Hello all, it has been sometime since I tried my hand at modding, but I am seriously considering picking up Sirens Call, and Beckett's development again. So seriously I am in the editor now . As such this will be a question to a few old names out there.

What put me off in the old days was the old 1.5 Bugs we found and had to fight constantly, so my question is have these been fixed in 1.7, or are they still a problem? Do we still need to use ESM's or ESP's for large mods, and if ESM's, has any system been worked out to address the possible problems of using many ESM's together?

Thanks for any help with this general question.
Maran/Markmid

Welcome back!

Yes we still need MasterUpdate to solve certain Navmesh issues and a few others, bugs are still in-tact.

However I would check out Mez's Merged Patch thread, there's a new BOSS tool and a bunch of updates. If you havn't used Fo3edit yet, there's a training manual now.

Lots of updates!

Thanks for the info I'll give it a shot, I'll have to read up on the merged patch. I always regretted not releasing what I had done at least , as I put a lot of hours into it.

Do you mean the navmesh bugs still exist in the ESM files too, and was the cause indeed areas that were too big at the end of it all? I was lucky (read persistent) in that I nailed most of the ESP navmesh bugs, but one would still hit now and again, do the ESM files remove that completely now?

Thanks again for the help.

It wasn't a navmesh-size thing, it's an odd problem with navmesh shape. If you make a level that has a walkway looking sorta area that extends away from the main area, the navmesh will stop working the second time you see it in-game. Turning it into an ESM instead of an ESP resolves it. This was not actually a 1.5 problem - the problem existed in the very first .exe release of the game and in all versions including the current one (1.7).

Quite some months ago, the developers came and got the details on the navmesh problem from us when we pinpointed it, but... there's been no 1.8 release... .

Many of the 1.5 bugs were fixed, like how anything esp-added that wasn't a persistant reference would be invisible/gone when you visited it a second time - and like, how you had crashes if the save had certain NPCs/creatures in it that were not persistant ref. Those highly-destructive things were fixed in 1.6.

I am very hopeful that New Vegas will be accompanied by a GECK patch. It would make sense, as NV is sure to add things that will need a GECK update, and it would follow in the tradition of supporting the modding community.

My money is that the bug has been now long-fixed in the GECK, and we'll see it when NV finally comes out.

Thank you both for clearing up my worries in detail . If I can stay in the esp file format I will as long as possible, now that the major bugs are gone. Good to hear from that you are both still around .

The 'Ignores Normal Resistance' flag is still broken since 1.5. It worked before that.

if a geck editor is released for new vegas, i suspect that it might be a slightly updated nif format and engine. if there are any new additions there, The Geck for NV will be a Geck for nv only. and F3Geck esp files will be incompatible. Might not even happen. Hopefully, if obsidian want to release the version of the editor they used, or whatever, Beth willl sort it out or let them go with it.

Hmmmm that may be true, but I'm not convinced that our existing content would be incompatible. I actually think that for the most part it would be completely compatible, if not 100% so - they will simply add more features and functions to the existing ones. An example just popped-up in the NV forums from an interview with Obsidian (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=234110. The quote that struck me was,


That means to me that the GECK was updated to support new capabilities in addition to what is already there (at least thats how I interpret it). I'm going to stick with the hopes that we will get a GECK update in conjunction with the release of NV - it would fit the pattern of their past activities.

As Ghogiel said, if an editor is released alongside New Vegas it will not work with Fallout 3. Even if it's an updated version of the GECK, and new features that it enabled would not be supported by Fallout 3, so the output will be incompatible. In order for it to work, Fallout 3 would need to be updated to use the same version of the engine as New Vegas, and I feel pretty confident when I say that's not going to happen.

Cipscis

I understand now, thanks for the clarification.

Do you think that Fallout3 content will work with the NV engine? Or perhaps with a conversion?

I.e. I wonder how much conversion will it take to port a Fallout3 mod to NV if we have the resources - similar to how Shivering Isles worked with Oblivion (that is the comparison I have heard them make for NV to Fo3).

Not really, no. The GECK will refuse to load TES Construction Set files, and vica verca. I'm almost confident that it will not only be difficult, but also be illegal to port Fallout 3 content over.

Wasnt New Vegas being done by a different company, something like that?

In that case, would we even expect to see a GECK version release that can edit it?

Hmmmmm but thats not the same difference here - Obsidian used the GECK to build New Vegas, which was not the case with the jump from TES to Fallout3. NV has been described as a Shilvering-Isles-type size expansion to the Fallout3 game, and they used Many of the same resources as those in Fallout 3 (from the mag pics). It makes alot more sense that the GECK would work with the files. So Obsidian would have had to convert the existing Fallout3 models/meshes/textures to some other format for them not to be compatible with the GECK, and I don't see that happening in an 18-month window. Clearly the Fo3 resources had to be modified to make them work with NV - OR - they are not making as radical a change to the engine as many might suspect.



Considering they built NV with the GECK, I would think that if they Do release a CS with the tool - it would be the GECK. Respectfully, I'll hold out hope that we do get a GECK update, and that the GECK will still work with the original Fallout3 files. I don't expect to be able to run my mod or Fallout3 binaries in the New Vegas engine, but it wouldn't surprise me either if Obsidian keeps the same format for the ESMs as used in Fallout3, and simply added bells and whistles to their own version of the Binary to add effects.

I have hope!

I fully expect that a little fo3editing will allow fo3 mods to be ported to NV, where it even makes sense to do so. The reverse will certainly not be possible.