Yeah, I just didn't really see a need for tracking calories seperately - derived or otherwise. Rather, I'm already tracking the consumption of the building parts that make up the calories - so tracking the calories as well seemed like "double dipping", or tracking the way the same portion of nutrition was being consumed twice (not technically accurate). I considered tracking them as just a general "one stop indicator of how one's solid nutrients are doing" - but once I settled on three values (plus hydration and rest), I didn't feel a need to make it more simple than that.

I thought about tracking fat for a while, but ultimately decided not to for two main reasons - one, it occurs to me that there wouldn't be a whole lot of fat in the Capital Wasteland - so few calories to go around in the food chain as a whole, I'd think most animals are pretty lean. Two, three food values seemed "sufficient" to meet the primary goal for me, without risking getting overly complex for the sake of complexity -- that is to say, my primary concern / desire / complaint about other HTS mods, is that all food is equal and there is ZERO reason to balance anything out or value one food type over another (I had characters living off of radroach meat for days at a time). Which is why as I've said, I certainly understand and appreciate the directions that you have gone with your mod, it just addresses concerns / wants that aren't quite what I was after.


ALSO, as far as the pipboy displaying too many effects on an item --- you've probably already looked at this, but in case you haven't, make sure you looking into shortening the display aspect for each effect listing. Drag0ntamer ran into this problem with TUPAM when he was adding a variety of additional effects to PA, so he shortened all of the effect names (beyond just what he was actually putting on PA, for consistency sake, if I recall correctly).

Can I change the hotkeys?

I don't know Blender, but I gave this a shot to see if it was feasible. It is (http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/5356/exoarmpoint.png http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/8503/exoarmpose.png http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/9004/exoarmaim.png), but the arms don't quite line up properly, so you've got to move them about a bit, and my crude attempts to do so have left it kind of distorted, so it might require an actual modeller if you want to get something decent out. But yeah, it's doable- mind if I steal the idea for this one suit of armour?

@T3T

Yeah, you should be able to change them from the power armor menu. The key used to access the power armor menu will always double as the key used to reposition the HUD, you just hold it down longer.


@ TheTalkieToaster

I think from a practical perspective having exposed mechanisms like that would be a bit of a liability in a gunfight, but it definitely looks pretty cool. If I incorporated something like that into this mod I'd probably look for some way to preserve the condition as it degrades, and you switch from the equipped to unequipped versions. I was kind of planning on limiting my visual stuff to some reskinned recon armor and maybe a few backpacks (and possibly the occasional earth-shattering kaboom), so no problem if you want to use that for your own mod.

I agree the exposed servos are a liability but my thought was, there'snot exactly a lot of room for expansion INSIDE the static volume of the armor given the plate size doesn't change and there's already a leg and servos etc inside. The onlly way to add more strength is external. So you can double the servos but the extras are likely to break leaving you at default.

Oh wow, I just installed both your and TTT's PA mods, and I love it. Thanks to both of you!

Yeah, the limited space was something I had in mind when I was thinking up upgrades. The liquid cooling is maybe a bit of a stretch, but beyond that everything's just chips and power electronics.

I haven't actually tried Impervious Power Armor yet, I've been too busy coding and debugging. But when I read that his mod was compatible with everything, I rethought the way I was implementing this one, because it sounded like the two would compliment each other well.

Got a chance to actually play around with this mod while I was testing some of my scripts. I haven't had a chance to look under the covers at this one yet, but thought I'd provide a little bit of feedback back on what I've seen so far.

-- Lowering the multipliers for timescale 30 still doesn't "feel" right. The power consumption is fine, but the TRO feels wonky -- the fact that the recalculations are done so rapidly makes it feel twitchy (or rather, it makes it feel like just what it is something designed to run slower, but sped up). This is particularly problematic on the cooldown side, which is practically instantaneous.

-- Cool down continues with the pipboy open, resulting in a silly exploit -- as soon as you're at max heat, open the pipboy and wait a second, then you're back to "cooled off".

-- I noticed that while I was easily able to overheat my legs enough to burn/hurt me, I noticed that when I picked up a minigun and fired it, I maxed out at somewhere in the low 140's, but was still not taking any damage - which made me think at first that applying damage from overheated arms was "broken". Then I did some additional testing and discovered that I take no damage at all while I'm firing -- so I can run while firing and work my way up to 140+ on top and 160+ on the bottom... then stop running while still firing for a couple of seconds, and I'm cooled off enough to take no damage at all. (Note: Either way, arms start cooling down from over 135 and I never take a single point of damage from them)

Note: All of the above testing was done with only TRO - no other upgrades in place.

My apologies if any of the above is already covered - I don't recall seeing anything about it, but sometimes my brain doesn't work the way I expect it to...



All of that having been said: Knowing that I tend to have a different outlook on things than you do, I thought I'd offer my own $0.02 anyhow... personally, I'd rather see the TRO be more of a longer term thing with smaller bonuses. That is to say, it gives you less, but turning it on and going "full tilt" for a brief battle will never be a problem -- keeping it up for mid-sized battles can be a problem -- and for long/epic battles, there is no way you'll be leaving it on.

IMO, _ideally_, you wouldn't be able to toggle it on until the temp comes down to below a certain threshold, and the cooling process would be substantially slower. I'd also love to see a larger temperature range and a broader spectrum of problems coming from higher temperatures. Just as an extremely rough example, something like...

90-something degrees: normal operating temperature
120 - maximum temp to be able to active TRO (from the off position)
135 - armor starts taking slight durability damage
145 - PC gets hit with some penalties (different / less than the benefits of TRO, so it is still questionably advantageous to keep it on)
155 - PC starts taking damage
175 - TRO -and- powered bonus is lost as the armor shuts down entirely, just unable to operate at such heats, not able to turn back on till below 120

In order to make it happen this way (I have no doubt this would be a major change), the process of heating up and cooling down would obviously need to be much more gradual -- such that the difference between going over 155 and hitting 175, is less than a single second's worth of running vs sitting still, etc.

The above is only shared as a matter of "throwing my ideas against the wall to see if they stick". If you like some of my ideas/concepts, groovy. If not, that's fine too.


Hopefully in the next week I'll have more of a chance to test other aspects of the mod as well, and will provide further feedback as needed.

As long as you're using a timescale that's close to the recommended 5, you should be able to reduce the heating/cooling multiplier enough to tune TRO the way you want. I tested it (albeit with liquid cooling most of the time) by repeatedly clearing out the DC mall, which is one of the game's longer battles. If your play style is based on dodging back and forth the entire time, you'll have problems with the default numbers. If you use it more to dash from cover to cover, pausing to line up shots, or to quickly close the distance for a melee attack, you should be fine. The weight you're carrying also plays a part. I'm a fan of Arwen's Encumberance module, which forces you to take the load you're carrying into consideration if you're planning on taking advantage of agility. I intended for TRO to be similar. I'm also toying with the idea of making TRO configurable, letting you choose your own balance of speed, carryweight, and endurance.

As far as limiting when you can turn TRO off and on, a temperature of 135 degrees is not even remotely a problem for electric motors. The hardware is fine, so there's no mechanical reason to limit turning it on or off, its just up to the user as to whether they can tolerate the high heat. If you have full health and a hundred stimpacks you might prefer having the option to just tough it out.

As for the upper body overheating, that might be in need of some balancing. The weight of the weapon fired or swung is taken into account, which complicates things, and I was thinking that if you overheated too quickly, it would make even a moderate boost to weapon skill more or less meaningless. I think you have to stop to reload before you'll overheat with the minigun, but swinging a supersledge will cause you to overheat. Of course the next release will allow you to incorporate my Ambient Temperature mod, so on hot days you'll find it a lot more limiting.

Regarding Timescale: I'm just trying to point out that your mod description makes it sound more like your mod will configure decently for timescale 30 more than it really feels like it does.

Regarding upper body overheating: You may have some rebalance to deal with, but based on the mod description, the behavior that I am seeing appears to be a bug.

-- I created a 200 lb sledge hammer to test with, and increased the heat mult to 2.5

-- Just holding the hammer gives me a heat of 185. I turn on TRO, no problems or damage. I start swinging the hammer and with a "power swing" reach a temp of over 600 degrees. Still no damage.

-- While holding the hammer with TRO on I start running around. Without even swinging I'm at 185/175 upper/lower temp. No damage taken. I put away the hammer and continue running around? My upper temp drops and my lower stays high, and I start taking damage finally.

-- Note: I can also run around swinging the hammer for a temp of 300+/175 with TRO on, and still take no damage.

Oh yeah, there's also an "isincombat" conditional on the menumode cooldown, so its more of a realism thing than an exploit.

*Edit - I checked out the heat damage code, and there were some errors with the conditionals causing the behavior you described - no upper body heat damage, and no lower body heat damage when the upper body was overheating. Nice catch. But 200 lb. sledghammers are not supported by this mod

Regarding trying to tune the TRO with a timescale of 30, adjusting it in increments of 0.05 doesn't quite cut it - the highest you can really go to get the default 5 timescale behavior is a timescale of 20 (pretty sure I said "just about works" in the readme :whistling: ). If you're dead set on a timescale of 30, you could set PPAHeatMult manually via the console though - going down to like 0.02 might help. Type:

setglobalvalue PPAHeatMult 0.02

I only went to a 200 lb hammer when it seemed you were dismissing my previous test as a balance issue -- I can already pass 135 upper body degrees, and hold something in the mid 140's for more than just a couple of seconds, with sustained minigun fire.


The comment in the description is quite non-specific. Note that I am not trying to hold you to something, nor frankly would it bother me if you just said "to heck with people who want to run at timescale30". Simply pointing out that the description gave me an impression of what to expect, and when I then went into the mod, I was not pleased with the performance of the mod based on that expectation. My thinking being that if one person had that experience, potentially someone else would as well. Just bringing that to your attention.

Personally, I rarely run mods as they were originally designed (currently using 178 mods - only about 10 of which, other than graphics and sound replacers, do I run without further modification). That isn't to say anything against the mod designers or their original ideas - as there are some truly brilliant creative minds in this community - it is just the way I am. My personal preference for timescale is actually 12 --- and at that timescale I still do not care for how steep/erratic the function of the TRO is, no matter what the multiplier is.

It just feels like watching a movie that is running at double speed. If you drop half of the frames, you still end up with the correct / consistent number of frame per second... but the actual experience of watching it does not feel right, and lacks the expected perception of smoothness. *shrug*

Can you add an option for the tackle perk of FWE?
I mean that you could tackle or trample someone easily while wearing power armor and thermal regulation override
( correct me if I'm wrong)

Hey Imp,

I'm sure you're probably sick of me by now... but if you're not...

I've been taking a look at the main PPA script, reading through it and digesting how it works (some good stuff in here by the way - kudos)... and something occurs to me regarding the TRO temp +/- issues and how it is being handled.

Rather, something occurs to me regarding "real time" vs. "game time" (or "gamedayspassed"), and the disconnect that exists between the two. Game time is used for many things, and makes sense for many things - yet for the most part it is not used for... for lacking a clear way to word this... "direct interface with the player".

Movement - combat - physics - etc, are all based on real time. You're run speed isn't multiplied by the timescale, nor is the rate of fire of an automatic weapon, or how long it takes a grenade to travel from your hand to its final destination (or the fuse timer for that matter).

All of that having been said... fDrain being calculated based off of timescale makes a certain amount of sense. There you are tracking something based on the time that the armor (as a "game" item) is functioning... rather than how long you the player are using it.

But for TRO calculations... which is more of a player interaction thing, feels like it should be dealt with in real time rather than game time. With that in mind, my suggestion would be to replace timescale with a constant (4? 5? that is what you balanced for, right?) in all calculations of dTUpper, dTLower, and fDamage (possibly more that I'm not thinking of right now) -- and then allow PPAHeatMult to be used by the player just to adujst to taste.

That way everyone starts with the same balanced experience that you tuned for, no matter what their timescale.

If you have Sprint Mod or FWE installed, their sprinting and tackling features will work fine with this mod. I'm not really sure I want to blatantly rip off their mod just to add another mod's feature into mine, but what I could do is create a compatibility patch. You should be able to tackle someone with or without power armor, but some things my patch might change would be to make tackling damage proportional to run speed, so TRO would increase damage that way. If I could figure out how, I might also make it much harder to tackle an enemy that's wearing power armor.

Regarding realtime/gametime heat drain, you're probably right, overheating has more of an immediate impact on gameplay, so it would make sense to make it something that didn't scale with timescale. The change is easy enough.

Yeah, I felt like kind of a tool for putting in such a lengthy explanation to justify such a trivial script change -- but I wanted to make sure my reasoning was understandable (rather than sounding like "just more whining from the Dark Uncle guy".

There's also a mod called Dynamic Timescale that varies timescale depending on what you're doing, so you get a high timescale's benefit of making travel distances seem longer, and a low timescale's benefit of having time pass more realistically when you're engaged in activities that should seem more realtime, like combat. I haven't actually tried the mod but I like the idea, especially the way it would work with my needs mod, but it would be impossible to find a good balance with timescale dependent overheating (although TRO was never something that was meant to be used for long distance travel).

Interesting.

Yeah, I can see how that would be potentially groovy for a needs mod that made adjustments based on specific actions --- but doesn't seem like TRO would be a necessary application of that.

When will there be an update I love this mod but does it support TTT's mechanist power armor?

It supports any armor designated as power armor in the GECK, so if you need power armor training to use it, it works. As of the next release (due out today or tomorrow) some armors will not require recharging - according to lore, the Enclave's Advanced Power Armor (Mark II, Tesla, and Hellfire), as well as T-51b, run on very long lasting MicroFusion Packs that carry 100 years worth of nuclear fuel. Some of the higher powered upgrades will be unavailable with those armors unless you upgrade the power supply, though. Since I have to do a check for individual armor types to get that effect, any armor that isn't part of vanilla Fallout and that I haven't made a compatibility patch for will use the default behavior - all upgrades will be available, but the armor will need to be recharged periodically.

Alrighty, Release 1.3 has just been posted. It includes the following new features:

APA and T-51b armors are nuclear powered by default (do not require recharging)
APA and T-51b can be converted to ultracapacitor power supplies access to high power upgrades
APA and T-51b can be upgraded to experimental power supplies for access to all upgrades, plus unlimited charge time
APA and T-51b armors will explode if the wearer is killed with a shot to the torso
UnderArmor can be worn under PA for various bonuses

• Aramid UnderArmor will provide a boost to damage resistance
  
• Environmental UnderArmor will boost radiation resistance
  
• Insulating UnderArmor will increase the temperature at which the player takes damage when TRO is engaged
  
• MediBrace UnderArmor will automatically splint crippled limbs as long as charged power armor is worn

The Proximity Alert upgrade will boost perception and provide an audible warning when enemies are engaged


Also, my http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13430 mod can be integrated via an optional compatibility patch, so that armor's heating and cooling characteristics will be dependent upon the surrounding air temperature.

Can only 1 underarmor be used at a time? Does it use recon armor as underarmor or is it new items?

It's re-textured recon armor (apparently that's what recon armor is, something that's supposed to be worn under PA). I'll upload screenshots shortly. Only one set can be worn at a time. I might add some sort of uber-underarmor that combines the effects in a later release, but for now you'll have to pick and choose.

*Edit - It can be purchased from Durga, Crow, and Pronto, or picked up from NPCs occasionally (hope you don't run into one wearing Aramid). To equip it, put on the UnderArmor, then put on power armor. It can also be worn without power armor, but in general, the stats are less impressive than recon armor's.

What does unlimited charge time mean? Does that mean still uses the same mechanism, but has no upward limit to how many kWh it can hold?

Sort of, except it comes fully charged. It means that it doesn't require recharging. According to lore (that I've heard through several complaints), T45-d power armor originally ran on microfusion cells, and went through them at a prodigious rate, but T-51b and APA both used MicroFusion Packs with enough fuel to last 100 years. The only sets of T51-b armor in the game both look like they've been sitting around for a couple of hundred years, and the APA that the Enclave wears was constructed more recently, so technically they should both still be running on effectively unlimited power. The drawback that I've added in is that these power supplies can't supply enough power to operate liquid cooling or TRO upgrades (I explained the difference between energy density and power density a few pages back). You'll have the option to swap out those armor's MicroFusion Packs for ultracapacitors, meaning you'll need to recharge but you can use all the upgrades, or if you find the experimental MicroFusion Packs, you'll be able to use all of the upgrades, plus you won't need to recharge. There's only one of each though, hidden somewhere in the wasteland.