With the exception of potential bug fixes, the Diverse Railroad main file is complete. Additional content will be in the form of an "Immersion Pack" and/or compatibility patches. If you have any requests or recommendations for such content, feel free to post your suggestions below.
I've experienced this before, but it isn't a problem with the file; rather, it is a "conflict" between Nexus and Windows Defender. It'll sort itself out eventually, but if you don't feel like waiting, temporarily disabling Windows Defender will allow you to download the file.
Just letting you know that I encountered one single invisible legendary railroad agent a day or two ago. I've had many, many RR agents spawn, but it was only this one that spawned invis - just a floating legendary sword (kinda funny actually, lol). This one did not have the synth 1/2 voice though, for some reason. It had a regular human voice.
Some of the Railroad agents I find in-game have no voices and their mouths don't move (though subtitles do appear) and I'm trying to find the cause. From playing around in xEdit, I've found that about half the NPCs added by this mod use the MaleBoston/FemaleBoston voices, whereas every other Railroad agent NPC I can find, both in the vanilla base game and ones added by other Railroad mods I use, exclusively use the MaleEvenToned/FemaleEvenToned voice. Likewise, when searching on the wiki, I can only find references crediting Brandon Keener and Misty Lee (MaleEvenToned and FemaleEvenToned respectively) as the voices of all the Railroad agents. There's no mention of Brian Frates or Mandy Kaplan (MaleBoston and FemaleBoston respectively) having voiced any Railroad agents. So could it be that the MaleBoston and FemaleBoston voice types have no lines recorded for Railroad agents, thus why I'm getting no voices on random Railroad agents? Or do they have voice lines recorded for those voice types and the cause of my problem is some other mod conflict? I'm hesitant to submit this as a bug report since I'm not sure if this mod is the cause or not, but I'd still greatly appreciate any knowledge you'd be willing to share. For now, I'm going to switch all the voices of the NPCs added by this mod to EvenToned to see if that solves my problem.
Your detective work is likely accurate. I've run into this before where certain factions/NPC groups use only one or two voice types. The wastelander faction, for instance, uses the male/female rough voice only. Far Harbor settlers use only even tone for females, while the males use only even tone and Maine accent. I wouldn't have expected this from the Railroad since they draw from so many face pools beyond their own. I'll post a corrected version ASAP, but until then, thanks for the heads up.
The "Diverse" series mods are already compatible with the other "Synthetic Facelift" mods, so this should be compatible too. I'll check just to be sure, though.
Edit: Seems I already checked this one back in November, so you should be good to go.
"Diverse Children of Atom" is next. I just have to look at the new faces in game to see if they work. If everything looks good, I'll post it within the next 24 hours.
One challenge I've noted is that this, and the rest of your Diverse series, conflicts with the leveled character records in the excellent Gender Ratios mod (lets the user define male vs female spawning frequency for various NPC pools). I haven't looked yet to see what would be involved in creating a compatibility patch, though will likely wait until development on these settles down a bit.
Based on the file contents, "Gender Ratios" looks like it does its thing via scripts, which likely places it beyond my ability to patch. I'll take a closer look at some point, though.
Theoretically, I could go the "Better Settlers" route and make mostly male/female variants, clean/dirty face variants, and so forth, but that's something for the future, if at all. These "Diverse" mods aren't terribly difficult to produce, but the work is tedious and requires a lot of time, so I'm not too keen on going back through them and creating all of these variations (and combinations thereof), especially when the series will likely have at least a dozen entries when all is said and done.
The script is pretty simple and probably wouldn't need to change. In essence, it operates on the genderless LVLN records, wiping them and then repopulating them with proportionally more or fewer of the corresponding gendered LVLNs. Take for example the Children of Atom... the script empties the contents from LCharChildrenOfAtomFaces and then adds some number of copies of LCharChildrenOfAtomFacesFemale and LCharChildrenOfAtomFacesMale, varying the number of copies of each in order to match the gender ratio configured for Children of Atom in its MCM.
Looking closer, since you already populate the gender-specific lists in the Diverse mods, putting Gender Ratios later in the load order will probably "just work" (praise be unto Todd!) because Gender Ratios merely uses those directly to create contents for the ungendered lists. The only reason it alters the ungendered lists in its plugin is to empty them completely of any preexisting default entries.
So long-winded way of saying probably no patch required, just try to make sure you keep up the gender-specific lists and tell people to make sure Gender Ratios loads after all the Diverse mods.
Interesting and makes sense, except for BoS, which doesn't have gender-specific lists to draw on to repopulate the master list. That faction has only LCharBoSTraitsSoldier for all of the non-unique adult BoS faces. The script must call on something else, too, in order to work with the BoS. Maybe the Female flag in ACBS - Configuration?
Edit: Cracked open "Gender Ratio" to see what's going on. It creates new gender specific lists for groups/factions that don't have them, which is how it works with BoS. Loading after any "Diverse" mods, as you suggested, looks like the correct approach. If that doesn't work, I'll consider making a patch for the eventual AiO, but not the individual entries since it would likely require dozens of patches to account for all of the combinations one might use.
That said, I was thinking about making new gender specific lists for the groups/factions that don't have them, but I wasn't sure if it would be possible. Now I know it is.
Right, for pools where Beth inconsistently got lazy and didn't create gender-specific lists, a patch for Gender Ratios would be awesome (if you use the same LVLN names for them, you could even trivially forward the record from a future Diverse Brotherhood or whatever into the patch and, boom, Todd's your uncle).
"Gender Ratios" uses the same naming conventions for new lists as Bethesda used for vanilla lists, so I expect to do the same when the time comes. However, if you can confirm the "Gender Ratios" works simply by loading after any "Diverse" mods, that'll definitely save some time.
Yes, I've been using them together that way for a while now and am seeing your awesome new NPCs but with the ratio of genders I expect for each different pool.
I don't have any save games far enough along to really see the new faces in action. Instead, I have to spawn them with the console and look for any weirdness, so I'm glad to know they're working as intended. The lists still skew towards males, but with so many new faces on the female side, there should be a lot more variety, even without a mostly male/female mod in play.
My ultimate goal is to add enough faces to the various lists that even places like Gunner's Plaza or Corvega won't have duplicate faces. I'd like to set up a cache system, too, that prevents faces from repeating until all other faces on the same list have spawned. That would make repetition within any particular NPC encounter nearly impossible.
21 comments
Completed Patches
Diverse Railroad - Sim Settlements 2 - Compat
Patch Requests
None at present.
Edit: Done.
edit: sorry about the text I must have had this mods name on my mind instead of synthetic facelift
Edit: Seems I already checked this one back in November, so you should be good to go.
One challenge I've noted is that this, and the rest of your Diverse series, conflicts with the leveled character records in the excellent Gender Ratios mod (lets the user define male vs female spawning frequency for various NPC pools). I haven't looked yet to see what would be involved in creating a compatibility patch, though will likely wait until development on these settles down a bit.
Theoretically, I could go the "Better Settlers" route and make mostly male/female variants, clean/dirty face variants, and so forth, but that's something for the future, if at all. These "Diverse" mods aren't terribly difficult to produce, but the work is tedious and requires a lot of time, so I'm not too keen on going back through them and creating all of these variations (and combinations thereof), especially when the series will likely have at least a dozen entries when all is said and done.
Looking closer, since you already populate the gender-specific lists in the Diverse mods, putting Gender Ratios later in the load order will probably "just work" (praise be unto Todd!) because Gender Ratios merely uses those directly to create contents for the ungendered lists. The only reason it alters the ungendered lists in its plugin is to empty them completely of any preexisting default entries.
So long-winded way of saying probably no patch required, just try to make sure you keep up the gender-specific lists and tell people to make sure Gender Ratios loads after all the Diverse mods.
Edit: Cracked open "Gender Ratio" to see what's going on. It creates new gender specific lists for groups/factions that don't have them, which is how it works with BoS. Loading after any "Diverse" mods, as you suggested, looks like the correct approach. If that doesn't work, I'll consider making a patch for the eventual AiO, but not the individual entries since it would likely require dozens of patches to account for all of the combinations one might use.
That said, I was thinking about making new gender specific lists for the groups/factions that don't have them, but I wasn't sure if it would be possible. Now I know it is.
My ultimate goal is to add enough faces to the various lists that even places like Gunner's Plaza or Corvega won't have duplicate faces. I'd like to set up a cache system, too, that prevents faces from repeating until all other faces on the same list have spawned. That would make repetition within any particular NPC encounter nearly impossible.