While exploring the mods for FNV and Oblivion, I have come up with some ideas for The Phoenix Imperative. The biggest one for FNV I have been using is Requiem for the Capital Wasteland. It basically turns FO3 into one big mod for New Vegas, allowing the character you create in NV to travel back and forth between the Mojave and DC. Experimenting with some FO3 mods has had a high success rate so far. This, I hope will allow me to run two completely separate FO3 games with different mods, so I won't have to remember to turn some on and others off when I am bouncing between "game realities". What I mean by that is, at some point down the road, you will be introduced to at least one alternate reality. One where familiar places and people are similar on the surface to the ones you have already seen, different enough to almost be completely new characters. I have already decided that I would need to build some "sets" from scratch, as well as drastically change some characters, so this would be an excellent place to put them, without really cluttering up my load order anymore than necessary.
What has caught my eye in Oblivion are the pose mods I have been using. In total, I have more poses available in Oblivion than I do in FO3. The Goma pose pack alone has 16 esps and around 850 poses! Thankfully, someone has gone through all the trouble of making a "picture book" mod with images of just about all the poses from a number of popular pose packs for Oblivion. Looking through these images, I have found several that would work great for The Phoenix Imperative, but I will need to learn how to port the poses over before I can use them. *sigh*
Speaking of learning the art of modding, I have been working on a new version of my Cameron Companion. Some of you might be asking "What Cameron Companion?". Since I never formally mentioned it before, nor have I released it anywhere for public distribution, that would be a valid question.
In the early stages of working on the comic, I decided it would be easier to get the screen shots I wanted with Cameron if I had her as a companion instead of my actual character. I could set her up anyway I wanted, and not have to keep going in and out of "free camera mode". That is time consuming and irritating, to say the least. So I did a companion version of Cameron, based on the RR Companion Vault system, which a number of my guest stars are also based upon. I ended up sending her out to most of the friends that allowed me to use their characters in the comic.
The new version of the companion is an experiment with making Cameron less dependent upon other mods, having more of her own resources. So far, Cameron is working like I hoped she would, but the mod still has more master files than I would like, even though the resources from some of those masters are now self-contained. I hope to figure out how to remove those masters without messing up the plug-in: I have already done that once :( Any suggestions from you folks would be appreciated :)
In case anyone asks about a public release of Cameron (and I know some of you will), I do want to upload her for public distribution. Both the original version and the new one have problems with doing so. The original version uses Anthony Ling's Finer Things as a master, as well as Operation: Anchorage. Until recently, having Ling's as a master was problematic as it wasn't available on the Nexus, so that prevented me from uploading Cameron there. It is currently available again, so I guess that is one problem solved :) I wanted Cameron to keep her Gauss Rifle, thus the dependency on O:A, but it has been reported to me that she doesn't use the Gauss Rifle, so I will have to swap it out for something else.
The new version of Cameron will require that I get permission from a number of modders to use their resources first, and even if I get all the permissions, I still won't be able to upload her to the Nexus, as she is using some, ah, "ripped" content from the Mass Effect games. An absolute no-no on the Nexus, but allowable on VGU (Video Games Underground), where the ME content comes from. In any case, I don't want to upload the new version until I can remove all the master files, except RR Companion Vault and, of course, Fallout.esm.
Now that I am done rambling, I will share a couple of images of Cameron with her Mass Effect gear.
Cameron in her Terminus Armour
And Cameron with her Anti-Material Rifle
That's right, he said CLASSIC DOOM!
ReplyDeleteLOL
I look forward to seeing Cameron "in the flesh". ;)
I thought you might like that :D
ReplyDeleteAs it sits right now, I am going to give the companion another build attempt. It completely slipped my mind that I can set the GECK up to have multiple GECKs open at once. I should be able to access the data I need in one window, and copy it out on the other, hopefully avoiding most of the master dependencies that way. I will get back to that after I get some more work done on the comic. I am way to far behind on that for my own liking, let alone that of readers...
Well cant wait for your next update to it. Hope the trimming of master files works out better overall for you.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Cameron nice suit, even nicer rifle.
There are quite a number of armours from Mass Effect on the VGU, most of them ripped and uploaded my members Plerr and Cire992. Of all the ones I have (which I now think is all of the ones available), there are only two or three that I liked as candidates for Cameron's new armour. The Terminus armour, as you can see, has a glow effect similar to her eyes, so I went with that one. The Widow Anti-Material rifle stood out to me mostly because of the base damage in the GECK. It is 325 points! And it is using only .308 caliber rounds. If I decide to keep it, I might just set the rifle up to work with Earache42's eXcalibr or Book of Earache mods to give it more appropriate .50 caliber ammunition. Since that version of Cameron would be a VGU release, that dependency won't be an issue, since Earache's mods are uploaded there as well.
ReplyDeleteI think I have a way to do the build and avoid most of the master dependencies, but I still have to get around to starting it to find out for sure.
And I might as well mention here, for those of you that don't know yet, that as of this writing, the mod Anthony Ling's Finer Things is once again not available on the Nexus, but is still available on the VGU.
Thanks for the comment Calabeth. It is nice to "see a new face" here :)
No problem, and blast those mods :(. I found Lings Pretty things already though elsewhere. Was some russian sight so I had used a ff plugin to do a whole page translation to make sure it was LPT mod.
ReplyDeleteMostly done with the basics of learning GECK, but will probably visit the tut's again for some brush up's. Now to start into figuring out blender and such. Most the tuts on Nexus and VGU seem to center around already knowing some basics of blender :/
I think I'll have to dig around a bit more as for now only real need for it that I have is to resize various clothing. Maybe eventually get good enough at it to kind of try to improve on the amount of stuff in Ling's Finer things. Then from that expand who all sells the clothings.
Such as an optional esp to add a clothes vendor to the RR Vault. Have a few ideas for that already, one is leaning up rivet city some, like I have seen in a few mods which add extra room's, and add vendors into there based on body size. Second is same idea for an optional RR Vault vendor, but in a room with multiple vendors. Or using 1 vendor with dialogue choices for the body size.
But these are just the ideas I hope to work on. If it happens 1 helps fill in atleast 1 gap left by LFT being gone possible. Would have to probably add a read me/how to for changing dependencies from LFT to my possible replacement if it works out.
Ohhh just remembered something, reading another story line based on Fo3 but using 1 SS and a story. ( Red-Eye / Allison Williams ) The ghost suit was pretty nice as well, and in the user submitted pictures there was a black and red version of the suit uploaded, also someone had changed the texture on some areas of the suit. The diamond pattern I thought looked good while the other portion not so much.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of being able to choose different outfits based on body style. I actually never thought of doing that myself. Not that I am ready to try something like that myself. Are you planning on just variations on the Type 3 bodies, or will you include any other body types, like Breeze's for example?
ReplyDeleteThere should be a fair bit of space to add a new vendor or two in Rivet City, but before you do, you might want to take a look at any of the mods that add vendors there, just to see if you can avoid any conflicts, or even just let users know of any overlaps.
If you want to add a vendor to RR Vault, I would suggest adding a new room to the outer tunnels or seeing if you can add the new items and merchant dialogue to Chloe. You could add a new room to Vault 1 itself, but that might conflict with RR Refurbished. Just a new NPC merchant that wanders around the Vault might have less chance of conflicts.
I have been following Juderodney's comic for a while now, which you may have noticed in the comments section. Judging by that, it seems that only myself and BlackRampage are the only readers. I am not really to sure about the availability of the Ghost variants on the FO3 Nexus, but I remember seeing a variant release on the New Vegas Nexus a month or so ago. I don't think it would be difficult to port them over to FO3, with permission of course.