Disable powder ganger spawns after quest

[MattyDienhoff]

I'm hoping to find a way to disable many of the powder ganger spawn points if their leadership (Eddie and his crew) are wiped out at the NCRCF, either as part of "I Fought The Law" or independently. I guess this could be done with a script, that's the thing, I have absolutely no idea how to do this stuff, I've looked around in the GECK but, well, I just don't know what I'm looking for. Sorry if this seems like a stupid question, I'm decidedly amateur and learning as I go. If anyone could point me in the right direction, it'd be much appreciated.

 

I guess it could be implemented as a result of the quest (somehow. Again, I don't know how to achieve this.), but it would have to be implemented in such a way that spawns are only disabled if you complete the quest the NCR way, or fail it by killing Eddie. May as well skip that by just tying it to Eddie's death. Eddie dies = no leadership = the powder gangers scatter.

 

Disabling spawns is a secondary feature of the mod I'm working on to make powder gangers level with the player (so that they're more challenging). That at least is simple enough. I'm not a fan of bullet sponge enemies, mind you, but powder gangers stand out as enemies that really need a boost. They're supposed to be dangerous, tough convicts. They're sort of challenging opponents at the very beginning of the game, but they don't level with the player so they soon become way too easy to kill - so easy, in fact, that they're basically the human equivalent of radroaches... they're squishy pinatas full of free equipment and XP. :tongue:

 

Anecdotal evidence: I'm only level 18, END 7, unarmed 35, and I can kill most powder gangers with a few bare knuckle punches. I cleared out the entire NCRCF with a baseball bat and two stimpaks. Their extreme weakness is exacerbated by the fact that you continue to encounter them in the surrounding areas long after you wiped out the NCRCF, which itself is pretty silly. Where are they all coming from? It only gets worse the longer the game goes on. When you've one-hit-killed hundreds of Powder Gangers, you can kiss suspension of disbelief goodbye.

[viennacalling]

If you don't mind overriding one of the game's scripts then NCRCFEddieDeathScript has Eddie's OnDeath block where you could try putting disables for whichever powder ganger references. You may want to add reference editor IDs to them, I looked at one powder ganger camp and none of them had any.

[MattyDienhoff]

Thanks for the reply!

 

I'm looking around the region in the GECK to make a list of spawns I want to disable, many of which are called things like "VSpawnSpecialGangerGS01", "LvlPowderGangerGunVar" or "LvlPowderGangerMeleeVar" and don't have their own reference IDs, they just use that of their base object. I guess that's what you're referring to.

 

So to disable these in the script, I would first need to give each one a reference ID, right? Can that be anything, like a worded description, or should it be a series of digits?

 

Or how about the number in parentheses here. It's different on each spawner, could I use that as the reference ID?

http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/2425/captureasu.jpg

 

Once the spawns in question have reference IDs to refer to, what's the proper syntax to write in the script to disable the spawners? I'll look around to see if I can find an example to emulate.

[viennacalling]

To clarify, in your screenshot 00103A49 is the reference ID. You could use the reference ID in your script e.g. 00103A49.disable, but that is not recommended. What you should do is give it a reference editor ID, which is that text field to the left. It can be anything that helps you remember the name, but should not start with a number. So for example, PGCampEastREF1. Then in your script you would use PGCampEastREF1.disable to disable the NPC.

[MattyDienhoff]

Oh! I see. Thanks for explaining the difference. I'll do that for all of the spawns and then do some testing to see if it worked.

[Gribbleshnibit8]

An alternative method, that requires less overall work (assuming you haven't done it all already), would be to use the Enable Ref system.

 

So what you'd do is place an XMarker in some cell. Doesn't matter where, but for consistency, let's say you put it in the NCRCF Administration building. So you then select Eddie in the Render Window and go over to his Linked Ref tab. Click the "Select In Window" option and then double click on that XMarker you placed.

 

Now that you've got that set up, go to the Object Window and do a filtered search for "Powder" under the NPC section. You should get all the powder ganger characters and leveled spawns. You'll want to find all the places that they're used, and set to respawn. Explaining this would be very tedious, but the gist of it is, you find each reference to those respawning objects, and select them all, then set their Enable Parent to be that XMarker you placed earlier. A fast way to do this is to select several that are close together and hit the "-" key to bring up the Batch Window.

 

So, once all that is done, and you've got them set up, you want to then add a few lines to Eddie's death script.

ref myLinked   ;this is a new variable to hold the ID of that XMarker you placed
set myLinked to GetLinkedRef
myLinked.disable

All that should go in the OnDeath part of the script, so that it only runs when he dies. If it's set up correctly, it should disable them all. In the long run it's a lot less work than finding and typing out tons of EditorIDs for every single instance, plus the same concept can be applied to many different things.