Holotapes to load mods? Would it work?

[euph]

So, I posted this originally in Homemaker's page but I'm going to leave it here as well so that you guys can talk about it in peace.

 

I had this idea last night while loading one of the hacking holotapes. Here's what it consists of:

1 - Instead of a grenade, wecreate a holotape.

a) Just having the holotape in the inventory does nothing. It must be loaded into the Pipboy to work.

 

2 - When loaded into the Pipboy, the holotape will load all the necessary keywords and give access to the menus for the mod.

 

3 - When the holotape is removed from the Pipboy, the keywords unload (delete) and the space gets released for other keywords.

I'm wondering if it would be possible to achieve this with scripts and/or without the GECK. This combined with the SK would solve a lot of the woes that a lot of people are having with hitting the keyword limit.

[HandofBobb]

I do like the idea of Holotapes rather than a Grenade, it's definitely more 'immersive', but if you limit it to only being active while loaded into the Pip-Boy, then you'd only be able to have one mod active at a time- I already spend a lot of time switching categories in the build menu, I can only imagine what fresh level of hell it would become if I had to stop, drop out of build mode, and plug in a new holotape every time I wanted to switch between using Homemaker's Institute tileset and DDPro's Castle parts, for example.

[euph]

I do like the idea of Holotapes rather than a Grenade, it's definitely more 'immersive', but if you limit it to only being active while loaded into the Pip-Boy, then you'd only be able to have one mod active at a time- I already spend a lot of time switching categories in the build menu, I can only imagine what fresh level of hell it would become if I had to stop, drop out of build mode, and plug in a new holotape every time I wanted to switch between using Homemaker's Institute tileset and DDPro's Castle parts, for example.

The point of the grenades is to not have all the menus up at the same time... having 10 grenades in your inventory kills the point of having them in the first place. Then again, I know people would just do this and then moan they can't see half the menus...

 

Thing is even with the GECK, I'm quite sure you will have to choose what you have active, be it in-game or through MCM. That means you will have to get out of build mode whether you like it or not.

In fact, I'm pretty sure MCM will be the way to choose which mods/parts of mods we want to have active. Loading a holotape or having to go to MCM to choose a mod... same thing as both will kick you out of build mode. People will have to plan how they build things instead of putting one piece of "castle" here and one piece of "institute" there and then hope they go along.

 

The current problem with mods is the keyword limit. According to tests, the only way to bypass it, is to completely delete any keywords from mods and just use vanilla keywords. That means having to scroll for ages to get to that one item at the end of a list of 50 or 100 items.

 

People like me and others will bend this to our will with xEdit and other tools but your average user won't know how to do it. I'm putting this idea here so that modders and scripters can take a look at it and see if it's possible to make it a reality and join it up to SK.

 

I'm not sure if this would even work as it would need scripts to create/delete all the keywords on the mods themselves, not on an override... and I'm not sure it would work without the GECK to tweak things. As soon as the GECK/MCM are out though, this would become basically useless.

Edited January 31, 2016 by euph