New Mod Development: McEnhancements

[RoyBatty]

That just makes it even more of a pain to make compatibility patches for things. Also moving a lot of refs will make the game pause for a really long time. Forget place at me, since it makes temporary refs anyways. You could place everything in a dummy cell and use moveto and setpos but you'd still need a reference in the cell to move things to and again it would cause a lot of pausing moving tons of items, and again compatibility patch issues. Just be careful what you do and check the more popular mods and make sure they don't use the area's you want to use.

Disable makes stuff disabled period, and not fade in until enabled. It's better to use an enable parent xmarker and link everything to it as an enable parent so you only have to enable the xmarker.

[Mystical Panda]

Thanks Roy. I'll read up on the xMarker and see how I can best use it.

[Anacostia Crossing]

I do use the tecnique to not edit cells and instead move the assets in runtime. It has its pros and cons, it's pretty much a personal choice.

[Mystical Panda]

Thanks AC! I'd decided to go with the asset placing at run time. I don't really have that many, just a few per wasteland, and that way I can keep GECK cell edit conflicts between differing mods to a minimum. Here's a test of how the gamer would place power armor stations throughout the wastelands:

https://youtu.be/omKeYJ3OV-E

This way, they can place them where ever and how every many they want. Even indoors. Since they're stored in arrays with all the "linkage" data, I'll probably put a "Remove all stations [ ]" MCM option just in case the gamer wants to remove the current stations/ and or mannequins and start over.

We've downloaded Blender, the import/export scripts for .nif, and the python dependencies. She's taken pretty quick to 3D modeling and should have a "basic" station frame built here shortly that I'll use to replace the "vanilla" console.

[Mystical Panda]

Here's another quick test for the "Features" MCM options. The carrying capacity boost only uses battery power if/when the player's inventory goes over their normal carry weight. So coming out of the vault I had about ~150lb carrying capacity- If I boost it, the battery won't start draining until my total inventory weight is  > 150lbs. I thought that would make more sense rather than draining all the time, since "power boosting" is just for putting me above the "norm".

https://youtu.be/h6XHIR5Yya0

I'll use the in game (scripted) asset placement for putting the power stations near the vanilla homes in both wastelands, which the gamer can select/ deselect. Deselecting will clean the stations/ mannequins up, and return any armor they're hold back to the players inventory.

[Mystical Panda]

It took some trial and error to see what the functions were actually returning, when and where, but I was finally able to "detect" a landing most of the time (had to combine 2 different techniques since the GetFallTimeRemaining still returns > 0 even when your on the ground- GetFallTimeElapsed was a better option, but had to bypass that = 0 and check something else to catch it in time); it still needs some refinement though. Here's the explosive landing feature, kinda lol thing. All the sounds are vanilla, and really need more "impact", but it'll have to do for now.

https://youtu.be/MS-mOxRlCec

All actors in the specified radius take a dive. I don't really like the explosion effect, so I'll be changing that when I have more time to test each one out.

[Mystical Panda]

A quick question: What's the most efficient way to determine which npc "hit" me without ref-walking?

[Anacostia Crossing]

It deserves to take a look at events: http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php?title=Event_Handling

If you want some good tutorial, look inside the signature of LL's moderator Doctasax

[Mystical Panda]

Thanks AC! That was actually a really good resource. He had quite a few tutorials that I could really use. The MCM tutorial on adding on screen images and "indicators" through xml was one I was definitely looking for, and very easy to follow. A this point, I've broken the original companion mod into 2 separate mods; an enhancement mod, and a companion mod. The enhancement mod is the current wip with only a few more features to add:

o - A telsa style repulsor field for PA.

o - Automatically removing bodies after looting that have no inventory.

o - Script bound placeable resources.

o - A TTW patch which will allow both NV and TTW access to the same mod.

o - An MCM "splash" image.

o - custom mesh/ texture for the power armor station.

After that, lots of testing and tweaking to make sure everything works right and is balanced. Thanks again for all yours, and everyones help- it's coming along great!

[Mystical Panda]

Here's some of the newest features in "proof of concept" alpha state (breath holding while scoping, and on screen indicators):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxYBZPN-5og&feature=youtu.be

Still a few things to add like, sounds- lol, use DarnUI font when DarnUI is loaded, add just a tiny bit of drift instead of having it set to none, and the option to select between text and a graphic bar for the remaining battery time (w/ color change based on current charge). More importantly though, I've hit the script size limit for the MCM! ug!!! Time to UDF chunks of it.