I am currently working on a custom race mod and have a few quick questions...

1.) I know if FO3 there was an issue with the age for custom races and problems that could be encountered through a normal play-through. Is there anything similar i need to watch out for in NV?

2.) I know in FO3 using the showracemenu option in game would screw up your traits. Is this bug still present in NV? If so is there any workaround? I intend for the custom race to be played from scratch but people are people and i know they will want the option to convert their current character.

3.) Are there any other things I should be aware of when creating a custom race?

Thank you all in advance

1) As long as you include a child/old form of your race you should be ok. I don't believe there's any issues specifically with NV though.

2) So far I haven't lost any perks/traits with using the showracemenu, but that doesn't mean there's no issue. YMMV.

3) Nothing I'm aware of. I'm using a custom race I designed and haven't found any problems yet.

OK thanks for the reply

I was just testing out some things and did find a perk bug, relating to Intense Training specifically, it appears that I loose the stat point by using showracemenu. Gonna have to play around with it some more.

Changing race with showracemenu still resets most perk effects. The only way around it to my knowledge is to remove and re-add the perks. I like to keep an up to date batch file so I can do it easily, but you still have to add all the perk ids by hand. It would be nice if there were some script you could run (maybe with NVSE?) that would dump all the ids of the perks you currently have into a text file for this purpose.

Good to know. I seem to recall in FO:3 if you used showracemenu it would actually drop the perks. Hmm... guess I need to dig some more then since my character may be messed up.

If you started the custom race from scratch you shouldn't have any problems. The bug occurs when you take an existing character and change their race after the fact using showracemenu

Would it be possible to create a script in G.E.C.K that would allow a player to change their race at an NPC? Have the script get their perk profile then reset it for them after the switch? I am no stranger to scripting / coding and I would be more than willing to do this, however i admit I am not up to snuff on all the scripting functions for this yet so I am not sure this would even be possible. Any know?

The only way I could see a script would be to use HasPerk and AddPerk. It's been a long time since I've done any scripting but I believe something like this would work:

Set up global booleans for each perk.

Before the race change run the following. Basically set up an if...endif block for each perk

If player.HasPerk GunNut  set gvarGunNutBool to 1endifIf player.HasPerk [next]  set gvarNextPerk to 1endif

After the race change execute the following for each perk.

If gvarGunNutBool == 1  player.AddPerk GunNutend if

This wouldn't take into account any addon perks either. Not sure if NVSE will have anyway to walk the perk chain to see if things are set. There may be a simpler way, and if so I'd love to hear it also.

I defiantly see what you are getting at. I am going to have to dig into the scripting and see what I can figure out.. at the very least it looks like it MAY be possible which is nice. When you refer to ad don perks are you referring to the ones you get from challenges? I am also curious how companion perks would be handled.

For that matter i wonder if the bug would still exist by simply launching the showracemenu via a NPC script. I'll test it out and let you know

OK i finally got around to trying to get this script working and there are defiantly a few snags.

Checking to see if a player has the perk, removing it and re-adding it is defiantly pretty straight forward EXCEPT FOR:

1.) Perks that have multiple ranks
2.) Perks that call upon a quest to do something special (I.e. Intense Training specifically, there are a few others)

Here are the major bottle necks:

Say a player has Toughness Rank 3

player.RemovePerk Toughness will actually remove all 3 ranks of the perk so there is no way I can see to "count" how many ranks of a perk a player has since RemovePerk only returns a 1 or 0 if the player has the perk or not. I see no comparable function to return the rank.

Next problem is with something like Intense Training. Even if I can resolve the rank issue, say a player has Intense Training Rank 4 and put 2 points in STR and 2 points in AGL.

player.RemovePerk Intense Training only removes the 4 ranks of Intense Training but DOES NOT remove the the 2 points of STR and 2 points of AGL. I tracked down the quest scripts that drive this perk and tried various methods of quest manipulation including resetting the quest altogether and could not get rid of the added points. I have not checked but I would assume perks like Tag! would yield the same result as well.

So.....

I decided to take a different approach of finding a method to change the players race circumventing the need to fiddle with the perks.

The closest I was able to come was player.MatchRace

I tested this out on an African American NPC while I was Caucasian and it worked beautifully I was able to jump back and forth between races without my perks being effected (at least not noticbly, like with showracemenu)

The problem arose when I now tried this with my custom race. The custom race was created off of a DUPLICATE of the base Caucasian race. When I would try player.MatchRace nothing appeared to happen. Then I decided to try it on the African American and it worked. While I was an African American I tried to change to my custom race once again and realized that it was actually setting me back to Caucasian.

Figuring there was some sort of "hidden tag" in the race information somewhere, I decided to create yet another custom race. This time I created it completely from scratch. Manually assigned all the mesh / texture info, gave it a few eye / hair options, did both male / female assignments, etc, for all intent and purposes I can not differentiate the new race from any other.

I jumped back in game and tried player.MatchRace on this new NPC and CRASH, and I mean CRASH hardcoe. Most times requiring a system reboot (fun for testing)

At this point I feel resetting the perks is not only not possible (even with NVSE) but also that simply circumventing or even fixing the bug that causes this is a better approach.

So basically I need to figure out a way to:
1.) Get the match race function to recognize a custom built race.
2.) Find the scripts, objects, quests etc that drive the showracemenu (I can't seem to find them) and debug what is causing the problem in the first place


So I am at a loss here. Anyone have any ideas?