Sexout Consequences - Coming Soon

[prideslayer]

Hulksmashing does usually help.. but the repetition I find most annoying is having to start FONV, skip the intro screens, type in whatever console commands, then wait to see if my change worked. The debugging 'cycle' for mods is the worst part for me. I really wish there were a nice 'emulator' for the scripting engine, so I could test running scripts without having to actually start the game up.

 

I don't make models, textures, or animations -- and haven't had any time yet to work on real mods with NPCs being created and stuff where you do the same or similar thing a dozen times. So, no real repetition for me yet.

 

Initially when I started work on this mod, working in the GECK render window to build an area was extremely annoying -- especially find all the right wall/floor/etc pieces to fit together, as I was creating a brand new interior space (silver rush basement).

[sbseed]

cant you run the test mods using the CK?

or is the CK kinda useless for that?

 

lucky you, its a pain in the ass to extract the f-ing files from the FNV.esm... then if you want to get everything right you have to fix the broken meshes that comes from being used in the .nif format or something. you have extract the textures seperately, and all of this has to be done while converting every file you are working on to a format that you can actually use to edit the mesh let alone the texture. then ontop of the regular meshes if you are planning on making any major changes you have to do that with at least 2 mesh/texture files up to 8 for every race or veriant of the model/texture, then if you want to try to do anything with anims on top of that you end up dealing with 4-10 files if its tweaking only a couple of movement anims and there are about 10-40 anims for every mesh, on the 'plus' side if you are working from scratch its soo much easier.

 

i would rather build an interior or a entire level/dungeon or whatever else in the CK than having to mess with that massive mess of extracting/tweaking/fixing/texturing/etc. lol

[Guest Loogie]

If you're converting formats and?making a different outfit per race, you're doing it wrong.

[sbseed]

was talking about the meshes, there are 4-5 in each set... and each set can be different for every race, not to mention between human and for each one there is adult female/adult male/child female/child male/mutants/raiders/NCR/Khans/BoS/Legion/etc. and for every one there are subsets, in order to even get at one of these models tho you have to extract all of the meshes or textures.

 

even when you do try to select one or two to extract... then of course you cant actually use nifskope to do any real editing without pulling your hair out so you have to convert the mesh models to a file type such as .obj (thank god its so widely used) and then you have to fix every model you modify because parts of the vertices in the mesh files dont connect properly and that is were you get the famous and super annoying tearing... not sure if its just nif files or if its the gambryo engine itself, either way its retarded and most of the meshes arent even triangulated properly so in-game the shadows show up in really weird spots on the model.

 

nothing to do with the CK is simple and quick it would seem.

 

i havent messed with any of the armors at all, the body meshes just scare me off of trying to do anything with the armor sets. thank god for simple programs like wings 3d, light weight easy to use and it took me about 5 mins maybe to mess with the body mesh i was working on.

[zippy57]

then of course you cant actually use nifskope to do any real editing without pulling your hair out so you have to convert the mesh models to a file type such as .obj (thank god its so widely used)

Doesn't Blender have a plugin that allows the import and export of .nif files?

[sbseed]

i have no clue about using blender... i tried using it but i cant manage to change the mesh at all nevermind trying to make a custom model.

 

that piece of software (while im sure its a great program) doesnt like me at all, and the feeling is mutual lol

[Guest Loogie]

You can directly import NIFs to blender and export them from it, too. Extraction is easily handld by FOMM. Every graphics program has a plugin for DDS editing for textures. You only need a male and female mesh - you don't need a separate mesh for each race and faction.

[prideslayer]

cant you run the test mods using the CK?

or is the CK kinda useless for that?

 

It's completely useless for that. The only thing it does is tell you that your scripts don't have syntax errors. Beyond that the only way to test them is to load the esp/esm in the game and try it out.

[sbseed]

well thats kinda gay, almost makes the CK completely useless as a modding tool... since you still have to extract everything you need for your mod and even packaging the mod can be done outside of the CK.

[prideslayer]

well thats kinda gay' date=' almost makes the CK completely useless as a modding tool... since you still have to extract everything you need for your mod and even packaging the mod can be done outside of the CK.

[/quote']

 

The CK is far from useless, it's the only way to actually make cells (interior or exterior) with any hope of them making physical sense -- you could try that in fnvedit by twiddling the x/y/z and orientation but it would never be right.

 

It's also the only reasonable way to write quests, scripts of any kind, create spells, and so on.

 

The name is just.. unfortunately specific. It's the creation kit, not the 'testing' kit or the 'debugging' kit.

[sbseed]

lol, definitively not the helpful/debugging kit... would have been nice if they had added that into the thing so that people could tell quickly if there mod scripts/etc. properly override the default stuff from the CK.

 

one of the reasons i dont like the GameBryo engine, its POS to begin with... thats were 80-90% of all the bugs and glitches come from, that and rushing product/sloppy coding.

 

anyways, i wasnt implying that it was completely useless... but mostly useless considering the outside programs used to make mods etc...

[zippy57]

anyways' date=' i wasnt implying that it was completely useless... but mostly useless considering the outside programs used to make mods etc...[/quote']I wasn't aware there were "outside programs used to make mods". You can't really do much of anything without the GECK/Construction/Creation Kit.

 

And regarding having to load up the game to test... What do you really expect? For the game to run, and test what you need to test, don't you need the game to load? Even if you were testing in the GECK, it would still need to load. You'd still need to tell it how to start testing, whether from a new game or a save. Unless I'm missing something, I don't really see how testing in the GECK would save all that much time.

[prideslayer]

 

And regarding having to load up the game to test... What do you really expect? For the game to run' date=' and test what you need to test, don't you need the game to load? Even if you were testing in the GECK, it would still need to load. You'd still need to tell it how to start testing, whether from a new game or a save. Unless I'm missing something, I don't really see how testing in the GECK would save all that much time.

[/quote']

 

I spend more time every day looking at the loading screens and madly trying to skip past them to load a save than I do actually testing, that's the problem. The cycle of "change something and see if that fixed it" is a slow ass process because the CK doesn't have any sort of interactive debugging features.

 

If the engine had to load up with the CK, and presented the game world in the render window, with the ability to stop/break, inspect, reset/reload, etc.. that would be tons better than the cycle right now.

 

It's an interactive debugger that I "need" (ok, want), and the place for such a thing is in the CK.

[sbseed]

that was the point i was trying to make, thank you prideslayer.

[zippy57]

I spend more time every day looking at the loading screens and madly trying to skip past them to load a save than I do actually testing' date=' that's the problem. The cycle of "change something and see if that fixed it" is a slow ass process because the CK doesn't have any sort of interactive debugging features.[/quote']But those loading screens are...loading screens. I don't know quite what it's loading, but the more plugins you have active the longer it takes. Why wouldn't the GECK have to perform that same loading?

 

Not being a programmer, I'm not sure what kind of debugging could be done without the game running, is what I guess I'm saying.

[sbseed]

there are a couple of mods that try to get rid of the opening intro's for loading to the start/exit menu and when starting a new game...

however all of them are glitchy and usually dont work with most mods, far as i know.

 

and the GECK wouldnt have to load everything that the game does, only those things that are effected by the mod you are working on. also it would be super easy to have it use the 'testing room' that is already in the game and the GECK to test out your mods for pretty much anything... so it would be really quite quick to load the small room through the geck, not to mention streamlining debugging let alone the entire mod making process.

 

edit: almost forgot, i know how to program but i cant stand doing it myself because doing custom programming is a pain in the ass not to mention the differences between old school coding (which is what i know) and the newer stuff. its also the same (most of the time) for scripting, the main difference is that with scripting you dont have to write the codes that run the program but instead only how the resources that are (usually) already there or custom stuff.

 

so not having the ability to test stuff within the work environment of the engine you are using makes everything 10 times or more harder because of the time it takes just to test out stuff.

[prideslayer]

I spend more time every day looking at the loading screens and madly trying to skip past them to load a save than I do actually testing' date=' that's the problem. The cycle of "change something and see if that fixed it" is a slow ass process because the CK doesn't have any sort of interactive debugging features.[/quote']But those loading screens are...loading screens. I don't know quite what it's loading, but the more plugins you have active the longer it takes. Why wouldn't the GECK have to perform that same loading?

 

It would only have to do it once. Not every time I need to test.

 

Not being a programmer, I'm not sure what kind of debugging could be done without the game running, is what I guess I'm saying.

 

That is the bigger problem. If you haven't ever used an interactive debugger, you don't really know what you're missing.. Here's a kind of geeky sounding dude explaining how to use a debugger (NetBeans / Java).

 

[video=youtube]

[sbseed]

we all like to get our nerd on when it comes to the goodies that make things like modding much faster/easier/etc.

 

mmm.... nerdy. lol

[sen4mi]

I have noticed that loading screens seem to go faster when I am using windowed mode. I expect that some part of this is psychological -- since I have not lost access to the rest of my system I let my attention drift onto other issues during the load. But maybe the low pixel count also helps?

 

(It would be nice, though, if we could play fallout in a vm that was instrumented for cloning instances of the game. This would have all sorts of practical issues (starting with needing massive amounts of memory if it's not going to be slower than the current system), but getting into graphics driver issues and all sorts of things I am not competent to solve.)

[sbseed]

VMs are completely different, you can already do that... slows your computer to a crawl but whatever floats your boat.

 

however it is vaguely familiar to what we are talking about.