I'm baaaa-aaaack! For 1.1: for an existing savegame, just DROP any Masks you have already, then pick it back up. It will be renamed and reprocessed, lose the stupid [Helmet] prefix, and conform to the rules of any Inventory or Sorting mods you're using. New ones you find after updating will be correct.
SO uh. Wow. Major face palm. Looking inside the .esp it seems i gave the stupid thing the name of "[Helmet] Assault Gas Mask" (with rules to append the color variant, " - Grey Hood" etc ) which, of course, completely breaks its compatibility with any current Inventory or Sorting mods (most notably Fall UI suite). Derp. Apparently i had a brain fart regarding how sorting and tagging works when i put this together. WHY HAS NO ONE COMPLAINED ABOUT THIS IN THREE YEARS LMAO
New version with just this fix about to be uploaded, as soon as I package it. Your Inventory, sorting and tagging mods will then process the damn thing correctly and as expected. Sorry about that......
Coming Soon(tm):
Will be making more color variants in the near future, and will add the ability to craft it. No ETA yet, but keep an eye out!
Hey, pal, I dunno if you still float around these parts.. but I've learned quite a bit about xEdit since I first downloaded your mod. For example, how to nerf this OP armor :P
One thing I was curious about, the model itself. It's like, bigger than the vanilla one. So it tends to clip through certain armors that the previous one didn't or it just wasn't as noticeable. You should come out of retirement and make a new one that solves clipping issues :3
It is actually not bigger at all. it is literally using the vanilla mesh lol. All i changed were the textures. So if you notice clipping you never saw before - it's likely that one of my custom textures is more visible than the vanilla was and makes the vanilla clipping more obvious.
I don't think it's OP at all, tbh: look at the stats of the Army Helmet, for example (which exposes the face), or some of the masks that are forward-covering only while this is a fully enclosed metal helm with a hood to boot. That was the basis of my stats adjustment.
To compensate, I made them a LOT more rare, and jacked up the player level that they start appearing at.
But fair enough, if you're able to tweak the values to your own preference, that's what modding's all about!
Yeah, maybe it has always clipped and I just didn't notice it.. I was gonna open it in nifscope but I have no idea what I'm doing lol. It's not that big a deal anyways, tons of vanilla armor clip through vanilla models. Not even Bethesda can do it.
The armor isn't game breakingly OP, but it's def one of the best armors for head. Personally, I kept the same stats just reduced em by Bout ⅓ to ½ iirc.
False alarm then, it's by far and away the best visual redux of any armor I've ever come across on Nexus. :D
It is a solid metal skullfort, with a gas mask to boot... my feelings were, it SHOULD be the best protection for your head. The Ballistic protection of the Army Helmet combined with the energy resist from the heavy hood, plus one of the few items that protect your FACE.
So rather than make it unrealistically (to me) "balanced" by arbitrarily weakening it in some way, i decided to NOT add any fancy effects or doodads - for example it's incompatible with West Tek Optics, it can be mildly upgraded with Perks and mats but doesn't have 3243 legendary slots lol, stuff like that. This forces me to choose between the best protection available vs. situational, so for example to use my West Tek Nightvision or Target Highlighting I have to remove it and use something else.
The design i prefer in most game-things is to provide the player with tactical choices, so there isn't one "this is best always" but makes you decide what the greater risk is in each new situation- an exposed head, or falling off a cliff in the dark ;)
Ay, my man, metagaming is my arch nemesis. Dunno if you're familiar with the book on game design, but there's a chapter on dominant strategy. Basically, "if you provide a player with a superior strategy, they will use it." Are you gonna learn the combos, cancels and counters... Or just spam Hadoukens over and over if that wins faster?
When I first downloaded your mod, I had no idea how these systems worked. It was pure magic. I kind of wanted to stay ignorant, and not ruin the magic. I want my belief suspended. But over the years, and my experiences with using people's mods.. so many fuckin problems. There's always a bug, an exploit, an incompatibility.
But that's not what grinds my gonads.. it's when a mod claims to be balanced..and I find issues, report them, and get blasted for my insulence. My hand was forced and 6,000 hours later, I know more about Creation Engine than any of the games made with it. Considering the heroin like highs the dopamine hits have given me from figuring out and creating solutions to issues and balancing have given me.. id rather have not paid with my soul.
Yours was one of the first mods I edited when I was starting out. I never reported the [Helmet] thing or stuff like that, bc you were disappeared. It has been a non-issue for a while lol. As far as I'm concerned, it's in its final form. But I'm glad you've decided to come back and make stuff again, I'll be tracking for sure.
But now, that being said, if you'd like to discuss your perforation mod.. I got a couple of issues with it :p
Sorry for walk of text, I am suffering from an unspecified neurological degeneration. Cheers.
Not sure if you're still around, but I would suggest adding the ability to craft them once certain criteria have been reached. Not sure what exactly. Some combination of having certain perks and having some of the vanilla gas masks or something? Just thinking out loud. Or are they already craftable and I just can't find them?
They are not currently craftable, but I just fixed a stupid error in the mod and will be uploading that fix shortly; now that I'm looking at it again, I think i'd like to make some more color variants, and adding the ability to craft it seems like a no-brainer so I'll do that too. No ETA yet but i'm active again (new rig, new install of the game, 2 days spent rebuilding my load order lmao).
Right now it's total RNG. Once you're level 15+, if you wanna find a Navy version, seek out Raider spawns (as the helmet is in their leveled lists) until you spot a "volunteer" wearing the blue one ;).
Love the idea, but the colors seem a tad bit more vibrant than the rest of the game. Seems a bit out of place. Might just be me though.
(I don't remember the purple in the buildings... and your raider armor seems vibrant too? Your images have me all kinds of confused! Are you just using an enb? What's going on here lol)
If you decide to update this as a new item instead of a replacer, do you think you could add a green hood?
AN alternate version with muted colors to fit the base game would also be fantastic but I realize that I'm asking a lot here lol, so assuming you don't want to do any of that, I'll just learn about textures and do it myself when you eventually update the mod to add these as a new item.
I've been looking at this, and thinking it would be good to have these be standalone from the normal, shittier Assault Gas Mask. I'd rename the vanilla headgear to something like 'Damaged (Assault) Mask' and have it give maybe 5 or so DR/ER, with its patched up nature and such, while this one remains a fixed up, stronger and more reliable piece of armor that only starts to appear later on. I might do this myself for my own game, but I'm sure others would probably dig it too. Hell, if I manage to edit the plugin so the new mask with the tape-less texture and color swaps is standalone like I was saying and it all works fine, I can send you the esp if it sounds worth uploading.
That's not a bad plan, actually. If I can resist the urge to name the original "Shitty Assault Mask"
Seriously, I started this a looooong time ago for my own use and had local override files in place for ages before I made it more complete and useful to others.... so it's just edited textures, originally, replacing vanilla. Adding them as their own thing would be the correct way to do it. And I like your idea about nerfing the stats and having it at its original drop rates. Hopefully I'll have time to get to this soonish.
Thanks! Technically neither - it's a replacer for the vanilla "RaiderGreenHoodMaskblahetc" object, with three templates attached to it, so anything that calls the old Assault Gas Mask will get one of these variants randomly instead.
Because it is much stronger and more valuable now, the only change I made was to edit the baseline vanilla lists to make them appear slightly less often, otherwise you'd see them everywhere in every raider group right from level 1 which kinda kills it. Anything after this mod which alters vanilla lists will take precedence; and anything which adds to them via script injection will be compatible.
That's what I figured. Unfortunately I have several other mods which manually change lists, so I guess that particular balance change won't be seen, but putting it above the other .esps will still allow me to see the excellent cosmetic/stat differences. Raiders weren't all that difficult anyways ;)
Yeah, there are soooo many things all changing the same lists now that with new stuff I tend to lean towards making changes that will act as defaults or fallbacks if nothing else touches them, but doesn't interfere with other mods.
And hey I suppose your Raider NPCs' heads will be a little more durable now, at least xD
Thanks! Yeah, it's small and I thought about it but not sure I should on the first version of the upload in case it turned out I had to change anything.
Actually maybe i'll just make an esl version as an optional download.
I understand. ESL files on mods that may need to be updated are a pain for you and the user. CK does a poor job of assigning the records and I don't think it even cares about the esl flag.
For those mod users that don't know, once you start a game you don't want to change the formids on items. They are baked into the save and changing them can cause issues. When an author needs to update a mod that is an esl the MA runs the risk of of the CK reordering form ids and causing problems with save files based on the old ids. Sometimes the MA will wait until the mod is "finished" before releasing an esl version or put out an esl for "a new install or new games only".
If the CK would just optimize the formid creation on new mods then any mod that does not naturally go over the form limit could be flagged by the user as an esl.
21 comments
For 1.1: for an existing savegame, just DROP any Masks you have already, then pick it back up. It will be renamed and reprocessed, lose the stupid [Helmet] prefix, and conform to the rules of any Inventory or Sorting mods you're using. New ones you find after updating will be correct.
SO uh. Wow. Major face palm. Looking inside the .esp it seems i gave the stupid thing the name of "[Helmet] Assault Gas Mask" (with rules to append the color variant, " - Grey Hood" etc ) which, of course, completely breaks its compatibility with any current Inventory or Sorting mods (most notably Fall UI suite). Derp. Apparently i had a brain fart regarding how sorting and tagging works when i put this together. WHY HAS NO ONE COMPLAINED ABOUT THIS IN THREE YEARS LMAO
New version with just this fix about to be uploaded, as soon as I package it. Your Inventory, sorting and tagging mods will then process the damn thing correctly and as expected. Sorry about that......
Will be making more color variants in the near future, and will add the ability to craft it. No ETA yet, but keep an eye out!
One thing I was curious about, the model itself. It's like, bigger than the vanilla one. So it tends to clip through certain armors that the previous one didn't or it just wasn't as noticeable. You should come out of retirement and make a new one that solves clipping issues :3
It is actually not bigger at all. it is literally using the vanilla mesh lol. All i changed were the textures. So if you notice clipping you never saw before - it's likely that one of my custom textures is more visible than the vanilla was and makes the vanilla clipping more obvious.
I don't think it's OP at all, tbh: look at the stats of the Army Helmet, for example (which exposes the face), or some of the masks that are forward-covering only while this is a fully enclosed metal helm with a hood to boot. That was the basis of my stats adjustment.
To compensate, I made them a LOT more rare, and jacked up the player level that they start appearing at.
But fair enough, if you're able to tweak the values to your own preference, that's what modding's all about!
Yeah, maybe it has always clipped and I just didn't notice it.. I was gonna open it in nifscope but I have no idea what I'm doing lol. It's not that big a deal anyways, tons of vanilla armor clip through vanilla models. Not even Bethesda can do it.
The armor isn't game breakingly OP, but it's def one of the best armors for head. Personally, I kept the same stats just reduced em by Bout ⅓ to ½ iirc.
False alarm then, it's by far and away the best visual redux of any armor I've ever come across on Nexus. :D
It is a solid metal skullfort, with a gas mask to boot... my feelings were, it SHOULD be the best protection for your head. The Ballistic protection of the Army Helmet combined with the energy resist from the heavy hood, plus one of the few items that protect your FACE.
So rather than make it unrealistically (to me) "balanced" by arbitrarily weakening it in some way, i decided to NOT add any fancy effects or doodads - for example it's incompatible with West Tek Optics, it can be mildly upgraded with Perks and mats but doesn't have 3243 legendary slots lol, stuff like that. This forces me to choose between the best protection available vs. situational, so for example to use my West Tek Nightvision or Target Highlighting I have to remove it and use something else.
The design i prefer in most game-things is to provide the player with tactical choices, so there isn't one "this is best always" but makes you decide what the greater risk is in each new situation- an exposed head, or falling off a cliff in the dark ;)
When I first downloaded your mod, I had no idea how these systems worked. It was pure magic. I kind of wanted to stay ignorant, and not ruin the magic. I want my belief suspended. But over the years, and my experiences with using people's mods.. so many fuckin problems. There's always a bug, an exploit, an incompatibility.
But that's not what grinds my gonads.. it's when a mod claims to be balanced..and I find issues, report them, and get blasted for my insulence. My hand was forced and 6,000 hours later, I know more about Creation Engine than any of the games made with it. Considering the heroin like highs the dopamine hits have given me from figuring out and creating solutions to issues and balancing have given me.. id rather have not paid with my soul.
Yours was one of the first mods I edited when I was starting out. I never reported the [Helmet] thing or stuff like that, bc you were disappeared. It has been a non-issue for a while lol. As far as I'm concerned, it's in its final form. But I'm glad you've decided to come back and make stuff again, I'll be tracking for sure.
But now, that being said, if you'd like to discuss your perforation mod.. I got a couple of issues with it :p
Sorry for walk of text, I am suffering from an unspecified neurological degeneration. Cheers.
(I don't remember the purple in the buildings... and your raider armor seems vibrant too? Your images have me all kinds of confused! Are you just using an enb? What's going on here lol)
If you decide to update this as a new item instead of a replacer, do you think you could add a green hood?
AN alternate version with muted colors to fit the base game would also be fantastic but I realize that I'm asking a lot here lol, so assuming you don't want to do any of that, I'll just learn about textures and do it myself when you eventually update the mod to add these as a new item.
Cool stuff!
Seriously, I started this a looooong time ago for my own use and had local override files in place for ages before I made it more complete and useful to others.... so it's just edited textures, originally, replacing vanilla. Adding them as their own thing would be the correct way to do it. And I like your idea about nerfing the stats and having it at its original drop rates. Hopefully I'll have time to get to this soonish.
Because it is much stronger and more valuable now, the only change I made was to edit the baseline vanilla lists to make them appear slightly less often, otherwise you'd see them everywhere in every raider group right from level 1 which kinda kills it. Anything after this mod which alters vanilla lists will take precedence; and anything which adds to them via script injection will be compatible.
And hey I suppose your Raider NPCs' heads will be a little more durable now, at least xD
Actually maybe i'll just make an esl version as an optional download.
For those mod users that don't know, once you start a game you don't want to change the formids on items. They are baked into the save and changing them can cause issues. When an author needs to update a mod that is an esl the MA runs the risk of of the CK reordering form ids and causing problems with save files based on the old ids. Sometimes the MA will wait until the mod is "finished" before releasing an esl version or put out an esl for "a new install or new games only".
If the CK would just optimize the formid creation on new mods then any mod that does not naturally go over the form limit could be flagged by the user as an esl.