Gaal

YES, this has been a real, to use one of my mother's terms which is haunting me today, bugaboo. With all these cybernetic enhancements, including eyes that have optical zoom and device scanning technology, I am shocked that some form of night vision has been left out. That aside, a flashlight or illumination device to attach to your shoulder would have been nice. Considering we have, though pixelated and kinda nasty, IR and audio sensing modes in other game modes, I would think this would have been a consideration for the player as well. You don't even get much of this in scope usage, except for a certain few that provide some image enhancements for only a specific set of weapons.

I'm not exactly sure how it is referenced here, but we've all been there I'm sure. You're in an area that, for some crazy reason, turns off your ability to jump (using any enhancements that it), pull out a weapon, etc. Usually, when you leave the area that has this restricted field, it returns your ability to do these things. However, on occasion, the game can get stuck into thinking you still need to be restricted and will not clear the effect. Even if you enter a restricted area, then leave again, it will still not clear the restriction. Quitting and reloading? Nope, still restricted. Only cure, so far, is to reload from a save before the initial restriction was applied. I imagine there has to be a way to modify a variable somewhere that controls what the player is allowed to do so that, when this bug appears, the player can clear the restrictions and be allowed to play the game again. As a bonus, perhaps, this could be used to enable these actions in restricted zones. As a programmer I can see many ways in which this could be achieved. However modding this game, and doing so with LUA lacking an IDE to assist me, is really stumping me a ton. This bug has appeared for me a total of 6 times in the last two days and appears to be getting worse the further into the game I go. I would appreciate any thoughts, or a mod to be released which addresses this.

I am at least a teeny bit comforted by the fact that someone out there is feeling similar pains. I will clarify that I don't know a whole lot about the engine itself and the way the Form IDs are handled. I'm also a bit confused over the fact that when using the console you pretty much have to use the ID to reference items in the game, but within the scripts I'm finding numerous places where the same commands are being issued but the items are being referenced by their Editor ID which is plain text. The last Bethesda game I played (outside of the game-testing world that is) was Morrowind. I'm sure that underneath all the plastic-coating there were similar hex-based conflicts arising in that environment, but the modders/players only had to reference items by their unique text-based Editor ID, and sometimes even their full not-completely-unique in-world name. It also seemed to have a capacity for a near-limitless number of separate and/or merged mods with a near limitless number of new and unique objects of any type defined. At least, I never ran into a limit and I still have a backup of over 200 separate esp files that I was loading into Morrowind on a daily basis. That's wothout tallying up the mods that required MGE and MWSE to run properly. Oblivion I never touched, mainly due to my computer not being powerful enough upon release and hearing that, compared to Morrowind, it looked amazing but wasn't nevessarily a replacement for the massive and open world that Morrowind provided, especially given that many of the graphical upgrades of Oblivion were making their way into Morrowind through 3rd party enhancements. It's quite possible that all this is really very easy to fix, or avoid completely, and we're only being confused by our total lack of experience with the tools available. I'm also quite sure that the designers of this system are well aware of these potential problems and couldn't have foreseen it would be this messy out here due to the fact that they were never adding to a completed product from several different sources. It was all one, controlled, project. We're not so lucky as the inferior beings that we are. Simple, one-celled, possibly soul-less, mod-makers. No offense intended. I did, however, in my experiements, discover that the Geck does help in some ways with the Form IDs being identical in the same esp file. I conclude that this would work in multiple esp files as well, but wouldn't be easily saved to those individual files due to the fact that there is always only one active file. The selected active esp, or the temporary work environment that can be saved as a new esp. That aside, it did detect that some items in my mod were supposed to override items in the master due to the fact that the esp referenced fallout3.esm as a master dependancy, and left those alone. It also found many cases of two non-replacing items having the same Form ID and changed one of them to a unique ID. However, it did not check for cross-references to the changed items and fix anything, so I had a lot of repairing to do on my own to make things work. Also, since I am merely human, I can't easily find things by their Form IDs, so I had to search by hand/eye to find items by their Editor ID which was very tedious and tended to leave me with blanks due to the extreme differences between some Editor IDs and their in-game names. I believe I was doing a lot of switching between Geck and TESsnip (via FOMM) with the same esp files loaded in both, in order to make sense of what I was seeing and what was actually there. Unfortunately after fixing everything, Geck crashed on me before I was able to save my work, which was rather rude. I could probably go on typing about my various discoveries as a simple, one-celled, barely intellectually trained, neophyte modder, but I might as well give someone else a chance to say "hello" and let my fingers rest. I do want to clarify however that these posts are not rants, as they call them. My intention is to cause people out there to turn on their brains, swap out the batteries, and simply be aware that though we may have a "Garden of Eden Creation Kit," we're a long way off from being able to produce the "Garden of Eden" with one push of a button. Without proper handling, we're more likely to blow ourselves up before we can say "oh crud, I hit the wrong button!" Gaal

Alright, I'm gonna try to make sense of all this despite the fact that I'm tired, frustrated, and ... well... really tired. So, I've been installing mods like mad and enjoying most of them. However, upon the release of the GECK, I discovered recently that some of the mods I'd been playing with were beginning to malfunction in some really odd ways. I discovered, after a lot of attempts to fix the issue in GECK, TESsnip, and FO3Edit, that the issue was due to duplicate Form IDs. This would usually not be a problem due to the way Oblivion, and thus Fallout 3, handles this problem. I discovered a post about 4 or 5 pages down the list in this forum that the first two numbers of a duplicate Form ID are replaced with the number corresponding to the plugin's order-number in plugins.txt. Here's where it gets rather confusing. There's a mod I have been using for some time that adds a bunch of scripts that mimic the functionality of the Ghoul Mask that is in the default game. This allows you to be disguised as a raider when wearing raider armor, meaning the raiders will not attack you when wearing their armors and will even stop attacking you if you put the armor on after thay've already spotted you. However, if you attack one it will still fight back, stopping that defensive attack if you stop attacking it. Yes, I know it feels a bit like cheating, but it's the best I've seen so far. It works great on it's own, but then another mod came about that added a new weapon with it's own script. The weapon itself had a unique Form ID, but the script ID was the exact same as the ID for the script handling the raider armor in the other mod. Somehow, due to the order of loading, suddenly the weapon was working fine, but the raiders were no longer responding to the armor. Oddly enough, a third mod which added a Raider Friend Perk was causing the raider's dogs to see me as a friend, but the raiders themselves were still attacking me while I wore their armor type. Still with me? Okay, so I had to conclude that when Fallout 3 modifies the Form ID of the duplicate item, it does not check for references to it, or from it, and make the proper adjustments to their corresponding Form ID references. This is where it gets confusing to me, because, so far as I know, there's no way to tell a piece of armor to reference a certain script Form ID while allowing for a certain number of possibly random digits caused by plugin load order. I did a bunch more investigating and found a number of cases where modded items were referencing FLST items that were actually the IDs for scripts, and several script items that were referencing ARMA IDs. I even found a few container items that turned out to be the IDs for a MESG item. These conflicts are present BEFORE being loaded into Fallout 3, and after my attempts at fixing them and testing them, the results were even more broken in-game due to the reassignment of the first two ID digits, which I didn't even known about until after those tests when I decided to check these forums. So, now that you're all totally convinced of my insanity after reading and re-reading this post several times, and beginning to doubt your own insanity, I pose this question... How the HECK are we going to resolve this issue? In other games that used hex-based IDs for mod items, the community had to develope scripts, and eventually whole programs, which could open the mod's files (sometimes as simple as XML-based scripts/lists) and check them for ID ranges that had been registered for use by a certain registered modder. The mods were then either filtered and denied posting on the website if their IDs were out of bounds, or they would flag them as Safe or Not Safe on the download page. I've also known a few cases, though I can't exactly remember them working very reliably, where programs were developed to scan for these types of conflicts in a wide number of mods, and then provide either a patch-mod which would be loaded AFTER the conflicting mods containing only the conflicting items and their adjusted IDs, as well as any objects referencing them, or the programs would edit the mod's own files and re-package them with the fixes items so that every ID was unique. However, we're not jsut making new items here, we're modifying original items too, and if the above fixes were to be developed we'd have to make sure we're not fixing things that are supposed to be a duplicate of a master-entry. Those Form IDs are supposed to be the same, or it's no longer a replacemement. And finally, with this system of Form IDs, eventually you'll end up with too many unique IDs for brand new items than the 8-digit hex IDs will no run out of possible numbers (unless you can have Form IDs longer than 8 digits.) so, when the last mod comes out with a Form ID of FFFFFFFF (8 Fs) then we're all done and royally screwed. As my eyes become rather blurry and I loose my ability to type with some level of accuracy... not to mention high winds starting outside threatening my power... I will leave you all to contemplate our fate however grim it may be. We're gonna need some sort of fix, or solution program, eventually. Good Luck. Gaal