A modding thread

Dunno why you would say it isn't modding, looks pretty convincing to me! Awesome. And I saw the leg thing in "this week's interesting mods" section on Nexus: I can see its rationale. Actually that reminds me on a much smaller scale I had to do the thimble thing for Elizabeth which involved more head-scratching than I'd expected until I discovered that unequipped body parts (e.g. hands without gloves) are also classed as armour and not buried somewhere in the race record, which I thought was the obvious place...

"Just taking my nug for a walk. It's called Booker. Isn't that a lovely name?"

I'm rather enjoying the summery if mildly unkempt vibe of the 23rd century.

Does anyone have a means of converting BC7-encoded DDS files into something more sociable like BC5? I would quite like to recolour the hair texture for her noir wig into something I can use to, well, create a wig rather than actual hair, but my elderly Gimp plugin doesn't know what to do with it, I don't have Photoshop and none of the converters I've tried seems to read BC7 (including the Skyrim one). Not that it matters, I hate the wig in question and I'm just being a completionist even though I can't redistribute the mod with or without my add-ons, but you know how it is.

I should really get on with playing instead of modding, faffing and trying to break things.

And now with added filth. It's hard to judge as it looks really over the top in Nifskope and too subtle in game, but hopefully I've struck the right balance with making her look less than pristine as you'd expect in a somewhat launderette-bereft wasteland without looking like she's just been rolling around in the mud for a laugh.

Yeah, I used the same overlay for both outfits because I'm cheap.




Edit: think I've finally got it figured out, I just needed to lighten and desaturate the base outfit: seems to work much better now.  My PC is modelling the original outfit.

Pretty much finished the "outfitting Elizabeth" mod, I've done two of her three usual outfits in both clean and "worn" (i.e. dirty & torn) versions, her "noir" wig (that was fun since I couldn't get the textures to load: they were either corrupted or in a still ill-defined format that's not well supported, but I ended up having to create the texture, specular map and normal map from the highlight map that was at least readable, with a bunch of trial-and-error and very poorly hand-drawn alphas: although I'm not entirely inept at drawing, a mouse is not the ideal tool) and some other bits and pieces. All that's really required now is a couple of world models for the wig and some jewellery.

Sadly it looks like it's destined for personal use only as nobody's willing to talk to me about the use of Bethsoft assets from previous games and I'm not in a mood to redo them, even though it's only the boots and not-especially-authentic shoes. So I can probably let anybody have it who wants it but I can't upload it anywhere.

I guess it's a bit moot anyway as it looks slightly peculiar on regular characters: Liz was created using a special race setting to give her that slightly Disneyesque "big head small waist syndrome" since she was pretty much the princess-in-a-tower stereotype. And that as much as I did a lot of tweaking and debugging, the mod itself was somebody else's work and got pulled for using too many of Irrational's assets.

Anyway, moving on, I've decided to start having a go at something more mundane but one of the most used parts of the game, which is the menus. There's a lot of mods out there which make them look a lot nicer: DEF_UI for layout, Gold Kit to enable colours on the PIP-boy* and the Vault Girl paper-doll add-on, Valdacil's item sorting to make sure the pretty icons happen and so on but even with all that it's only half done: to enable colours elsewhere the UI needs to be set to a rather stark and in-your-face white (the colours will fade and ultimately disappear if it's not, thanks to them being tints rather than absolute) so I've been trying to figure out how to change it.

Argh. I don't know whose "good idea" it was to use Flash for menus, but it's bloody awful. Okay, it was worse in Skyrim where the PC controls were even more awkward and unpredictable, but it's still not fun. I've booked myself onto Trial & Error's Crash Course in Flash Editing so I can at least alter stuff with a decompiler, but it's extremely tedious and fairly abstruse, opaque and abstract: there's so many not-at-all obvious steps for getting information from the game and onto the screen and it's doing my head in. Even where I've started to get a bit of a grasp (even if that "grasp" is as good as I have on a slippery bar of soap in the bath) it's pretty excruciating to make any changes at all: maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but even where it does the same thing often needs to be repeated ad nauseam and it seems that Flash editors are not designed to be labour saving devices.

The results are nice, when they work, but getting there is pretty excruciating.


* as an ex DEC employee, it still amuses me how much the PIP is very clearly based on the PDP: I guess "'50s retro" doesn't really work with computing (Bioshock got that wrong too, since they were typically way past using valves by the late '50s: The Thinker looks more like an early '40s Colossus: probably deliberately since Turing is also mentioned, even though Colossus is Tommy Flowers' work) so Seventies retro is I guess the next best thing.  The OS does look a lot like a mix of all the PDP-11's various green-screen systems.

I'm still trying desperately to get the menus to work consistently in terms of colour but it's a real uphill battle and I can see why the author of the Gold Kit interface (the one that introduces the colour PIP-boy) didn't extend his work to the rest of the menus: just doing the PIP-boy is a major achievement in itself but I think it is an unreasonable amount of effort to figure out everything else, especially as there's so much stuff buried very deep in a fairly impenetrable tree of attributes and values, and even scripting sometimes.

I'm really repeating myself at this point and have nothing new to add that I didn't mention in the past couple of posts, it's just another two days of trying to figure it out with very little actual progress has left me feeling rather frustrated! I guess at this point I should probably just leave it alone.

Some links to the mods I used, for those interested:

DEF_UI
Valdacil's Item Sorting
Gold Kit
Vault-Girl Mod (can't find this one any more :/ )
And a couple of patches for the iconlibs2 file etc.

Most of my stuff was getting Gold Kit and Vault Girl Mod to play nice together, and recolouring the HUD; I think I'll back out my somewhat lame attempts to get stuff like the crafting menus to work as it's made stuff actually look less consistent rather than more.

Pity the guy who did the Gold Kit got himself banned: AFAICT he admitted to using a cracked copy of something because the legit one didn't work (I think) and while I agree that discouraging piracy is pretty much essential, zero-tolerance approaches to anything usually cause more problems than they solve.

I'm still faffing about with these bloody outfits! Partly as I have Elizabeth as one of my followers so any problems with them tend to niggle away at me.

I'm specifically looking at the Noir one whose shoulders look weirdly big even though they're not. I think that's just a common problem with FO4 that may be the same thing that dates back to Oblivion, due to the use of male skeletons for female NPCs, and though there were some work-arounds for the big hands and broad shoulders, the problem never really seems to have been fixed entirely satisfactorily.

I've decided to leave the Edwardian outfit alone for now as the blouse is slightly more loose-fitting (though it still looks a bit big compared to Bioshock) but this is my best effort at trying to tame the Noir one. It's still not great, partly as I'm out of my comfort zone making substantial changes to the overall shape but largely I suspect due to FO4's limitations. I think it's an improvement, even if it's not as significant as I'd hoped, or it should be. But I've kept a backup in case I notice any nasty clipping issues or other weirdness.




Before & after.