DorostheConqueror

I've recently started releasing a series of radio station mods for New Vegas, and few people have PMed me asking how they can make their own. There are a few such tutorials for F3, but to my knowledge there are no up-to-date tutorials explaining how to create a new radio station in New Vegas. I've got a bit of time to kill, so I figured I'd whip up a short tutorial on how to make your very own custom radio station from scratch! his is pretty basic stuff and is still very much a WIP, but hopefully some of you will find this interesting and informative! For illustrative purposes, I'll build my own radio station mod as I walk you through the steps. Check the Spoiler sections for screenshots of the mod as it progresses! 1. Start a new mod Fire up the GECK and click on File/Data. Make sure Fallout.esm and only Fallout.esm is selected, then hit OK. Once everything is loaded, go to File\Save and save your mod under whatever name you'd like. SAVE OFTEN! The GECK is fairly unstable, and nothing sucks harder than losing thirty minutes of work to a crash. 2. Set up a Talking Activator The first thing you should probably do is set up a Talking Activator. This is the object which actually broadcasts your station; without it, you'll never detect the station on your Pip Boy. Look on the Object Window and go to Actors/ Talking Activator to bring up the list. You can make one from scratch, or you can simply duplicate one: double click on a talking activator of your choice and change both the ID and name. Make sure both the Radio Station and Cont. Broadcast checkboxes are checked, click OK, then say Yes when you're prompted to create a new form. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! If you don't create a new form, you'll overwrite and possibly bugger up a vanilla TA. 3. Place the Talking Activator Open up a cell of your choice; it can be any cell you'd like. Click and drag your newly created Talking Activator into the Render Window and place the copy of the TA somewhere off in the void where players won't see it. Next, double click the placed TA to bring up the Reference Window; navigate to the Radio Data tab and change the Broadcast range to Everywhere. Click OK. 4. Set up a Radio Quest Now you need to link your TA to a Radio Quest, which is where you'll define playlists, dialogue, and all that other good stuff. On the Object Window, go to Actor Data/ Quest. Right click on the list of quests and select "New". Give teh quest an ID and a quest name, check the boxes next to Start Game Enabled and Allow Repeated Conversation Topics, and finally, hit OK. Now you've got to go back in to the Quest window and set the Conditions. In the Quest Conditions box under the main Quest Data tab, right click, select New, and chooce GetIsID (parameter) == 1, with your Talking Activator's ID set as the parameter. Your radio station SHOULD be fully activated at this point! Now's a good time to save all your work, fire up New Vegas, and test your mod ingame to make sure you're doing everything right. If things are going smoothly, your Pip Boy should detect your new radio station... of course, it's nothing but dead air at the moment. You won't need the GECK for these next two steps! 5. Pick your songs Radio stations will play anything, so pick out your favorite songs and stick them in a folder for safekeeping. I'm going to put two songs in for now, "I'm Gonna Lasso Santa Claus" by Brenda Lee and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" by Reverend Horton Heat. 6. Encode your songs as wavs The main problem here is encoding. Radio New Vegas uses stereo mp3s; however, I have yet to have any success using mp3s myself. For whatever reason, Fallout is prone to glitching songs depending on what format they're in, so your best bet to encode each of your songs as mono channel .wavs. Goldwave is a shareware program that will allow you to do this for free, but any audio encoding program will do. name these songs whatever you like, but it's best to keep them descriptive, especially if you plan on adding lots of new music to your game. Once that's done, it's time to place them in a safe spot. Navigate to your Data/Sound/songs directory (you'll know you're in the right place when you see a folder named radionv) and create a new folder. Name this something descriptive and put the newly encoded wavs in here! 7. Add the songs as Sound Objects Go back to the GECK, and look at the Object Window under Audio/Sound. Right click, new. You can ignore most of the settings for now (these can be tweaked later, or the raw sound files can be modified as necceasry). Give your new song an ID (preferably something related to the track you're adding) and click the Add Sound button. Navigate to the folder you created earlier and double click your newly encoded wav. If you'd like, you can preview the song with the Play button, just to make sure it's working right. 8. Set up the topics Now you've got your songs ready to play, head back to the Radio Quest you made earlier. Double click the quest, and navigate to the Radio tab. If you know how conversations work, you can probably take things from here. For the rest of you, this part can be long and boring. First, right click on the Editor ID box, and select the topic "RadioHello". It's very important you use this topic as your header; for whatever reason, radio station don't seem to like playing unless RadioHello is the first topic in their list. After that, set up some more topics to serve as playlists. There's thousands of ways to approach this process, and once you get the hang of radio creation, feel free to experiment. Radio New Vegas uses a bunch of topics, mostly for different banter topics, as well as one master music playlist controlled by some clever scripting. For now, let's keep it simple, and use multiple linked topics to serve as your playlists. For my radio stations, I've been using five seperate playlist topics with up to four randomly selected songs in each. Mouse over the Editor ID box, right click, new, and add an ID name for any Playlist topics you might need. I've got two songs, so I'll add two topics, "zmodRADIOXmasList01" and "zmodRADIOXmasList02". 9. Setting up RadioHello Now, go back to RadioHello, and in the Info Box, click New, add anything you like under Response Text, and hit OK. Highlight the newly created response text in the Info box, and in the Link To box to the right, right click, add topic, and select your first playlist topic from the menu. Change the Speaker to whatever NPC you'd like, and leave everything else blank, like so: 10. Setting up the playlists Now, go back to the Topic list and select your first playlist. Add a new response, like you did with RadioHello. The response text can be anything you want, I'd recommend making it your song's title for future reference. DO NOT put your Response Text in {} quotes!!! Radio New Vegas does this, but I've found it prevents my songs from playing. Now, click on the TESSound button, and select the Sound object you set up earlier. You might want to turn off your computer's speakers at this point! The GECK likes to play the sound you picked, automatically, in full, with no option to stop it. If you get into a groove, it's not uncommon to hear your GECK blare five or six songs at once. Now, Link To the next topic in your playlist group and select ANY in the Link From box, like so: 11. Keep going! Repeat 10 until you run out of Topics. Once you've got to your last topic, Link it back to RadioHello, creating a loop. Voila: Congrats! Fire up New Vegas and test the station again; with any luck, you should now be able to hear your tunes. 12. Expanding the Playlist and Randomizing your songs Of course, your radio station is kind of dull right now. It's the same small batch of songs, over and over, one after another. Randomizing your radio station playlists will go a long way towards keeping your radio station fresh and interesting. It's fairly simple to do. Go back to your first playlist topic and create a new response in the Info box just like you did before. Now, check the Random box for every response under your current topic. You can tell which responses have been Randomized by looking at the Info box; responses which have been checked off properly will show an R under the Flag column. This way, the computer will randomly select a song to play each time the playlist comes by. And that's it! Do this over and over until you've added all the music you want to hear on your radio station. Like I said before, I personally like to use five playlists with two to four songs per playlist, but feel free to tweak things to suit your taste. You can see the finished Christmas station here. Feel free to reverse engineer it or simply overwrite the wavs with your own songs if you're still having trouble!

Hey guys, I recently added a bonus Christmas radio station to my Radio Free Wasteland mod: http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=37655 I figured it's that time of year, might be fun to have lore-friendly holiday tunes available on your Pip Boy! The Holidays are rapidly approaching, so I was thinking we should start a master list for Christmasy-mods; sort of like a New Vegas Christmas tree, only instead of being surrounded by presents, it's surrounded by mods. So what do you think? Have any of you made Holiday-themed mods yourself, or know of any good ones available for download? Post 'em here!

Cool, thanks, I'll keep an eye on that thread. I checked for "Cathedral" stuff, but nothing's coming up. I did manage to find some Star Trek uniforms, though, so that's a start.

Well, if a Vegas wedding chapel would be involved, I'm actually working on one now. It's part of a bigger radio station mod that I uploaded the other day. I don't have any plans to include romance options, but if somebody wants to use any resources or cells if and when it gets finished, that'd be cool! -edit- Well I'll be! looks like SimplyWayne beat me to my own plug! :biggrin:

REALLY? I'm going to need to see some sources on that. It does sound like something he'd do (he was willing to star in The Ice Rink, for God's sake) but all the same, I want to see this for myself. On the off-chance it's legit, oh hell yeah, I'd totally hire Bruce Campbell to do some voice acting for my mods! The first time I ever saw House was last year. My girlfriend was watching some rerun on TV, and the first thing I said was "Oh my God, it's the Prince of Wales".

OK, I was wondering if anyone knew of any resources available- static objects, equipment- that would be appropriate for a Las Vegas wedding chapel? I'm making a mod, and one of the areas is a country western radio station based in an old ruined church. Originally, it was just going to be a plain old church, but the other night I was thinking, how awesome would it be if the church was actually one of those notorious wedding chapels that are everywhere in Vegas? Nobody in-universe would "know" exactly what the chapel was used for before the war, mind you. They'd probably assume they were standard Pre-War churches. The DJ who lives there is a sweet, earnest, God-fearing country gal, and I would think there's a lot of potential for humor and interesting storytelling by juxtaposing her innocent enthusiasm with the, ah, "seedier" reputation that those places tend to have today. I don't know exactly what I'm looking for here. A fully-built ruined chapel with gaudy decorations and big hearts everywhere would be ideal, but anything to add to the ambiance might work. Off the top of my head, things like Elvis memorabilia, Star Trek costumes, or "pimp pad" clutter might help establish the scene.

Not to necro my own post, but in case anyone cares, the mod is well under way. Raider Radio is uploaded and fully listenable and I am currently in the process of uploading the rest of the stations. Due to network problems, this might take a few days, but the first phase of the mod is essentially done. Still no DJ banter or finished studios; that should be the next thing I work on after debugging the stations themselves.

Hey, I tried what you suggested, but it still doesn't work. I tried about seven or eight different encoding settings, from 8000Hz at 8kbps on up, and the songs still only play for five seconds before skipping. I checked the sound files the game uses for Radio New Vegas, and they all seem to be mp3s at 44100Hz, 256kbps, stereo. There's got to be a way to mimic this, right? Or is there some hardcoded variable that prevents player-created radio stations from operating at the same level of efficiency as Radio New Vegas?

Is there any way to restore and resume an upload if it's been ended prematurely? I've tried uploading a decent sized (150MB) mod file three or four times now, but thanks to a spotty internet connection, it's been interrupted every time. I'm never going to finish uploading it at this rate!

Do any of you guys know how to get mp3s to play properly in custom radio mods? My problem is that the radio will only play the first 4 or 5 seconds of a song before switching to the next one. I've got my radio to work fine using wavs, but wavs are far too big to be practical.

1. It's kind of a pain in the ass, but I know you can do it by mass selecting the objects you want, then using keyboard commands to rotate them in the Render window (Z+right click or ctrlZ+right click, I can't recall offhand). The Geck can be very temperamental, however, and it may deselect everything if you click wrong; I like to select the objects I want to rotate in the Object List window, then "rotate click" on the Render window directly from the Object List. This should reselect the Render window and allow you to rotate your objects in it without deselecting everything. 2. Maybe build a radio talking activator linked to a unique radio quest, then set the talking activator to broadcast only in it's own cell? I haven't done this yet, but I am making a radio mod right now, and I'm fairly sure that would work. 3. Did you simply overwrite the default texture? That would cause a problem like that. You can make it so only your new object uses the new texture, but you'll have to give the texture a new name and change the texture path for your object. I haven't done this yet for NV, but there should be an option to do this in the object's main property edit screen, close to the .NIF path lists. 4. Probably? You'd have to have access to 3D modeling software, and that's outside my comfort zone! 5. No idea, but it might be a time thing. Some changes you make in the Geck don't register immediately upon loading the game. It could be that his inventory for the day (week?) is already "loaded" and set in your game; try waiting for awhile and see if his inventory resets with your new items.

Sweet Azura... Well, I figured out what went wrong. It took me about three hours of painfully slow reverse engineering, but I finally isolated the problem. There are actually two, both related to the radio quest dialogue. 1. The dialogue response text in my song Playlist. I had them set up like this: "{ Song title }" "{ Song title }" ...like how they wrote them for Radio New Vegas, placed inside those comment tags. The game doesn't like that, I guess it assumes there is no dialogue for that response, so it doesn't play the sound? I removed all special symbols from the dialogue response text, and it works. 2. The initial topic's editor ID. I had my dialogue greeting topic labeled as: "zmodRADIOstationnameHello" It seems that the radio works ONLY when the greeting dialogue topic is set to "RadioHello". No clue why. Switching the topic to RadioHello makes it work fine. There's a third problem, too. The wavs work great, but they're big. REAL big. A few wavs might not be a problem, but twenty or so wavs takes up a full 300 MB. I'm going to have to figure out a way to get around the mp3 "play for four seconds then skip" problem, because there's no way in hell I'm going to use 2 full gigs of harddrive space just for New Vegas songs. The TA location doesn't seem to matter, at least not for me; I have my TAs set up in a custom built cell. Just be sure to select the TA in the render window and set ti to broadcast Everywhere! That's an easy step to miss. I'm not sure if you're experiencing any of these problems, but if you still can't get your radio running, let me know and I'll try and help.

I had this exact problem. It's an issue with room markers, and it effects almost every large premade cell in FNV. Look on the Object list in your Cell View window. There should be a whole mess of static objects called "RoomMarker". They're invisible in the Render Window unless you go to View/ShowHideWindow and check the box next to Portals & Rooms, at which point they'll show up as big blue boxes. Basically, everything inside each of these RoomMarkers is invisible, so you have to move them before you can do any editing. The easiest way I've found is to figure out which RoomMarker you need to move (by inspecting the Render Window), selecting the RoomMarker you want, then changing it's Z position by either giving it a negative or positive sign in the edit object box. Once you're done editing the room, you can easily put the RoomMarker back in position by flipping the sign back again. You could also edit them en masse by moving them in the Render Window, or simply delete them all, but they're placed there for low-end machine performance reasons so unless you intend to keep the mod you're working on for personal use only, I wouldn't recommend doing this. There's a second problem, however. The Render Window does NOT update RoomMarker changes immediately, it only updates when the cell is first loaded. If the Jacobstown Lodge or Sunset Sas cell is already loaded into the Render Window when you move the RoomMarker, you'll have to switch to a new cell view, then switch back before the rooms will appear. If all else fails, save the mod and restart the Geck; you should be able to see the room in question again. It's a MAJOR pain in the ass, I know, and hopefully they'll patch it in the future.

Still nothing. I'm going to try playing around with FNVedit to see if there's some hidden screwup preventing us from making radio stations in the GECK. I've got about 120 working wavs sitting in a folder waiting to be modded in, and it's driving me NUTS!

Well, I've been playing around with it, and I don't think it's the .wavs. I converted them to mono like you suggested and tested them by overwriting some songs in a downloaded radio mod. They play fine, so the sound files work. I'm not so sure the recording is the problem; I read a F3 radio tutorial that recommended doing this, but it creates sound files in Sound/voices, rather than Sound/songs. The working radio mods I've seen as well as the vanilla radio all use music stored in Sound/songs and linked to a Sound object.