GUIDE General Feedback

[Kelmych]

The female upper body model (mesh) in the guide is from Exeter's Type 3 Underwear replacer mod. The Dimonized Type 3 mod is used only for textures. The body mod you reference would replace the Exeter mod in the guide with an NSFW nude female body, and STEP guides don't typically include NSFW bodies. You can always use a different mod yourself, of course.

[Tukka]

Thanks for writing up this guide. Overall, it's a great help.

 

I've stuck mostly to your Core recommendations, but ended up a removing a few mods.

 

The DC Interior Projects seems like a wonderful effort, but to me the areas clash too much with existing vanilla environments. The unique items/monsters it adds, the sometimes overly-cluttered environments, the little story bits that don't quite mesh with the world's lore/tone all ended up taking away from the experience for me a bit.

 

I've also removed the More Perks mods, as to me a lot of them seem silly or unbalanced, and the perk descriptions often are unclear or exhibit poor grammar. What's more, with the perks added by FWE and the More Perks mod the perk list gets to be quite extensive. Once you get a few levels under your belt it seems like it takes forever to scroll the available ones, and if you want to look ahead to see what's available and what you might want to build towards, it becomes even more of a chore to sift the wheat from the chaff.

 

I found that Robert's male bodies resulted in a fair number of glitches, but so far with Breeze's haven't had any issues that I've noticed.

 

For stability, I found that I had to make the commonly-suggested Fallout.ini tweak of setting bUseThreadedAI=1, and added iNumHWThreads=1 to the [General] section. (Setting iNumHWThreads=2 seems less stable for me, and I don't have any performance problems with it at 1 on my admittedly fairly powerful system - i5-4690, GTX 970).

 

To clear up an issue with some NPCs having very pale faces, I had to add to add bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=1 to the [General] section of Fallout.ini. I'm not sure if you would want to add a note anywhere recommending or noting these tweaks.

 

As for suggestions for mods to add, have you considered No Theft Comments? The ideal thing would be a mod that adds a longer delay to trigger comments and/or making it karma sensitive, but failing that I consider this mod to be almost must-have. It's pretty immersion-breaking to be scolded for having my line of sight briefly touch someone's desk.

 

The only other mod I've added is one to add some extra storage to the player housing, but IMO it's a little overzealous so I wouldn't recommend it.

 

Thanks again for compiling the list, hope this feedback helps.

 

Edit: Turns out I had overlooked the ini tweaks link/section of the guide.

Edited July 23, 2015 by Tukka

[Kelmych]

Thanks for writing up this guide. Overall, it's a great help.

 

I've stuck mostly to your Core recommendations, but ended up a removing a few mods.

 

The DC Interior Projects seems like a wonderful effort, but to me the areas clash too much with existing vanilla enviornments. The unique items/monsters it adds, the sometimes overly-cluttered environments, the little story bits that don't quite mesh with the world's lore/tone all ended up taking away from the experience for me a bit.

 

I've also removed the More Perks mods, as to me a lot of them seem silly or unbalanced, and the perk descriptions often are unclear or exhibit poor grammar. What's more, with the perks added by FWE and the More Perks mod the perk list gets to be quite extensive. Once you get a few levels under your belt it seems like it takes forever to scroll the available ones, and if you want to look ahead to see what's available and what you might want to build towards, it becomes even more of a chore to sift the wheat from the chaff.

The Fallout NV guide also includes this. There are some useful and reasonable additions in More Perks as well as some that are not ones I'd prefer to add, but I felt that each user could choose among the ones they considered reasonable (ignoring the others).

 

I found that Robert's male bodies resulted in a fair number of glitches, but so far with Breeze's haven't had any issues that I've noticed.

 

For stability, I found that I had to make the commonly-suggested Fallout.ini tweak of setting bUseThreadedAI=1, and added iNumHWThreads=1 to the [General] section. (Setting iNumHWThreads=2 seems less stable for me, and I don't have any performance problems with it at 1 on my admittedly fairly powerful system - i5-4690, GTX 970).

With my system I get a CTD if iNumHWThreads=2 isn't used.

 

To clear up an issue with some NPCs having very pale faces, I had to add to add bLoadFaceGenHeadEGTFiles=1 to the [General] section of Fallout.ini. I'm not sure if you would want to add a note anywhere recommending or noting these tweaks.

That parameter has been included the INI tweaks section of the FO3 guide since the first guide; it's the last one in the Fallout.ini [General] section.

 

As for suggestions for mods to add, have you considered No Theft Comments? The ideal thing would be a mod that adds a longer delay to trigger comments and/or making it karma sensitive, but failing that I consider this mod to be almost must-have. It's pretty immersion-breaking to be scolded for having my line of sight briefly touch someone's desk.

I'll look at it. I might make it optional since there might be some users who prefer the vanilla functionality.

The only other mod I've added is one to add some extra storage to the player housing, but IMO it's a little overzealous so I wouldn't recommend it.

I've avoided adding player houses and most house item mods (except texture improvements) to the guide so the guide is more of a base for modding than a list of all potentially useful mods. Some of the quest mods also add player homes.

Thanks again for compiling the list, hope this feedback helps.

Thanks. Feedback is certainly useful.

[Nebulous112]

Hello, great guide! Best that I have found for modding Fallout 3. A couple suggestions:

 

1) The "Vanilla Weapon Retextures" category is slightly confusing. It has a list of individual weapon textures that are compatible with EVE, but further down the list is the Weapons Enhancement Pack, which includes all the non-EVE compatible textures for energy weapons. Won't these overwrite the EVE compatible textures when downloaded? Or do the EVE-compatible individual weapons have some unique files that won't get overwritten? (Which would make the order not matter.) As with UI, obviously texture order matters, so I want to make sure I get it correct per the guide.

 

2) The instructions for the ENBoost for Nvidia Optimus users doesn't seem to work (at least not for me - Intel HD 4600 and Nvidia 970M in a new MSI laptop). I did some research, and the injector version doesn't seem to work for many people at all, even though your instructions are from the author himself (after some frustration I independently verified this). The ENBoost text simply will not appear in the top-left corner at start with the injector version, no matter what I did.

 

I found an alternate solution: Use the wrapper version, but download this afterward - NVIDIA OPTIMUS D3D9 DLL FIX. Make sure to follow the instructions in the readme (i.e. rename old d3d9.dll to a specific filename he tells you, etc.). Worked like an absolute charm.

 

3) While your list is fairly comprehensive, there are a few textures that I don't think are covered, and a couple mods that may be worth adding to the list:

 

Textures:

 

 - What's Your Brand (Cigarette pack re-texture)

 - Better Pre-War and Burned Books (You have Books Debunked and a re-texture of skill books, but no re-texture of other books)

 - Hi-Res Lunchbox Retexture (Name says it all)

 - Earth from Space texture for Mothership Zeta (Truly amazing looking re-texture of our planet from space)

 

New mods to consider:

 

 - Expanded Megaton House with Universal Sorter (Best Megaton house mod I have found. Very slight additions for more storage space, better layout, etc. and compatible with all themes. I don't care about the sorting feature, so I suggest the version without the sorter. If a sorter is wanted, the mod author provides a link in the mod page to the updated stand-alone version.)

 - Auto Aim Explained and Properly Applied (Simply increases the auto-aim max distance [when red cursor is active] from 1800 units to 6000 units. Worth checking the page out to just get an explanation of how auto-aim works in Fallout 3. Note that this may conflict with FWE...I do not use FWE, but I think I once read that FWE changes auto-aim...not sure. Great addition to the mod list, assuming it does not conflict. Vanilla auto-aim is...not the greatest, to say the least.)

 

Anyway, thank you very much for putting this thing together. Simply tremendous.

 

Cheers!

Edited July 11, 2015 by Nebulous112

[Faldaani]

2) The instructions for the ENBoost for Nvidia Optimus users doesn't seem to work (at least not for me - Intel HD 4600 and Nvidia 970M in a new MSI laptop). I did some research, and the injector version doesn't seem to work for many people at all, even though your instructions are from the author himself (after some frustration I independently verified this). The ENBoost text simply will not appear in the top-left corner at start with the injector version, no matter what I did.

 

I found an alternate solution: Use the wrapper version, but download this afterward - NVIDIA OPTIMUS D3D9 DLL FIX. Make sure to follow the instructions in the readme (i.e. rename old d3d9.dll to a specific filename he tells you, etc.). Worked like an absolute charm.

Make sure that ENBInjector.exe, enbhost.exe and Fallout3.exe has "Run program as Administrator" checked in the properties view of each file and that enbinjector.ini has Fallout3Launcher.exe, Fallout3.exe and fose_loader.exe in its "Target Process" section. EDIT: And of course start enbinjector.exe before hitting "play" in MO.

Edited July 11, 2015 by Faldaani

[Adonis_VII]

 - Hi-Res Lunchbox Retexture (Name says it all)

MG's already includes this retexture (with slightly different tint).

Edited July 12, 2015 by Adonis_VII

[Kelmych]

Make sure that ENBInjector.exe, enbhost.exe and Fallout3.exe has "Run program as Administrator" checked in the properties view of each file and that enbinjector.ini has Fallout3Launcher.exe, Fallout3.exe and fose_loader.exe in its "Target Process" section. EDIT: And of course start enbinjector.exe before hitting "play" in MO.

Setting Fallout3.exe to have administrative privileges can potentially cause other problems, so be careful if this is done and make sure that this is really part of the problem.

[Kelmych]

Hello, great guide! Best that I have found for modding Fallout 3. A couple suggestions:

 

1) The "Vanilla Weapon Retextures" category is slightly confusing. It has a list of individual weapon textures that are compatible with EVE, but further down the list is the Weapons Enhancement Pack, which includes all the non-EVE compatible textures for energy weapons. Won't these overwrite the EVE compatible textures when downloaded? Or do the EVE-compatible individual weapons have some unique files that won't get overwritten? (Which would make the order not matter.) As with UI, obviously texture order matters, so I want to make sure I get it correct per the guide.

The weapons in this section are vanilla weapons, not weapons added by EVE. I'll make this clearer. The first four of the retextures add some textures that should override ones from EVE if EVE is used (yes, EVE uses some additional textures for these weapons); if it isn't I expect the additional textures are unused. These need to be installed before Weapons Enhancement Project so WEP overrides all the vanilla textures from these 4 mods.

 

2) The instructions for the ENBoost for Nvidia Optimus users doesn't seem to work (at least not for me - Intel HD 4600 and Nvidia 970M in a new MSI laptop). I did some research, and the injector version doesn't seem to work for many people at all, even though your instructions are from the author himself (after some frustration I independently verified this). The ENBoost text simply will not appear in the top-left corner at start with the injector version, no matter what I did.

 

I found an alternate solution: Use the wrapper version, but download this afterward - NVIDIA OPTIMUS D3D9 DLL FIX. Make sure to follow the instructions in the readme (i.e. rename old d3d9.dll to a specific filename he tells you, etc.). Worked like an absolute charm.

 

3) While your list is fairly comprehensive, there are a few textures that I don't think are covered, and a couple mods that may be worth adding to the list:

 

Textures:

 

 - What's Your Brand (Cigarette pack re-texture)

I'll add this to user recommended mods. The diversity is a nice feature, but the textures have no mip-maps. The textures that are used need to be processed with DDSopt to add the mip-maps. The Marlboro textures from Better Clutter and Furniture are almost identical except they do include the mip-maps, reducing the need for users to run DDSopt on them.

 - Better Pre-War and Burned Books (You have Books Debunked and a re-texture of skill books, but no re-texture of other books)

MG's Neat Clutter has higher res versions of 2 of the books; the sex book textures in this mod are a little better than the ones in Better Clutter and Furniture. The Prewar books in this mod seem too clean to me.

 - Hi-Res Lunchbox Retexture (Name says it all)

see other reply

 - Earth from Space texture for Mothership Zeta (Truly amazing looking re-texture of our planet from space)

The Mothership Zeta Retexture mod has the identical texture and also has a 2Kx2K version.

 

New mods to consider:

 

 - Expanded Megaton House with Universal Sorter (Best Megaton house mod I have found. Very slight additions for more storage space, better layout, etc. and compatible with all themes. I don't care about the sorting feature, so I suggest the version without the sorter. If a sorter is wanted, the mod author provides a link in the mod page to the updated stand-alone version.)

 - Auto Aim Explained and Properly Applied (Simply increases the auto-aim max distance [when red cursor is active] from 1800 units to 6000 units. Worth checking the page out to just get an explanation of how auto-aim works in Fallout 3. Note that this may conflict with FWE...I do not use FWE, but I think I once read that FWE changes auto-aim...not sure. Great addition to the mod list, assuming it does not conflict. Vanilla auto-aim is...not the greatest, to say the least.)

 

 

Anyway, thank you very much for putting this thing together. Simply tremendous.

 

Cheers!

[Faldaani]

Setting Fallout3.exe to have administrative privileges can potentially cause other problems, so be careful if this is done and make sure that this is really part of the problem.

Mmm, true. Forgot to add, these instructions were on Win8.1 64-bit if that matters, it was the only way to get the Injector working. And I was being lazy and never moved my steam directory to somewhere other than program files, so that is probably one of the reasons I needed to do that. But either way, its worth a try, easy to reverse if it doesn't work :)

[Nebulous112]

Thank you all for the replies!

 

1) I appreciate the advice regarding ENBoost injector, Faldaani (I am using Win 8.1 64-bit, btw). I thought I tried this setup, but I could be mistaken. I know for certain that I had Fallout3.exe, FalloutLauncher.exe and fose_loader.exe set to run with administrative privileges, but I could have forgotten to set the ENBoost .exe files. Which leads to my first question:

 

Kelmych, why can setting Fallout3.exe to have administrative privileges cause other problems? And what are the potential problems, exactly? I am glad you folks are mentioning this, as (without doing any research,) I assumed setting something to run as administrator could only help matters. Knowing how buggy Fallout 3 is, I just set it, the launcher, and any other .exe files I run with it (FO3Edit, mod manager, etc.) to run as admin. Obviously, after reading what you folks have posted, this is probably causing me more troubles.

 

I thought I learned my lesson many years ago about "assume", but it looks like it is still making an ass out of me!

 

 

2) Back to the ENBoost - Since I have gotten the wrapper version working using the Skyrim nVidia Optimus d3d9.dll fix, is there any advantage in me trying to get the injector version working, utilizing your advice, Faldaani? I am only interested in the memory fixes, not the graphical changes.

 

 

3) Thanks for more information regarding the Vanilla Weapons mods, Kelmych. I don't think I was very clear with my question - I did not think these were weapons added by EVE, but I was aware that EVE modified them. I was just confused about the order of installation (why the EVE compatible version of weapon "xyz" should get overwritten by the non-EVE-compatible version of weapon "xyz", when they are written by the same author). I'm still a little shaky on the subject, but I think I may now understand why this order is needed (we are looking to only keep the EVE files from that mod; the rest of the textures are better in the WEP). Anyway, more to the point, you have made the required order for these quite clear.

 

My question now would be - if these are textures to overwrite the ones found in EVE, should I install EVE before these mods? EVE is below these mods in the guide, so I assume I should install in the order listed (i.e. install previous mods in list, install said texture mods, follow the list down and install a few more mods, then install EVE).

 

However, won't EVE just overwrite the new textures from the said individual weapons (and defeat the purpose)? Or am I making the same mistake as I initially did with the individual energy weapons and the WEP?

 

*shakes head* I haven't been this confused since my introductory calculus class! LOL

 

 

4) I suppose I should have known that with your guide having such a comprehensive list of textures, that my suggestions would somehow already be covered! Thanks for the responses, though, Adonis and Kelmych. It does save me from installing unneeded textures.

 

 

5) Lastly, does anyone have any thoughts on the Auto-Aim mod? I thought this was one of the most interesting that I had found. I haven't seen it in many Fallout 3 mod guides...is there a reason for this that anyone knows (i.e. known to be buggy or conflict with other mods, etc.)?

 

 

Anyway, thanks again, folks. I really do appreciate you all taking the time to share your expertise.

 

Cheers!

Edited July 14, 2015 by Nebulous112

[Kelmych]

Thank you all for the replies!

 

1) I appreciate the advice regarding ENBoost injector, Faldaani (I am using Win 8.1 64-bit, btw). I thought I tried this setup, but I could be mistaken. I know for certain that I had Fallout3.exe, FalloutLauncher.exe and fose_loader.exe set to run with administrative privileges, but I could have forgotten to set the ENBoost .exe files. Which leads to my first question:

 

Kelmych, why can setting Fallout3.exe to have administrative privileges cause other problems? And what are the potential problems, exactly? I am glad you folks are mentioning this, as (without doing any research,) I assumed setting something to run as administrator could only help matters. Knowing how buggy Fallout 3 is, I just set it, the launcher, and any other .exe files I run with it (FO3Edit, mod manager, etc.) to run as admin. Obviously, after reading what you folks have posted, this is probably causing me more troubles.

 

I thought I learned my lesson many years ago about "assume", but it looks like it is still making an ass out of me!

I'll try to find the posts about this. Tannin mentioned some specific problems that result from giving Mod Organizer administrative privileges (vs. just running it as an administrator), and in the same thread there was a discussion about not running the game exe with admin privileges (vs running the game as an administrator which is fine).

 

2) Back to the ENBoost - Since I have gotten the wrapper version working using the Skyrim nVidia Optimus d3d9.dll fix, is there any advantage in me trying to get the injector version working, utilizing your advice, Faldaani? I am only interested in the memory fixes, not the graphical changes.

 

 

3) Thanks for more information regarding the Vanilla Weapons mods, Kelmych. I don't think I was very clear with my question - I did not think these were weapons added by EVE, but I was aware that EVE modified them. I was just confused about the order of installation (why the EVE compatible version of weapon "xyz" should get overwritten by the non-EVE-compatible version of weapon "xyz", when they are written by the same author). I'm still a little shaky on the subject, but I think I may now understand why this order is needed (we are looking to only keep the EVE files from that mod; the rest of the textures are better in the WEP). Anyway, more to the point, you have made the required order for these quite clear.

 

My question now would be - if these are textures to overwrite the ones found in EVE, should I install EVE before these mods? EVE is below these mods in the guide, so I assume I should install in the order listed (i.e. install previous mods in list, install said texture mods, follow the list down and install a few more mods, then install EVE).

 

However, won't EVE just overwrite the new textures from the said individual weapons (and defeat the purpose)? Or am I making the same mistake as I initially did with the individual energy weapons and the WEP?

 

*shakes head* I haven't been this confused since my introductory calculus class! LOL

It's common to have a mod include resources that should be replaced by ones from another mod, but the first mod might also include ones that need to overwrite other textures. In this case EVE is installed later than some other weapons because of other resources it replaces. EVE should be loaded before these vanilla retextures, so the EVE textures don't overwrite. It looks like the guide wasn't updated properly for this; it should be fixed now.

 

4) I suppose I should have known that with your guide having such a comprehensive list of textures, that my suggestions would somehow already be covered! Thanks for the responses, though, Adonis and Kelmych. It does save me from installing unneeded textures.

We encourage users to find new potential texture additions; a lot of texture recommendations have been added to the guide based on these. It's most helpful if they try these in game or compare alternate textures (I typically use Compressonator), and also use the MO Conflicts tab to see what they replace.

 

5) Lastly, does anyone have any thoughts on the Auto-Aim mod? I thought this was one of the most interesting that I had found. I haven't seen it in many Fallout 3 mod guides...is there a reason for this that anyone knows (i.e. known to be buggy or conflict with other mods, etc.)?

I haven't had time to look at this in detail. My concern is that the aim might become unrealistically good. I've noticed even without this that NPCs seem to get far too many hits on me when I am far away, and I'm worried that this might make it even worse. Is the standard aim behavior something Bethesda did as a hack to have a simple way to limit effective distance of weapons? I'm not sure.

 

Anyway, thanks again, folks. I really do appreciate you all taking the time to share your expertise.

 

Cheers!

[james4832]

Hey Kelmych, just wondering, do you have any idea as to how to get the sneak indicator to display? For some reason after following the guide I have no sneak indicator, which is rather annoying.

Edited July 16, 2015 by james4832

[Kelmych]

Did you enable the sneak indicator in iHUD?

[Brainfever]

Its de-activated by default in the FWE sneak settings.

[james4832]

Did you enable the sneak indicator in iHUD?

Its de-activated by default in the FWE sneak settings.

Yeah, I did, however, the above is what fixed it for me. Thanks though, what you have done here on the guide is amazing! After adding a minimalist ENB to it, I can safely say that I am stunned at how good the game can look :D Edited July 16, 2015 by james4832