What's Going On?

As most of you are aware, it has been some time since I posted any new episodes of The Phoenix Imperative.  I apologize for that, but I have managed to get myself distracted with quite a lot of mods for FO3, FNV, Oblivion and Classic Doom.  Yes, I said Classic Doom :)

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

Story Evolution

Before posting the first episode of "The Phoenix Imperative", I outlined about a dozen different episodes, then began scripting them.  I'll be honest about the scripting part: I have only finished up to episode three.  Well episode four actually as I originally considered episode one to be a prelude or introduction strip and not technically an actual episode *shrugs*  Any way, "A Lone Wanderer" ended differently than originally planned, but kept the spirit of the script, and "A Lone Wonderer" was absolutely nothing like the script!  Nothing at all!  I did episode four entirely "on the fly".  Each screen developed in my head as I was doing the one before it, and the dialogue ideas worked out the same way.  I wonder if how many movie and TV scripts go through a similar process of evolution?

I completely surprised myself with how well it turned out, and was even more surprised by how well the Nexus community accepted it.  When last I checked, about an hour ago, episode four had gained 22 endoresments, some from people I rarely hear from!  Twenty-two is a personal best for my uploaded images, so I'm rather thrilled with that :)  Hopefully, future episodes will continue around a similar level of acceptance, maybe even break the 25 mark.

I have mentioned around here, on Nos's blog if I remember correctly, and over on the Nexus, that I was thinkng on releasing Cameron as a companion to at least the loyal readers, if not the community as a whole.  That sort of think is still undesided and might depend upon how well "The Phoenix Imperative" does in the next few months.  If I do release her, it would be easiest to do so as a RR Companion Vault character, since that is what the current companion version is built on.  Even that system would require me to make some additions, just to make Cameron more like Cameron in the story, and not a RR companion that happens to look like her.

I will post more musings on that topic later.