correct place? When you relink doors these can move into the wrong spot.

Unless you use the GECK to modify something in the game, and then save it, then no just using the GECK cannot cause FO3 to break.

Just off the top of my head, without testing it all myself, I have a couple of ideas. First, I would try making that "else timer == 0" near the end an "elseif" statement. Second, unless you need the timer for some reason, try using a "getdistance" function in the script instead or maybe a "GetInCell" function depending on your exact situation and desire. This way the light would disable when you are a certain distance from the light or if you left the interior cell itself.

As far as I know, and this is just what I suspect from experience, hostile NPC's will not follow you from an interior cell to another interior cell OR interior cell to an exterior cell or vice versa. I am not sure of the exact mechanics of it, but it could be that once you leave that cell through a door into the other cell then the NPC's go out of aggro and thus do not chase you through the door since their current aggro state tells them to revert back to the Patrol Package. The only thing I could suggest is to make sure that the NPC does not have the "No low level processing" box checked and to use a Find Package after the NPC goes into aggro against the Player. Set the Player as the Specific Reference as the Find Target and use Conditions to make sure the Package goes and stays active when the NPC detects or goes into combat with the Player. Then in theory the NPC will continue to try to locate the Player and attack the Player once located.

I actually like this idea and have thought about something similar for some time. My idea was more along the lines of random alien encounters like you stated, but also have a quest involved to find the source of the aliens. I would think that the aliens would have had some form of forward base on the surface. I just have too many things in my plate right now to attempt the work, but perhaps in the future. The adding of the random aliens would not really be that hard, but it would be a little time consuming to get it all done right.

First, thank you for the kind words to the modding community. Many people seem to think that modders just sit and mod all day and have nothing else in their lives to take into consideration. Or that the GECK is some super program that makes modding as easy as pressing a button. Now about voice work. First about voice actors. Sure you can find voices, but not always actors and yes their is a difference even in mods. Bad voice work can ruin a great non-voiced mod. The kids on the block might want to do your voice work, but they really are not good at it and thus sound bad. Maybe they have an accent or inflection that does not work for your mod or they are monotone or their age is too old or too young or their sex is wrong or just bad at acting the voice to make it sound even decent. Once you start doing the voice testing for actors and listening to recordings you start realize how hard it really is to get good voice work. Decent female voice actors are extremely hard to find. If your mod has more than 1 female voice then it can be hard to fill those voices. My mod for example has a need for around 15 voices with about 6 of those being females. Sure some can do double duty on the voices if they are good enough to make the difference, but not many people can do multiples and make it sound different each time. Even after you find all your voice actors you then need to sit down with them and have them read for you to make sure everything sounds like it should and they have the voice sounding like expected. Then once you get all the parts filled you can count on someone dropping out at some point or just taking forever to get you the recorded lines. Second about mechanics of it. It is a long and laborious process. You have to get your dialogue into some form that the voice actors can read. The GECK will export the dialogue, but it is a messy text file that you have to go into and clean and format for voice reading. Then you have to make sure that every voice actor has a decent microphone and place to record. Otherwise your recordings will have the sound of squeaking chairs and dogs and computer fans humming and static and airliners flying over and the TV in the next room or the next door neighbor mowing the lawn and all kinds of background junk. You would be surprised how much background stuff we block out but shows up in recordings. Also you can have various levels of volume output, tone and clarity between actors that make the dialogue sound horrible as the voices move from line to line in the game. You also have to make sure they know how to record into the correct format. If they get the format all wrong them sometimes you can fix it and sometimes you cannot. Then you have to listen to every single line they read and make sure they got it right and did not miss a line or say a line twice or miss a word or 2 during the reading. So unless everything with their reading went perfect then you have to go back and have them redo part or even all of it. So lets hope you got all your voices recorded correctly and now you can move to the feared and dreaded GECK. The GECK does not make it super easy to input voice. Most all of it has to be done externally in other programs. In the GECK the dialogue voice files are not named with any naming convention you can easily match up with the voice files. You must rename all your voice lines, and yes each acting line has to be a separate reading and file, to match this name given in the GECK. Then you have to do the whole lip synch thing for every line which is another separate process. The GECK lip synch is broken so you have to install and use the Elder Scrolls Construction Set and do the lip synch work in that program. Note that there is a way that you can make the GECK work by combining parts of the Construction Set with the GECK, but I have not tested it. It is very tedious to get the file names all done correctly including lip synch files. Then after all is said and done you have to go back and fix all the things you find wrong when you do your testing and trust me you will find things wrong. So then you have to go back to some actors and ask them to rerecord a part or 2 or 3 or mess with the voice files to get the volume all at the correct level or even rewrite some dialogue that does not fit now that you have heard it in the game. Of course now you can't get 1 of your actors to record again because he is busy with other things in life. Just the simple act of making a mod in the GECK can be a very time consuming and extremely frustrating process. As a modder the last thing you want to think when all is said and done is oh boy now I get to drive myself crazy with adding voice. Once you start the voice process you really have to stay at it and get it finished without any long delays or pauses and many modders just don't have that time to commit. If you delay with modding in the GECK you can come back a year later and pick right up where you left off. If you get delayed in the middle of doing voice work, by things in the real world like work or school or life in general, then you risk actors dropping out or equipment changing or voices changing. So to sum it all up it is a long and tedious process to get done above and beyond the actual modding of the mod which itself is a long and tedious process. :smile:

I have a very small amount of experience with FO3 hair and adjusting it, but I can attempt to tell you what I understand or at least think I understand. Let me start with an important point about the hat and nohat part of the nif. I think, and by think I mean I'm pretty sure, that it is not really about when a hat or helmet is equipped or not. Let me explain how it works below. Open any hat or helmet in the GECK. You will see a box that says Biped Object with a list of body areas or types. This essentially tells FO3 where this item is to be located on the body or what items it is supposed to replace. This is not to say that it tells FO3 to equip the item in this spot, but only tells FO3 that this spot is taken and no other item can go in this spot. The Baseball Cap says Headband and Hat. This means an NPC or the Player cannot have any other items in those slots on the body when that item is worn. The Security Helmet says Headband, Hat, EyeGlasses, Mask and the important one Hair. This means that this helmet takes the place of all those items including hair. Which means the hair, which more or less worn like a hat in FO3, is switched over to the nohat part of the nif when this helmet is worn. This is why there is no clipping because the hair is switched over to the nohat part which is essentially no hair or very short hair. If you unpicked hair from the Security Helmets Biped Object list then in FO3 you would see the hair clipping through the helmet like you do the cap. On the flip side if you picked the hair in the caps Biped List you would see the hair disappear. So that means that when they say hat or nohat in the nif what it is really looking at is if the Biped Object list has hair picked. I think there are some exceptions and other factors on occasion depending on the hair, helmet or cap, or maybe the egm's because I have seen it sometimes act unexpectedly, but for the most part this is the case. As far as the tutorial steps. I think the tutorial was written to get non FO3 hair into FO3 and thus you might be able to skip some steps. In the case of cool45.nif it is already a FO3 hair so all you want to do is adjust it a little. All you should have to do is import it into Blender. Make your adjustments and then export it back to FO3. Most of the steps in that tutorial have already been done for you by the previous author. Here is a potential problem though. If you adjust the hair in Blender to work with the cap then it will look all wrong without the cap since the hair will be used with all other hat and helmets and by itself with no headgear equipped. The best you can probably do is adjust the hair a little and also adjust the cap and make it a custom cap that you use only with that hairstyle. Then you might be able to get it just good enough to work with and without that cap.

Go to this Bugs Page and look down at the 1st bug for the PC. I had this issue on a play-through and for the life of me I can't remember how I fixed it, but I did. Your issue sounds similar, but not exactly like this bug. Still worth a look though.

I think people care, but there are 2 limitations. Time and Ability. If you have the time you probably don't have the ability and if you have the ability you probably don't have the time due to other current modding endeavors. Still, you give some good ideas for modder's to either work on independently or in conjunction with their current mods. One of the problems is the proximity idea. The GECK, if I am not mistaken, would have to rely on REF id's which very few Workbenches in the FO3 world have assigned. That is why you have to click on a Workbench to make it work. I am incorporating repair kits into my mods update and you have given me some ideas though. There are a few mods that add tools such as soldering irons and ohm meters. Perhaps they could be items you purchase to increase the effectiveness of repairs or repair kits. Also, are you saying that repairs via vendors should cost money and like items?

We had thought about using Hawaii as a setting for an expansion for our mod Merc2, but it never came to be. Several years ago I had a mod that involved Japan in the works that was never released due to the time involved in keeping Merc2 going. We were going to kind of combine the 2 mods by more or less meeting in the middle which would have been Hawaii. Who knows maybe someday I will end up doing it using FO3, NV or maybe FO4 when it is released.

I think I see what your saying...I think. :smile: Mod A has the NPC or NPC's and Mod B has the Armor. Now I am thinking that Mod B also has a lot of other stuff you do not want. What I would do is use FO3Edit to get rid of everything in Mod B except the Armor and then Merge the 2 Mods using FO3Plugin. Now I know what your thinking...oh great now I have to learn 2 more programs besides the GECK...and yes you are correct. Well, you at least have to learn those small portions. Plus, I and others will help you along the way if needed. Then in the GECK you can just swap out the new Armor that was merged from Mod B with the old Mod A armor on your NPC's. Now let's see...cleaning out all the stuff you do not want using FO3Edit should take 5 minutes...merging the plugins should take another 2 minutes and doing the swap in the GECK should take another 5 minutes. Adding time for the built in GECK quirks and bugs should bring the total time to 2 weeks of work. Just kidding...the GECK is under my skin right at the moment. :smile:

You could just make a weapon that has the "Ammo Use" set to 0. Then as long as the Player has at least 1 round of 10mm the weapon will never run out or need reloading. Or you could make a Quest Script that says something like below and starts and ends with Anchorage. If Player.GetItemCount Ammo10mm < 20 ;or whatever amount Player.AddItem Ammo10mm 500 ;or whatever amount EndIf Then the Player would reload like normal. Just depends on exactly what you want.

There are Mirelurks, Mirelurk Hatchlings and Mirelurk Kings in the game. Each of these variations has it's own Mesh and Texture. Compared to the Mirelurk the Hatchling is a different color and has smaller head armor and no appendages on the torso. The King is of course totally different. The King's texture is textures\creatures\mirelurkking\MirelurkKing_d.dds. The Hatchling is textures\creatures\mirelurkhatchling\MirelurkHatchling.dds. When you are looking for Textures you should search for and extract the Mesh from the bsa first and then use NifSkope to look at what Textures the Mesh uses and where they are located. This is much more reliable than searching in the Texture bsa by name. After you open the Mesh in NifSkope you look for BSShaderTextureSet in the Block List and then the Block Details will show the Texture information.

F5 refreshes the entire cell and shows everything again. You can also select the actual object in the Cell View - Objects Window by double-clicking it or right-clicking and saying view. Then make sure you go over to the Render Window and click the top border of the Window. Then you can hit 1 and you can toggle it viewable again.

There is also a Blender Forum on the Nexus. You might also ask in that forum.

The control for the scope reticle is on the "Art and Sound" tab of the Weapon in the GECK. On that tab on the bottom you will see "Target NIF" which controls what nif the weapons scope uses for the reticle.

To make a new group you would right click the BSFadeNode or NiNode or whatever is the top Node. Then say Node - Attach Node and make your choice form the list. This is my very limited understanding of Shapes vs Strips. Back in the days of Oblivion, probably before but that was my first experience, there were Shape and Strips. Shapes were used for some things and Strips for others. Among other things I think one was best for faces and the other for transparencies and other special effect type objects. You have to remember that hardware and Software were kind of in this running battle at that time and before. Software was in this running battle to crush any hardware available. Hardware was slow to catch up, but eventually did...more or less. Strips were kind of a way to simplify the mesh so the hardware could render it easier. Shapes may have been a little better, but Strips were easier. These days it does not really matter that much so you can use Shape with no hardware issues. To convert a Strip to a Shape you right click the node and say Mesh - Triangulate. My 2 cents in all this. In a Mod production environment be careful getting too crazy in Optimize and Strips vs Shapes. What you are doing is an excellent way to learn, but even between versions of NifSkope things can be different. You do one thing in NifSkope 1.1.0 and it works perfect, but in 1.1.1 it acts a little different. I used to run Optimize and Sanitize on every nif I worked on in NifSkope, but not anymore. Things can look perfect in NifSkope and even the GECK, but messed up in Fallout 3. You don't want to get down the road with a production mesh and find out it is missing pieces in-game or something similar. You have to remember that many nifs have several hands that have worked on them. Some to them are held together by spit and baling wire. They might work, but who know how. Like you I try to optimize everything in my mods to be as clean and easy to run as possible on most hardware. But Fallout 3 is over 5 years old. Most hardware can smash FO3 into submission now. :smile:

Part of the coming update to my Mod MERC2 will include a new type of Sorter. I do not want to jinx this, but I THINK I finally have a working sorter that should allow the Player to dynamically sort items. By dynamically I mean custom items can be sorted into a container and the container can be picked by and changed by the Player. For example, lets say you download a cool laser pistol mod. This sorter will allow you to pick a container to sort the weapon into via a Terminal. So now this cool Laser will sort into that container when you say sort. In theory, and I am working on this part, there will be an option to remove the Laser sorting to that picked container and pick another different container. My hope is this system will also allow the Player to have a series of "Kits" that can be customized. In this case you can just have a loadout of Weapons, Ammo, Armor and other items always sorted into a container that the Player can choose from depending on the mission. Anyway, my question is about the Containers since that is currently what I am placing in the GECK. What containers do you think would be useful? I was thinking things like Sniper Rifles, Laser Pistols, Vault Outfits, Stealth Armor, Jewelry, Power Armor Helmets and so forth. What would you like to see as far as Container options for items? Essentially I can make a container for anything so let me know your wishes and HOPEFULLY I can get this completed.

Everything I learned about NifSkope and Blender have mostly been trial and error so what I know may or may not be totally accurate. D6) The ## seems to be a naming convention used while modeling in 3dMax or Blender or whatever they use to actually make the model of the weapon. When you make a new Object (OB) in Blender such as a Cube then the name says something like Cube, Cube.001, Cube.002, Cube.003. etc... This is not very helpful so you would normally rename the Object to something more helpful like Barrel or Hammer or Slide or whatever. To help further you might use ## to show a specific connection between the objects like the animated parts that work together in some way or maybe Objects tied together in a certain axis. If you look at your image example you can see that the ## names are connected by being part of the firing and reload animations. This might not seem like a big deal on a small model, but on a very large or complex model or scene this would be useful to everyone working on the model or scene. When people are editing other peoples models they might use the underscore _ to show their work. This is simply to find and identify their custom work in the model. Similar to how people use custom prefixes such as 11 or AA or abc inside their mods naming conventions to find their work more easily in the GECK. D7) So this brings us to how you should edit strings in NifSkope. Unless you are combining pieces of models in NifSkope or really know what you are doing I would not recommend renaming at all as it can lead to issues because some nodes rely on others to have a certain name. I really cannot think of any benefit to doing it. For example with the hunting rifle, if you rename NiTriStrips ##Bolt:0 to Bolt:0 then no big deal and everything works. But if you rename NiNode ##Bolt to Bolt then the animation is messed up for the bolt. You do not see it upon first firing the weapon in Fallout, but if you look closely you see the bolt is not there when the hand cycles the bolt. Learning a little Blender can help you kind of understand NifSkope and how the models work. Since my knowledge of 3d Modeling is very limited I use both from time to time to get done what I need to get done. There are things that I do not fully understand, but I know about cause and effect which is how I learned what I know so far. :smile:

Just a word of warning that using the Enable Parent can be a little glitchy at times. At least in my experience you can sometimes get strange side effects. Nothing I can ever really put my finger on as far as a cause, but just strange bugs where things do not work as expected. I still use it at times, but not so much with NPC's. Just something to keep in mind if you ever run across one of those bugs the GECK seems to have where you cannot workout why it is not working when it should.

I had this issue with my mod at one time. It ended up being a very long script I had written. Going above 225 lines or so in that script made the GECK throw an error and crash. If I kept it under 225 it seemed to do the search just fine. Why? Maybe the GECK runs out of memory or maybe it was really the number of characters in the script. This may or may not be your issue, but at least it is a start. How many mods I had loaded made no difference to the crashing. It was just the length of that one script causing the issue.

I am horrible at spotting load order issues, but there are some people on here who are great and I am sure they will chime in at some point. What I will tell you is that unticking mods in FOMM and NMM is not the same as removing them. You need to "deactivate" the mod to make sure all traces are removed. Unticking the mod just keeps the esp or esm from doing it's part. All the meshes, textures, sounds, etc... are still active until the mod is deactivated in the mod manager. All this is said hoping you used a mod manager.

The command is SetEssential TheNPCsID 1 or 0. So "SetEssential LucasSimms 0" would set Lucas Simms as not essential and "SetEssential LucasSimms 1" would set Lucas Simms as Essential. You just need to find a place to put this script command. First you would just click the Essential box on the NPC in the GECK. This starts the NPC as essential. Then in your case you normally could set the command to make them not essential in one of the Quest Stages Script in a Quest so when that Quest Stage runs it will run the command in the Script. This can be a little different in some cases, but this is the basic way to get it done. One case I would consider as different would be adjusting a Vanilla Fallout 3 Quest. If you put the command straight into the vanilla Quest Stage Script it could easily get overwritten by other mods that on purpose or accident affect that same Quest. In that case I might make my own dummy quest to hold my own quest scripting. The below for example would set Lucas Simms as essential after you complete Stage 10 of the Baby Steps quest, which is after you walk to dad. scn babystepssimms int doOnce Begin GameMode if GetStageDone CG01 10 && DoOnce == 0 SetEssential LucasSimms 1 set doOnce to 1 End