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Two Months +/- in, tons of downloads, some significant hiccups along the way (Download corruption for the first several weeks) but we are past that....
That said I'm in the middle of overhauling the mod completely, which is part of the reason I'm a little MIA... But it needs to be done for 3 major reasons...
1) LooksMenuby Expired6978. Compatibility.
expired6978, with a little begging, has been working on Setting up complete body swap functionality for LooksMenuby Expired6978.
This will allow swapping of of the "Body", Face and Rear head as a linked group.
Early testing shows some texture configurations work better than others, with the MNAM style seeming the "king"...
This means I need to do the following
-Rebuild all 600 +/- Texture Sets, creating linked Material files, for every current Texture set. In the process create some more for things I linked before, but will work better as standalone textures.
I've more than 20 logged hours into that part, and I'm slightly more than half way in (there is a second reason it's taking so long, mentioned it part #2)
-Make Face Textures and RearHeadparts for every Skinset that needs it, that I skipped before.
-Once completed and Testing successful, create a JSON with every combo baked in, for all more than 300+ skin Combos, and then verify functionality. Example of what it will look like
Spoiler:
Show
I also need to export all of the Bodyslider sets I have permission for, via script provided by expired6978 into a file, to allow for additional body size Randomization (Seriously check out the Looksmenu page for that feature, seriously awesome!).
2) Rebuilding the NPC's, all 3,899 of them (no seriously) to increase stability...
But likely not that way you think....
Prompted by some EXCEPTIONAL troubleshooting by Reidlos (Serious check the Comments section for that thread, great info) and the results I repeated some of the tests described and could reproduce some of the results.
This prompted a Chat with ousnius, the Brilliant mind behind BodySlide and Outfit Studioby Ousnius and Caliente etc. who brought to light the fact the engine can only handle "X" number of Dynamic NPC's.
Dynamic NPC's are NPC's without Exported Face Geometry, basically a linked head nif, face texture, generated by Creation kit.
Now this likely explains why some people can run Unique NPC's without too many issues, but others reports instability and random CTDs. Most of
those people had exceptionally bad Load orders (ya ya my personal "Go
to" explanation and a good chunk of them who spent the time to optimize
their plugin list saw significant increases in stability, (See article
Two "Load Order is King").
This is something I knew that had to be done, but it is an insane amount of work, troubleshooting etc.
One of the major issues was the "size" of the Exported data.
When I did a Sample export before launching Unique NPC's I ran into problems, and those that did export lead me to believe it would be around 2 - 4gb's worth of face textures.
This sounds like a ton, but keep in mind Unique NPC's has roughly *DOUBLE the base NPC's Vanilla Fallout 4 has in the Vanilla Game.
(*Fallout 4 has roundly 1,000'ish "Faces", and has about 2,000 Leveled actors, creatures, NPC's used for unseen faces etc)
Thankfully one of the hurdles preventing this, "Indexed BA2's" (Fallout4 - Textures1.BA2, etc.), has been overcome, I've successfully Indexed (Unique NPC's - Textures1.BA2, Unique NPC's - Textures2.BA2, etc.) thanks to the help of jonwd7 (Nifscope guy) and expired6978.
To make all of this work worth it, I need to make Unique NPC's a "Closed System".
Every NPC in it needs to reference a face texture and rearhead part (it's part of the head, even if it uses a body texture) that is locked in and can't be touched by the people using Unique NPC's.
Again check out the post by Reidlos for the details, but the short version is if you change the face texture for an NPC, by installing one to use, you force the game to work harder as it assigns that face and changes the rendering of the NPCs. It's less significant for NPC's with exported Face Geometry, but it's still a factor.
If this sounds like a good deal of work, I've not hit the worst part.....
Problem 1:
A couple other authors suggested, or had configured in their NPC's rolled into Unique NPC's, that the flag "Is CharGen Face Preset" be flagged, and I had been slowly converting the NPC's over to that, that were not flagged.
Turns out that flag prevents Creation Kit from generating and exporting Face Geometry, which I discovered after a couple hours of frustration and troubleshooting.
I have to disable that flag, but thanks to the help of another author, robboten the mind behind Snappy HouseKit the insanity of disabling that flag by hand has been alleviated. He created a script for me to run to check for that flag and remove it. This was possible because of the prompting of MunkySpunk (seriously prolific author who has something amazing on the horizon) because I'm terrible at asking for help (or even thinking of asking for it).
Problem 2:
I have to check every exported Face texture set. It turns out NPC's can be valid without certain data in their records on the Face Morph table, but when exported if it's not present the generated Face Texture will be "black" in those areas.
One of the first successful test Exports was missing Morph data for the Neck, and it exported a face texture with the bottom 1/3 completely black.
Upside, thanks to kkthebeast, I have a great program built into Windows to allow quicker previews of texture files.
So wrapping up....
None of this means Unique NPC's can't be used, is unsafe or "bad", it just means I need to further optimize it to make it the best possible mod it can be.
It means the mod is going to grown in size, significantly, but is also going to, once the LooksMenuby Expired6978 compatibility is built in, bring some amazing new features. One of the early tests allowed me to change a Human NPC to a Ghoul, and the reverse. This should also work on the Player, which will open up the possibility for new "races".
I don't have an ETA yet, and I'm responsible for a couple other Mods, but working on it hard
If anyone likes mindnumbing tasks and wants to help with this, I'd welcome it.
-I could use help with creating the exported bodyslider sets. Need a general understanding of the script expired6978 created (I can provide it).
-I could use help creating the Skin.JSON allowing for player usage of the skinsets built into Unique NPC's.
Credit of course, etc. etc....
.
If you've got questions, I'll try to answer them!
6 comments
But mainly - more important than better faces or fewer CTD's - less underwear, please.
Rebalancing a number of the skins as well, reducing some sets, increasing some of the non-tattooed frequency and if I have the time will work on the inverted never nude (EVB male)