Patching New California with Tale of Two Wastelands Impossible?

[Trm8r]

I suppose it's a matter of expectations. I don't mind a few rough edges.

[Wowboy]

I am afraid lore reasons are the smallest of roadblocks. Unfortunately, the way New California was made would conflict very heavily on a technical level with TTW. Running the two of them side-by-side is a recipe for troubles, ad a patch to make the two coexist would be tantamount to rebuilding New California.

https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/65839
I finished an NC playthrough with TTW version 2.9 and it was fine. I had a small bug with hardcore needs after returning to Vegas but it's been fixed. I played for several hours afterwords, both world spaces, and haven't seen any problems.

You got very lucky, that's all I'll say. Put it this way - it's hard enough nobody on either team has stepped up to do it, and that patch has become an internal meme. I'm not going to be mean about it, I don't doubt the guy who made it had good intentions, but it's like a bandaid over a crack in a glacier. It does something, but the problems go far deeper.

I posted the patch on Nexus. I finally took the time to reset my password on these forums. They seemed pretty dead for the longest time. I would have these discussions facebook (and began doing so for a bit), but due to professional concerns I must avoid social media.

Thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt. I did have rather good intentions when I originally posted the mod on nexus. I threw it together, had fun with it and thought I would share it.

I would really like to get more specific information as to just what I need to be doing to enhance the compatibility. And yes, Lore issues are the least of my concerns. With my approach being to enter FNC at some point after a standard TTW startup I have:

Altered the startup scripts to prevent FNC's new game prompt and default to TTW standard.
Created a transition script to handle the setup of the FNC gameworld mid-playthrough.
Tweaked the FNC vigor tester scripts so that you don't have to reallocate SPECIAL points.
Tweaked FNC endgame scripts to transport you back to the Mojave.
Resolved conflicts between TTW and FNC forms in FNVedit - typically reverting back to TTW standard.
Resolved potential dialogue conflicts between FNC and TTW.
Parsed out the meshes and textures used by both FNC and TTW and re-pathed assets that were altered for FNC so that the Mojave and DC are unaffected.

I don't doubt that I have more to do. I would truly appreciate a more specific critique.

[RoyBatty]

You must be still using 2.9, you cannot alter the startup for 3.2 it always goes to OUR quest, if you do your mod will break as we add new features and conflict with Alt Start when it comes out.

FNC needs to be cleaned and rebuilt to not conflict with TTW, nor need to be placed after FalloutNV.esm which will break a lot of stuff. It's a total conversion, and TTW is a total conversion. The depths of the things which are incompatible are great and deep, it's not something you can just make a patch for like that. This is exactly why neither they or I have done so, and won't do so.

It's entirely too much work and it has to be done on their end completely. I'm certainly not changing Fallout 3 in any way, not only would it break the game, but would completely invalidate any converted mods or any hope of compatibility with Fallout 3 content. TTW is far greater in scope than FNC is, and being an actual game from Bethesda, along with New Vegas being built entirely upon it (which is what makes TTW possible) there is just no room for compromise on that front.

This has already been explained many times, and appears to fall upon deaf ears. I and they are not being dicks or jerks here, this is the reality of it.

[Wowboy]

Thank you for responding. I have always appreciated your directness when addressing questions posed.

So, I think maybe I was not quite specific enough in what I stated. When I said "Startup Scripts" I was referring to the embedded scripts within the initial quest, VCG00. What I did with it is copy the code added by FNC for game setup and incorporate in my own startup script, called when it is time within the playthrough to set up the FNC gameworld. I then reverted all changes back to TTW standard. This allows the game to startup just as it does in vanilla TTW.

What exactly do you mean by "total conversion"? When I see the phrase total conversion, I think of a mod that essentially ditches all or the majority of vanilla assets and with new assets, creates an entirely new experience. Are we on the same page here?

That being said, I was a part of the FNC team a couple of years ago, doing a lot of testing for them, bug reporting, etc. back when the mod couldn't be played from start to finish. Regrettably, I had to step away to focus on other issues, but I've had access to the files for quite some time and have gone through them quite a bit. FNC goes a long way in retexturing existing meshes in FNV. This creates issues not only in TTW, but in base FNV. I've already gone and re-pathed a lot of the nastier offenders (textures that were changed to look aesthetically different in FNC than in FNV) and am now focusing on the less obvious conflicts (textures that vary in size, due to either the FNC team wanting a better resolution for aesthetics or a lower resolution for performance.)

Additionally, when making the patch, I obviously created it first in FNVedit, resolving conflicts between the FO3 esms, the TTW esm, and the FNC esm. I'm not going to list all the changes here, there were quite a few, and many were picked up in the data analysis report floating around on twitter and discord. You don't have to waste your time poring over this stuff. I know how to use FNVedit (I used the asset scripts there to see what assets were conflicting as well to give me a road map to work from.)

The only question I have is, beyond resolving form conflicts in FNVedit, beyond resolving asset path conflicts which have to be resolved in FNC anyway for it be truly compatible with base FNV, what else do I need to be looking at? I know TTW uses dll injection, but the source code is not public so I can't say with any degree of certainty what I need to account for with those.

Look, I get that this is a labor intensive task with a lot of monotonous grunt work (re-pathing) but I have a fair amount of free time right now. If the task is truly impossible, I would like to know why. If it would just take a long time, please point me in the specific direction I need to start from and off I will go.

[pintocat]

The main point was that 1) the DLL in TTW 3.2 forces the sCharGen quest to be ours, regardless of ini setting, so that users can no longer mess up/forget this step and 2) we don't want the patch to edit that quest of ours in case we have updates to it in the future and the patch gets out of step with TTW itself

[Wowboy]

If that's it, then I don't see a problem with the DLL conflicting. My personal approach has always been to play FNC within the bounds of a TTW play through. While I have toyed with the idea of a FNC start, it is low on the priorities list. Given this stipulation, I would shelve it indefinitely.

[RoyBatty]

For me a total conversion can be either a completely new game using the engine in question, or like TTW which makes massive changes to the game which essentially creates a new game, its not Fallout 3, it's not New Vegas, it's TTW based on the complexity involved. I treat it as it's own separate game and don't really care about compatibility as it's too constraining. FNC is essentially a new game as well, using the same platform but completely custom in most respects other than shared assets. This is no different than New Vegas itself which is basically a giant mod of Fallout 3 where they had access to the source code.

You've got most of it there from what you are saying, the main problem being asset conflicts. There is also leveled lists, form lists etc. Stuff like altering the fists to have the knockdown effect is a serious game changer that needs to be addressed. The settings in JIPLN may cause issues with FNC, I don't know how bullet proof the scripting in it is, my initial glance over the records just raised so many flags about stuff that had to be patched it quickly became something I didn't want to do, let alone QA.

Repathing all their changed assets alone is a huge task in an of itself, this was one of the main things and making sure stuff still worked correctly afterwards in both games. It should have been done that way from the start. All those nifs and texture sets and statics is a giant undertaking and not something most people are willing to do and QA.

It's just not something I wanted to do, and I don't think the FNC team wanted to do either based on conversations with Thaiauxn.

If you are willing to do all that work then by all means don't let me stop you, frankly it should be done in FNC itself, but I cannot make that call.