Dawngate, Fallout and Graphic Content

This is probably old news to many, but Elisabeth Hunter (Meresine, Falatild, Caylene) has voiced another Dawngate character for EA, Sakari.

According to the official website, every decade Sakari’s tribe puts their most beloved youth adrift on an ice floe, offered as a spouse to the Spirits of the north for good weather and fine hunting. Wow. That’s some fucked up shit. Hopefully Elisabeth was the ice floe-tee and not the ice floe-ter.

In any case, pretty cool to hear her voice attached to a pro project. In other news:

Lastly, I’m putting together some short little vignettes for both Fallout 3 and New Vegas to pass the time while I decompose. A couple background NPCs in Goodsprings, and maybe a short quest for Fallout 3. More to come as I figure out how to GECK.

 

11 thoughts on “Dawngate, Fallout and Graphic Content

  1. Fallout 3 desperately needs more interesting NPCs. I played that game only once and I’ve been waiting for a good follower mod to make me go back to it while waiting for Fallout 4, but still no hope. On the other hand I’ve played New Vegas far too many times so only high quality Kris style companions would make me give it another try.

    1. Yeah, I’m learning fast and making good progress on this thing, but my god GECK can be frustrating because unlike the Creation Kit, the scenes are so easily broken. So you have to be gentle with the AI packages, or get rid of them all together, or make it so the scenes are superfluous if they break.

      I just spent 4 hours trying to choreograph something that would take 10 minutes in the CK. And I’m still unsure of whether it will fire correctly every time.

      But yeah, I might be done with my first FO3 quest by the weekend. Voices though might take a while. Might have to reach out to actors instead of waiting for auditions.

  2. Do you know modders with extensive GECK knowledge? Maybe they can ease your way into GECK. But yeah, that 4 hours :10 minutes ratio is harsh. GECK seems like a painful tool to work with.

    On the other hand, if you succeed in bringing life to Fallout 3 like you’ve done already with Skyrim, well…I wouldn’t know what to say. I already think what you’ve done to Skyrim is pretty impressive, so if you accomplish that epic gesture again I promise I’ll build a Kris shrine and pray to it whenever some good writing is needed.

    1. It’s not so much lack of knowledge, it’s just the fragility of doing scenes, which it feels like GECK isn’t designed for.

      In the Creation Kit, they created a separate section for scenes which can have their own AI packages and can be flagged as more or less indestructible by the player (the “This person is busy” thing). So I can have the person “sit down and say this” or “walk over here while saying that”

      In GECK, it’s almost like each individual string of dialogue in a scene is held together by a fraying thread, and adding AI packages or player interruption to the equation can break them. So in the above example, telling the person to sit or walk while talking can break things. So it’s hard to choreograph a person to act a certain way while doing a scene – like say, talking to someone then leaning on a table or lighting up a cigarette in the middle of her talk. Instead, you have to put her on the table and smoke before the scene starts, then pray to god she doesn’t move or smoke afterward or else shit breaks. At least, this is my limited, amateur understanding of how it works. I’m sure there are ways around these problems.

      Still, none of the above would matter in the Creation Kit because you attach an AI package to each individual string of dialogue, and you can control how easily it breaks.

  3. OT but what is it about NMM users that makes them such a peevish and querulous lot? I’ve never had people using Mod Organiser or Bash or manual installers come in to complain and insult. Whether one keeps 3dnpc NMM-downloadable or not, one way or another they seem to find a whole lot of nits to pick. *shakes head*

  4. And yes, scenes (as we know them) and aliases and all that are pretty new to Bethesda modding (as I generally think of TES/Fallout modding). Looks like one of the purposes of overhauling the old Gamebryo was to have inbuilt coding support for them, which is why it’s such a pita in Geck. If only there was an uninterruptible flag to tick somewhere.

  5. Damn, Kris, it seems very complex to create a scene without breaking it then.

    Probably, like you said, there must be a workaround for it. I think there is a quest mod for Fallout 3 (“Ties that Bind – a narrative mod-“) in which they make up a sister for the main character and she has a lot of scenes so maybe you can ask them how they managed not to brake them?

    Nonoodles! Don’t put all NMM users in the same bag! XD …Yes, I use it just because it’s the only one I’ve tried (I am Rumarin lazy) but I also read everything the mod author says in the description. If the description says it’s easier just to drop the files in the data folder or wherever, I just do that. I don’t understand why people don’t do that with 3dNPC. It’s the easier way for everything to work perfectly and personally I think I’ve had like two 3dNPC bugs in 400 hours. Anyway, people love complaining, sadly.

  6. Lol, I don’t really. There’s numeriku, who has been a perfect angel with answers, and she uses NMM. I was on the verge of blue boxing her but…the view looks different when you’ve got a blue box around your comments than when you’re simply popping in and out to answer. In any case, I’d never inflict anybody with Nexus page responsibilities. xD (Unedjis excepted. But I did get his consent first, lol)

    For the record, I’ve used NMM back in the early days and it’s a very decent app, user-friendly etc. I think I endorsed it. But you know how the saying goes, a tool is only as good as the primate using it. : D

    Anyways, @Kris, rather than suffer through another lengthy bout of ignorance, insults – however veiled- and truculence, I’m either going to rule that page with an iron fist and delete any and all comments not deemed relevant to the mod, or put it in lockdown. Trying to be minimally civil and drop polite hints doesn’t work either, as that weird experience with that one dude who kept on spamming about follower mods showed. Clearly, it’s a lose-lose situation haha.

    And just to keep this on topic – it’s not so much getting scenes to work per se, more about how he wants random multiple-npc conversations to work. Kris and I went through a session of figuring it out. The scene itself isn’t hard to set up, there were/are other factors involved and those are much easier in Skyrim since the game supports it. *supports it inherently with Actor Dialogue Event. And other ways.

  7. Ah, ok. Thanks for elaborating on the scenes topic, nonoodles. That explains it. Seems like you are gonna have a headache or two with your GECK friend :(

    PS: Why in Gorr‘s name would anyone get into 3dNPC nexus page to insult anybody? Damn. I am sorry that you have to put up with that. I would say, if people are not reasonable, iron fist away.

    1. Well, sigh, went back in and deleted a bunch of related comments after a strong cup of tea. Apparently there was a whole lot of partying while I was AFK, enough to attract the attention of a moderator.

      Soo…dunno what happened overnight, but for example: among the deleted comments was someone doling some rigmarole about databases and file management, no doubt their roundabout way of saying how much we suck for taking away the NMM option, leaving them blind and helpless re:file version numbers, ahaha. Numeriku tries to help out this person and all they can do is virtually call her (and me, but that’s kind of incidental) a fool for not understanding databases or some other similar crap. Database lolwut tell me another one. In any case, not going to subject her or anybody else to this sort of rubbish so yep, iron-clad fist here we come.

      edit – sorry, I know your question was rhetorical. I don’t know why some mods seem to attract…controversy more than others. It’s almost a pity 3DNPC is as high up on the list of top mods or whatever it is that keeps drawing this type of user. Makes me think back to the days when Wars in Skyrim was still around. That mod had more trolls, abusive comments and whiners than any mod I’ve ever known. The author did the sensible thing and left the site.

  8. It would be a shame if you guys have to leave the nexus. I would say the iron-clad fist should work fine (I hope). I just think that when a mod is as popular as 3dNPC is, it’s kinda like a given that in the same way that nice people stop by to say hi and thank the mod authors or ask something politely, you also get rude people and trolls (that also like to be very vocal). It’s kinda sad for that to happen but the 3dNPC numbers are huge (1 million unique downloads!) and is also the first mod in its category. Let’s hope iron-clad works.

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