[WIP] Collect Unique Weapons Quest

[Pellape]

Hello Fallout fans - Old modder here that will make a new mod for NV, my first one.

Some background stuff

I am used to make WIP's, which many of us used to make between 2004-2010 at least and some still do, I guess. This mod will not be anything special at all, just a simple Quest-mod, but my goal will be to not touch any cells at all except one single cell and that is my Dummy Cell, where the quest giver and all items I add will be stored and then I move them to the right place with the JIP command MovetoCell when the quest starts so JIP will most likely be a requirement.

I already started to make this for F3 and I added 6 quests there so far during the 2 latest days but as far as I know right now, JIP is not available for F3, is it? Well I have not checked as so few plays F3 anyway, so I do not mind making a couple of cells there dirty or at least conflict with anything else others may have add there and I do not make changes to any cells anyway, just adding 1 item to a cell if there is no Persistent References there that I can use to move my items too with the moveto command.

How experienced am I? Well I am extremely experienced with Oblivion (and OBSE scripting) and Morrowind and also to make new 3D stuff like this one, that I made last spring, but I dislike Papyrus, well I do not have any control over Papyrus at all, even if I made mods using Papyrus, but with extremely numbers of fails and frustrations but I finally succeeded with a lot of help from the very nice and helpful Skyrim community here at Nexus but I still do not understand how it works honestly. I am used to Shorts, floats, arrays and references, not the weird and odd way you make scripts for Skyrim and fallout 4. In the other hand, I dot think anything is missing for those games anyway and I have no ideas about what to add to them. Well enough about this and before I start write about my WIP I want to show off 2 of my best mods I made, well that I think is the best ones and both took 2 years to make each:

• The Caldera Ancient Mine (Morrowind 2004-2006, remade 2020)
• The legacy of the Champion (Oblivion 2020-2022)

I also made some simple 3D stuff for F4 with Blender and Nifscope, well check out My Mods if you want to see them all. All old mods where uploaded as pekkape, an account I cannot login too any longer or to sites that no longer exists, as many of us used to do that 20 years ago, for some odd reason?  Some players did upload some of my best stuff to Nexus after 2012 and I am very grateful and happy that they did that for sure. Well enough about my old stuff but as this is my first post here, I felt I add it if anyone now would be interested at all. 

 

The [VIP]  Collect Unique Weapons Quest

I will not make anything fancy, no factions, no story, well except a simple background for the Quest giver, the Smith and Weaponsdealer Sam Colt that will stick around at the Gibson Scrapyard at Novac but I will not make him available there until the player have completed the Main Quest, to avoid me interfering with it, sending the player to cells that are included in any quest really as those will be completed first before any quest that is related to it will become available for the player using this mod.

The reasons that I am doing this are at least 2.

• I have not found many Unique weapons the natural game play-throe really and I sure take good time examining every room I enter, every single corner. So where are they? 
• I want to add them to the weapons rack in the Underground Hideout. Not that all will fit there, but it sure gave me this idea in the first place for this mod(s) for FNV and F3
  • Honestly, I like the design for this cell to look a bit better in F3, same author, as the room is much smaller and tighter in FNV but that is my opinion. I can always remake it if it starts to become a problem.    I like space, specially for companions in mind and that where the main reason that I made the oblivion mod I linked to earlier in the first place as I used so many companions there and they got stuck everywhere, mostly because of bad NAV-Meshing, (Pathing) and many modders did ignore pathing at all, specially in many dungeon mods, so if I wanted to play them with my companions, I had to edit them first, adding proper Nav-meshing (paths). My original Caldera mod for Morrowind was not pathed, so I did that 2020 instead.    I am not perfect in any way.

I could just add all items to myself with the additem command in the console, but how fun is that? I want to play the game the way it was made for in the first place and I guess that counts for all that plays Bethesda's games?  Some cells do not respawn, so it was a bit boring honestly to go back to Adams Airforce Base in the F3 version to get the 2 Unique Flamers there, but as long as you already have the Unique weapon for the current quest in your inventory, you do not need to go anywhere, just hand in the quest.

Sam Colt is a Smith and Weapons dealer but he will not take your items, just make a quick examine of them, so he can make copies that he will sell and then he returns them to the player (In reality, nothing is removed from the players inventory). He will always have at least 5000 caps, checked with a Quest Script every 3s, 1000 5.56 ammo as well. He will also sell all types of standard weapons available and all sorts of ammo, stimpacks, doctors bag and some snacks. He does not sleep, have no advanced AI, just walk around at the Scrapyard for 24-7 but if the players requires that he would have a proper daily schedule, a proper home, I will make it, but honestly, does anyone care about Sam Colt's daily routines?     Well what is your opinion?  That will require that I make changes in the cells of Novac, which I want to avoid and the question is, will I be able to keep the game completely clean at all?     I think that at least.

 

Double Unique Weapons?

I will add copies of all unique weapons that are part of these quests and add them mainly to my dummy cell, move them close to where the original unique weapons are located or to a cell that is most proper for it. Why?  I do not plan to make scripts that checks if the player have already found them, stored them away at some odd container from some odd mod, even if I can scan for them with nvse. I know such scannings is possible in Skyrim but that it also takes papyrus several minutes to complete such tasks. The script engine have higher priority in the older games, like F3, FNV and Oblivion, even Morrowind and much lower priority in the newer Bethesda games. To make things easy, I add a copy of the item and if the player already have it, they can choose to use it or go for the copy, just for the fun of exploration, even if it was not fun to run all the way back to Adams Airforce Base in F3.    The first quest in F3 does not have a double copy, s I point to a safe anyway in the quest and if the safe is empty, well so be it as you can always cancel the quests and if you now really want to have Callahan's Magnum in F3 and you sold it earlier, well use the bloody console.     I do bet the chance of you finding it without this quest is minimal or even impossible really as it would require you to blew up the Citadel and how many did that? The dirty harry revolver is evil after all but good and evil, well, that is another topic debated else where.

I am not sure which weapon to start with as I have not tested the GECK expander yet, only GECK, with and without nvse, so I will soon try the expander for the first time and I did love it for Oblivion, so damn great, simple and fun to use, specially the script editor that is extremely great in all possible ways. I love it. I guess I peek here and pick them one by one, but if the item is related to any quests, I will make sure the player have done those before I make my quests available and that also means I must do those quests before I will be able to test my own in the first place.

 

Textwall? 

Well sorry for that as I always or mostly get carried away when i make WIP's, descriptions, tutorials or what ever, that is the way I am...    Some did dislike my walls in the Oblivion forum, but I cannot do much about that really, well except stop typing.  

 

Edited October 26 by Pellape

[Pellape]

Have spent 2 hours trying to make GECK to compile scripts, looking at different forums for a solution an finally I did find GECK Powerup, that solves this issue. So frustrating.

[sullyvanj93]

Don't use GECK Powerup. Once upon a time, that was the preferred updater, but it's been outdated and lapped now. Instead, use GECK Extender:

https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/64888

You'll find it has all the powerups, plus quite a bit of other content/ini stuff to make the geck as easy to use as possible (which is still a 15 year old system...)

[Pellape]

But @sullyvanj93I did use the extender and it refused to make the compiler to work for me and I even tried to combine them and I did use both Geck 1.4 and the Geck 1.4 provided by the extender, it did not help. The only thing that works for me is the Powerup. I spent 2 hours with testings and I almost gave it up, but in the other hand, all of you got it working so I did not give up, but kept searching with Google until Powerup popped up. The Extender for Oblivion, which is older, well 18 years now, is really MUCH better, as it has a proper script editor, with color's and much more cool custom settings than the GECK extender but maybe it will get there one day?  For me it is important, as I script a lot. I did use Notepad ++ with color themes for Oblivion scripting, which is the same as F3, FNV scripting, with some minor diffs.

I read at one forum that some modders, with the exact same setup, either got this issue or not. No useful solution was published there however. They did call it the GECK curse. I keep the current setup now, as it works, so either I will be able to make a mod or not, and I prefer to be able to make one.     If you have any better ideas, then I test it.  It might be some dll somewhere causing it as well, maybe some nvse plugin I use or something? I did try both with and without nvse by the way but I must use nvse as I will use some JIP functions.

Edited October 28 by Pellape

[madmongo]

I still use the GECK Powerup. It may be older, but it still works.

I looked into upgrading to the GECK Extender, mostly because Powerup doesn't work with version control and using the GECK in networked mode (necessary if you are doing large mods involving worldspaces). The GECK Extender claims to work in networked mode, but when I looked at the details, you basically have to disable all of the Extender stuff, and if you're doing all of that, then what's the point of using it? So I didn't bother switching. It's easier for me to have one shortcut for the GECK in Powerup mode and another for the GECK in normal mode for when I need version control.

Powerup is rather annoying with all of its error messages. But other than that, I have no complaints. Well, not about the Powerup part, anyway. The GECK itself is an evil Vault-Tec experiment designed to test modder's frustration levels, but that has nothing to do with the Powerup part of it.

[Pellape]

@madmongoI did install the extra error message stuff but I was then back to ZERO, with no working compiler again, so I had to uninstall them as well. I do not plan to work in new worldspaces what I know right now but who knows? If some mod community wants some aid, I might need to get my GECK to work, and then I might get help from the others involved to solve it. Well one day in a time.

I did work in a couple of teams between 2005 to 2010 and I loved it and it sure gave me a kick working with other great modders, some was the best modders available at that time and pioneers and they solved a lot of new issues that did pop up, specially with Oblivion 2006 that made us all extremely frustrated. The sad thing is that almost all our mods are gone, as we uploaded them to sites that no longer exist. I do know Wrye used and like some of my mods as he wrote about one of them at TES-Wiki and I did ask him if he had any of them saved, and he looked at his old drives, but all is gone.

If I know what I know today, we should used Nexus but for some odd reason, our mod community disliked Nexus and I cannot figure out why? I do find a lot of stuff on Nexus that they did make anyway, and if I use google and search for something specific, I might find it else where. Maybe they disliked Nexus because not all stuff we made wheres suitable for kids  .  I do think our old leader Canadian Ice was the first one that made skimpy stuff for any Bethesda game and she started to make it for the original Morrowind body. We should not forget the prostitutes in Daggerfall, that only had a couple of tiny pants and they where so beautiful as well, made by Bethesda. Then the Better Heads and better Body popped up for Morrowind, the rest is history. Today it is even hard to find a proper good looking armor that is not skimpy and that is a bit annoying as well really. Armor should protect the body and it makes no sense to use skimpy armor, but still, I did like this one a lot for Morrowind:

I made the shield 2005 and they are still available for both Morrowind and Oblivion here at Nexus and I made a lot of different ones, with colors perfect suitable for a lot of different armors. Shields where something no one else did bother about and maybe I was among the few ones to use them really.

Edited October 29 by Pellape

[Pellape]

I have applied for Voice Actors today at both NAVA and Voice Actors Club and it would be cool if I can get anyone interested of doing it. I mostly voice act myself but it also takes a lot of time doing it, so I mostly do not add voices in my mods these days, but it sure makes it funnier and more realistic if a suitable actor is doing it. I also know that a member of any of those 2 links I provided here, is able to make the voice acting MUCH better than I do or have done earlier as I did voice act a lot for Oblivion 15 years ago, together with one of my sisters.

The FNV mod only have a single quest so far but 10 quests are made for F3 at this point, and I also play tested them and they work perfect, so far. I do not know if it is to early to involve a voice actor at this point, but if he has suggestions for changes, which I will not demand as I will not demand anything really, than it is time now to start implementing them. I am not a writer, so the dialogues are very simple at this point but I do try to make them as immerse that I am able to make them. So if the voice actor wants to improve the dialogues, I will of course be open minded for it, no doubt.

Edited October 29 by Pellape

[Pellape]

I have decided to make Sam Colt into a companion. Why not? Why should he hang around around the scrapyard at Novac and do nothing there except sending the player all over the map? I do prefer female companions and I could make him female, but in the other hand, I already have 4 female companions and 6 dogs.

[Pellape]

It looks like I have been able to get a voice actor. We see, but a female one. That means I must remake Sam Colt. The best thing honestly with names like Sam and Charlie, is that they are gender less.   

Renaming an NPC is easy but the name Sam Colt is used all over the quests, changing it, may cause issues and also may also confuse the player if I would miss any changes. It is one thing to create stuff, another to find what is wrong and do something about it.

So what about the voice actor? I have not heard her yet. She is also claiming that her voice suits both females and males which could be extremely cool for a smith or weapons dealer really. I do want this char to appear as a strong and reliable char and he is right now, no doubt about it.

[Pellape]

Fallout 3

I do bet no one is reading at the Fallout 3 forum, so I add my stuff here. I made a quest for the Experimental MIRV at the National Weapons Depot and I must say, it is the hardest quest I have ever played in any Fallout game or TES even, as far as I can recall. I just had to watch a video online to solve it. I did play this back and forth since yesterday, been making videos for the Voice Actors Club, to see if I can catch one or not. I do hope I can make as challenged quests later for FNV as well. I made this video to really show the Voice Actors how the AI react with the player and I did put myself in layback, to show how progressive they are, to show their role in the game, what the result will look like.

What I do know now is that the Keller family is involved in this quest and maybe I should send the player to it to start with, or mention it in the quest dialogue, that if the player has not done the questline, then do it, if the player have done it, that line will not pop up. I do not even know if I done it or not really. Well it is not a quest as I did watch Oxhorn's Video about it, I should really make one instead. Making such a quest, will make this much much better really and to make more sense, where did we get all info about this Depot at all in game?    Very good question indeed. If the player has the holotapes, all 5, fine, then we skip that quest, if not, then we need it. How do I test it? Well, I need to make doubles of the Holotapes, as everything else, to not break the quests, that the player are able to cancel anyway. Using the Holotapes already in game, might break stuff, maybe not? I stop typing and test it.

Sam Colt in action, Fallout 3 - Raiding the Depot, shortie - Voice Actor showcase