Mod Making Help

[majorm]

I need some serious help getting into making a mod for new vegas. My issue is I want to change a few things and want to use some new guns as well. My end goal is to make some new NPC's to wak around and repace the various creatures with norma people. I also want to get rid of the energy weapons in favor of real weapons that currenty exist as well as the current bullets they use. So I need to some how incorperate a few mods into one where i can edit all that info. What little I know is I can ony have the new vegas data file as the master but im not sure about pugins. The caliber mod says its a master file though as well so I cant have it active with the newvegas master.

 

All the videos I found on youtube are demos of mods and not so much how to make them anymore. Nothing I have found really helps me out learning how to get my mod started. Anyone have any links tips to get started or do a part of it?

 

Thanks for any help.

[Moraelin]

Hello.

 

First things first, you can have more than one master at the same time, as long as they don't conflict for some other reason. In particular, I don't think anyone made a replacer for the FalloutNV.esm, so, yes, all .esm files you'll find on the Nexus work just fine with that one.

 

"Master" here doesn't mean "master file for the whole game", but "can be used as a master file for another plugin." But really even calling it "master" is misleading. It's just a type of plugin that other plugins can use. Sort of, it can be "included" by other plugins.

 

That said, usually you don't have to incorporate master files into your own plugin, and in fact it's usually counter-productive, so you can forget about that. You can just make your mod depend on a master, and if you upload the mod, just tell people what master file they need.

 

E.g., my 454 Casull Auto depends on the ammo from either CASE or CaliberX, so I just tell people where to download either of those. It would be counter-productive to actually merge either into mine (never mind that I wouldn't get permission from the authors), because the whole idea of either mod is to have all ammo additions in one place, so all mods that need a .454 Casull round can use the same round. If I make Alucard's gun and some other guy makes a Taurus revolver for it, the same 454 Casull round can go into either. If both mods just copied that into their own plugin, you'd have some 454 Casull rounds that only work in Alucard's pistol, and some 454 Casull rounds that only work in the Taurus revolver, although for the player both rounds are called the same.

 

Incorporating other mods, well, I suppose you could merge them with TESSnip, by copying and pasting evertyhing into one plugin file. But first of all you need permission from those modders if you want to upload the mod. And second, well, why bother? If another mod already does some of what you need, you can just point your users at it.

 

Other than that, what you want to do is somewhat vague, so I can't comment much. At a superficial level, all of that can be done with the GECK, especially if you don't want to make new meshes. If you want to do retextures, the GECK and some graphics editor are enough. If you just want to change what weapons the NPCs use, you don't even need the graphics editor, the GECK is enough.

 

For some tasks it also helps if you can unpack the meshes and textures BSA files. FOMM will do that for you just fine. Not knowing what you want to do, I can't really predict if you'll need that or not.

[majorm]

Yea I see what you mean. Thanks for the CaliberX and CASE example. That really did help me understand why they need to be seperate. I may modify the look of some weapons but that will be later on so it sounds like the GECK will do what I need for now.

 

My main goals are:

- Get rid of the energy weapons and add real weapons

- Change some of the armors to be more (current) military and contractor styles

- Add small camps and squads of people that roam that I have to fight. ( I really want to make some 2 man recon teams that will snipe at me from far away)

- Get rid of some of the mutants in favor of real sodiers.

 

What parts in the initial starting of the GECK do I need to have selected (active?) if i want to make a new group of people and change existing mutants into people? For example say i want to have access to faces and items in the various addons it wont let me select mutiple ones and start the GECK. I get an error that more than one master file is selected. I also want to get rid of energy weapons in favor of some real ones that are included in the expansions so this effects that too. I assume i need to have any weapon plugins selected when i start. Im just lost on what to start changing with any of this and what what I should backup beforehand. If this ever gets to a point where its good enough to upload I definatly get permission for anything if its combined with my plugin.

[Moraelin]

Masters are basically chained, so it's not a tragedy if your mod depends on, say, Caliber and Caliber in turn depends on the FalloutNV.esm.

 

You can actually have multiple masters, though, in any case. The restriction is just an artificial GECK restriction when creating a plugin. And it's actually only checked when creating the mod; afterwards it's loaded and saved just fine with multiple masters. You can open the mod in TESSnip (included in FOMM or NVMM), duplicate a MAST sub-record in the TES4 record, and just edit one of them to point at a different master. So for example if you have a mod that depends on FalloutNV.esm, you can just add Ling's, and Caliber and whatever afterwards. (I think it can actually be done with the GECK too, but I always did it with TESSnip.)

 

Using weapons and armours from other mods, well, you may have to convert them to master files, since a plugin can only include content from master files, not other plugins. TESSnip will do that for you too. It has an option right in the menu to turn an .esp into an .esm for you. Of course, then you'll have to have the newly created master selected to be used by the game, not the original .esp any more.

 

The rest, well, it's mostly a clerical job. You'll have to edit all the NPCs and levelled lists used for their inventory, to replace the energy weapons with whatever you wish. It might also be useful to change their class, if they have something that gives them energy skill instead of guns.

 

I can't say I've edited or scripted spawns before, so I can't comment on that.