How to play this game with custom races ?

[ANewVegasFan]

Without any custom race, i have 0 issues so far while playing with other 120 mods. But when i install any custom race, my game freezes so hard that i have no choice but to restart my PC.

 

In Skyrim, there is one universal skeleton mod that all custom races require, but in this game, it seems every custom race has its own skeleton. This makes it impossible for me to play as a custom character. 

 

What to do ? I have both used LOOT as well as manually sorted my load order as mentioned on custom race pages on nexus. But the only difference after following that is the game still freezes, but, after an hour of playing and not instantly.

 

[Blaze69]

20 minutes ago, ANewVegasFan said:

in this game, it seems every custom race has its own skeleton. This makes it impossible for me to play as a custom character.

Which "custom race" would that be? The only custom races that use unique skeletons (and thus require the whole "RaceCustomizer" mess) are the two Anime races (Nanakochan and Fallout Sama) and the joke races from Crimes Against Nature. That's it. Everything else uses standard human skeletons and is fully compatible with ZeX and stuff (and doesn't require RaceCustomizer).

 

I've created and used several custom races myself and they all work fine other than some minor chargen-related issues/bugs caused by the sorry state of LooksMenu and which cannot be solved until expired comes back and cleans up his stuff.

 

Also stay the fuck away from LOOT as it will inevitably break your load order, manual sorting is the only right way to do it.

[ANewVegasFan]

4 minutes ago, Blaze69 said:

Which "custom race" would that be? The only custom races that use unique skeletons (and thus require the whole "RaceCustomizer" mess) are the two Anime races (Nanakochan and Fallout Sama) and the joke races from Crimes Against Nature.

Just the Nanako Race. I followed this post (https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/7595478-animerace-nanakochan/page-222#entry96716758) about manually setting it at the most bottom of my load order. Still, it freezes the game after an hour of play. Only Zex skeleton is overriding this mod.

 

Spoiler

REPOST OF RECOMMENDED LOAD ORDER

(O) 512 Standalone Hair Colors (1ESP) - https://www.nexusmod...21365?tab=files
 
(O) AnimeRace_512StandaloneHairColors Compatible Files - https://www.nexusmod...38588?tab=files
 
(R) Caliente's Beautiful Bodies Enhancer - https://www.nexusmod...ds/15?tab=files
 
(O) LooksMenu Customization Compendium - https://www.nexusmod...24830?tab=files
 
(R) LooksMenu - https://www.nexusmod...12631?tab=files
 
(R) RaceCustomizer - https://www.nexusmod...15212?tab=files
 
(R) AnimeRace Nanakochan - https://www.nexusmod...38588?tab=files
 
(R) AnimeRace Nanakochan CBBE Bodyslide Patch - https://www.nexusmod...out4/mods/39165
 
(O) RaceCustomizer LMCC Compatability Patch - https://www.nexusmod...15212?tab=files

(O) - Optional
(R) - Required

 

4 minutes ago, Blaze69 said:

Also stay the fuck away from LOOT as it will inevitably break your load order, manual sorting is the only right way to do it.

 

Every time ?

[Blaze69]

58 minutes ago, ANewVegasFan said:

Just the Nanako Race.

Then I'm afraid I can't help there.

 

58 minutes ago, ANewVegasFan said:

Every time ?

Yup. Welcome to Bethesda game modding. ?

Edited July 18, 2021 by Blaze69

[ANewVegasFan]

Fixed it! it looks like the game hates it if mods are installed in it, in the classic Skyrim way. In other words, Skyrim requires one universal skeleton mod (XP32) to override all body/race mods and must be put at the most bottom of the load order. 

 

Did the same method with zex skeleton here. Result - guaranteed crash when using slm 14 in console. Now i have put Nanako at the most bottom and zex skeleton at the very top of my load order. That stopped crashing and now i can finally fully use slm 14 on this race.

 

What a depressing game.... 

[IBAGadget]

19 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

 

Also stay the fuck away from LOOT as it will inevitably break your load order, manual sorting is the only right way to do it.

Interesting that you say that. I've been using LOOT for the last 5 months and have had no issues with my load order breaking my game. Perhaps you've only used an older version? It has been updated. Several times in the last couple months even.

[Blaze69]

4 hours ago, ANewVegasFan said:

Did the same method with zex skeleton here. Result - guaranteed crash when using slm 14 in console. Now i have put Nanako at the most bottom and zex skeleton at the very top of my load order. That stopped crashing and now i can finally fully use slm 14 on this race.

Nanako uses custom skeletons so I'm guessing the crash happens because ZeX doesn't have the special Nanako bones (obviously), so when the game tries to load the FaceBones data for chargen those are missing and cause it to have a stroke and commit sudoku.

 

Stuff like this is why I think using custom skeletons is a terrible idea and why none of the custom races I've made or worked on use them, but alas, you're stuck with them if you use any race that does require them.

 

3 hours ago, IBAGadget said:

Interesting that you say that. I've been using LOOT for the last 5 months and have had no issues with my load order breaking my game. Perhaps you've only used an older version? It has been updated. Several times in the last couple months even.

The problem with LOOT is its masterlist is shit and only works well if you're using <~50 mods which are all (semi-)popular and come from Nexus. The very second you start adding mods from other sources (including LL), more obscure ones and/or mods with special sorting requirements (e.g. "load at the bottom of your LO/load after all the other mods that edit X"), it all goes to shit.

 

It can be a bit useful if you install a limited amount of Nexus mods first, to get them sorted(ish) out quickly, but there's still manual tweaks to do afterwards and any further mods that are added need to be sorted manually.

 

I don't care if it has worked fine for you, I've had way too many times where bug reports were bogus and only caused by LOOT retardedly messing up the load order so I'm never going to endorse using that dumpster fire.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Blaze69

[ANewVegasFan]

31 minutes ago, Blaze69 said:

Nanako uses custom skeletons so I'm guessing the crash happens because ZeX doesn't have the special Nanako bones (obviously), so when the game tries to load the FaceBones data for chargen those are missing and cause it to have a stroke and commit sudoku.

Guess i do not need zex then, if Nanako has its own skeleton. But maybe the physics mod requires it.

 

31 minutes ago, Blaze69 said:

Stuff like this is why I think using custom skeletons is a terrible idea and why none of the custom races I've made or worked on use them, but alas, you're stuck with them if you use any race that does require them.

Fallout 4 is not Skyrim where you go nuts and install 9-10 custom races and hope somehow they will all miraculously work perfectly with each other. They won't. This game is all about making sacrifices. The best possible way to get this game to play for at least few hours without instant ctd is, not to install mods like sim settlements 1, 2 or any such demanding mods. The best efficient mod combination for me is just this anime race, game optimization, functional objects like cars bikes etc, blueprint mods, few new weapons and finally some Loverslab mods. All this installation takes roughly around 116 mods in my modlist. Most certainly i won't even imagine playing such rigid game with 200+ mods since stable gameplay is most important of all.

[Blaze69]

3 hours ago, ANewVegasFan said:

Fallout 4 is not Skyrim where you go nuts and install 9-10 custom races and hope somehow they will all miraculously work perfectly with each other. They won't. This game is all about making sacrifices...

Okay, imma just stop you right there because you're trailing off. I like for people to know the reason for things to happen the way they do, so I'll just explain what's going on here.

 

The bugs you're experiencing are caused by two (2) issues and nothing else.

 

Issue #1 is the fact that, for all the improvements FO4's implementation of the Havok system has over Skyrim's (most notably the fact that new anims don't need a program like FNIS to be loaded by the game), it's a downgrade on some aspects. One of them is the fact that for some reason if you attempt to have the player use any skeleton file not placed in the game's vanilla humanoid skeleton path, Havok will puke its guts out and die. No ifs, no buts, if the skeleton.nif ain't in the vanilla path, the game dies. Period. NPCs can use skeletons in other places just fine, but the Player themselves cannot. There's simply no way around this, as it seems to be hardcoded into the game engine. Sucks, but oh, well. All humanoid characters already share the same skeleton just fine, so this shouldn't really be that much of a problem.

 

Issue #2, on the other hand, is the fact that the Nanako and CaN authors decided they would require a custom skeleton for their custom races. The only reason I've found to do this is to be able to manipulate the "human" head bone without touching the race's custom head bone and thus "refit" human hairs and headgear universally through the skeleton itself. This, in my humble opinion, is a waste of time and only adds unnecessary complexity, since the end result usually still looks like shit anyway unless you go and manually fit the hairs or items in question to the custom heads on a mesh-by-mesh basis (which in that case you might as well do right away instead of having all that custom skeleton bullshit). This is 100% avoidable by simply not setting up the race like that, and as it may be obvious from all the custom races available for FO4 other than those two, not using this "custom skeleton" method works perfectly fine.

 

FO4 is broken and fucked seven ways to Sunday in many aspects, a lot of which do negatively affect custom race use, but this particular bug is caused by an (IMO very wrong) certain choice on the custom race authors' parts rather than something being 100% wrong with the game itself.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Blaze69

[ANewVegasFan]

3 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

Okay, imma just stop you right there because you're trailing off. I like for people to know the reason for things to happen the way they do, so I'll just explain what's going on here.

 

The bugs you're experiencing are caused by two (2) issues and nothing else.

 

Issue #1 is the fact that, for all the improvements FO4's implementation of the Havok system has over Skyrim's (most notably the fact that new anims don't need a program like FNIS to be loaded by the game), it's a downgrade on some aspects. One of them is the fact that for some reason if you attempt to have the player use any skeleton file not placed in the game's vanilla humanoid skeleton path, Havok will puke its guts out and die. No ifs, no buts, if the skeleton.nif ain't in the vanilla path, the game dies. Period. NPCs can use skeletons in other places just fine, but the Player themselves cannot. There's simply no way around this, as it seems to be hardcoded into the game engine. Sucks, but oh, well. All humanoid characters already share the same skeleton just fine, so this shouldn't really be that much of a problem.

Wow, would you look at that. And they said if you want guns and ammo, go play Fallout 4. More flexible and popular than Skyrim. So much for that....

 

3 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

Issue #2, on the other hand, is the fact that the Nanako and CaN authors decided they would require a custom skeleton for their custom races. The only reason I've found to do this is to be able to manipulate the "human" head bone without touching the race's custom head bone and thus "refit" human hairs and headgear universally through the skeleton itself. This, in my humble opinion, is a waste of time and only adds unnecessary complexity, since the end result usually still looks like shit anyway unless you go and manually fit the hairs or items in question to the custom heads on a mesh-by-mesh basis (which in that case you might as well do right away instead of having all that custom skeleton bullshit). This is 100% avoidable by simply not setting up the race like that, and as it may be obvious from all the custom races available for FO4 other than those two, not using this "custom skeleton" method works perfectly fine.

 

FO4 is broken and fucked seven ways to Sunday in many aspects, a lot of which do negatively affect custom race use, but this particular bug is caused by an (IMO very wrong) certain choice on the custom race authors' parts rather than something being 100% wrong with the game itself.

 

To be honest, Oldrim is way more broken than Fallout 4, however, the variety of customization features provided by it, are the only reason why so many Oldrim mods have been ported to SSE and SSE mods to Oldrim. Comparing all that with Fallout mod ports among various FO games, its clear that porting any Fallout 4 mod to older Fallout game or the reverse process is a major headache and no one seems even least bit interested in it. Sexlab for example, is originally an Oldrim Mod but has been completely ported to SSE and works perfectly. However, we haven't seen or probably will never see Family Planning Enhanced ported over to Fallout 3 or New Vegas only because they lack sufficient customization features.

 

The problem is not that the game engine is bugged up, the problem is, there is hardly any character development, race-wise. Game engine can be fixed with mods. However, customization totally depends on the game company to add. If everything is hard-coded to follow only one race, then naturally the role-playing options will be seriously limited.

[Blaze69]

1 hour ago, ANewVegasFan said:

Wow, would you look at that. And they said if you want guns and ammo, go play Fallout 4. More flexible and popular than Skyrim. So much for that....

I mean, it's true. FO4's gun gameplay systems are pretty solid (you can tell ID Software aka the Doom devs pitched in), and the armor and weapon customization systems have so much potential it's ridiculous. You can basically turn your game into Escape From Tarkov: Boston Edition, EFT-tier autistic levels of weapon customization included. You can add as many anim sets for each weapon as you want easily, the game already supports "real" projectile bullets with gravity and travel time instead of hitscan (Beth just didn't use them for some reason), NPCs can use cover and behave tactically, all that stuff.

 

FO4 may have absolutely shit writing and worldbuilding and such, but when it comes to gameplay alone, it easily beats FO3 or FNV (aka Jank: The Game and Jank 2: Even Jankier). Skyrim can't really compare there either because it has no guns.

 

1 hour ago, ANewVegasFan said:

To be honest, Oldrim is way more broken than Fallout 4, however, the variety of customization features provided by it, are the only reason why so many Oldrim mods have been ported to SSE and SSE mods to Oldrim. Comparing all that with Fallout mod ports among various FO games, its clear that porting any Fallout 4 mod to older Fallout game or the reverse process is a major headache and no one seems even least bit interested in it. Sexlab for example, is originally an Oldrim Mod but has been completely ported to SSE and works perfectly. However, we haven't seen or probably will never see Family Planning Enhanced ported over to Fallout 3 or New Vegas only because they lack sufficient customization features.

All of that is because SE is pretty much the same as LE under the hood other than the DirectX11 renderer and some other 64bit-related code. Which, while very relevant for stuff like SKSE plugins that need to alter memory addresses on the exe at runtime and stuff (and which obviously vary between 32bit and 64bit), don't actually affect the way standard game scripts work or the way data is stored in plugins or meshes/textures/sounds.

 

FO3 and FNV use an older iteration of the Gamebryo engine (which was still called Gamebryo back then, instead of "Creation Engine" as it is now) which is very different from the new one, so you can't just copy-paste stuff from one to another like you can between LE and SE.

 

I... also don't know what this has to do with using custom races? Yes, Skyrim has a race selector and all the required base frameworks for it because there's several playable races, and so do FO3/FNV because back then Beth didn't know how to have a single code-wise race that could accurately depict white people and black people and asian people and hispanic people at once, so they had to turn them into separate (code-wise) "races" too.

 

1 hour ago, ANewVegasFan said:

The problem is not that the game engine is bugged up, the problem is, there is hardly any character development, race-wise. Game engine can be fixed with mods. However, customization totally depends on the game company to add. If everything is hard-coded to follow only one race, then naturally the role-playing options will be seriously limited.

Game engine cannot be fixed by mods, as evidenced by the fact we still have to resort to using plugins to directly edit the Player's internal NPC record and cannot change races on runtime like in Skyrim (at least not without stuff breaking and bugging out badly).

 

FO4 only ever expects the player to be a human and is 100% written as such. This makes sense since you were never meant to play as anything else and the fact you can is only due to the way the Race data is set up in Creation Engine. Yes, it sucks donkey dick, but oh, well.

 

Also, it's not like there being nonhuman races in vanilla would actually allow for roleplaying. Skyrim is written 100% for the default blonde male Nord Dovahkiin PC in mind, and the only thing using a different race does is swap the places where they say "Nord" with whatever race you're using. There's some very minor lampshading when you do stuff that'd make zero sense in lore like joining the Stormcloaks as a non-Nord (or even as a Dunmer), but it's literally just an extra line or two at most and then people just shrug and go back to treating you as they would the default Nord. Beth is either too lazy or too scared of being accused of "racism" to make it so different races get different quests or dialogue or reactions from NPCs or whatever.

 

And yet, worst-case scenario it's not like race-specific reactions/dialogues/quests are impossible. All the functions are there. The "GetIsRace" conditional operator exists. You can have a NPC that greets you warmly if you play a human PC and tells you to "go kill yourself, freak!" if you go nonhuman. It's just... nobody has actually used it in any mod or quest yet. But it can be.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Blaze69

[ANewVegasFan]

5 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

I mean, it's true. FO4's gun gameplay systems are pretty solid (you can tell ID Software aka the Doom devs pitched in), and the armor and weapon customization systems have so much potential it's ridiculous. You can basically turn your game into Escape From Tarkov: Boston Edition, EFT-tier autistic levels of weapon customization included. You can add as many anim sets for each weapon as you want easily, the game already supports "real" projectile bullets with gravity and travel time instead of hitscan (Beth just didn't use them for some reason), NPCs can use cover and behave tactically, all that stuff.

 

FO4 may have absolutely shit writing and worldbuilding and such, but when it comes to gameplay alone, it easily beats FO3 or FNV (aka Jank: The Game and Jank 2: Even Jankier). Skyrim can't really compare there either because it has no guns.

That's not really exciting or anything. As i have played both Call of duty and Medal of honor, and in their comparison this game that is supposed to allow you to use mods to play as any faction with guns for roleplay, has banned mods on nexus that mention or provide German Reich and World war 2 level simulation. Why cannibal necros and ultra-racist Thalmor Justiciars are allowed but Nazi raiders are not ? Sadly i started Modding FO4 just now and all these classic mods have now been banned.... If only there was some backup of them....

 

5 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

All of that is because SE is pretty much the same as LE under the hood other than the DirectX11 renderer and some other 64bit-related code. Which, while very relevant for stuff like SKSE plugins that need to alter memory addresses on the exe at runtime and stuff (and which obviously vary between 32bit and 64bit), don't actually affect the way standard game scripts work or the way data is stored in plugins or meshes/textures/sounds.

 

FO3 and FNV use an older iteration of the Gamebryo engine (which was still called Gamebryo back then, instead of "Creation Engine" as it is now) which is very different from the new one, so you can't just copy-paste stuff from one to another like you can between LE and SE.

Hence the flexibility. No  wonder.

 

5 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

I... also don't know what this has to do with using custom races? Yes, Skyrim has a race selector and all the required base frameworks for it because there's several playable races, and so do FO3/FNV because back then Beth didn't know how to have a single code-wise race that could accurately depict white people and black people and asian people and hispanic people at once, so they had to turn them into separate (code-wise) "races" too.

 

Game engine cannot be fixed by mods, as evidenced by the fact we still have to resort to using plugins to directly edit the Player's internal NPC record and cannot change races on runtime like in Skyrim (at least not without stuff breaking and bugging out badly).

There are people that, even to this day, have not moved on to SSE even though it promises superior stability than Oldrim. Thus, its clear that if you find a proper compromise, make a few tweaks correctly in your game, then even one of the most buggy games, like Oldrim becomes more attractive than SE.

 

5 hours ago, Blaze69 said:

FO4 only ever expects the player to be a human and is 100% written as such. This makes sense since you were never meant to play as anything else and the fact you can is only due to the way the Race data is set up in Creation Engine. Yes, it sucks donkey dick, but oh, well.

 

Also, it's not like there being nonhuman races in vanilla would actually allow for roleplaying. Skyrim is written 100% for the default blonde male Nord Dovahkiin PC in mind, and the only thing using a different race does is swap the places where they say "Nord" with whatever race you're using. There's some very minor lampshading when you do stuff that'd make zero sense in lore like joining the Stormcloaks as a non-Nord (or even as a Dunmer), but it's literally just an extra line or two at most and then people just shrug and go back to treating you as they would the default Nord. Beth is either too lazy or too scared of being accused of "racism" to make it so different races get different quests or dialogue or reactions from NPCs or whatever.

 

And yet, worst-case scenario it's not like race-specific reactions/dialogues/quests are impossible. All the functions are there. The "GetIsRace" conditional operator exists. You can have a NPC that greets you warmly if you play a human PC and tells you to "go kill yourself, freak!" if you go nonhuman. It's just... nobody has actually used it in any mod or quest yet. But it can be.

 

So naturally, if the game company has limited our choices regarding race selection on purpose, then all there is left, is to craft our own race using mods. This seems to be the only solution to bypass this limit forced by beth.