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
