Hello,

I am modding out my FO3 and have a couple questions:

1. Where do you find and can change the XP awarded for beating the final quest for the original FO3? The "Take It Back" quest? I was able to change the XP awarded for everything else (all the other main quests and misc. quests), but I can't find it for the "Take It Back" quest (Editor ID: MQ11 in the GECK).

In the GECK go to form type "QUST" and double click on MQ11. Once this is up, you then click on the "Quest Stages" tab. You can normally change the XP awarded on here by clicking on index 200 and then editing it in the "Result Script". MQ11 doesn't have this option, so I am unable to locate where I can change this value. Does anyone know where it is located?

2. I replaced all the FO3 stock game music for exploring, public (towns), dungeons, etc. All the new music I have replaced it with works great, EXCEPT a couple of the "special" music files. The ones that don't seem to work even though the original music is no longer even in the folder is "ExitTheVault" and "Success". I even switched the "MainTitle" track and that works just fine, but those other two"special" music files aren't changing. Anyone know why or have a solution?

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read through and reply to this post!

~SD~

Is there a reward for Take It Back then? I thought you at the end anyway.

You get 1200 XP at the end, but I am not sure what happens because I have beaten FO3 yet (sending all my time modding it instead LOL). With all the DLCs, what will happen at the end when you beat the main quest for FO3? Anyways, I need to know where that entry is that gives yout eh 1200 XP, so I can change it. Any ideas?

Also, anyone know why those 2 "special" music tracks aren't changing even though the original ones have been replaced and no longer exist in my music folder?

You get awarded the 1200 XP not at the end of MQ11, you get it after the cutscenes and Broken Steel starts, so it's part of the BS DLC quests.
Edit: with special music like that you need to double-check.. sometimes there's 2 seperate files for the same piece.. one would be in the music folder and the other would be in sound/fx/songs with a name that starts with MUS_...
The music folder one might be an mp3, but the one in the sound/fx/songs folder is definately a .wav file.

Hi Bonedog,

Your reply in regards to the 1200XP award being a part of the BS DLC quest is correct. After I loaded the Broken Steel.esm in the GECK, I seen it had a MQ11 entry and I was able to find, as well as edit the XP award on the "Index 200" line. Thanks for your help with that! I really appreciate it!

However, in regards to the music issue, I checked my data/sound/fx/songs folder, but there are no folders or music for that matter that matchs the tracks in the data/music folder. It definately seems like those two "special" tracks have to be located somewhere else though, because they still play even though I have replaced them with other tracks. How else could they still play? The question is where though....?

I had the exact path wrong, but like I said.. check all through the sound folder because if it's not in the music folder then it IS in the sound folder.
The correct path is data/sound/fx/mus/ , and they're both in there as mus_success.wav and mus_exitthevault.wav.
http://webpages.charter.net/biscuit1/success.jpg

Bonedog,

That is extremely odd, b/c when I view that folder (data/sound/fx/) I do not have a /mus folder in the /fx folder. With that screenshot, are you viewing that in the GECK? Just to verify, don't use the GECK and double click on your Fallout 3 ---> Data ---> Sound ---> FX Folders and let me know if you have a Mus Folder inside of that folder, because I don't. Thanks!

The way the Fallout 3 (and Oblivion) engines work is that almost all assets start off living in the BSA files. But you can override those textures / sounds / assets by placing a file/folder in the "data" folder of the Fallout 3 installation location. Which is how texture replacers work. They don't touch the BSA, they just place a file in the actual file system in the correct place. The game checks the file system first, then falls back to looking in the BSA.

(This is true for almost any game that can be modded. The assets are kept in single big files and do not actually live on the disk. Off the top of my head I think Civ4 and the original CoD/CoD:UO did it the same way. I don't recall whether FO3 will search every BSA for an asset...)

Like Snabbik said, at runtime the game extracts all the necessary assets to their proper folders and locations within the Data folder, and that is where it's read from when running the game. If a copy of a file exists in the proper folder already when the game opens the master BSA for the assets, that particular file won't be extracted and the game will instead use the copy that's already there. MOST folders do not show up inside the data folder when the game is not running, as they and all the files that were extracted by the game are removed when you exit the game. Any files and folders that were already in place do not get removed. I have the mus folder because at one time I manually extracted some of those sound files out of the BSA master file into the data folder, so they remain after the game has stopped running. To do that you will need to get Fallout Mod Manager (FOMM), and use its BSA unpacker utility to open the Fallout - Sound.bsa, then extract 2 or more files into the data folder, and the folder structure will be created automatically.

The screenshot shows the 2 sound items side-by-side from the Sound list in the geck. Every piece of audio, including music, has an accompanying sound form that goes with it (either under Sound or Music Type).

Awesome! Got it working correctly now and learned a bit more about modding FO3. Thanks to the both of you for all your help! :foodndrink:

It doesn't literally extract the files, it reads them directly from the BSA. This is why you need archive invalidation, to tell Fallout to look somewhere else for resources.

I was under the impression invalidation tells the game it's ok to use updated or newer versions of the same file and date found in the bsa table list, not where to look for them. I do specifically remember making changes to extracted resources before I ever had invalidation installed, and it worked just fine reading from the folder directories.

ArchiveInvalidation.txt tells Fallout which files to read outside of the archives. Since BSA's (and all other archival formats I've ever heard of) order files in a folder structure, it's natural to just use the same method to identify replacements, ie by putting them in identical folders on the disk.

I'm not quite sure how Fallout handles replacements without ArchiveInvalidation.txt, since I've always used a separate invalidation method of one sort or another, but apparently it can be unreliable. There's a http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/BSA_Files on the Geck wiki if you want to read up on it.