Fistandilius

The fact that he was there just made it more convenient. It doesn't change the fact that House had Victor monitoring you the whole time. He pops up at several points in the game when you're in trouble or when you've completed a mission. He's obviously able to travel wirelessly from securitron body to body because once you meet him at the strip, his body in Goodsprings is still there, but it's offline. It always irritated me that Victor wasn't explained more. There was so much cut content in the game because of time constraints I'm sure, but you'd think they'd have at least fleshed out the main quest before worrying about side stuff. That's why I like FO3 so much better, because there's so much more to do, and Bethesda is so much better at fleshing out a world space, even if you don't like their story telling. Except that we don't know that either of those things are true. We don't know that it was normal for couriers to take more than one package anymore than we know that it would be suspicious for them to take only one. I can't prove my point anymore than you can prove yours, but we do know that the Mohave is supposed to be a dangerous place (as is everywhere post apocalypse), so if you hire someone to deliver a package they're expected to be able to handle themselves and get the job done. Carrying two packages would delay your delivery even moreso than if they ran into trouble. It's not like fedex where they can just drive around in their truck and just make an extra stop. It takes a while to walk from point a to point b. It doesn't take long in the game because well... it's a game. Just like you don't see all the people, just like you probably don't see all the dangers. When a package can potentially take days or months to deliver, I would wager it's uncommon to carry more than one at a time. But again.. we'll never know. Like I said before, I don't think House leaves anything up to chance and I'd still bet that the courier had no deliveries for Good Springs. As a final point; when Doc Mitchell patches you up, he finds only one receipt for delivery and there's no reason for Benny to take your receipts when he believes you're dead.

I just happened to do that area again... It's the Franklin Metro Tunnel and I think you get there from Metro Central IIRC. It's got like a Reaver every 10 yards if you do it on level 30. I just went through it on level 20 or so and I encountered 1 in the building and 2 in the tunnels. I didn't have the Dart gun schematic yet (for some reason I had a ***** of a time finding it on this playthrough), so I couldn't use my regular strategy, but I found that with bottlecap mines you can place one, then shoot the Reaver to get him to come after you, and the bottlecap mine both cripples them and takes a good chunk of their health if you get a good hit (try placing it in a doorway or something where they have to walk directly over it). I happened to have the gause rifle and it only takes about 4 shots after you cripple them with a bottlecap mine. The only problem with the gause rifle is it has such a small hit box that its easy to miss them, and sometimes it knocks them down, other times it does, and you only get one shot before you have to reload. The combat shotgun will take them down, but it takes a boatload of hits. Same with a plasma. The nice thing about the plasma and combat shotgun is you don't have to be as precise when you aim, and you can get a bunch of shots off without reloading. The guns in NV were so ridiculously overpowered. I picked up a Laser RFV or whatever it was called on like level 4 from a fiend and I kept that sucker til like level 35 or something it was so awesome. I do miss having more silenced weapons in FO3. There's only the silenced 10mm or the Infiltrator that I know of. If you don't have the gause rifle, I recommend you get it. I do Anchorage Alaska as soon as I'm able to, because you get power armor training right away and then I have the option of using it if I want to play a heavy armor character, or you also get the chinese stealth armor if you want to play a sneaking character. I happen to think hellfire armor is the best looking armor in the game. The other power armors aren't proportioned right and they don't look near as cool as they do in the game art.

No way in hell House would have allowed that. He leaves nothing up to chance. You forget he hired 6 couriers just so 5 could be decoys. AND he sent Victor to watch you as well.

How does that make sense? We already know what his delivery was. It was the platinum chip and he was headed to New Vegas.

Thank you. That's exactly what I didn't know how to do.

That sounds like what I'm looking for, but I can't find it in GECK. I know there's something like this for Skyrim in the Creation Kit, but the only thing I can find in GECK is one complexion slider. The individual sliders let me change the shape of the lips, nose, etc. (there's like 40 sliders or something, didn't count them), but I see nowhere that I can change the tones. Unless it's not under the NPC folder?

Well the majority of the NPC's don't have this problem, so there must be something special about the texture that Moira Brown, Lacy, etc. are using. How do I find out which textures they're using? I really don't have the first clue how facegen information is stored and I know they use a variety of .nif files for eyes, face, etc.

You have to go under Render->Settings, then click the Render tab, click Add Folder and then go down to folder and browse to your texture directory. I usually add the /data directory as well as the /data/texture directory just to be safe. You may have to restart to get them to work.

Moira Brown from Fallout 3 has a shadowy dirt mustache. It doesn't show up that well in the CK as you can see from this pic, but with in game lighting, it's very pronounced. http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101229221905/fallout/images/6/69/Moira_Brown.jpg The same thing occurs in New Vegas with Lacey of the Mohave Outpost and Lt. Carrie Boyd at Camp McCarran: Here's a good example of how bad it looks in game under certain lighting: http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110120031616/fallout/images/e/eb/Lacey.jpg http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110209011911/fallout/images/b/b6/Carrie_Boyd.jpg Changing the race simply changes the color of the dirt and doesn't make it go away: It seems to be similar to whatever effect is used to give Pretty Sarah her burns. If you change the race on Pretty Sarah, the burns aren't as severe, but there are still markings there: These imperfections don't appear to be part of the player skin texture:

So.... the game's been out like 4 years and nobody knows how to get dirt off npc's faces?

Well there will be a Reaver or Overlord in every group of Feral's or Super mutants after about level 15-20. Thus they lower my ammo a lot.. The deathclaws stick to certain areas and I found Deathclaws in NV to be much easier to take down then a Reaver or Overlord in FO3... I tried your tactic, problem is Reavers are found in confined places with little room to move back. One place (the presidential subway) spawns 2 Reavers who take almost all of my ammo to take down... Even with the broken OP companion Fawkes aswell... :\ Overlords even get a damage boost with tri-beam lasers. Which they can just pick back up if knocked out of their hands... Deathclaws can't always fit through the same doorways you can... XD Where did you encounter a doorway in the Mohave to keep the deathclaws from following you exactly? You don't have to keep backing up away from the Reavers, you can just circle around them. I took several down in the sewer. I forget which one, but it was loaded with them. The presidential tunnel you can at least enlist the help of the sentry bots if you do it correctly. And yes, the Overlords will pick their weapon back up. Just shoot their arms and they drop it again. With the right combination of perks you can take them down in one VATS session. Alien Pulverizer with Action Boy, Finesse, Sniper, Gunslinger, and Grim Reaper and you're practically invincible. You get 9 head shots with the Pulverizer before running out of AP and they're ash most of the time.

I don't know how you can not have thousands of rounds by the time you reach the level where reavers and overlords show up. Also your assertion that they're around every corner is a massive exaggeration. Regardless, I don't know how you can accept that Deathclaws at level one in New Vegas are ok, but Overlords and Reavers at level 12 or whatever is unfair. There's nothing to a Deathclaw except high attack and high armor, the same as an overlord or reaver. The only difference is a deathclaw is as fast as a reaver and can jump. In any case, there's a strategy for everything. Two darts in the Reavers legs slow him down then it's a matter of staying close enough he won't throw his radiation muck at you and far enough he won't claw you to death and they go down easily enough with a combat shotgun or a plasma. Firing at an overlord's arm so he drops his weapon or knocking him down with the guasse rifle works just fine as well.

And that's not a fact, it's an opinion.

Yeah, which are 3 NPC's that keep the game challenging on level 30, instead of the cakewalk that NV is at level 50.

You can only select them as they were broken up when the mesh was created. The reason you can take the shoulder pads off the Riot Gear is because when they built the mesh they built them as separate objects. I don't think there's any way to do what you want to do without going into blender/3ds max/etc. and separating the meshes. Sometimes you can get away with a mashup if you can overlap the two and only the parts you want to see show up properly, but that depends on the pieces involved.

There's something that really bugs me about the faces of NPC's in FO3 and FONV, and that's the dirt on faces. I'm not against it in theory, it's realistic, but it's just poorly executed graphically in these games to the point where NPC's like Moira Brown in Megaton and Lacey in the Mohave Outpost appear to have mustaches. In contrast, the female Raiders in FO3 were dirty, and yet the majority of them were actually attractive after you stopped them from trying to kill you. I was looking through the game files and the dirt doesn't appear to be part of the skin and I can't seem to find it in the NPC creation either (but that doesn't mean it's not there). How do I go about eliminating this? Is it an actual dirt slider I'm missing like Skyrim, or is it some kind of effect that's done with a script or something?

I think my knowledge of heightmaps is what's holding me back. I didn't really understand what you said about.... quads was it? I was hoping I would pick up on it as I went through your tutorial. But I actually tried to extract a heightmap from Oblivion and try to put it into Skyrim to see if I could figure it out and I couldn't even manage that, so clearly it's my knowledge of heightmaps and the proper settings that's holding me back.

I wouldn't say it's not fair. It's not your fault Adobe charges $700 for software that hasn't changed a great deal since the late 90's. Like I said, I tried Tesanwynn with regards to Skyrim. I was able to successfully get my heightmap into the game, but it looked nothing like what it as intended to look like elevation wise. It could have been something as simple as the elevations being entered wrong, but it's not exactly a newbie friendly program. I guess I'll have to try looking for something more generic in terms of heightmap tutorials to try to learn more about heightmaps in general before I can try to fudge with Tesanwynn some more.

That link doesn't work anymore. They require you to register and buy it. CS2 was never free. They released the free code to allow people who had already bought CS2 to use it since the activation servers were down. But the internet ran rampant with stories about free CS2. Most of them ended up having to print an retraction: http://www.forbes.com/sites/adriankingsleyhughes/2013/01/07/download-adobe-cs2-applications-for-free/ Even if you wrote down the activation code they gave, it doesn't work anymore. I tried. You can't even download the software now without registering an account whereas before you could just download it. Also, I tried TesAnnwyn with Skyrim and it's not "newbie friendly" software. I got my heightmap to import into Skyrim, but it looked nothing like what it was supposed to and I didn't know where to go from there. Everyone points to that Hoddminir blog as the goto tutorial for Skyrim, but they built their heightmap from scratch. Yours seems much easier to use if I could figure out some of the terms in this thread and get it to work in Gimp.

Typically in Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Oblivion I always played on my own (unless I was playing a Mage in Skyrim, because destruction magic is so crappy). In Fallout New Vegas I used companions. I usually at least had Ed-E with me just to carry some junk, but usually Cass or Veronica as well. The follower characters are actually really well done in FO:NV and each of them having their own quests and extensive back stories make them much better than any of the other 3 games I mentioned. The followers in Dead Money were really well done as well, even though I hated DM with a passion. One of those reason was because they put those awesome companions in there and you can't use them at all later in the game (and I had to kill one of them.)

I don't understand everything I've read in this thread, but before I attempt anything I have to ask, will this work with Gimp? I think I read somewhere that Gimp doesn't have true 16 bit capabilities and therefore has issues with heightmaps.

Generally speaking, if your gun isn't silenced they're going to spot you after you make the first attack. Sometimes if you get like a head shot with a plasma rifle or something you can get away with one shot without tripping your detection, but that's about it. That's one thing I liked better about NV was there were more silenced weapons. Even on level 30 with 100 sneak and a bunch of excellent perks, if I fire my gauss rifle, every enemy in the area knows where I am. When I used to carry a sniper rifle, it didn't matter how far away I was or if I got a head shot. Once the shot was fired, they would look around for me even if I was up on a mountain and they couldn't get to me. There's something seriously off with the AI as well, because the moment you get "caution" status, the enemy automatically knows where you are. They won't come charging at you like when you're in "danger", but they will slowly and methodically start heading towards you. It's not like they're going to go off in another direction looking for you. Or at least it's very rare. Also, that entire area is heavily trapped and mined, so make sure you're not tripping any traps, because that could be part of your problem too, although I would think you'd know that because I think they're all explosive traps. IIRC.

I definitely had mutants attack on my playthrough... I activated the robot and proceeded to travel west down the road and was met by two mutants. One had a missile launcher. I took them out. I forget what level I was, but I'm thinking around 14 because I found the place very early on and didn't think I was strong enough to handle the german town part of it. Anyways, when I took out those 2 mutants, I headed back to town and the robot was finishing up one mutant while another was dead on the ground, so there was apparently an attack from the east as well. I don't run mods either.

As weird as that sounds, that's what I got out of it. The recordings had people screaming, pleading, etc. and then roaring as they were injected with... something... and the same roar came from the "Abominations" that walked around clearly looking alien and they seem to spend just as much time attacking aliens as they did me. Whether or not that was their primary purpose, I doubt it. I think they looked at us as zoo animals to be studied.

I played NV before FO3, and I've been playing FO3 for a month and a half now I think. It's amazing to me how much more balanced FO3 is. Deathclaws are too rapey in NV. In FO3, you might encounter one or two, but usually not until you're well able to handle them (unless you stumble into Old Olney or the wrong end of an Enclave party early on.)