GUIDE v1.1.0 - Feedback & Bug Reports

[brandonpotter0]

DarnifiedUI - TTW is no longer available  to download for the guide.
An older version of Darnified UI is avalible on Moddb - Darnified UI v04 addon - Fallout: New Vegas - Mod DB

Project Nevada and Weapon Mesh Improvement patches for Anniversary Anim pack are also no longer available to download as they have been archived.

Edited July 28, 2022 by brandonpotter0

[Daniel399]

Why are you still recommending Project Nevada and FCO in 2022? When they're known to be god-awful mods that are so outdated they are guaranteed to crash any modlist or cause major incompatibilities?

[theblackman]

On 7/30/2022 at 7:36 AM, Daniel399 said:

Why are you still recommending Project Nevada and FCO in 2022? When they're known to be god-awful mods that are so outdated they are guaranteed to crash any modlist or cause major incompatibilities?

Re: PN (per the guide):

As of 2021 Project Nevada is very outdated and should not be used as a standalone mod. However, it adds some lore-friendly weapons and armor that can be used with the help of Project Nevada-Equipment Standalone.

And the instructions included are: disable all plugins.

Re: FCO, there is a fix which is included in the guide.  I'm not sure if it fixes all of FCO's deficiencies but I'm sure Tech will enlighten us.

[theblackman]

Some questions:

1.  Why are you not using the BSA decompression tool on the BSAs ( I assume the OGG Vorbis library solves part of the problem here)? https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/65854?tab=description

2.  Ultimate Edition ESM fixes? https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/77170

3. Mesh Improvement Mod?  I note you have a lot of mesh replacers so perhaps they are your preferred options: https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/74295

4.  Elijah Voice Audio Files Fix: https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/73526

I will throw these up on the wiki if you like.

[Majorman]

On 7/28/2022 at 10:42 PM, brandonpotter0 said:

DarnifiedUI - TTW is no longer available  to download for the guide.
An older version of Darnified UI is avalible on Moddb - Darnified UI v04 addon - Fallout: New Vegas - Mod DB

Project Nevada and Weapon Mesh Improvement patches for Anniversary Anim pack are also no longer available to download as they have been archived.

 I only heard about this yesterday. The latest version of Darnified UI TTW was uploaded to ModDB yesterday, so I will update the link later today (EET zone).

 

Edit: Changes to Darnified UI and Anniversary Anim Pack are done, thanks @brandonpotter0!

[Majorman]

On 7/29/2022 at 10:36 PM, Daniel399 said:

Why are you still recommending Project Nevada and FCO in 2022? When they're known to be god-awful mods that are so outdated they are guaranteed to crash any modlist or cause major incompatibilities?

As @theblackman explained, the assets of those mods (meshes and textures) are needed by other mods on the list. In both cases issues are caused by poorly designed plugins and I have provided modern alternatives that actually work as initially intended.

9 hours ago, theblackman said:

Re: FCO, there is a fix which is included in the guide.  I'm not sure if it fixes all of FCO's deficiencies but I'm sure Tech will enlighten us.

I'm not sure Tech plays FNV, but in case you are interested: the author of FCo left the mod in a pretty bad shape. For example:

1. The FOMOD installer will always intall "FCO - OHSB NPC Edits.esp" and "FCO - Russel.esp", even if they are not ticked durinf installlation. Those plugins will search for masters that >96% of the people downloading FCO for the first time do not have in their setup, which leads to immediate CTDs (Error: Master not found) upon starting the game. This alone has caused hundereds of people to delete the mod at that initial stage.
2. "FCO Master" and "FCO - NPC Change.esp" contain a lot of pathing issues, pointing to textures that are either missing, or located in folders different than the ones the plugins refers to. This has been the cause for the infamous "pink face" bug (missing face texture), "double irises" bug and "cross-sightedness"
3. One of the "optional features" of the mod is a plugin that added a cool-looking green-glow effect to glowing ones. The script is terrible, though, very taxing to the system and perpetually running in background, so it is bound to cause CTDs and worsre yet, since it gets baked into savefiles - cause savegame corruption.
4. FCO contains its own body textures for "African Male" and "African Male Raider" races (and only for those two). It was supposedly aiming to reduce neckseam. However, rhe mod does not use vanilla file structure and does not play well with body replacers that use different UV mapping than vanilla bodies - therefore will cause visual bugs with pretty much any male body replacer.
5. The optional "Sweating" effect does not seem to work and probably addes another useless script that would get baked into our savegames if it installed correctly - but it does not, as the FOMOD installer does not add the ".esp" extension at the end of the file and the game does not recognize it all.
6. FCO does not cover any of the DLC content, leaving those characters vanilla.

So what does "FCO - The Last Few Edits" do:

1. Corrects the pathing errors to ensure no more missing texture errors. All improtant eroneus entries in FCO Master get overriten. There are still some custom races that have the "pink face" error, but they are not assigned to any of the NPCs. For some reason the author of FCO - The last Few Edits forgot to make them unavailable to the player, so you can see them during character creation - but not during gameplay.
2. Remade "FCO - NPC Changes" from scratch, making sure that all NPCs (even DLC) ones are covered, The only exception are Marked Men, as there are no existing textures for their specific "charred red" skin tone in FCO.

On top of that I have found workarounds to make FCO work with Robert's Male body and left very clear instructions how to prevent the usage of the broken plugins.

The only remaining issue is that FCO currently requires that faces are generated in real time (via bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=1 in Fallout.ini) instead of coming pre-generated. This in turn has an impact on performance, but only noticeable on older hardware (I have i-5 7400 and RX 580 8GB and do not feel a drop in performance, for reference). There is a way to "fix" even that issue, as done in this mod and as explained in the Facegen guide.

P.S. It's a question of personal preferences as well. It's either FCO or NV Redesigned an d I tend to like the faces of FCO more.

[Majorman]

8 hours ago, theblackman said:

Some questions:

1.  Why are you not using the BSA decompression tool on the BSAs ( I assume the OGG Vorbis library solves part of the problem here)? https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/65854?tab=description

2.  Ultimate Edition ESM fixes? https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/77170

3. Mesh Improvement Mod?  I note you have a lot of mesh replacers so perhaps they are your preferred options: https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/74295

4.  Elijah Voice Audio Files Fix: https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/73526

I will throw these up on the wiki if you like.

1. I am not familiar with process and feel it might be too advanced for the casual modder. For reference, notice how the comments section in Nexus is filled with complaints from people who failed to follow the process by the book. I don't want to dedicate much time in tracking issues that Step users had with BSA  decompressor. But maybe @TechAngel85 or @z929669 have more experience with BSA Extractors for Skyrim? I can't also judge the performance gain.
2. This is a new tool (June 2022) that I'm not familiar with. But most of the concerns I shared under p. 1 apply to it as well.
3. I am planning a version 1.1.1 of the guide and this mod is shortlisted. Currently the guide uses Collission Meshes, but it's more taxing to the system. I will have to assess where both overlap, I am considering dropping Collision Meshes entirely.
4. Will be included in version 1.1.1.

So, since you are interested, you can go ahead and put Mesh Improvement Mod and Elijah Voice Audio Files Fix on the Wiki.

[z929669]

BSA extraction subverts the standard game mechanics, especially with respect to vanilla plugins and mods packaged into BSAs. That said, it's not a problem if you know the ramifications.

I have heard that some of the Fallout games may benefit, but I don't typically mod these games. @Greg and @DoubleYou probably know for FNV.

[DoubleYou]

The only reason that I would extract a BSA would be if there are issues with it that need fixed or a file from it that I need to overwrite a loose file. It is a known issue that sound files can be particularly troublesome in BSAs, so I wouldn't doubt there may be some mods incorrectly packaged. I doubt that using zlib compression significantly impacts performance in either case, but I haven't tested that.

I will say that loose files in general negatively impact loading time even on solid state drives in my experience. 

[Greg]

I'll pretty much echo what DoubleYou stated. I have extracted meshes and textures from BSAs for quick 'n dirty comparisons to get a rough feel for whether I want to include a mod for deeper in-game comparisons and to get a rough idea of what vanilla meshes and textures are still used in a fully-modded profile, but I always revert back to the original BSA in the game. I have run into the rare mod that has a mesh or texture in the wrong folder that I've had to extract, restructure, and repackage. I think I've done this one or twice since I started modding Skyrim LE.

[theblackman]

16 hours ago, Majorman said:

I'm not sure Tech plays FNV, 

Apologies - I clearly didn't read the OP carefully enough and thought Tech was the guide curator.

16 hours ago, Majorman said:

1. I am not familiar with process and feel it might be too advanced for the casual modder. For reference, notice how the comments section in Nexus is filled with complaints from people who failed to follow the process by the book. I don't want to dedicate much time in tracking issues that Step users had with BSA  decompressor. But maybe @TechAngel85 or @z929669 have more experience with BSA Extractors for Skyrim? I can't also judge the performance gain.

The process is very straightforward and the aspect of the process which appears to have been the subject of most of the 'complaints', being the edit required to the .ini file, is now performed by the tool itself.  It's arguably less complicated than the process described in the guide for NVTF.

If you have a look at the comments section of the FCO Bugfixes mod, for example, (which you already have in your guide), it is filled with comments by people experiencing various issues.  If you look at any reasonably popular mod on the Nexus, you will always find users making comments where often they failed to follow clear instructions, or discovered that the issue was caused by a different mod.

Or have a look at the Vortex support forums where you'll find users who can't get xNVSE/SSE etc to work via Vortex even though Vortex automatically installs it.

Hopefully you can see my point....

The term 'casual modder', to me at least, would seem to be more applicable to someone who would be more likely to install a collection rather than a fairly extensive modlist like STEP F:NV.  Regardless it's not a discussion for this thread.  My impression is that users who come to STEP are likely to want to push themselves a bit to learn more about how to better mod their game.

16 hours ago, Majorman said:

1. This is a new tool (June 2022) that I'm not familiar with. But most of the concerns I shared under p. 1 apply to it as well.

My responses to #1 apply here as well, with the caveat that it's arguably simpler than the BSA decompression tool/process.

You can perform the actions yourself to see; the Viva New Vegas guide has clear instructions on how to use both tools:  https://vivanewvegas.github.io/utilities.html

16 hours ago, Majorman said:

So, since you are interested, you can go ahead and put Mesh Improvement Mod and Elijah Voice Audio Files Fix on the Wiki.

Will do.

15 hours ago, z929669 said:

BSA extraction subverts the standard game mechanics,

And the 4GB patcher and Heap Replacer don't....?  Still, I guess it depends how you define 'game mechanics'.

11 hours ago, DoubleYou said:

The only reason that I would extract a BSA would be if there are issues with it that need fixed or a file from it that I need to overwrite a loose file. It is a known issue that sound files can be particularly troublesome in BSAs, so I wouldn't doubt there may be some mods incorrectly packaged. I doubt that using zlib compression significantly impacts performance in either case, but I haven't tested that.

I will say that loose files in general negatively impact loading time even on solid state drives in my experience. 

 

2 hours ago, Greg said:

I'll pretty much echo what DoubleYou stated. I have extracted meshes and textures from BSAs for quick 'n dirty comparisons to get a rough feel for whether I want to include a mod for deeper in-game comparisons and to get a rough idea of what vanilla meshes and textures are still used in a fully-modded profile, but I always revert back to the original BSA in the game. I have run into the rare mod that has a mesh or texture in the wrong folder that I've had to extract, restructure, and repackage. I think I've done this one or twice since I started modding Skyrim LE.

From the utility's mod description page:

Simple tool to decompress the FNV BSA's and repack them without zlib to increase performance on modern systems.
Additionally it transcodes all sound fx in .ogg format to .wav so they function in the game.
It also extracts any mp3 files to loose files because they will not play when in a BSA.

 

Edited August 2, 2022 by theblackman

[Majorman]

@theblackmanI'll definitely try them out in preparation for 1.1.1. I think the transformation of OGG files to WAV might be the main benefit here, as the guide contains replacers for most of the textures (and some of the meshes) anyway.

[AiKiXeN]

On 8/1/2022 at 2:54 AM, Majorman said:

 I only heard about this yesterday. The latest version of Darnified UI TTW was uploaded to ModDB yesterday, so I will update the link later today (EET zone).

 

Edit: Changes to Darnified UI and Anniversary Anim Pack are done, thanks @brandonpotter0!

I finished installing all mods for the Step Fallout New Vegas Guide and ran LOOT one last time. Everything checked out. I launch the game and it crashes before i get to the main menu. I thought it was the issue with bRestore2Hotkey in nvse_stewie_tweaks.ini, but changing the setting to 0 doesn't fix the load/CTD issue. I checked the nvac.log and see the following:

07161055 _ NewVegasAntiCrash FalloutNV.exe
07161055 _ 18DB0000 07050000 nvac.dll
07161055 i 008BFBC1 0441B60F FalloutNV.exe
07161055 i 00490B10 6666018B FalloutNV.exe
07161055 _ 18A10000 06020080 nvse_1_4.dll
07161055 _ 77AB0000 0A004A64 ntdll.dll
07161059 a 0072607A 0048A1DF FalloutNV.exe
07161059 ; Hud Menu Creation Failed... This likely means that the archives were not built and the xml doesn't match the code.

I thought I tracked it down to One HUD - oHUD because disabling it at least gets me to the game menu. But after seeing the above comments about Darnified UI, I realized that the mod guide did not have any section that referenced installing Darnified UI mod. I've checked and re-checked, but do not see any mention or link to install this mod. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I went ahead and installed the mod from the ModDB link included above...the updated one...and placed it just above UIO - User Interface Organizer. When I launch the game, I no longer get the "Hud Menu Creation Failed" error and make it to the main menu. I moved on to the next step of starting a new game for general testing purposes. I'm talking with Doc Mitchell on his couch and the answer choices are all squashed and running together...so I'm pretty sure I'm missing some Darnified setup steps. I just wanted to see if installing Darnified UI improved my load/CTD issue and it does.

Looking forward to getting this ironed out. Thanks.

[Majorman]

@AiKiXeN it's fixed now. DarN UI should be above oHud. It seems that changing the mod's name (as it was changed during the re-upload) has taken it down from the modlists itself - this seems to be a vanilla feature of the Wiki. Will have to beore careful from now on.

Find the mod section on the guide to make the necessary ini edits to make the text flow naturally.

[AiKiXeN]

Thank you Majorman. One other thing. Did the following get resolved?

Quote

Project Nevada and Weapon Mesh Improvement patches for Anniversary Anim pack are also no longer available to download as they have been archived.

I don't see updated info/links for these two patches. I was able to Google their names and download them from the Anniversary Anim Pack archived files direct link that Google gave me. I assume they would get installed just after Anniversary Anim Pack, but not sure if there are any other instructions I need to follow?