Ignoring matters of personal taste, off the top of my head the first thing that comes to mind is how incredibly common crippled limbs on the part of the player would become without tweaking on that end.


Obviously AP ammo would need adjustment, but why HP? It is already based on multipliers -- fixed numbers should be your problem points.


I don't personally agree with this, but I see how others would disagree with me. Either way, perks like toughness and sub-dermal plating are the arguably the only way that a light-armor wearing character archtype can be truly viable in the end game. With the *3 multiplier you are talking about adding, this is going to become even more of an issue than ever before, as you're already putting literally three times the emphasis on DT than before. So without adjusting those perks as well, you're making it nearly impossible for someone to survive end-game battles without the heaviest armor they can find.


Too important, IMO...


1) I already, constantly, see the pattern of the same guy that it takes four or five hits to the chest to drop, drops with one to the face.
2) There are more targeted ways to accomplish this goal.

Ah yeah AP ammo is the only one that would need updating. I am considering just not bothering with heavier ammo anyway. I want to consolidate the esps and remove the fluff then make seperate downloads for each one possible.

I do agree that I should most likely update those perks to reflect the higher damage formula but I disagree about the notion that triple damage makes light-armor wearing character archtypes less viable. From what I can tell right now it makes the less than sneaky stand out in the open class archetypes less viable. IMO it feels really good to me at the moment. Limb damage can be a problem but from what I can tell if a guy shoots me in the face I die rather than suffer head injury and if a land mine goes off with me nearby I gib instead and reload a save game. *Shrugs*

I think when I played through the SP hardcoe mode I died maybe 3 times even on very hard even after I began making the game harder myself. ( At least until I got to a very cheap end sequence where difficulty spiked stupidly high )

Ill do some more testing and see if limb damage gets annoying at all.

With vanilla settings, a charater with 200 hit points in reinforced leather armor being shot by 20dmg bullets, takes 20 normal hits to kill him. Wearing T-51b shot by the same bullets, takes 50 shots to kill him.

With tripled settings, 20 and 50 drop to 7 and 17. Still maintaining the same relation to one another -- but there is also a matter of how long the firefight lasts. Surviving 50 vs 20 shots, in many fights isn't a matter of survival or not, it is just a matter of how much damage you're going to take. 17 vs 7 however, is often the difference between life and death -- even when you can kill faster as well, there are still certain timing realities... as such, things don't scale linearly as you get to shorter time frames.


Pretty much anything that "makes combat more deadly" is going to have the effect.


And if that is what you want, then go for it and have fun. Personally, I consider increasing the number of one-shot player character deaths to be poor game design. I would much rather survive the shot to the face, but be badly wounded - have to use the resources of a Dr's Bag and several stimpaks to stay alive and recover, while cursing my bad luck for taking the hit to the face in the first place. Same with setting off a mine.

On the other hand having no choice but to reload, and continue redoing whatever it was (combat with someone, trying to disarm a minefield, whatever) until I accomplish it "perfectly", is boring - and not only ends up being monotonous, but also leads to resources bloat. Only 10% of my ammo and drugs go to "when things go to plan". The other 90% are my trying to desperately shoot my way out of and/or otherwise recover from, a plan not going as expected. Turning those times into forced reloads doesn't make the game more fun, it makes it more tedious IMO.


I had the same "problem", and I do agree that more peril in the game is a good thing. But there is a big difference between dying because I couldn't reload my shotgun fast enough to take out the fifth extra-tough nightkin before his bumper sword did me in... and dying because I shot a legion recruit, and his buddy that had been out of LOS turned the corner and one-shotted me before I had a chance to react.

More realistic? Sure. More perilous? Yup. Better gameplay? Not in my opinion.

Well I ran into an all new problem with increasing damage. Basically with my limited testing it turns out that from what I can tell damage threshold seems to have an interesting problem when everything does triple damage in that when an attack fails to go above the threshold the fixed percentage that is removed per shot is balanced specifically around the default damage value. High rate of fire weapons seem to scale way better than slow but high damage weapons. Combine that with the fact that DTs fixed damage reduction isn't high enough to stop meaningful damage in higher damage environment means even with 80 DT your target will run out of HP well within acceptable time frame reguardless.

Even double damage this tends to be pretty noticeable. You can take a 9mm sub machine gun and plow through a power armored opponent with roughly 80 DT with relative ease at triple or double damage. ill have to look into this a bit more as I am not yet sure if its possible to further enhance the damage reduction from damage threshold. I am experimenting with giving a fixed percentage of DR per point of DT but the end result seems to be a lot of work to make the game feel pretty much the way it does out of the box anyway.

On top of that....
If you thought melee weapons were bad before wait until you see them at triple damage. A good power fist can two shot the universe.... Full size deathclaw spinning in the air kind of stuff.... /facepalm....

I have considered the idea of looking into making melee weapons behave more like hollow point and/or armor piercing ammo. Some melee weapon could be better for armored targets and others could be nearly worthless vs armor.

The amount of "leak" that goes through armor no matter what is a percentage of the original total damage of the weapon, as I understand it. The default is 20% -- but it is a GMST as I recall, that can be adjusted.

Hi. Using the More Spawns module from your mod and it's great. One request: Increase the number of corpses that can be in a cell at one time. Burning a boatload of ammo and supplies to take down a boatload of spawns, then watching half of them disappear before I can loot them is frustrating.

I found it.
That fixed the problem in a hurry.




I will look into this today, I am most likely going to release a new version of this module in a few days if I can.

I seem to actually have the damage module in working order. I suspect it will need a good bit of play testing to work out the kinks but I what I have right now is a mod that globally increases damage and Damage threshold together. It breaks no compatibility with mods like fook or Arwen's in that the solution itself is programmatic. And most likely configurable in future updates. I have also updated ammo and perks that modify DT.

Six Hands is getting extra functionality to allow you to also carry up to 6 explosives such as dynamite, grenades, mines ect.
Auto-regen is being updated to a slightly more robust needs module where your physical condition is what determines your regen rate among a few other things. I am kind of interested in making other factors play a role in how fast your hunger and thirst increase over time. Direct sunlight, humidity, chems, alcohol, general health?

The spawn module is an interesting cookie because separating random spawns is very important however monsters agro at very long distances so I may have to reduce the number of random spawns in favor of more specific ones or remove random spawns that are too close together. I also am considering adding an optional super mutant camp north of boulder or on the far north west section of the world map. ( Suggestions? )

Making these things configurable will also be a priority but at the moment too much needs to happen at the same time at the moment.

I have been looking around for the game settings on this and I am not sure how high I should tweak them. Do you think doubling the values would cause any problems?

Suggestion: Crack open the FO3 version of MMM and see what he set things to. I know Mart did a lot of testing and had a lot of feedback with regards to changing that setting. so that might make for a good guideline.

A few suggestions that would make the game harder, but not crazy monotonous...

1) the more weight you carry,the slower you move. Have it on a sliding scale rather than a breaking point.
2) traveling during the day dehydrates you faster. Traveling at night makes you hungrier(its cold in the dessert at night)
3) the more dehydrated you become, either have your hp shrink, or actively lose hp. Same with food

This way you need to pay attention to when you travel, and the more goods you take with you effectively costs you more to transport(in food/water) as well as helping to limit how far you can go in one trip. IE if you are really loaded down, you can only go x miles, because you will run out of food/water otherwise.

I have no idea, I'm pretty GECKtarded, but I'd be more than happy to test it if you like.

So far awesome mod...

I used geck and intergrated with the Zombie Apocolypse mod with higher spawns and my personal tweaks on zombie (health/DT/DR/DMG)

must say was in a state of constant war until it crashed...

I tweaked some more and I got it to a decent stability... pretty awesome seeing lumbering zombies slowly swarm a pack of radscropions right outside goodsprings with the resisdents fleeing in terror and forcing me to use an air strike (Enclave Commander port) to lower the attack and spawn a group of 5 NCR (Portable NPC Spawner Mod) to protect the town...

exactly what I was looking for... +props

While I have not tested to confirm this in game, according to Obsidian this is how the vanilla game already behaves.

I spent last night re-tweaking the spawns module. Once I lock down a couple more basic things for the mod I will release it under its new name and all that.

I have a much better combination of random and specific spawns that should compliment each other. It should feel less like all out war and more close to how the game should have shipped. albeit still a little over the top sometimes still. Rule of spawn placement is clump specific spawns together and separate random spawns far enough so that only one can occupy a cell by itself. I haven't heard anything from Martigen in awhile

After talking about it for awhile I have recently come to the conclusion that the cleanest and best way to do a damage module is to increase base damage a little, cut max hp down, increase armor absorption. Trick with this is just to tweak the settings constantly until they feel right I guess.... But that is a heck of a lot easier to do than other solutions with god knows what that can go wrong... Anyone have thoughts on this particular topic?

anyway back to work. I might need to take another day before release at this rate. (I am drunk)

[quote name='TheCastle' date='28 November 2010 - 08:19 PM' timestamp='1291004351' post='16736655']
I have a much better combination of random and specific spawns that should compliment each other. It should feel less like all out war and more close to how the game should have shipped. albeit still a little over the top sometimes still. Rule of spawn placement is clump specific spawns together and separate random spawns far enough so that only one can occupy a cell by itself.[/quote]
Now you just need to add a script such that all of your added spawns have only a percentage chance to actually spawn at any given time, and have a way (inventory carried activator may be the easiest) for the player to select between several values. Increments of 25% (including 0 to temporarily disable new additional spawns, and 100) would probably be enough I'd think.

[quote]I haven't heard anything from Martigen in awhile [/quote]
Not surprising. He's been drowning under some real life stuff for a while.

[quote]After talking about it for awhile I have recently come to the conclusion that the cleanest and best way to do a damage module is to increase base damage a little, cut max hp down, increase armor absorption. Trick with this is just to tweak the settings constantly until they feel right I guess.... But that is a heck of a lot easier to do than other solutions with god knows what that can go wrong... Anyone have thoughts on this particular topic?[/quote]
My personal opinion between "increase damage and increase armor to compensate" and "cut max HP down" is to do one, not both.

Both have their own balance issues that come into play, such that trying to rebalance both at the same time makes it more likely that something will get missed. It also increases how likely it will conflict with something else, since you have twice the number of things to consider a need to tweak with rebalancing.

Overall, I prefer the "cut down max HP" approach over increasing damage and armor. This not only makes weapons more deadly, but explosions (weapon related or otherwise), effects (poison, burning), traps, falling...

anyway back to work. I might need to take another day before release at this rate. (I am drunk)
[/quote]

as far as spawning randomly, the game does have a chance to spawn mechanic. But as it is right now its not configerable. The only reason I don't want to try and do that myself now is because I don't want to expend effort competing with Martigen on that front. He will do a much better job of that kind of stuff. My strong suit is purely level design type stuff, building environments and placing spawns not so much with scripting. What I want to do is help provide a better platform to support MMM when/if it does come only so that there will be enough spawns for the spawn logic to actually do what it does best. Believe me, the new spawn module feels a lot better than the one that's out now as far as creatures fighting each other and general randomness. I want the module to make the wasteland feel more solid then have NV MMM just blow us away.

I was looking over the idea of the damage system more and started to think about yet another angle entirely for damage. What about a really intensive overhaul of ammo? Just looking over the ammo effects and what I can do with them it would be very easy to add a ton of interesting depth on this front. At the cost of compatibility I suppose. Ill talk with the some of the FWE guys and see what they think about this idea.

Really looking forward to seeing how you've revamped the spawns. In vanilla, the game poses little challenge - roaming across the map, there's little sense of danger at all, and the atmosphere suffers because of it. I'd welcome a bit of chaos that a few more 'encounters' could deliver.

Have you considered looking into the triggers for Legion Assassins / NRC equivalents when you become vilified by either side? Many have reported that these assassins rarely appear and so could do with an overhaul ( only one Legion Assassin squad was sent after me, after becoming vilified early on, in a 60+hr playthrough! )

Will be monitoring this mod with interest....

Quick question, when using the more spawn plugin of this mod is it a good idea to wait in an interior cell for a few days to wait for the respawn time as normal of is that not necessary?

I did not find it necessary when I was testing it...

I have an update. Last night I was doing final testing on all changes and prepping for release. Sadly I was unable to release due to crash errors on save games due to the fact that the spawn module cannot even be partially esp. It has to be 100% esm or the game freaks out it seems.

At this point in time I have two choices, redo my updates by hand to the spawn module or figure out a way to merge the esp into the esm. So I might have to bite the bullet on this and redo all my changes in a single plugin and in the future make damn sure to never underestimate how hard it is to merge two plugins in FNV. It was Once a snap with FO3 it is now a nightmare. I really want to see a version of FO3Plugin for new vegas ....

anyway if I cant find a reasonable way to merge these two files ill be redoing my changes to the spawns plugin.

edit: For the spawns module you do not need to wait in a room. That will only happen with MMM if it adds verity to the types of creatures it spawns.

I haven't really been following the thread all that closely :whistling: but what, exactly, are you trying to merge? It seems like you're trying to make the Spawns ESM an ESP instead, which (with my limited knowledge of the GECK) is not possible. OR, were you trying to move the changes from the ESM into a new ESP? In which case, can't you do that with FONVEdit? (I use it all the time to merge mods for compatibility patches)

Can't imagine what would be causing crashes other than some error occurring during the "merging" process.

TheDamned

Sorry wrong place

The problem is that I goofed up and forgot that merging a complex esp with with hundreds of entries into an esm is a total nightmare with FONVEdit. ( Unless I am wrong and its actually pretty straight forward I would like to know. )
I made the mistake of editing the esm and saving my changes out as an esp thinking that merging the changes would be a simple process.

If the spawn module is not an esm it will crash the game. I don't know why, it just seems like anything that places a large number of objects in world space is simply not happy in esp format.

How difficult it is really depends on the contents of the records that are going from the esp to the esm. If the records do not include references to formids that are from the esp itself (ie, the reference formids from master files), then it really should be a walk in the park (might be a long walk in the park depending on the number of records).

If however there are a lot of references to records in the esp itself, the "most straightforward" method doesn't work, but there are other methods to work with -- certainly worth at least asking those with more FO*Edit knowledge about it before redoing a bunch of work...