Help using klaxon to make big Lighthouse light

[xoham]

My goal is to create a proper Kingsport Lighthouse light that rotates, is super bright, and controlled by a switch and timer.

 

I did a bit of modding a few years back on FO4 and some on FO3 so I know enough to do some of the work.

 

I managed to get this much done:

• Copy klaxon and light
• Place one in the lighthouse
• Link the klaxon light to the object so the script can find it (using the same klaxon script that the other objects use)
• Set it to "on" to start and not to timeout
• Modify the light to be much brighter, white and longer range
• It spins and looks pretty good.

What I still can't do is

1. Slow down the rotation (tried animationmult property to no effect)
2. Place the light in the exact same location as the klaxon object
3. Select the light in the render window. Once placed I cannot select it
4. Create a packin so #2 is easier
5. Don't know where to start to modify the lighthouse geometry so the center column is deleted
6. Activate it with a switch
7. Have it run on a timer so it is only on during the evening hours (6pm to 6am)

Any and all help is appreciated, thanks. If there are tutorials to watch, I'll watch them.

Edited September 5, 2020 by xoham

[xoham]

I figured out how to change the speed of the animation. Extract the thing you want to modify with Bethesda Archive Extractor (find on nexus). Make a copy of it if you don't want to modify the base item for the whole game. Then get Nikskope. Open the file with Nifskope and find "start time" and "stop time" in one of the items probably named somethingController. Write those values down. Set the stop time to the time you want in seconds. However, you will need to find all occurrences of that speed so dig deeper. Go down a bit further and look for more Time entries with the same value that you wrote down. I found them NiControllerSequence under NiTextKeyExtraData. There were entries there with "Time" and the same value as the "stop time" that I found first. If I changed them all it worked. If I only changed "stop time", that only controlled the period the animation ran, not the speed of the animation. Hopefully some future Googler or Duckduckgoer finds this helpful.

 

The hotkey to turn on stuff so you can see your light object in the render windown is M.

 

Working light switch video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrhoYbbtd08

 

I think I'll skip the timer part and just leave it on.

 

Placing in the exact same spot will probably involve double clicking on the destination to get the coordinates, writing them down, and copying them in by hand.

 

Useful hotkeys:

 

C Center on object

T Top

Shift + F Set the focus of the selected object. Might be better than C

M Show markers. Important to find a light

F Drop down to first collision object

W Rotation gizmo

CTRL+D Create new copies

Edited September 6, 2020 by xoham