GUIDE General Feedback

[Kelmych]

Ok, I've completed the whole guide for the third time and for the past one week I've been playing a fresh new game.

 

I have followed the guide to the letter then created a new copy/paste profile in MO and added some other mods I wanted in my modded setup (like AWOP, 85 Outfits ReColor, Better Balanced Backpacks,etc.).

Perhaps at the end of the guide there should be a section for recommended mods. I've tried to keep the guide reasonably consistent with the STEP philosophy on lore friendliness, but of course even I use mods that don't fit this.

Since you have been using FO3 AWOP you might want to suggest what the guide entry should say, including comments on how it balances with the rest of the mods, so it can be added to the guide. FWE makes armor and weapons more powerful, and perhaps AWOP will fit it well or need only small changes. The only reason it's not added (like some of the other quest mods) is lack of knowledge on my part of how well they fit in.

The only alternation I've made is that instead of using Megaton Lighting Overhaul, Realistic Interior Lighting and the weather mods from the guide, I used the URWLFO3 for ENB from moddb.com. It's a personal choice since I consider it the best weather/lighting mod available for FO3(it's actually the only weather mod that comes close to Nevada Skies for NV in terms of quality of cloud textures, etc.) and it also covers the megaton lighting and the interiors lighting on its own, so it saved me a bunch of plugins as well. I didn't use the ENBoost feature since it caused me a heck of problems like stuttering and freezing, but I used a custom ENB preset of mine and everything runs flawlessly.

If you want to provide an initial version of ENB comments/suggestions along with the URWLFO3 mod that would be great. Based on previous comments it seemed like to get full advantage of it you need to be running an ENB. EssArrBee hasn't added any ENB recommendations for FNV yet, and I have been waiting until he does before adding this since I am not nearly as knowledgeable about ENBs as some of the STEP staff.

 

Regarding the bashed patch, I took the decision to leave the Blackened combo patch for FWE+MMM+PB+EVE out of the rebuilding bashed patch process and placed it right after Bashed Patch, 0.esp in my load order. In the end I created my own custom patch in FO3Edit fixing conflicts between Bashed Patch, 0.esp and the Blackened plugin and anything that had to do with NPCs inventories and some cells and worldspace records(records from my weather mod getting overwritten by vanilla records that kind of stuff).

I've been providing cleaning, load order, and bash tag data to LOOT. A small part of th load order data hasn't been put into LOOT since it isn't generally applicable, and this includes some additions (load after) that affect the Blackened patch. I'll provide a userlist very soon to supplement what is done in LOOT. I find with these changes that I prefer having Blackened before the bashed patch as it reduces the size of the manual patch I need to make. I'll check on the delay mods; at the moment the only one I see impacted is delaypl and I might have forgotten to give it a script tag.

 

Now, about the result; I have to admit that it is by far the best modded FO3 gameplay I've ever had till now. I can't thank you enough Kelmych for this tremendous effort and for giving us again a reason to grab this jewel from our shelves. Of course, I've already found some glitches and bugs so let me finish my post mentioning some of them.

Thanks

 

- Zealotless MP5 Pack doesn't work properly for me for unknown reason. I found a couple of machine-guns from this mod and they were both white changing colors when moving my camera all around. I know this usually has to do with missing textures or wrong textures pathing or something like that but in MO the mod is not overwritten or overwrites nothing and in FO3Edit there's no conflict of any kind. I don't know if i did something wrong with its patch for FWE, but anyway in the end I just decided to remove it from my installed mods list. There are already enough guns to play around anyway.

I'll look into this; I haven't noticed it although MP5s are showing up a little too often in Raider loot.

 

- Found some random female raiders that had weird body textures or those brown blocks around their legs and bodies ONLY when you stripped them off looting their armor from their inventory.

Solution: Install TYPE3RAIDERTEXTURESfull from DIMONIZED TYPE3 female body mod, then install MMMF3 Type3 Raider Textures from MMMF3 Type3 Raider Texture Fix [ https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/9010/? ] and then install TYPE3-V-RaiderSkins-MMMF3 from Alternate Female Raider Skins for Type3 - TypeV - MMMF3 [ https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/11711/? ] right in this order. I don't know why or how but only after installing all 3 of these mods together in this order seems to fix the problem. No weird raider body textures this far in my gameplay. I guess it needs further testing but let me be the first to confirm that this works, for me at least.

I'll add this to the guide.

- Had to manually override some script records from the Delay DLC mod's plugins that were getting overwritten by FWE in order for the mod to work properly.

see above

Ok I think these are the most important I can remember. If anything else occurs I'll let you know immediately.

 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find a place for young Bryan Wilks to stay. See ya!

I'll provide a summary of what I've been looking into for additions later today, including some fixes for the Zealotless ACR weapons and Powered Power Armor.

[Brainfever]

AWOP: Hmm can't come up with something clever so I'll say just what I feel about this mod; If you liked AWOP for New Vegas you gonna love its FO3 version.

Regarding balancing with the rest of the mods and since I haven't involved with any AWOP location yet in my current playthrough I'll tell you what I remember from when I had played with it almost 2 years ago. One word, HARD. It is certainly not for low level characters and requires a fair amount of ammunition and decent guns in order to survive in its areas (especially when combined with Marts Mutant Mod). Although, I've never had the chance to finish it I do remember that the storyline behind this mod is amazing and keeps your interest till the end like the quest to find that guy Zeus -super challenging.

 

ENB: URWL FO3 for ENB comes with its creator's ENB preset, which I think works just fine with the latest enb binaries, since marcurios' preset is based on the 0.194 version if I'm not wrong, which still has the first person weapon transparency glitch.

But, as you already know ENB preset is a tricky subject since it is based heavily on each user's personal taste. So I will speak completely subjectively on this matter.

 

I personally like a more apocalyptic, isolated and deserted feeling for the capital wasteland so I wanted an ENB with cold, washed out lighting that would make me feel the apocalypse right on my skin.

Now, I don't remember what I've used exactly since I'm using a custom tweaked preset based on Eremotherium ENB for NV, but the only ENB available on nexus, as close to my preferences as possible is The ENB of the Apocalypse [ https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/18514/? ].

 

But again, I can't tell how compatible with URWLFO3 will it be. My enbseries file was based mostly on marcurios's preset and I used all the files and the palette from Eremotherium ENB.

 

This is how my game looks:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are many other popular presets like the one from Midhras, but as I said before its totally up to the user which one to select.

In your guide's case, obviously it must be something compatible with dynamic weather and realistic interiors project.

Edited September 19, 2014 by Brainfever

[Kelmych]

The guide can certainly suggest some different mods when using ENB. For now I'll add a pointer to your post in the ENB section, and gradually we can add more.

 

For AWOP I'll look in FO3Edit at the weapon statistics for the weapons introduced in AWOP. It might even be easier to integrate AWOP into Fallout 3 than Fallout NV. FWE makes large changes in weapon damage to all the weapons, usually at least 2x, and the weapon-related compatibility patches for FWE make similar changes. The general weapon damage changes that Project Nevada makes in Fallout NV aren't as large, so the default AWOP weapons (with M in the names) in FNV are much too powerful for balance with the rest of FNV. Of course, the various AWOP compatibility patches in Fallout NV including those in NVEC change the AWOP weapons stats to more balanced values.

[Kelmych]

The description of optimizing the vanilla textures in Fallout 3 has been added to the DDSopt guide in the Fallout QUICK-START guide tab. The batch files provided in the guide that simplify this are the same ones used when optimizing Fallout New Vegas textures. The use of optimized vanilla textures has been added to the Clear and Present Danger guide for Fallout 3.

[Mikaal]

I am using a mod called "Quiet Molerat Footsteps". It's really good, no more loud footstep sound.

 

EDIT: https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/12436/?

 

Just a suggestion.

Edited September 29, 2014 by Mikaal

[phosphor]

This is driving me nuts...

I've never had an issue with ENB before however I cannot get the game to load if the ENB is installed. I'm only using ENB Boost, by the way. I went through the guide until I finished with the UI (which I've done before the 'fixes' section as recommended in the guide so 'fixes' are not installed currently). I got to the end of the UI (Unified HUD) and it recommends testing the game out. It 'Run' in Mod Organizer and it's like nothing happens. Tried disabling some mods here and there... same problem. I uninstall the ENB and the game starts up real quick.

So, if the ENB is loaded into the Fallout 3 GOTY folder it causes my game to not load. I tried the "Fallout Launcher" and with ENB instsalled it loads the launcher almost... box appears... no text... then crashes.

I tried working with the injector version. Installed the ENB. Ran ENBInjector.exe. Loaded up the game. The game starts but without any kind of sense that the ENB is running. No Version number in the upper left corner. 

I run an AMD Radeon 5800 card 1gb Vram. I've run the game in the past using Midhrastic so I've used ENB's before with Fallout 3.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

EDIT: Sorry, realized this was not the 'support' forum. Moving it there.

Edited September 26, 2014 by phosphor

[Brainfever]

ENBoost is a feature of ENB series that is included in the newest binaries for FO3/FNV and helps some people with RAM related issues. I say "some people" because it's not working perfectly for everyone and in some cases (like mine) it even causes worse problems than before using it.

You can still install an ENB preset, delete any ENBoost related file(enblocal.ini, enbhost.exe) and still be able to play with that preset just fine.

 

About the game not loading at all, from my own experience this used to happen to me when I was testing, installing/overwriting different ENB presets and somehow I always ended up with different dll's or enb files being completely messed up causing my game unable to launch properly. Other than that, I remember there used to be a driver's bug with AMD cards and ENBs that would crash you to desktop with a popping message about your monitor failing, but again this would happen in-game after the main menu when you actually loaded a game, which is not your case. Not to mention that this bug has been fixed long ago. But you never know since your gpu is pretty old.

 

So my advice, remove/delete any ENB related file, download and install the latest 0.263 ENB binaries from enbdev.com and run the game to see if it loads. It's up to you whether you want to keep ENBoost files or not.

Now, if everything works fine from that point on you can install a specific ENB preset that you like. Advanced and experienced ENB users can just replace which files need to be replaced with the ones from their selected preset, but I would STRONGLY recommend you to remove everything again before installing a different preset(EXCEPT the d3d9.dll which is the only file you actually need from the enbdev site).

[Kelmych]

As Brainfever mentions, it's a always good idea to load the vanilla enb files and then edit them when you are making changes in enb parameters. Since there is a new version of the Fallout enb series (0.263) I need to review the guide to make sure the parameter recommendations for ENBoost are still correct.

 

Also make sure that Fallout.ini and FalloutPrefs.ini haven't changed. I've had problems when these are inadvertently changed while I was making other changes. The Troubleshooting section at the bottom of the guide lists all the problems with launching that I've seen discussed, and when I hear of new problems and solutions I add them.

 

In the game I started to test the guide, as I get further into the game I do have occasional problems with game CTDs when loading old save games and opening doors. I've found that removing d3d9.dll sometimes reduces this problem; I can add it back later.

[phosphor]

After much trial and error. Uninstalling programs. Tinkering with the Ini files. Doing a scan to make sure the game cache was fine. Attempting older enb's...

I reinstalled the directx version that was packaged with Fallout 3.

Still did not work.

I then stumbled across this page which updates DirectX and... it loads up.

 

Man... that was frustrating.

[Kelmych]

I'm sorry you had these problems. I added the comment about upgrading to the most recent DirectX to the guide. I wouldn't have thought that it would matter with an ENB (which uses a different d3d9.dll) but perhaps there are other updated files that the newer d3d9.dll expects.

[Nozzer66]

Kelmych, I recalled enough wiki-fu to edit a couple of links that were pointing to the wrong mods. One was the Busworld English translation link, which was pointing towards the Busworld FWE compat patch instead.

 

There were a couple of others too but just cant recall what at the moment.

[Kelmych]

Thanks for fixing the links. I saw in the history page that you had entered fixes in the guide; it's always good to have help.

[hellanios]

Kelmych, the link for Paradox Ignition presents Marts Mutant Mod Merged is pointing to another mod Alternate Female Raider Skins for Type3 - TypeV - MMMF3

 

[Nozzer66]

Not any more it's not. Another link fixed. :)

[WilliamImm]

Kelmych, IIRC, the compatibilty patch for EVE on the RH_Ironsights page still has a test container for the energy weapons left in. I don't it's been updated since Gopher discovered that very fact during his LP of Fallout 3 via the monsters taking non-level appropriate weapons from that area. Might want to include instructions to remove that test container from the compatibility patch.