I decided to make a stealthy version of the laser rifle.

I wanted it to be the laser equivalent of a silenced firearm.

So the first thing I wanted to do was make the laser invisible, the premise being that it would be an infra-red (IR) laser that would be invisible to the naked eye, thus the IR Laser Rifle.

I don't have my .nifs extracted or anything like that, and while the geck has dialog boxes that allow you to select nifs for things the "art file" for a projectile it doesn't seem to have any way of reading the .nif files in the game's data files so you open the dialog box and then can't select anything, no files show up.

So the first thing I tried was just to make a new version of the "BeamLaserProjectile" and delete the art file altogether so that it wouldn't have any image to display when I fire the weapon.

I tried that and the game immediately crashed. Later I tried it again and the game didn't crash, but the gun also didn't work. Somehow without an art file for the projectile (which I assumed would be completely superficial) the weapon cannot fire over range at all no matter what the range setting for the projectile is.

Doesn't make any sense to me, but that's the way it seems to be.

I had to put the gun on the target directly, and then it would get hit by the laser. I'm guessing without a projectile art file the game defaults to the weapon's "reach" setting for a range?

So, that didn't work.

Then I figured out another workaround. I changed the projectile type to "missile" and checked the "Hitscan (visible in vats only)" check box and that made the laser disappear without causing the gun to fail. But it gave rise to a couple more small problems... first off, obviously, the laser is still visible in vats, but then weirdly so, because it's being treated like a physical bullet type projectile by the game instead of being shown as full length beam from the end of the rifle to the target that appears instantly, its a short segment of beam that travels from the barrel to target over short period of time. It looks more like a Star Wars style blaster shot thingy...

Anyway, the other more important issue is that not it takes time for the laser to get to the target, in vats or not. I was shooting at some moving targets and I had the aimpoint right on them but they weren't getting hit, I figured the laser was just missing and I was surprised because I thought it was more accurate than that. Took a while but eventually I shot at a stationary target and I noticed a slight time delay between my shooting and their getting hit and that's when I realized that because it's a "missile" type projectile now it takes time for it to reach the target. I was missing before because I wasn't leading the targets. So this really annoys me.

Does anyone know any way I can make the laser invisible without making it a "missile" type projectile? Short of making my own custom .nif art file that shows nothing.

If not, how would I make a custom .nif file and what would I need to make it?