More love for the melee/unarmed pacifist

[frank lee]

I once saw some footage from a weapon test in the 70's, Instant Banana peel was the name of the project. It was a powder that when spread on the ground and soaked reduced the friction to almost nothing! People running on the spot like cartoon characters. the weapon wasn't developed for obvious reasons, It's completely indiscriminate an knocks anyone who walks into it on their ass and it turned out to be a nightmare to clean up afterward.

However a grease-gun immobilizer would (I'm guessing) be pretty straight forward as far as game mechanics. A pacifist weapon, Squirt, reduce your opponent to running on the spot or landing on their keister and just walk away. . . .

Edited November 24, 2010 by frank lee

[Geeves83]

Wow....that's actually a really original idea. It's be cool to see that effect in the game.

I've since incorporated a few ways to be at least a partial pacifist in my own mods and tweaks. The introduction of a few tranquilizing weapons and rounds, taser rounds for the 12ga shotguns, concussion and stun grenades. Most of them seem to work pretty well, but I'm still trying to get the melee and unarmed part. I've just started adding scripts to most unarmed weapons and most blunt melee weapons that cause them to deal fatigue damage based on the user's respective skill and the target's armor and endurance. I'd just really love to see some original moves and effects for an unarmed/melee specialist, whether animated or not. Obsidian added the new unarmed and melee attacks, but they just kinda seem tacked-on and incomplete to me....a lot of the special attacks for melee weapons don't even do anything different for a regular attack for all I can tell, which is ridiculous. I'd love to see more knockdowns, crippling of specific limbs, knock-outs, disarms and the like to make it a more viable character build. They did improve it over FO3, but really only by brute force; making the unarmed and melee weapons more powerful, which was kind of disappointing. It'd be nice to have options. And if they were animated well by the mod community, well that would be amazing.

 

Edit: While we're on the subject, does anybody out there have any idea how to mod unarmed special attacks effects? You know, moves like the the cross and uppercut, as well as the learned moves like the Khan Trick, Ranger Takedown, etc.... I can't seem to find them anywhere in the GECK.

Edited November 25, 2010 by Geeves83

[frank lee]

If you like that, here's couple more quickly, a stink bomb gun that reduces humans to helpless vomiting (the animations exist in game) and the opposite of the banana peel the 'Sticky Gun' tested by the US Marines in Mogadishu I believe.

Ah, the wacky world of weapons research eh.

[Rasana]

I've always been a big fan of the melee/pacifist character, and I love how in NV they added some extra moves for both the unarmed and melee attacks. The only problem is that all of the attacks seem to have pretty unimaginative effects. Extra damage, knockdown, etc. Changing the effects for melee weapons in the GECK is pretty easy, but the unarmed attacks I can't even find mention of in the GECK. It would be awesome to be able to add a repetoire of unarmed moves and melee moves to choose from, and with varied effects like knock outs/fatigue damage, disarming an opponent, disabling limbs, etc.

 

Think about it; how cool would it be to be fighting three guys, one with a gun, and two others with melee weapons, go into VATS, attack and disarm the guy with the gun, attack the closest melee fighter and knock him out, then turn the recently liberated gun on the thirds kneecaps and watch as he limps away in terror.

 

Another thing that would be great is if people stayed out for longer and you could loot unconscious bodies. That's one thing I loved about the first 2 fallouts; Knocking people out with a good crit to the head, and taking all of their stuff. It's irritating in NV when you knock someone out, continue on to dispatch his buddies, then have him wake up 10 seconds later with all of his gear, shooting you in the back. You can adjust the minimum fatigue values in the game settings to allow for long knockouts, but then of course you still have to inflict that much fatigue damage on someone to keep them out for any period of time. Thats the tricky part.

 

Lastly, and probably one of the more ambitious things, is being able to add some scripting that allows you to rob and loot stuff from people who are fleeing. The way I see it, they lost the will to fight and will most likely happily part with some of their belongings in order to convince you to leave them alone. It's also another way to render someone mostly harmless without killing them outright.

 

Does this sound good to anyone but me? I've been playing/modding FO3 for the last year, hoping some decent unarmed and pacifist mods would make an appearance, and there are a few, but they definitely don't seem too popular as far as I can tell. Maybe I'm just weird <shrug>. I usually don't even play a purely pacifist character; it's just nice to have the option, I guess. I'm trying to find a way to do this, but the more I get into it, the bigger an undertaking it appears to be. I'm not a very good scripter or modder, though I'll continue to try it out. If anybody did do something like this, or even had any ideas or advice to add, it would be awesome.

 

Thanks

 

I'm a modder, and a recent fan of melee (decided to take it up with NV, while FO3 I never bothered), and some of what you ask for is already in game to a point. However, to be exact of what you are asking for requires custom animations and scripts. That's the big catch.

 

I can count on one hand the number of modders who are working on FO3 and NV mods who have the ability or resources to do custom animations. Scripts, its quite a few .....but animations to boot? Yea....single digits. Its a lot of work. They would really have to be dedicated to the project of redoing melee and unarmed to go this route.

 

Not to discourage you, but the modders I know of who do custom animations don't have melee animations on their radar. The 3 guys I knew of who did really popular custom melee mods in Oblivion (1 with around 20,000 downloads, the other two with around 60,000), aren't modding for FO3 or NV.

 

It makes sense - both games, FO3 and NV, are heavily gun/energy weapon based. Good luck, however, I'm a new fan of melee weapons in NV, so I'd be eager to see some new changes here as its beyond my abilities.

[frank lee]

Here's someone working on this stuff

 

Non-lethal weapons

[UttaNutta]

You know what I did like about F3? The dart gun. If you wanted to stop a deathclaw, that was the way to do it.

 

But what about a stun grenades or flash-bangs? Also, maybe the option to tie them up?

[AnjyBelle]

 

 

 

 

However, to be exact of what you are asking for requires custom animations and scripts. That's the big catch.

 

I can count on one hand the number of modders who are working on FO3 and NV mods who have the ability or resources to do custom animations. Scripts, its quite a few .....but animations to boot? Yea....single digits. Its a lot of work. They would really have to be dedicated to the project of redoing melee and unarmed to go this route.

 

Not to discourage you, but the modders I know of who do custom animations don't have melee animations on their radar. The 3 guys I knew of who did really popular custom melee mods in Oblivion (1 with around 20,000 downloads, the other two with around 60,000), aren't modding for FO3 or NV.

 

 

 

 

Out of interest:

There are many mods available with custom animations, mostly sex-related.

I really have no clue about how these modders could do that, so I have to ask:

 

Is it more work to create some unarmed (= martial arts) moves, like kicks or even flying kicks and some typical stances?

 

Would it be hard, to make a "true" unarmed fighter, who doesn't even need these claws, knuckles and gloves?

[Syonryoken]

well from what i know, it is about as easy as oblivions are to make. The problem as one user stated, is the fact that this game is based on guns and energy weapons ( well definitely FO3). Hopefully with the advancement of NV someone will port their files ( some manual edits via Nifskope willl need to be done such as the fingers and arms), and we could have not only new unarmed/ melee attacks, but have specific melee and unarmed for VATS since they do have their own .kf slot. This seriously could make melee/unarmed so epic. I mean look what this guy was doing with a FO3 mod at 4:46

 

 

[Park77]

That clip was epic!

 

I am always curious about targeting in melee/unarmed.

I've heard it's pretty difficult, but I can't imagine it'd be impossible.

 

I don't know much about modding, so I may be totally off base with this, but here goes.

 

Thrown weapons in NV are treated like ranged weapons in the sense that they allow you to target body parts in VATS, but unlike ranged weapons, they don't use ammo (in a strict sense) and the VATS percentage always seems to be 95%.

 

Would it be possible to use the script that allows targeting for thrown weapons, and apply them to other unarmed/melee weapons? I am guessing the animations won't match up, but they already don't right now (an uppercut to the gut is just as likely to cripple a limb as it will the torso)

 

But I'd imagine doing something like that would involve changing it for every single unarmed/melee weapon, which sounds like a lot of work.

[Savage117]

I once saw some footage from a weapon test in the 70's, Instant Banana peel was the name of the project. It was a powder that when spread on the ground and soaked reduced the friction to almost nothing! People running on the spot like cartoon characters. the weapon wasn't developed for obvious reasons, It's completely indiscriminate an knocks anyone who walks into it on their ass and it turned out to be a nightmare to clean up afterward.

However a grease-gun immobilizer would (I'm guessing) be pretty straight forward as far as game mechanics. A pacifist weapon, Squirt, reduce your opponent to running on the spot or landing on their keister and just walk away. . . .

 

I actually saw some test footage on the discovery channel about this stuff a while back, it's probably floating around the internet somewhere, but it was some cool stuff, it was to be used as riot and crowd control, kinda hard to have a violent riot when your falling all over the place and sliding around on your ass. :-D

 

Geeves, take a look at this mod, http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=38000 this guy looks like he's going the same direction as you and already has some things finished and posted, I'm playing with his tranquilisers right now and I like it. Maybe you two should get together then both of you can get to the end product faster. Unless you and he are the same person.

 

I also have been wondering why some of these animators have plenty of time to do sex animations but don't spread the love to all the other things that people want, pun intended by the way, ;-) I would love to play a wasteland martial artist but as the animations stand I feel more like a wasteland brawler.

 

Oh, Geeves, I forgot to mention it, most of the special unarmed attacks you can get pop up as perks, I did find some in the perk area in the GECK, so I would check there for your special unarmed attacks, and then maybe backtrack to find what else is used to make those work.

 

Also, take a look at the Sprint Mod it gives a little love to melee characters with a couple added perks.

Edited November 27, 2010 by Savage117