About this image

Crime And Punishment - Roadmap

Now that I have revealed my next mod and shown a few screenshots of it in action, relating specifically to the crime and justice aspects of the mod, as well as highlighting, very high level, how it works, I thought I would take a few moments to go over the road ahead, so that you can get a basic idea of where things stand in development and how far out a potential release is.

• At the moment, I am working on a sub-system to the Bounty Hunter functions that will allow you to take on bounties from the agent in Diamond City Security. These bounties are for named raider and triggermen bosses, but may potentially include gunner and super mutant bosses as well, if doing so fits the narrative I am trying to build. My mindset at the moment is to not include those two factions and to use them for another purpose relating to community service tasks. This subsystem is rather complicated to get working, simply because of how Bethesda made the named raider bosses function, as they are unique named NPCs that once killed, are replaced by generic bosses. This was done to allow Radiant Quests to function with a location reftype of BOSS, such as kidnapped settlers or clearing out a location. Without a BOSS location reftype, those quests would fail to start and that would break the Radiant Quest system, more or less. So, because of how they swap out the actors with generic bosses when you kill them, they cannot simply be referenced in the way normal generic NPCs can be, due to their use of Parent Enable on their location reference records. I am in the process of working around this and recent tests have shown it to be successful, however, putting this method into work as a means to accept and collect on bounties is still ongoing and presents additional technical challenges. I am confident that I will resolve it, since the hardest part has already been overcome.
  

• Once the Bounty Hunter system, top to bottom, is complete, I will move on to Stalkers. These NPCs are generic and function based on your SOCIAL layer, meaning, the activities that are not considered illegal. Of course, your CRIME layer will also impact them, but they are driven mostly by the SOCIAL layer. Putting these NPCs into place will be relatively simple as they only need to have NPC records made, with leveled character records as well as leveled lists (for weapons and inventory), as well as an outfit form, so that users may create their own patches to change who stalker are dressed, should they want. Also, they will need generic travel packages to control how the follow the player around and also to determine how they will behave if confronted by the player, either by fleeing, fighting or engaging in dialogue. Dialogue itself will need to be constructed. And then I want to tie the whole system into player sleep and/or traveling at night in unnamed locations (in the CK, these are WILDERNESS locations), places were there aren't settlements or anything else - we can call them highly unsafe locations, for all intents and purposes. And based on those sleep / travel conditions, I will create scripted scenes and outcomes. Again, all of this sounds involved, but it really is quite simple.
  

• After Stalkers, I will work on lynch mobs, which are spawned raider gangs that will come after the player every 'x' time they kill a boss level raider NPC, be they named (unique) or a generic leveled NPC with the location reftype of boss. This is simple. Basically requires a check against total raider bosses killed and then spawning them into the world with a travel to player package applied to them. No dialogue, no scenes, just straight up combat, revenge style, for messing up the raider lifestyle.
  

• There are aspects of this mod that I have NOT spoken about yet and some of them are already in place. I may have actually hinted at working on such things, I can't recall, but I am rewriting some of the game's quests, via scripting so as to not override any forms in the Fallout4.esm file. I already have one MAJOR section of the game completely rewritten to use a KARMA SYSTEM, where your choice, at a critical moment, affects the outcome. Where once there were HINTS and THREATS of an outcome, I have taken those and made them a reality, completely via scripting. The whole scenario I am referencing has been well tested and functions flawlessly as it stands. And when I say that this one thing can change a GREAT DEAL about the game for you, I am not kidding in any way shape or form. Now, regarding this, I am in the process of working on other QUEST and FACTION related outcomes, karma based, that are derived by your actions and choices and will impact the entire game for you, in much the same way that the one mentioned above does. It is here that I have been consulting with top-tier mod authors to ensure I will not break their mods by the things that I will be doing. One such thing I am working on is to gauge your SOCIAL standing and if it is shitty and gets shittier, you will start losing settlements and all NPCs (including turrets) in that settlement will become hostile to the player, forcing you to retake it through violence. I am considering adding a second layer to this to allow for a peaceful arbitration that could see you regain the settlement without bloodshed. Companions will not be impacted by this, although hired tier four vendors surely will be. On this particular part of the mod, I have consulted with Kinggath to ensure that removing settlements will not affect Sim Settlements. The method I outlined wanting to use is the precise one that he himself uses when testing such things, and he has assured me that doing so will not cause issues with Sim Settlements. Conquerors is a different story though and I think that I will actively block the settlement karma outcomes if Conquerors is found to be installed, simply because of the way settlements work in Conquerors and how it is completely different to the regular system that the base game and Sim Settlements uses.
  

In a nutshell, that are SOME of the major things I have remaining before the mod could even be consider as a release candidate, although there are plenty of other things I haven't mentioned that surely need to be handled and tested rigorously as well. Not the least of which is deciding if I want to try to track down about 5-8 people to do some small levels of voice work for Bounty Hunters, Stalkers, Diamond City Guards and other NPCs.

Either way it pans out, at least you can see where the mod is going, even if you don't see the WHOLE picture of what it already does. You will get ALL of that information later. Its just all highly complex to share at the moment, especially since the mod is still kind of fluid in what it does and what it will do. No matter how it ends up, understanding this mod will be a complex matter, as the MCM already has over 100 controls in it and I am sure that will only continue to grow.

Thats about all I had to share at this point. Again, more information will appear later. I will try my best to answer any question posed, provided of course, it is information I am ready to share.

One question I can proactively answer right now is that this mod will NOT be compatible with any of my previous RSE / RSE II mods (or any "adult" mods for that matter). Crime And Punishment is highly compatible with Advanced Needs 2 however, since I coded CAP to communicate with AN2, to prevent strange things from happening at the wrong times.