antistar

Yes, you can; that's exactly the "cludgy workaround" I described in my last post (on the previous page now). Like I said there though, it's a pain to do if you've got hundreds of items that need that treatment. An update while I'm here: Still testing, still fixing/rebalancing things as I come across them. That side of things has been slowing down though - I'm finding less and less to fix - so right now I'm finishing up the documentation for everything so that people in the closed beta will know what everything does and how to install it. Should be pretty soon(!), though there are a bunch of different compatibility/support patches and they all need documentation/packaging up, so still a bit of monkeying around to do there.

You can't craft and breakdown ammo at a reloading bench like in FNV, if that's what you mean; it's done using factory machines instead. Beyond that, it's very similar to ammo crafting in FNV. (Especially if you used my Ammo Crafting Schematics mod.) The reason for this is because the crafting interface in FO4 (used by the Chem and Cooking stations) is really, really NOT well-suited to ammo crafting and breakdown. (You'll notice that BGS themselves avoided doing ammo crafting using crafting stations.) The three main problems are: 1) Each recipe can only have one output item. (This is the really big problem.) 2) There's no ability to set the quantity you want to craft. The recipe outputs a set quantity, and that's it. (Always a quantity of one though, because see below.) 3) The UI doesn't show the quantity (of the single output item) that will be produced by the recipe. Why does the game even support a quantity greater than one if it doesn't show it? I don't know. These issues don't make it impossible to handle ammo crafting, but they do make it very awkward. It's especially painful for ammo breakdown, because that requires multiple output items, and you can't do that. At least, not without a cludgy workaround. You can have a recipe output a dummy item that is scripted to then remove itself and give you the contents of a levelled list (LVLI), but that's a pain to do. You need to make the LVLI and dummy item with a script attached, then set the script properties to point at the LVLI - for every single thing that needs a breakdown recipe. (I did exactly this for just a molotov cocktail breakdown recipe recently - so that you can get the Flamer Fuel out of them to use in building fuelled generators.) That's every ammo sub-type, every empty casing type, every primer type, every grenade case and fuze and mine sensor and etc, etc. It'd be a nightmare. Setting up the crafting/breakdown for all these things using factory machines took me many months. I don't really want to do that all over again, but worse. Like I said, it's not impossible; AmmoTweaks v1 even includes a reloading bench like this - but it's disabled in WARS because it's set up for ammo sub-types added by AmmoTweaks, not the sub-types added by WARS. (When I was working on the ammo sub-types stuff, the idea was still to move to AmmoTweaks v2 once it became available - and I needed something different for some of the ammo types anyway, so using the AmmoTweaks v1 ammo sub-types wasn't really practical.) From memory, one of the things isathar was working on for AmmoTweaks v2 was an all-new crafting system/interface that functions more like the crafting interface in FNV. (I've said it before, but wow... so many things in FO4 were a step backwards compared to FNV.) Anyway, the lack of an ammo reloading bench wasn't much of a blow for me personally, at least. I'm having a blast setting up my own ammo factory in my game. The key thing about it being a factory, too, is that it's automatic once set up. There'll be a minor bit of fiddling to swap between crafting different calibres for example (at least with the design I've come up with so far) - swapping out a builder machine, maybe setting a sorter to sort a couple of different things - but apart from that, I'll be able to just dump the ammo I don't want into it, and then get the ammo I do want out the other end.

Some of the new weapons have custom sounds, and some don't. Well... just about all of them have custom weapon handling sounds - though mostly they're edited vanilla sounds - but only some have custom fire sounds. The anti-materiel rifles and grenade launchers have custom fire sounds, while the other new weapons are set to use vanilla fire sounds. That's so that people can use whatever weapon sound replacers they want (e.g. Commonwealth Warfare for me) - along with saving me time, of course. As an update: Still bashing away at the test playthrough, fixing bugs and re-balancing things. Like - and I don't know how I missed this until now - I just noticed that the hotkey functions for swapping ammo, cycling fire/attack modes and toggling launcher mode could fire when the weapon is holstered. It... didn't seem to cause any significant problems, surprisingly - though I didn't test it too much. The worst seemed to be the weapon being empty when you draw it, if you swapped ammo while it was holstered. In any case, I added a check so that those functions don't take effect if the weapon isn't out. In my playthrough I'm in the middle of building an ammo factory setup, finally - I've been looking forward to doing this for... years. The idea is for it to take ammo that I don't want as an input, break it down into casings, primers, powder, lead, etc - and then reassemble the parts into the ammo I do want. Should be very helpful. I've been finding enemy robots challenging due to a scarcity of armour-piercing and pulse ammo sub-types (which is how I wanted things to go with robots, so that's good) - but once I get set up to make a bunch of AP ammo, pulse slugs, pulse 40x46mm grenades, etc... the shoe will be on the other foot. I've already got another factory line set up to - and this is more of a PEACE thing - butcher animals, process meat (and fruit and vegetables and everything else) and then turn the intermediate processed ingredients into packaged food like Cram and MREs and whatnot, that don't spoil. ... I should really record some videos showing these factory setups - if only because there's no other way to craft and breakdown ammo in WARS, and people who are maybe less into building factories might appreciate some ideas on how to do it. Videos like that would probably need commentary though, and I'm not super keen on hearing my voice recorded... but we'll see. Anyway. I have still been turning up bugs and fixing them, like I said - but I feel like it's getting pretty close to time for the closed beta. Barring other bugs, the main thing still to do is tidy up the documentation a bit. (E.g. actually write the installation instructions parts in the various readmes.)

I wondered the same thing when I saw that, but at a glance I don't think it would be suitable for WARS - at least not as it appears to be right now. Ammo types and sub-types in WARS are handled by OMODs, and RobCo Patcher appears to change the ammo type on the weapon record itself - which wouldn't do anything in WARS' case. The main thing I wondered if it might be useful for is automatically handling NPC HP/DR/ER normalisation across all the plugins in a user's load order, but it seems like it works by finding a match (via Race or keyword or whatever) and then setting a flat value. What I'm using for that is an edited version of the FO4Edit Despongifier script (or rather, three edited versions; one each for HP, DR and ER) that - for every NPC - does a calculation based on the original value, and then sets a new value that is relative to that original value. I'll be releasing these scripts (with permission) alongside WARS, so that people can generate a normalised HP/DR/ER patch for their load order - a bit like generating a sorting patch for FallUI. I'm actually halfway through writing the tutorial on how to use it. I think there's a lot of potential there with RobCo Patcher, though. On the load time shenanigans: I finished overhauling the loadout levelled lists (LVLIs) for now, and the breakdown for loading that test save in Valentine Detective Agency is like this: Loadout LVLIs completely emptied out: 45s Before overhaul: 3m30s After overhaul: 1m30s So the load time (in this case) is twice as long as if almost all the NPCs in the game are set to spawn without weapons, but it was five times as long before this overhaul, so... that's a massive improvement. The load times also don't start out as long; this is in a 60-hour or whatever save.

There is the Revert script function that removes any script-added items from a LVLI, but I don't think it would be a practical way to combat this load time issue. Something like requiring people to run a script (via a hotkey or consumable trigger or whatever) that cleared those LVLIs before saving their game, and then the LVLIs were set to be injected into every time a save was loaded? No way. I mean maybe if it was presented as a custom save system it wouldn't be as bad (assuming it would work); a hotkey that reverts the LVLIs, does a scripted save, then re-injects the LVLIs. That'd still be asking a lot of people, I think. Fortunately, I don't think any weird stuff like that will be necessary. I started refactoring the "loadout" LVLIs in a less dramatic way than I'd thought might be necessary, to begin with - basically just changing the part that spawns different ammo sub-types - and even just doing that is making a significant difference so far. Load time for that save in Valentine Detective Agency went from ~3m30s down to ~1m50s, and I haven't even finished going through all the loadout LVLIs yet. Still to go are (among others) the loadouts that are arguably the most commonly used; those for low-tier weapons like Pipe Guns and Walther PPKs. Since those can show up on more NPCs, I think it will mean (based on my experience fiddling with this stuff) that changing those loadout LVLIs will have an even more significant impact on load times. I doubt I'll be able to get these load times right down to being comparable with these LVLIs being literally empty, unsurprisingly - but these are some pretty significant improvements. Much better than I expected. Hopefully I won't need to really overhaul the loadout LVLIs in the way I thought earlier - and I'm currently not planning to. It'd be a huge pain to do, and would either make the loadouts less interesting (e.g. this primary weapon always spawns with this backup melee weapon), or incredibly sprawling and unwieldy behind the scenes. (E.g. a unique, special-cased loadout for every combination of primary, sidearm and melee weapon I wanted to include.)

Following on from the above: I just did a test where I loaded into one of my current saves (in Valentine Detective Agency) before and after clearing out the contents of the weapon loadout LVLIs in WARS that are script-injected into NPC weapon LVLIs. Load time before: 3.5 minutes Load time after: 45 seconds Oof. I am going to have to try simplifying all those LVLIs. That will mean overhauling/adding a loadout LVLI for every variant (short/long/semi/auto/sniper/etc - plus some faction variants) of every ranged weapon, so... oof.

Hey, here's something I'd like to ask people reading this, if they happen to know: What kind of load times do you get in FO4? Loading a save from the main menu, I mean. Do you notice load times increasing as the playtime on the save increases? And do you notice certain mods causing increased load times? Right now my test playthrough is apparently 56 hours in - level 22 - and it's taking 2.5 to 3 minutes to load from the main menu into a small interior cell. 4.5 to 5 minutes to load from the main menu into a complex exterior, like down-town Boston. Load times have increased as the game has gone on. In contrast, using "coc qasmoke" from the main menu takes less than 30 seconds. As a test, I used Resaver to remove changes to active characters in one of my saves, and that dropped the load time to ~30 seconds. (It also borked all the characters of course; it was just a test.) I'm thinking it means that NPC inventories are causing the long load times. People might remember me talking about how the relatively complex levelled list (LVLI) setup required by WARS to spawn weapons with different ammo types and spare mags - and alongside backup melee weapons and potentially sidearms - was causing the game to take a long time to load; even just using coc qasmoke from the main menu. I mentioned a while back that I was able to "solve" this by clearing out the LVLIs used by NPCs to spawn weapons, and adding their contents back in via script. At the time I'd wondered if load times would go right back up as soon as this script injection was baked into a save, but it didn't. I also wondered - though I can't remember if I mentioned it - if load times would creep up again as a result of running into progressively more NPCs as a playthrough went on, and their inventories get... evaluated, or whatever. I think that may be what's happening; just delaying the problem. This LVLI stuff has been a real thorn in my side. I come up with an elegant LVLI setup that's efficient and flexible to work with, but the game chokes on it. I've already refactored the LVLI setup in WARS two or three times to try to optimise load times, and it's always a huge, time-consuming pain. I may have to do it yet again, though. Uuuuuurrrrrgh. I think I know how I can simplify the LVLI setup even more, but it won't be pretty. (Less nesting of LVLIs.) People who open up the plugin and don't know the reason for it will probably wonder what the hell I was doing. Anyway, that's what I've been looking at the last few days; optimisation. Yesterday I improved the NPC ammo-swapping system so that the non-playable dummy weapons it uses are removed from an NPC's inventory on death. (If the associated "real" weapon is equipped at the time.) No idea if it will make a significant difference, but it should reduce save file size a bit, I guess?

I touched on this in a recent post, but having multiple of the same weapon in your inventory isn't an issue when it comes to the extended features from AmmoTweaks/WARS, as far as I've seen - at least for the player. There's the potential for NPCs swapping ammo sub-types to get a bit mixed up if they have multiple copies of a weapon in their inventory, but from memory that only manifests as them switching between weapons a few extra times when doing a swap. Haha well... I'm nominally a scripter, at least. I've said it before, but I consider myself average at best when it comes to scripting. I expanded the AmmoTweaks scripts quite a lot, but something I didn't add (or even change that much) is how it identifies which weapon in your inventory to operate on (i.e. your equipped weapon) - so I don't recall ever having trouble with having multiple copies of a weapon, and I can't take credit for that either. I can't really take SS2 out of my test playthrough now that it's in there, so I'll have to see how it goes. I'm not using Rise of the Commonwealth - and I am using this Long Save Bug Fix - so hopefully that will result in SS2 being gentler on my saves. I'm enjoying SS2 so far - doing the quests, unlocking things - but it is true that I've never been that interested in Rise of the Commonwealth (or Conqueror), so it may be that I won't use SS2 in future playthroughs? I'll see how I find the rest of it... and whether or not it destroys my saves, I guess.

Using in-game holotapes to save the game is still having the player character do something in order to affect something outside the simulation, so that's not something I'd do, no. It's fine if other people want to use a mod that does something like that, though. :) (Also it's fine to post things re: PEACE in the PEACE WIP thread. I'm set up to get notifications for both threads.) What I'm personally using (and what I'm including in the recommended mod list for both WARS and PEACE) when it comes to saving in Survival Mode is Unlimited Survival Mode. Having access to the console is essential in these games - even if you're not a mod author. For example I went to the area added by Vault 1080 yesterday, and the terrain in the exterior was all messed up - some kind of compatibility issue, I guess. (Not with WARS or PEACE.) I had to use the TCL console command to get in. I also use the console to save the game - have done for... decades in BGS' games, probably, since that way you can actually name your saves. They haven't bothered to let you do that in the regular interface since... Morrowind, maybe? I can't remember if you can do it in Oblivion and FO3/FNV. It's also very fast; you just pop the console open and type in: save charactername01 ... And that's it. (Obviously you can name it whatever.) For subsequent saves, you can hit the up arrow in the console to get the previous command, and then just change the number. I'm rotating through twenty hard saves like that in my current playthrough. Speaking of that test playthrough: I haven't had that "ammo swap getting stuck" bug come up again yet. I've figured out though (and this is possibly related in some way, but who knows) that ammo reference "fragmentation" can interfere with the Physical Mags system a little bit. This "fragmentation" (don't know if anyone else calls it that) is what Kentington is talking about re: the "Inventory Management Brain" in Manufacturing Extended. Stackable items like ammo can be regarded as multiple separate stacks if you found them sitting in the game world like that (i.e. not in a container) - or if they were produced in a factory - even if they look like a single stack in your inventory. You can observe this if you drop a stack of ammo from your inventory that contains ammo you picked up in the game world, or was produced in a factory setup: it will drop as multiple separate stacks. When I was testing this, it actually seemed like the game was sometimes losing a couple of rounds in the process, too; that or they were getting dropped as single rounds, and they were so small that I missed them. This seems to only be a minor issue for the Physical Mags system; the worst it seems to do is occasionally make a magazine drop with only one round of ammo in it, when it should be dropping with more. Still, I'm thinking about ways I might be able to fix it. Maybe consolidating stacks of ammo in the player's inventory (a bit like the Inventory Management Brain), if I can find a safe way to do so.

Well I was wondering if it could be something along those lines - though not so much concerning mags specifically that are currently in weapons in the inventory; those are just OMODs attached to weapons at that point, same as any other. I was wondering if it could be due to having two weapons in inventory that have the exact same OMODs overall - so that they would stack in inventory. But no - I've done a bunch of testing; it's not that. I haven't been able to intentionally reproduce the issue; it's only happened those ~3 times. Something I did see at another point that might be related is the "Extra Weapon Info" message-box coming up twice in quick (instant, really) succession for both the weapon I just equipped (a combat knife) and the previous weapon I'd had equipped (a PPK or a Skorpion, I think it was). It... shouldn't do that. The manager script used by weapons in WARS specifically unregisters for the (hotkey) event that brings that up when the weapon is unequipped. So maybe there's occasionally some hiccup and these events (like the "OnUnequipped" event) aren't getting sent and/or received? I.e. the script engine is tripping over itself sometimes? That's been a perpetual problem in Clockwork - for maybe <0.001% of users, but still; sometimes the script engine seems to just decide to not work. Some script - or some part of some script - just doesn't run, and someone gets stuck with a quest not advancing, or something. I don't think I've talked about the Extra Weapon Info function much, actually. I'll paste in the bit on it from the readme, for anyone that's wondering what I'm talking about: - Extra Weapon Info: --- Pressing the Show Extra Weapon Info button shows a message-box with info on the equipped weapon: ----- Current Strength and STR REQ for the weapon. ----- Weapon COND: current and max. (As literal values, not a percentage. Useful for comparing the reliability of different weapons.) ----- Wear Rate, in COND loss per shot/hit. ----- COND Thresholds: The COND values at which the weapon enters different condition levels. ----- Penalties for not meeting the STR REQ for this weapon. Anyway, I'll keep testing and see if I can find a way to reproduce the weapons getting "stuck" issue. If I can't, it might have to remain as a rare known issue unless someone comes along who knows Papyrus - and the game engine generally - better than I do (and there are definitely a bunch of people who do)... and maybe they'd be able to work it out.

No, the Handmade Anti-Materiel Rifle is just using the vanilla Bolt-Action Pipe Gun animations. I did edit the meshes for the HAMR a bit, but I can't remember if any of those edits were to address any clipping during the reload. I haven't had a close look at it in a while. The HAMR in WARS is actually still based on the first version Shoeburglar made, as a side-note; not the later redux version. I didn't want to redo the WARS-specific mesh/texture changes I'd made prior to that redux version coming out. On my current testing: I've had that weird problem with weapons getting stuck and not wanting to swap ammo (or even reload at all, I think?) a couple more times, though it's still very sporadic and I can't nail down a cause for it yet. Every time has been when I had more than one copy of the weapon in question in my inventory, but that might just be a coincidence, since that situation just on its own isn't causing it. Usually it's fine. What I've been doing specifically each time has been that I've just found an extra (say) Walther PPK and I want to eject the mag from it so I can use it with the PPK that I'm currently using. You can do this by hitting "swap ammo" when you have no spare mags in your inventory (so I'd just temporarily stick any spares in a container), since it will drop the mag from the gun and not load another one into it. That's when it's been getting stuck somehow - but it's only happened a few times, and I don't know why yet. Some kind of script lag, maybe? I'll keep testing. Yesterday I added a minor quality of life feature that lets you highlight dropped mags via rank 2 of the Scrapper perk, making it easier to find them amongst the rubble and undergrowth and whatnot after a fight. I did this by adding a dummy recipe to the Chem Station that requires 1000000 of each casing and ammo type that can be found in dropped mags; you use the "Tag For Search" option in the crafting UI on that recipe, and it will result in dropped mags being highlighted. ...Along with any other containers that might have those ammo or casing types in them, of course. (This highlighting behaviour seems hard-coded to the Scrapper perk. Otherwise I would have added support for highlighting only dropped mags, separate to the perk.) So I'll be suggesting that people might want to use Tagging Assistant, since (among other features) it lets you assign a hotkey to toggle highlighting. That way you can toggle highlighting on when you're trying to find those elusive dropped mags, and then toggle it off again afterwards.

I started my test playthrough yesterday. It feels really good to be actually playing FO4 for the first time since my first time through when the game came out. Can't believe it's been seven years. Some first impressions of playing the game with WARS and PEACE: It's challenging. You definitely have to think about what you're doing more than in the base game, which is good; that's something I wanted. In the heat of battle it's all too easy to lose one or more of the precious mags you've scraped together for your dinky little PPK. Raiders have been carrying the same .380 ACP ammo so I've got enough of that, but they're using pipe guns - so I'd be drowning in spare mags if I gave in and used them too... but I'd rather not because they're shoddy, fragile, inaccurate pipe guns. It makes for interesting choices. It's been a constant struggle for carry weight, thanks to the encumbrance overhaul in PEACE. I just got that first suit of power armour from Concord, and am looking forward to getting time to strap some bags to it so I can make use of its comparatively massive cargo capacity to go back collect all the loot I had to leave behind in Concord. Time though, yeah; I actually have to think about time management thanks to the These Things Take Time (TTTT) system in PEACE. We need to set up shelter, food, water, defences, etc in Sanctuary, but that all takes time - so do I do that, or spend the time butchering one or two of those mole rats at Red Rocket, and cooking them up, and boiling some river water while I'm at it, since we're pretty low on food and water generally? I'd love to be fixing up my gear, but that may have to wait a bit... (It's great. I love it. No more sweeping through the town and pointing at all the fallen trees and wrecked cars and fallen-in houses and magically vanishing them instantly into resources. It's going to take some in-game time to clean this place up.) I've been fixing and tweaking things as I go - mostly pretty minor stuff, so far. Earlier I did get one weapon seem to get stuck and not want to swap ammo - reloading a save fixed it. Hopefully that's rare; it's not something I've seen in any of my other testing. More testing needed - and that is why I'm doing this playthrough. :wink: (Edited for clarity.)

Probably not on the DU ammo, sorry. (Not from me, anyway. I'll be encouraging people to make whatever add-ons and patches they want, though.) The ammo sub-types that are already in there took ages to implement as it is - see the second post in the thread for the full list. While I'm here; the WARS - Sim Settlements 2 patch is done. I'm working on the PEACE patch now. I've already handled the new consumables - the obscene variety of different beers was a pain - and am in the middle of doing the clothing. The large number of consumables (again... mostly beer) did prompt me to improve the formlist injection script included in both WARS and PEACE for use in support patches, though. Previously if you had more than one item you wanted to inject into the same formlist, you'd need a separate entry in the array for each item. That's no fun if you have, say, over a hundred beer records (including "ice cold" variants) to inject into a couple of different formlists. So the script now accepts formlists as input items; it will add the contents of the formlist into the target formlist. It's going to take a reasonable chunk of work to add pockets to all the clothing in SS2 (and tweak whatever other stats, as required) - there's a ton of it in there. That is the last thing to do before packaging WARS and PEACE up into ba2 files and starting my test playthrough though, finally. Not long now.

Thanks. :smile: I've finished going through all the mods I collected over the years (assessing if I want to use them or not, checking for errors, compatibility, etc), and I've gone through most of the mods I tracked over that time too. I started at around 450 tracked mods (oof), and now I'm down to about 120. I'm ordering them by when they were first released, and I'm now back in time in 2016, so it's getting faster to check over them since most of them were simply made too early on to be something I'd want to use. I just installed Sim Settlements 2 and had a brief look through the plugins in FO4Edit, and I will need to make both WARS and PEACE patches for it. Nothing too heavy-duty, judging by that quick look; probably just a few weapons to add WARS support for, NPCs that need their inventories edited so that they carry ammo/mags, and a bunch of clothing items that need to be given "pockets" OMODs from PEACE. To give a kind of overview of the patches I've made so far, here are all the WARS and PEACE plugins in my load order (that aren't testing or private plugins or whatever): *WARS-WeaponAdditionandReplacementSuite.esp *WARS-AmmoTweaksV1Integration.esp *PEACE-ProjectExtendAndChangeEverything.esp *WARS-PEACE-WarAndPeacePatch.esp *WARS-Subversion-InstituteReformation.esp *PEACE-Subversion-InstituteReformation.esp *WARS-MilitarizedMinutemen.esp *PEACE-ModularMilitaryBackpack.esp *PEACE-MilitarizedMinutemen.esp *WARS-LendLease.esp *PEACE-WellDressed.esp *WARS-BetterManufacturingExtendedPatch.esp *PEACE-BetterManufacturingExtendedPatch.esp *WARS-PEACE-BetterManufacturingExtendedPatch.esp Anyway, the way things are going, the Sim Settlements 2 patches will be the last ones I'll be making. Then I can finally get into that extended play-test, yeesh.

As an update: I recently made both WARS and PEACE patches for Militarized Minutemen. The PEACE patch was more substantial, considering all the clothing/armour items included. The WARS patch was mostly giving the different ranks and specialists and whatnot appropriate load-outs, so that they wouldn't spawn with no ammo/mags. To maybe give a better idea what I'm working on at the moment (re: getting my load order set up so that I can test WARS and PEACE properly), I've been collecting and/or tracking FO4 mods as they've popped up on the Nexus - since they started being made. So yeah... roughly seven years' worth of mods that caught my attention to sift through. If I'm interested in using a mod, I'll chuck it in the Data directory and open it up - alongside the rest of my load order - in FO4Edit, to (as quickly as I can) check it over for potential errors or compatibility issues. (Usually I'll glance at its Nexus page to look for any reported bugs while I'm at it.) I'm being pretty ruthless and picky with the mods I even go this far with, because there's a lot of them, and believe it or not, I don't want this to take forever. Sometimes I'll turn up issues and fix them on my end (if it wouldn't take too long to do so), sometimes I'll see how a mod is set up and decide I don't want to use it after all, sometimes I'll decide that there are too many conflicts with a given mod for it to be worth using (at least for now), and sometimes I'll make a compatibility patch for WARS/PEACE that I'll be releasing at the same time as the main mods. (Like with Militarized Minutemen, most recently.) These patches will be available to everyone helping out in the closed beta too, of course. It all takes time. But; the more I can do now to sort out compatibility (even stuff as minor as knowing how certain types of mods may conflict with WARS/PEACE), the smoother things will go once they're out in the wild.

Funny timing; I just posted this update in the PEACE WIP thread.

Okay, I've finished the initial version of the PEACE support tutorial. Here it is, for anyone who's interested in what it takes to make a compatibility patch for PEACE and a clothes/armour or power armour mod: - PEACE-ThirdPartyModSupportTutorial It's an illustrated tutorial in pdf format - and phew, I'm glad that's done. I find tutorials to be difficult and time-consuming to write - and this one ended up taking more work than I expected. (And that's always the way - you'd think I'd work that out eventually.) While writing it, I put together the first version of the "PEACE - Well Dressed" compilation patch (so I could use it for examples while writing the tutorial) - which so far is covering Red Shift Power Armor and Chosen of Atom. Back to getting my load order set up (and sorting out compatibility)...

For my part I think I'll be going relatively light with the weather/lighting mods since I still haven't actually played Far Harbor and Nuka-World yet (didn't want vanilla game mechanics to spoil the first-time experience with them), and I want to see what the intended atmosphere is with them first, instead of getting some potentially wacky results via heavier weather mods. So at the moment I've just got True Storms, Darker Nights and Interiors Enhanced. Anyway; the power armour part of the PEACE support patch tutorial ended up being more work than I expected (writing tutorials is hard), but it's mostly done now. The normal clothing/armour part will be much simpler. Like with the WARS support patch tutorial, I'm working on my own support patch (called "PEACE - Well-Dressed") at the same time, so that I know what needs to be covered, and to use it in examples. For now the plan is for Well-Dressed to initially cover Red Shift, Chosen of Atom and possibly Vertibird Flightsuit. That's... good to hear, because that's actually a requirement for using WARS. ;) Third-party weapon mods will require a patch to work well with WARS. Like, technically you probably could use them at the same time without one, but the balance will almost certainly be off, and they won't be using the extended WARS/AmmoTweaks features like ammo swapping, weapon condition, fire mode toggling, physical mags, etc. Using WARS (and/or PEACE) will probably be a good time for people to try out any "multiple profile" system their mod manager might have. ;) Instead of uninstalling all their weapon mods, necessarily, they could just disable them in an alternate profile that includes WARS until/unless patches come along for them.

Yes, I'll appreciate people's help with the closed beta, when the time comes. I need to test it myself a bit first. That shouldn't be too far away, though it's hard to judge exactly, as always. Currently I'm setting up my load order and working on compatibility issues I come across, in advance of starting my proper playthrough test of both WARS and PEACE. Right now I'm writing the support patch tutorial for PEACE; like the WARS one, but much shorter. (Thankfully.) It'll cover adding compatibility for third-party clothes/armour and power armour mods.

I mean it's feature complete as far as a first release goes, so I guess it's 100% in that sense. :wink: A percentage estimate could mean a lot of things depending on what you want to account for (my testing, the beta, fixes, documentation, etc), and probably wouldn't be very accurate regardless. WARS has built-in support for Bullet Counted Reload System (BCR), if that's what you mean? That affects the China Lake Grenade Launcher, Mossberg 590 and Lever Rifle with Hitman's right-handed animation set. (Actually all those anim sets are by Hitman47101, just with reloads that I edited to support BCR.)

Well thanks - you too. :) Mine was a little rough in places; a couple of family members had some brief but intense gastro or something immediately after Christmas. Not food poisoning I don't think, or we'd all have had it. This included my father though, and he is still undergoing cancer treatment, so at first we were worried that it might have had something to do with that. I've also got what seems to be tonsillitis, and it's been extremely painful. Just excruciating. It was at its worst over New Year's, which is really bad timing for kind of needing to see a doctor. Saw one yesterday though (even if it seemed to be finally subsiding on its own by that point) and got some antibiotics. Even that was a bit of an ordeal. Trawling around multiple pharmacies in the Australian summer heat when you're in pain and exhausted from fighting off some kind of infection because it turns out there's a national shortage of the specific antibiotic you were prescribed... that's no fun. Had to call the doctors surgery and get them to send me an alternative prescription electronically, in the end. Still... I think I'm recovering now. Anyway. As an update; I'm in the process of getting my load order set up for the extended playtest of WARS and PEACE. I'm fixing any conflicts with WARS and PEACE I come across (that are reasonable to fix) while I'm at it. I've already brought forward any changes from UFO4P that would otherwise be overwritten by WARS and/or PEACE - as long they were compatible changes and didn't require making UFO4P an explicit master. I also updated the WARS and PEACE patches for Better Manufacturing, since it got an update recently. Pretty cool update actually, I think; its Mod Scrapper machine now returns accurate components for all loose mods, including from third-party mods. (You just need to generate a dynamic patch for it in FO4Edit - like with FallUI.) While I'm doing all this I'll probably need to put together a brief tutorial on how to add PEACE support to third-party armour/clothing mods - similar to the tutorial for adding WARS support. Thankfully it will be much simpler than the WARS tutorial; mostly just covering the STR-based Carry Weight bonus stuff, and the Load-Bearing Equipment for power armour.

Not there yet; I did that update to BAM (and PEACE of course) as a minor Christmas present - adding the M14 Pistol Rack. Also, jwarner got back to me about the M1905, graciously giving me permission to update and use the assets - so I've been implementing that. I'm adding it to WARS itself instead of Lend-Lease, since I needed to edit all the assets for it anyway. (I.e. it wouldn't be using any of the assets from the original mod.) If anyone's interested in the technical details, the green channel in the normal map needed to be inverted to fix highlight/shadow directions (some renderers use it one way, some the other), the spec and gloss textures both needed to be inverted (I'm guessing the original source was metal/rough rather than spec/gloss) so that shiny is shiny and dull is dull, not the opposite, and all the textures needed to be re-exported with mip-maps to avoid moire artefacting. All things that are relatively easy to miss when porting, but you get a much better result if they're fixed. On top of that I chopped up the meshes a bit so that I could have different materials for wood, steel and brass, and re-did the snub and long barrels to get a smoother result. Anyway, the M1905 is done now except for testing. In addition to all that, I have family visiting for Christmas; less time for modding at the moment, unsurprisingly. ;)

I just made a minor addition to PEACE: - M14 Pistol Rack 01 The M14 Pistol Rack is based on the real-world US Army M14 "Rack, Storage, Small Arms", which was designed to store M9 and M11 pistols. That's what it does here too. You can put rifles and melee weapons in it (sort of awkwardly), but it's designed for pistols. This has been requested before, and is something I always wanted in PEACE (and BAM) myself - but as you can see, the real thing kind of has the pistols hidden away inside a box, and the idea in the mod is to have the weapons on display. If not for that, I would have had this in the mod from the beginning. Recently though - from looking at the design of the M14 storage rack again - it occurred to me that I could just leave the side panels off. So this one doesn't resemble the real thing quite as closely as the M12 Weapon Rack in PEACE/BAM does, but I think it's still recognisable. Anyway; I put this together quickly recently as a kind of small Christmas present, because it's available now in the BAM update I just released. Merry Christmas everyone. :-)

Okay, here's the updated draft of the tutorial, for anyone who wants to have a look. I'm considering it finished unless I later think of something I forgot to cover, or I need to clarify something, or whatever: - WARS - Third-Party Weapon Support Tutorial

Hey, thanks. :) I'll need to do at least some of my extended play-test before I'm comfortable putting it into others' hands, of course. I don't want to waste anyone's time (including my own) if there are any obvious issues that need to be fixed first. It'd be unfortunate if you spent time making some support patches but then had to redo a bunch of work because I needed to change something out from under you. I guess that will still be a possibility if you were to start making a patch during the closed beta, but a lot less likely if I've had a chance to check how it all behaves in normal gameplay beforehand. I can see about quickly adding that part about misc. balance aspects and then put up a link for what should be the more-or-less finished tutorial so that you (or anyone who wants to) can check it out, though.