Adding over 200 custom weapons

[coorscollector]

First off, I have to say that I recently got blender and nifskope and all that good stuff last week and it is awesome. I have been modifying and creating meshes and textures nonstop in order to make a crapload of new guns. However I have a problem that desperately needs fixing. This may sound extremely noobish but I have no idea how to make it so my guns are spawned in NPCs and containers randomly. I believe its called a leveled-item list but I have no idea how to do it. If anyone could tell me that would be great.

 

Thanks in advance,

CC

[ultskeletor]

First off, I have to say that I recently got blender and nifskope and all that good stuff last week and it is awesome. I have been modifying and creating meshes and textures nonstop in order to make a crapload of new guns. However I have a problem that desperately needs fixing. This may sound extremely noobish but I have no idea how to make it so my guns are spawned in NPCs and containers randomly. I believe its called a leveled-item list but I have no idea how to do it. If anyone could tell me that would be great.

 

Thanks in advance,

CC

 

The two types of list objects you'll be using are form lists and leveled lists. Form lists are the simpler of the two; it's just a list of other objects. You'll use those mostly for creating the lists of what can be used to repair a weapon (repair lists.) You can look at the vanilla FO3 repair lists by clicking on the Form List section on the left pane of the Object Window in the GECK. It's under the Miscellaneous section. Fallout 3's default repair lists start with 'Repair________'. If you want Super Mutants to use any of your new weapons, you'll need to add those weapons to the "SupermutantWeapons" form list. (Human enemies do not anything like this done. Keep in mind that super mutants have no animations for using one-handed firearms, so don't put any into that form list.)

 

Leveled lists are also lists of objects, but they also contain additional information that form lists cannot. I suppose they're called leveled lists because you can assign levels to the objects in the list. These levels serve as limitations to what the game will pick from the list when it generates something. This is what keeps you from running into raiders wielding missile launchers when you're wandering around at level 1, stuff like that.

 

As for the getting your new weapons randomly spawned in-game, I don't have an easy answer for you; some one else may, but I don't. My advice is to open up a weapon mod (I'm using 20th Century Weapons) and start looking at how someone else has done it. I used a big plastic board, some sticky notes, and some wet erase markers. I made one sticky note for each type of object (mostly leveled lists, about a dozen objects in total) and wrote on each a short description of what it contains (usually what other objects are in the leveled list) along with special flags or attributes (like 'chance none' information or the 'calculate from all levels <= player character level' flag.) All the notes get stuck on the board, and I draw arrows from each note/object to any other object that contains it. You end up with a network of objects that are dependent on other objects, and this shows you pretty much which lists you need to create, and in what order they need to be created.

 

20th Century Weapons is a good learning resource, because all the leveled lists that make up the mod's foundation are contained in the .esm, while all the game changes that make use of that foundation are contained in little modular .esp's. If you want to see how 20th Century Weapons gets new weapons spawning in vendors' stocks, load up 20th Century v5 ALIVE (Vendor).esp in FO3Edit, expand it, and take a look. Same thing for spawning in containers, enemies, whatever.

 

Learning the network of leveled lists that make these things possible is currently where I am in my own mod-making efforts. 20th Century Weapons uses ammunition types from the CALIBR modding resource, but if you use only vanilla FO3 ammunition types, you can skip over a few things. If you can give me more information, I'll try to give you a rough overview of what leveled lists you need to create. Are you using only the vanilla ammunition types, have you created some of your own, or are you using ammunition types added by any other mod?

[coorscollector]

Thanks so much for the help, I am now adding my stuff to some enemies. Also some of my guns use calibr ammunition and some use vanilla, like some alien weapons like my Dalek gunstick from Doctor Who. Also I am not sure I fully understand what it takes to make a leveled list but your advice helped greatly and I am now trying to make my own. :biggrin:

[ultskeletor]

Thanks so much for the help, I am now adding my stuff to some enemies. Also some of my guns use calibr ammunition and some use vanilla, like some alien weapons like my Dalek gunstick from Doctor Who. Also I am not sure I fully understand what it takes to make a leveled list but your advice helped greatly and I am now trying to make my own. :biggrin:

 

If you aren't already using it, I recommend you also check out the xCALIBR mod. For modders using CALIBR ammunition, it includes a lot of the needed CALIBR ammunition leveled lists. A real time-saver. It sounds like you're already off to a start, so let me know if you need more explanation on how the various leveled lists work. Anyone else is welcome to contact me too if they want to know about said leveled lists, randomly spawning weapons in-game, etc.

[coorscollector]

I ran into a bit of a wall. Do you have any advice on making it so that a particular weapon will only spawn 10% of the time?

[ultskeletor]

I ran into a bit of a wall. Do you have any advice on making it so that a particular weapon will only spawn 10% of the time?

 

If you are saying 90% of the time it doesn't spawn and nothing else spawns in it's place, that's controlled by the 'chance none' attribute in the leveled list. Setting that to '90' will tell the game, "90% of the time, pick nothing from this list. The other 10% of the time, pick one (or more things) that I put in this list." So with that set to 90 and you set a raider to use only that list, 90% of the time the raider will be generated with no weapon at all, and only 10% of the time he'll have the weapon you put in the leveled list.

 

If you are saying 90% of the time this weapon spawns and the other 10% of the time my custom weapon spawns in it's place, you can do that by manually weighting the probabilities on the items in the leveled list. You can do this by duplicating entries in the leveled list. (Right clicking the one you want to duplicate and selecting 'New' will add a duplicate onto the end of the list. That can save you some time.) Imagine the raider's list of possible weapons consists of ["Chinese pistol"] and the chance none is 0. 100% of the time, that raider will generate with a Chinese pistol. If you change the list to be ["Chinese pistol", "my_super_custom_gun"], there's now two possibilities (each with a 50% chance.) If you want your super custom gun to spawn on the raider only 10% of the time, otherwise the raider should have a Chinese pistol, duplicate the Chinese pistol 8 times (for a total of 9 Chinese pistols to just one of your custom gun.)

[coorscollector]

Thanks i followed your advice and it seems like it is working