Enclave Development: Energy Nouveau

[Deridor]

This is a mod i plan on developing that will add new, sleeker, enclave-made energy weapons. Many will be simple upgrades of current energy weaponry (pistols, rifles, etc...), but other weapons are planned such as an energy based missile/grenade launcher, energy nuke (weaker than the fatman, but perhaps shock damage/higher critical chance), energy smg, energy blade (NOT HALO OR STAR WARS CRAP).

 

The designs will be based on/use pre-existing models and textures, mainly the enclave armors. This might be considered a cheap way of doing things,but I believe it will help the weapons fit into the game (and with the enclave soldiers who will be using them) a lot better than if I were to attempt to create entirely new textures (I'm experienced enough to modify and do small edits, but not to recreate the bethesda art). The main goal of the design is to make the weapons more compact, unlike the massive bulky weapons that currently exist (which make sense considering the lore of the game, but just don't fit right to me with the somewhat sleek armor of the enclave).

 

Here's a list of things i need help with (I'm somewhat experienced with modelling and texture editing, the problems generally relate to other things)

 

-Changing the color of the plasma weapon projectile, as well as the plasma mine blast (the textures connected to the .nif files are white and changing the material color in my 3d modelling program seems to have no effect on the rendered color, at least for the plasma bolts) without replacing the old one (i.e. fully new plasma bolt/blast with different color for new weapons)

 

-modifying the nif file of the plasma mine blast to be smaller (if this helps, it's planned for that energy weapon equivalent of a missile launcher) without breaking anything (this might be easy, but it's animated after all so scaling it might be more complicated)

 

-ANY good tutorial links at all for making weapons, projectiles, explosions etc... would be greatly appreciated. Not the ones on these forums of course, I've looked at them.

 

I might add more problems later... but for now this is all i can think of. Thanks for the help, if you give any.