[WIP] Project Extend And Change Everything (PEACE)

[antistar]

The medical brace stuff is done now:

 

- Medical Braces 01

- Medical Braces 02

 

 

To recap (and conveniently copy-paste what I said in the Nexus image share):

 

In PEACE, stimpaks no longer heal injured limbs. One of several alternative methods available to heal them are medical braces. They are worn like armour pieces - one per body part - and slowly heal that body part over time. (Faster with ranks in the Medic perk.)

The ugly "hospital green" monstrosities are the regular medical braces. While they do work, they're cumbersome to wear and cause various penalties while equipped. They also prevent you from wearing armour on the affected limb while equipped of course, and they offer very little protection themselves.

 

The gaudy black and gold monstrosities are the unique set of medical braces. Unlike the regular "hospital green" variants, they are not cumbersome to wear and so have no stat penalties associated with them. They still prevent you from wearing armour on the affected limb while equipped though, and still offer very little protection themselves.

Power armour pieces can have medical braces installed in them too - and these are not cumbersome either - but they do take up the "Misc" mod slot.


I should note that the head brace is based on real-world "halo" braces, but doesn't accurately depict how the real thing works. Technical limitations. The same goes for all the medical braces, really; you can't immobilise the limb without having to redo half the animations in the game. ;)

[Moldy]

Nanomachines,son. That's how they work,without limiting mobility.

 

Though,for some reason,I was imagining the medical braces being more skeletal in appearance,like the medical braces in FO3 and NV.

[antistar]

Ha - if it were (standard-issue video-game) nanomachines there'd be no need for the medical braces. ;) Then we'd just have Deus Ex 1&2 style health regen via bionics. (They were always the best bionics in those games.)

 

 

If I had made all the medical braces from scratch then I would have made them resemble the FO3/FNV one, yeah. The heavy Synth armour is reasonably close though and had the benefit of already being modelled/textured/rigged/etc. The Institute's visual design in general is pretty heavy on the hospital-equipment aesthetic, actually. From memory the FO4 art book mentions that the gen 1&2 synth design was partially based on vintage prosthetics.

[Moldy]

I've noticed something with several pieces of armour - Especially the "Heavy" variants. They have pauldrons that,simply put,do not work at all with shoulder stocks. The single most egregious example of this is Combat Armour. Those pauldrons look like they'd be more at home on StarCraft's Marines. And those drugged up,brainwashed,Southern-fried psychopaths are wearing power armour. A quick look at images on the wiki has led me to conclude the following suits of armour,as they exist in vanilla,are not compatible with the use of shoulder stocks;

 

-Medium and Heavy Combat Armour; Insufficient shoulder space for a buttstock after moving arms into an aiming position,obscene pauldrons,respectively.

-Heavy Metal Armour; Insufficient shoulder space for a buttstock after moving arms into an aiming position.

-Robot Armour in general; Insufficient shoulder space for a buttstock after moving arms into an aiming position,obscene pauldrons.

-Marine Armour in general; Insufficient shoulder space for a buttstock after moving arms into an aiming position.

-Operators Armour in general; The inflexible steel sheet mantle makes using a shoulder stock an exercise in futility.

 

Would it be at all possible for you to at least take a look at these armours,and make a judgement call on what'll happen,if anything?

[antistar]

It's unfortunate, because clipping is always annoying, but this is not something that's easy to do anything about, I'm afraid. Clipping in general is rife in BGS' games, due to the one-size-fits-all (or one-size-fits-none if you prefer) animations coupled with lots of choice when it comes to weapons and armour/clothing. There are a number of reasons I'd like it if BGS would incorporate more procedural animation in their games, and this is one of them.

 

That said, if the right resources were available to use, I suppose it's possible that certain armour sets could get asset replacements? A bit like the weapon replacements in WARS but for armour. That's a tall order though because they'd need to meet the same requirements as the existing armour - e.g. being separated into multiple pieces for arms, torso, legs, head.

 

All this makes it a low priority, sorry. I'm also firmly in the "playing in first-person as much as possible" camp (I've been known to call third-person games "unfinished first-person games" :wink:), and you don't see these specific instances of clipping nearly as much like that.

Edited July 15, 2019 by antistar

[Moldy]

My issue is less with third person and clipping,and more with immersion and logical sense. Heavy Combat Armour's pauldrons are goddamned bubbles. Realistically speaking,you'd never be able to brace a shoulder stock against that in any meaningful way. And,you'll be getting facefuls of that bogus armour even in first-person,thanks to all human enemies having access to this.

[antistar]

Yeah, those pauldrons are ridiculous - same with all the examples you gave. For something like the combat armour that has different models for the light, medium and heavy variants, it'd be trivial to point the heavy arm pieces at the light or medium models so that you'd keep the stats but not have to look at the bubble-pauldrons... but I'd be reluctant to do that. Having different models for those different weight categories is helpful in terms of gauging how well-armoured an NPC is at a glance.

 

The models themselves could be edited to try to scale things down or move them around or whatever, but that's a lot more work and is kind of a can of worms. Once you start editing armour models, where do you stop?

 

Not easy to do something about all this, unfortunately - like I said.

[antistar]

I've been working on backpacks. Here's a whole bunch of them!

 

- Backpacks 01

- Backpacks 02

- Backpacks 03

- Backpacks 04

- Backpacks 05

 

To recap; PEACE includes an encumbrance overhaul - and there's more info in the first couple of posts of the thread, but in short: To be able to carry much of anything, you need both Strength and something to actually store your stuff in; Load-Bearing Equipment (LBE), like backpacks. The higher your Strength, the bigger the Carry Weight (CW) bonus you get from any given piece of LBE.

Here's the full range of backpacks added, along with a percentage value indicating the relative CW bonus they provide (100% being roughly the maximum you can expect from a backpack), and any penalty due to being cumbersome:

- Satchel Bag: 50%, -1 AGI
- Makeshift Sack Pack: 75%, -2 AGI
- Makeshift Frame Pack: 100%, -3 AGI
- Small Backpack: 50%, No penalty
- Leather Backpack: 75%, -1 AGI
- Canvas Backpack: 75%, No penalty
- Hiking Rucksack: 100%, -1 AGI
- Duffle Bag Pack: 110%, -2 AGI

(Note that having rank 5 of the Strong Back perk will negate those penalties.)

 

 

The second image (featuring backpacks from the excellent Mercenary Pack by L0rd0fWar) shows an example of how the stats appear in-game. The "+22 Carry Weight, plus 2.3 CW per point of Strength. Cumbersome: -3 AGI." description format is new as of the last couple of days. Previously it was like:

 

"More STR = more Carry Weight: 1-3 STR = +13 CW. 4-6 STR = +16 CW. 7-9 STR = +20 CW. 10+ STR = +25 CW. Cumbersome: -1 AGI."

 

... Which was pretty awkward. Both to look at (and parse) and also because it meant that you only saw an increase in Carry Weight after every few points of Strength, which I didn't like. So now, every point of STR makes a difference, and the CW bonuses cap out at 12 STR rather than 10. (Just to give a bit of wiggle room for using chems and whatnot.) It's also much easier to read and make sense of, I think.

[antistar]

Okay, I think I've worked out a Strength requirement system for armour. Here's some info on it from the draft readme:

 

 

Armour now has Strength requirements. You can still wear armour that you're not strong enough for, but will suffer various penalties as a result. The Strength requirement for a piece of armour can be seen in its list of current mods, usually looking something like "Medium Armor - STR REQ: 4". Examining the armour at a workbench will let you see what penalties are associated with not meeting this requirement. (Also see just below.) Armour can be modified to reduce or even negate its Strength requirement; again see below. (This means that the "Pocketed" mods may not always automatically be the best choice any more.)

The different sizes a type of armour is available in does impact its Strength requirement. E.g. Light (or "Standard") Combat Armour has a lower Strength requirement than Heavy Combat Armour.

- Penalties for not meeting the Strength requirement depend on the part of the body the armour covers:
--- Head: Reduces Perception by 2.
--- Arms: Each reduce melee damage by 15% and reload speed by 15%.
--- Legs: Each reduce movement speed by 15%.
--- Torso: Reduces Action Point regeneration rate by 3 per second.

- Armour modifications that affect Strength requirements:
--- Lighter Build: STR REQ reduced by 2.
--- Ultra-Light Build: STR REQ removed.

- List of armour with Strength requirements:
--- Leather (Light: 1, Medium: 2, Heavy: 3)
--- Raider (Light: 2, Medium: 3, Heavy: 4)
--- Combat (Light: 3, Medium: 4, Heavy: 5)
--- Metal (Light: 4, Medium: 5, Heavy: 6)
--- Trapper (Standard: 5, Heavy: 6)
--- Nuka-World Raider (Standard: 6, Heavy: 7)
--- Synth (Light: 6, Medium: 7, Heavy: :cool:
--- Marine (Standard: 8, Heavy: 9)
--- Robot (Light: 8, Medium: 9, Heavy: 10)

 

 

 

Related to this, I've also made the different size options for armour craftable; if you've got the components and meet the perk requirements, you can convert a Light piece of armour to Medium/Heavy or vice-versa.

 

Also related; I'm making some "lining" mod options available to helmets; largely so that the light and ultra-light build mods can be attached to lower their Strength requirements.

 

It took a bit to to work out how to actually do all this - and it doesn't require scripts; it's all based on omods, enchantments, keywords, etc - but so far I've done combat armour as a test and it seems to all be working fine. Now I need to do the same for all the other armour sets in that list - plus some full-body armour like the Cage Armor and Coastal Armor, probably.

 

It's going to be a bit of a slog - though hopefully not too bad now that I've worked out kind of a framework for it - but I think it will work well as part of the encumbrance overhaul. In fact I think it's just about required in order to balance against how (in PEACE) armour weighs less when equipped - down to nothing with successive ranks in Strong Back.

[Macnspam]

Hmmm Antistar, you've been on the modding scene for a while. So I gotta ask: Why doesn't anyone ever try and make a durability system for normal armor pieces in the game based on the Power Armor durability and repair system already in place? Is it an engine limitation? Wouldn't it be more realistic that the shabby 200 year old piece of metal you put over your chest has a limited number of bullets you can riddle it with before it unequips itself from your body (with 0/however much hp) and has to be repaired? It does sound like a lot of work, but with scripts couldn't people just take armor types and dynamically assign values to them based on that and let the game engine handle it from there? It does seem tedious with so many items in the game, but it'd really open the door up for all sorts of interesting survival mods...

 

Just curious.