49 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

Yeah, scenario has to be that everyone was always furry unless somehow you could have everyone human, skip character setup in front of the mirror, then when you break out you're like OMG I'm furry how did that happen and you do character setup then.

Synthetic Player mod has you start as an Institute agent going undercover with a fake "muh babbey was kidnapped" story as a way to stir shit up for them and also get rid of Kellogg for Father (which is no longer the player's son, but rather their boss).

Start Me Up lets you choose an alternate start where Nate and Nora's bathroom (and chargen) scene is just some weird dream/nightmare your character is having before they wake up somewhere in the Commonwealth (from the Railroad scout mini-camp right next to Vault 111 to any other of several options). It also edits the main quest and all the related dialogue so you find Nate and Nora's corpses in V111 and thus become a random wastelander trying to find a kidnapped kid that is actually unrelated to you (so there isn't as much urgency to it, as it's just "some random kid").

Either of those could work to skip the pre-War sequence and thus avoid the weirdness, I guess, but it would require making them at least a "soft" requirement for the lore to make sense.

(Personally I'm a fan of Start Me Up, because the "dream/nightmare of what life would have been pre-War based entirely on 50s Americana Picket Fences fairy tales" sounds like a good handwave for the intro scene up to the point when you trigger SMU's menu and pick your start. It also lets you roleplay a much different Sole Survior (e.g. younger, doesn't have a kid, never married), and it solves one of the main issues with the vanilla game: the contradiction between "MuSt SaVe MuH BaBbEy" and "Another settlement needs you to wipe their asses and make beds for them 'cause they're useless tools". Since Shaun isn't your kid but rather some random whippersnap whose possible kidnapping you're investigating in your spare time, it makes more sense to get sidetracked doing mercenary work or building homes for the destitute utterly useless and retarded or whatever else it is you want to do first).

...back to your original question, there's no way to properly change the Player's race without editing the Race record in their NPC entry, which requires enabling or disabling plugins, so that's a no-go. So I guess "furry world" it is.

Most I can think of would be to skip the chargen scene, lock the player into 1st person during the whole intro (so you can't actually see they're furry), and open LooksMenu properly right after leaving the cryopod. But there's still the issue of how to have them pick male or female PC, and I'm not even sure "perma 1st person" is a thing, what with dialogue scenes being cinematic and all.

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If there are only a few families they can be hard-coded in the script, which is way easier than trying to parse relationships.

I mean, there's a handful of them, the question is how many exactly and whether that's above the "I should automate this whole thing instead of hardcoding them by hand" threshold.

27 minutes ago, Blaze69 said:

the contradiction between "MuSt SaVe MuH BaBbEy" and "Another settlement needs you to wipe their asses and make beds for them 'cause they're useless tools".

This. 1000x this. It's a bit of a game design problem. Final Fantasy XV trips over it--OMG, my dad (the king) is dead and I have to rescue a kingdom and kick out the usurper before he RAPES MY MOTHER (or something), but sure, I'll collect your dog tags and have fun on rideable dodos. 

Mass Effect does it better, where you're collecting allies and building up strength for the final battle, so exploring makes sense.  

Okay, so what freaking format do tint masks have to be in for this mod? I've tried a couple of things and got a few different errors. I finally got CK to accept a face tint, but in the game it shows up all black. What's the format? Do I need mipmaps?

6 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

Okay, so what freaking format do tint masks have to be in for this mod?

...oh boy, here we go.

The TL;DR is, Beth got extremely lazy and retarded with the chargen textures and their code, which means you have to be very careful with texture formats and sizes because a single texture not matching the proper scheme can cause a perma-Gray Face bug (like NPCs had in Skyrim, but on the player themselves).

Thing goes like this:

--- Diffuse textures must be saved either as BC3 (aka DXT5) or as uncompressed RGBA8, depending on whether BC3 causes too many artefacts for the texture in question or not. (Note the A in RGBA8, as Fallout doesn't support uncompressed RGB8 aka without alpha, it's either RGBA8 or you have to compress it).

--- Normals and Speculars must be saved as BC5, it's a "new" DX11 format that only includes Red and Green channels, since the Blue one is unused for those texture types and thus a waste of space. You'll need either Paint.Net or the latest version of the DDS plugin for PhotoShop to be able to save (and load) this format.

--- Tintmasks must be saved as BC1 aka DXT1.

--- All textures must have mipmaps, except for tintmasks which I think don't need them but I'm not sure (I think mine have them and still work fine, so maybe their presence or absence is irrelevant).

And now, for the fun part. These are the details you have to keep in mind:

--- All textures of the same type must be of the same format. Meaning, if the base diffuse is RGBA8, then any other diffuse must be RGBA8. and I do mean Every. Single. One. This may not be a problem for now as there's no other diffuses, but if you add stuff like the Vulpine eyebrows or face details or whatever that include their own diffuse/normal/spec, the formats have to match. Same goes for normals and specs, but since those will always be BC5 no matter what, it's not that much of a problem with them.

--- All textures of the same type must be of the same size. Meaning, if the diffuse is 2k, then all diffuses must be 2k as well. and I do mean Every. Single. One. just as I did above. Again, maybe not a problem while there's no other diffuses/texture sets apart from the base head texture, but it's still something to keep in mind.

(I should note that while the vanilla human head textures are set to 1k Diffuse and Normal and 512 Spec, this is just 'cause Bethesda liked those sizes, they didn't hardcode these values or anything so you can have all 3 types be 2k or 1k or whatever as long as the rules above are still respected).

--- Tintmasks should be the same size as the diffuse, so if your diffuse is 2k, all tints must be 2k as well. The format is still always BC1/DXT1 as mentioned above.

EDIT: BTW, you can check out how I did all face-related textures and tints for the sharks for reference, as there aren't a lot of textures there or anything so it should be easier to reverse-engineer.

1 hour ago, Blaze69 said:

or the latest version of the DDS plugin for PhotoShop to be able to save (and load) this format.

There's actually a couple of different DDS plugin options for Photoshop but the ones I have used are:

NVIDIA Texture Tools Exporter which does a pretty decent job with compression but doesn't support the DX11 BCn formats. Or maybe it does, hard to say since the newest version is hidden behind NVIDIA Developer Program Membership.

The other one is Intel Texture Works which doesn't do as good of a job with compression artifacts but it supports BC7 et. al.

There's also an unofficial "update" to that one that fixes some grievances here.

I have the sharks and have been looking at them but I can't tell much about the format except that they do have mipmaps and notepad++ (of all things) will show it's DTX1, which is there in cleartext. But I never would have figured out all that.

By "all the same size" you mean all the same size for a race, right? Body, hands, face?

I do like that the face color can mask off nose and inner ear so they don't get the fur color.

All right, armed with that info I go back to the salt mines. I'm losing ground tho--I started with the vulpine tint list, replaced the base skin mask, ck objected (which now makes sense), found a format that it didn't object to but still didn't work, got rid of all the other face masks and got a black head, made hand and body textures, now the head isn't showing up at all, and finally the game stopped loading. Now when I hit "new game" I get infinite load screen. 

Gonna roll everything back and start over.

As mentioned by Blaze69, paint.net offers many different DDS format compressions. I often use this program for minor modifications, but mainly for conversion to various formats.

4 hours ago, Bad Dog said:

I have the sharks and have been looking at them but I can't tell much about the format except that they do have mipmaps and notepad++ (of all things) will show it's DTX1, which is there in cleartext. But I never would have figured out all that.

Oh, right. Yeah, I can't really think of any "good" way to figure out the format a DDS file is saved as other than try to guess judging by the file size and pixel count.

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By "all the same size" you mean all the same size for a race, right? Body, hands, face?

Nope. The points I posted above only apply to face/head textures. Anything that isn't part of a HeadPart texture like body/hands/tail/whatever has no "restrictions". In fact it is strongly recommended to always save all non-face character diffuses as BC7, since it gives a low-ish file size with no artefacts (or with so weak and so few of them they're basically invisible). Normals and specs should remain as BC5 since that format was made for them in particular so there's no reason to use anything else. And as for texture sizes, the sharks use 4k as you may have noticed and it all works just fine.

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I do like that the face color can mask off nose and inner ear so they don't get the fur color.

TBH I think this may have been possible in Skyrim too, it's just we all used the solid white Skintone.dds right away and never tried using a more customized one for stuff like this.

1 hour ago, Blaze69 said:

Yeah, I can't really think of any "good" way to figure out the format a DDS file is saved as other than try to guess judging by the file size and pixel count.

IrfanView can tell you outright what compression DDS textures use, though it doesn't tell what kind of uncompressed if uncompressed. Also can't open BC7 ones but it's pretty easy to say that if it doesn't open there, it's BC7.

On 2/25/2021 at 4:55 PM, Bad Dog said:

Yeah, scenario has to be that everyone was always furry unless somehow you could have everyone human, skip character setup in front of the mirror, then when you break out you're like OMG I'm furry how did that happen and you do character setup then.

 

If there are only a few families they can be hard-coded in the script, which is way easier than trying to parse relationships.

While not 100% intentioned, I somewhat get around this as far as the Shark Race mod goes, since the project that created them had it's first success in early 2075, meaning that with some consideration of both possible PC's backgrounds, they both could be Selachii without much issue. Well, there is the idea that, if the project is meant to be the sort of "black" project that simply does not get public attention(and it gets bad for those who might leak information), then why would they be allowed to live what seems so publicly? It could be either that, in spite of not wanting the information to get out, the setting lacking in internet/social media would mean that at best, you get photos that might not be of a trustworthy quality, and this might be after what, a week or so of development? So that might not be believed easily. Otherwise, it could be that a majority of people they interact with would be paid off, and/or threatened to keep their mouths shut about it. 

The only part where that doesn't work is...Shaun. So overall I can't find any issue with recommending Alt-Start mods to play these new races. Though I'd argue that at least for the games I've played in the series(3, NV and 4), they ALL have this issue - the opening of the game setting you on a path, with a heavy handed notion of who you are, and while New Vegas seems mostly hands off on this(and could get some passes due to a shorter development cycle), there isn't much of a way to play things very differently - like 3 and 4, you can't spend hours on a faction questline, because ether the faction is maybe one or two quests at most, or the faction is from the outset or at some point, tied to the main quest. 

The Brotherhood in 3, is heavily attached to the main story. not bad, but if you approach the Citadel before the MQ where you have to? You can't join, yet(not 100% sure on this, but I'd bet even with 100 speech you couldn't convince Sarah or the Citadel guards to let you join). Oh, and I have no idea how Broken Steel works if you didn't or don't want to join the Brotherhood. 

In New Vegas, they have a very short list of quests, with two of them intersecting horribly in my opinion. Say you do Veronica's quest first. It ends with the Elder saying that, no, he isn't going to listen to reason(not sure if the swap actually matters), and is going to do things by the book, even with the knowledge that doing things as they have been, means they won't last. Oh, but then you do the main faction quest(or complete it)? NOW he will listen to reason. WHAT? 

And of course for 4, almost every faction crashes into the MQ at some point, even if they can be joined without MQ progression(all but one, at least). Though with that, I'd say it is annoying how even a high INT PC can't just build(and use...) the damn teleporter themselves, especially if you'd require most of not all the hacking perks too, and/or a companion that thematically works for this. Sure, this would make sense to lock you out of anything but the Institute ending, but I'd find it sensible if any factions that survive it either distrust you, or could be convinced(high skills, etc) to see your point of view and how it could and/or does work in their favor. 

Though more to the point, a toyed with idea for the Shark race mod was the serum/injection/etc being usable. This probably won't(or isn't going to) happen due to the mentioned issues with FO4 and race mods, though at most I could have NPCs who might go through exactly that - akin to Skyrim's(and the fallout games') alive and dead versions of NPCs, which is likely much easier to do.

7 hours ago, Kuroyami said:

While not 100% intentioned, I somewhat get around this as far as the Shark Race mod goes, since the project that created them had it's first success in early 2075, meaning that with some consideration of both possible PC's backgrounds, they both could be Selachii without much issue. Well, there is the idea that, if the project is meant to be the sort of "black" project that simply does not get public attention(and it gets bad for those who might leak information), then why would they be allowed to live what seems so publicly? It could be either that, in spite of not wanting the information to get out, the setting lacking in internet/social media would mean that at best, you get photos that might not be of a trustworthy quality, and this might be after what, a week or so of development? So that might not be believed easily. Otherwise, it could be that a majority of people they interact with would be paid off, and/or threatened to keep their mouths shut about it. 

Yeah, as I mentioned above, Sanctuary Hills being some kind of "gated community" where the government kept their bioengineered soldiers and/or ran experiments on how they would behave in "standard human society" scenarios to test if they could be integrated (or just for the sake of SCIENCE!) is the only handwave I can think of for the intro to make sense if the furrification only happened post-War. (Other than just skipping the intro altogether with either of the Alternate Start mods I linked, of course).

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Though more to the point, a toyed with idea for the Shark race mod was the serum/injection/etc being usable. This probably won't(or isn't going to) happen due to the mentioned issues with FO4 and race mods,

Not gonna happen with the player, I'm afraid. The SetRace command still exists in the game code and it can change the player's current race successfully, but all the head parts end up stuck as the old/default ones and there's no way to change them (oddly enough, the new race's face texture does load, but it's the only thing, everything remains as it was with the previous race, human or otherwise).

I'm guessing that behavior is either a bug with the SetRace command and/or chargen related engine code that Beth didn't bother fixing because it doesn't matter for a 100% vanilla game (and we can't expect them to fix bugs that don't affect the vanilla game considering they don't even bother fixing bugs that do), or is intentional so the player's head doesn't end up scrambled when they use Power Armor (and thus are swapped to the "PowerArmorRace").

I've managed to brute-force the headparts swap to the new race ones via script headpart manipulation functions and it kinda works, even allowing for proper tints and customization and all that, but the hair always bugs out no matter what and ends up as whatever specific hair record I force on the player in the script with no way to change it afterwards, be it through the barber chair or the SLM command. So that's a dead end.

I tell you what, the learning curve on this thing is gonna kill me.

I just can't get the face tint to apply. I have the color list and can change body color, but not the face. I did see it work once with the vulpine's skintone file, but I can't repro that with mine and now I can't make theirs work either. 

And the LooksMenu UI kinda stinks. So I have to select "Face" to set the body color and once I'm there I have to highlight a specific face part, and then I can set the color, but it's not the color for the face part, it's the color for everything. !? Who does that?

I can't get the color on the hands yet. I'm sure there's some kind of setting but I haven't found it yet. Maybe in the nif file, I'll look there.

This morphs and facebones vs tri files is really confusing. Regular expression tris are fine, mostly.

It's looking like I get as many face tints as I like which is nice. And I like the friendly names on the morphs. 

And the freaking Vulpines. 250 skin color options? Who does that? And how did they do it? I haven't found a bulk drag-n-drop way to assign the colors yet.

...and as soon as I bitch about something, I figure it out. Which is why I bitch. 

Ignore the lady, she's not done yet.

Problem has to do with having all those other face tints in the lists.  I zeroed them out and now the skin tone is working.

Not sure why the creepy smile. I guess I have to scale back the morphs a bit.

1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

And the LooksMenu UI kinda stinks. So I have to select "Face" to set the body color and once I'm there I have to highlight a specific face part, and then I can set the color, but it's not the color for the face part, it's the color for everything. !? Who does that?

Bethesda does it. Shocker, I know. I guess expired is partly to blame too since he could perhaps have done more to clean up Beth's mess instead of leaving LooksMenu in such an unfinished and buggy state, but I dunno how hard it was to work on FO4 compared to RaceMenu for Skyrim so maybe it was simply impossible.

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I can't get the color on the hands yet. I'm sure there's some kind of setting but I haven't found it yet. Maybe in the nif file, I'll look there.

Whatever base material file the hands nif points to must be tagged as "Skin Tint" (Towards the bottom of the second tab aka "Material") or else the game won't actually recognize it as a body part so it can apply the tint. Basically the same as Skyrim's "Skin Tint" shader but in the material file instead of the nif itself (as is the case with all the shader settings and texture paths now).

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This morphs and facebones vs tri files is really confusing. Regular expression tris are fine, mostly.

As I think I've mentioned elsewhere, I've found a way to load Skyrim-style chargen TRI morphs in a way that "replicates" Skyrim's slider method somewhat. You basically create a new face region (like "Nose - Tip" or "Face - Lower") for each slider and set the two slider values as "Type" morphs under them.

(This is probably gibberish to you right now so just let me know if you want to do chargen TRIs with Skyrim-like morphs instead of (or even alongside) FaceBones and I'll try to explain the whole thing properly).

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And the freaking Vulpines. 250 skin color options? Who does that? And how did they do it? I haven't found a bulk drag-n-drop way to assign the colors yet.

Why: I'm guessing not wanting to outright rely on LooksMenu for custom colors (perhaps for a future/hypothetical console port) + Not knowing much about "proper race etiquette" since Vulpines were basically the first non-100%-jokey custom race for FO4.

How: I honestly have no idea. Just getting the 16 vanilla tint options for the handful tints I added to the sharks was hell, so the mere thought of doing fuckin' 250 color options make me wish for a refreshing glass of bleach. ?

1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

...and as soon as I bitch about something, I figure it out. Which is why I bitch. 

Yeah, that's more common than anyone would think, lmao. ?

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Problem has to do with having all those other face tints in the lists.  I zeroed them out and now the skin tone is working.

I guess try adding them one at a time with 2 or 3 color options first and see if they work, then you can add the rest once you're sure they work (or not).

Cookin with gas now.

Okay, here's the plan: I have male and female Lykaios loaded up with a few fur colors. They have basic human feet and hands. Seams are acceptable. They have no face tints except the fur color, which stays off the noses, lips, and inner ear. The heads are positioned close to human heads so they wear a lot of the human hair, but as you can see in the pics the forehead and cheekbones clip a good bit. They have the one set of eyes. They have all the expression and mouth movement tris, but some of them are a bit wonky because I didn't know how the animators used, for example "RJaw" so I didn't know how extreme it should be.

What I'm gonna do is a very little bit of cleanup--make the eyes less stare-y mostly--and then I'm going to get the furificator working. It will go through each NPC, assign it one of the available races randomly (only Lykaios right now) and assign chargen options randomly (hair and fur color only right now). So there will be some variation among the NPCs right out the gate.

I'll put that up as an early test version. 

Then as I add more features and races, I'll extend the furificator to take advantage of them. I'll probably do at least some face tints for the lykaios, but I think I'll move on to other races pretty quickly. You hairballs can say what you think, but I'm not sure the chargen options make that much difference on furry races, where fur color and face patterns are much more salient. (On the carnivores, anyway. Horse heads are a different story.)

I'll keep posting versions as I implement new races. That means the race and look of NPCs will change as I go. If that bugs you, don't download the intermediate versions.  ?

Then once we have a base set of races working, I'll cycle back and do things like hands with claws, pawfeet, tails, clean up tris, put some expression in the ears, furry-friendly hair, furry-friendly clothes (glasses) and helmets, etc etc.

Results of the Doodle poll:

I'm surprised the deer and horse rated so high. They're going to cause more problems with helmets than the others, but hey. Of the ungulates, I'm surprised minotaurs weren't higher. Cheetah and Tiger are definitely in. I'm probably gonna put the lions in because it's my mod and I get to say. That would make the race list:

            Lykaios, Fox, Hyena, Cheetah, Tiger, Lion, Deer, Horse.

Which seems fine. Could make the Cheetah easier by using the lion heads, but I probably won't. All those Citrus heads are morphs of each other anyway. 

Some folks asked about argonians, and I don't know whether that's legit. I think Bethesda might have issues, even if it's a port to another Bethesda game.

54 minutes ago, Bad Dog said:

I'm surprised the deer and horse rated so high.

Lol, same here. I have to admit I voted for Deer because it turns out I like my she-reindeer more than I thought, but I didn't really expect them to end up so high on the list. Horses and cervids aren't exactly the kind of species I see people going for in Fallout.

Not that I'm complaining since as I said I was one of the people that voted for one of them, and I have a horse and a zebra to replicate there as well.

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They're going to cause more problems with helmets than the others, but hey.

...yeah, that's the downside. We got lucky with horse helmets in Skyrim thanks to people already having made those as actual (feral) horse armors, but eh, since FO4 doesn't have horses, this may be a problem. Also, how the hell do glasses or face masks fit on horses, lol?

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I'm probably gonna put the lions in because it's my mod and I get to say.

Yay!

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Some folks asked about argonians, and I don't know whether that's legit. I think Bethesda might have issues, even if it's a port to another Bethesda game.

Porting the official/vanilla/Beth-made Argonian assets from vanilla Skyrim is haram, just like doing so with any other Skyrim/Oblivion/Morrowind assets would be.

Replicating the looks of Skyrim Argonians using made-from-scratch assets, on the other hand, is fine and dandy. And in this case, since CITRUS heads were made from scratch, you could use those. You'd still need new textures and horns and mouths and the like, though. As for textures, I'm pretty sure Flawn recreated the vanilla textures from scratch for the Vanilla Argonians Redux mod so maybe you can even take a shortcut there too.

Argonians ? would be an interesting race for Fallout 4.

PS: I like the shape of the cheetah head as it is in YA, I would not change anything.

1 hour ago, Bad Dog said:

I'm surprised the deer and horse rated so high. They're going to cause more problems with helmets than the others, but hey.

I pretty much don't see any other way around glasses and bandanas except repositioning them so that glasses/goggles are always on forehead for them and bandanas are neckwear instead of mouthcover.

Gasmasks and the like though, I have no idea.

1 hour ago, Blaze69 said:

I'm pretty sure Flawn recreated the vanilla textures from scratch for the Vanilla Argonians Redux mod so maybe you can even take a shortcut there too.

Hm, I seem to recall Flawn mentioning somewhere that he used the official HD textures as base but only @LordFlawn can say for sure here.

16 minutes ago, ASlySpyDuo said:

I pretty much don't see any other way around glasses and bandanas except repositioning them so that glasses/goggles are always on forehead for them and bandanas are neckwear instead of mouthcover.

Glasses may be doable. They will look weird and it will take quite some work to get it done, but I don't think it's impossible considering I managed to fit them to the shark snouts and those aren't exactly eyewear-friendly.

Bandanas tho... yeah, we're gonna have to turn them into neckwear (which I guess wouldn't be such a big deal since dogs already wear them like that, so one could argue we're making things more consistent, lol).

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Gasmasks and the like though, I have no idea.

Oof. That's gonna be a problem, yes.

LOL  ?

14 minutes ago, ASlySpyDuo said:

I seem to recall Flawn mentioning somewhere that he used the official HD textures as base but only @LordFlawn can say for sure here.

I actually used an AI upscale of the vanilla textures (This one to be precise), I don't know if that really counts as a new texture.

27 minutes ago, poblivion said:

LOL  ?

I mean, that actually looks pretty cool (and fitting). The only problem is whether Bad Dog is willing to put the work required to do this stuff since this would need either very extensive edits of the vanilla gas mask meshes or just creating new meshes from scratch (either using their own custom textures or matching the vanilla UVs).

24 minutes ago, LordFlawn said:

I actually used an AI upscale of the vanilla textures (This one to be precise), I don't know if that really counts as a new texture.

Huh, thanks for the info. That's a good question tho, would this count as enough editing to be considered a new one, or would it need to be rebuilt 100% from scratch for that? ?

4 minutes ago, Blaze69 said:

That's a good question tho, would this count as enough editing to be considered a new one, or would it need to be rebuilt 100% from scratch for that?

Well technically none of the pixels are from the original.

Ya, those horse gas masks pretty much nail the FO4 feel. I'll put them on the list.