Creating new weapons mods?

[thelaurent]

Hey there, I'm trying to make a weapon skin mod, the idea is there will be a new weapon workbench type that allows you to change the texture your weapon is using, I'm using the creation kit to try and make this new workbench, and to give weapons new mods, can anyone give me any advice? I'm new to modding, but I have experience in game-development so like.. I'm not a total pleb. Thanks in advanced!

 

I'm also not too sure how to actually have the creation kit reference my new textures, they are dds files and are in the proper locations. Like I can see them on their own but id like the player to be able to choose between all of the skins, ya feel?

 

[KaelVirum]

Ok, for this I think what you really should do is going to be more complicated than what you might want to do, though, you could probably do what you want to do without all this and it would be fine.

 

First off, for what you want to do, you create the workbench, which from what you said I think you already did. Then you'll want to make sure that all your textures are in the CK. From there you'll have to create a new recipe for each new texture that you're adding, you might actually need to create your own new keyword to use to make sure that your workbench is the only one that can apply these "paint jobs" and finally figure out the restrictions for your new textures, like if you want to keep someone from using a certain texture until they reach level 15 or you want them to have a certain perk first, that sort of thing. You could probably accomplish all that fairly easily, maybe within a week, less if you devote all your free time to it.

 

What I would do if I were making this mod is to look through all of my textures and figure out all of the colors used in all of them, create a new item for all of the colors, i.e. blue paint, red paint, yellow paint etc., and make the recipes require a certain amount of each paint, depending on the colors used in that specific texture. Like I said, that's probably a little more complicated than you'd wanna go with this mod, but it would add that touch of realism to it that a lot of players like.