Random Bits From New Vegas

[The Question]

So I'm playing (an extremely heavily modded) Fallout: New Vegas. 252 mods, at current count, most of it aimed at improving the general gameplay mechanics, combat mechanics, lighting, textures, etc. Naturally, there are weapons thrown in, as well, and other miscellanea.

Anyway, the main point of this thread is posting just... random funny or interesting shit that happens in game.

For example, one of the mods in the "Companions" group allows you to recruit Ulysses (primary antagonist from the "Lonesome Road" DLC) as a companion after you complete Lonesome Road (provided you talk him down rather than kill him, obviously.) Well, I took Ulysses into the "Honest Hearts" DLC. I figured, seeing as it was Ulysses who gave the White Legs (antagonist tribe in Honest Hearts) their combat training, draft him in the effort to clean up his mess by wiping them out.

For those who haven't played Honest Hearts, there are 3 short "acts" to it. In Act 1, you meet a fella by the name of Joshua Graham (aka "The Burned Man") who tasks you and a Dead Horses tribal named Follows-Chalk to scout Zion National Park for equipment the New Canaanites, the Dead Horses, and the Sorrows (another friendly tribe) need in order to evacuate the park and escape the White Legs. In Act 2, you meet the other New Canaanite in the park, a fella called Daniel, who gives you some more errands to run. You also lose Follows-Chalk, but gain another tribal companion, a broad called Waking Cloud.

So here's the funny. After getting Daniel's list of errands, I'm trying to find where the hell Waking Cloud wandered off to. Spot her at the bottom of a cliff, standing in the river. It's too far down to just jump, but I kinda crouch-walk my way down various ledges until I can jump without crippling myself. Takes a while and takes being real careful. As I'm about to talk to Waking Cloud...

Ulysses fuckin' lands on her. SPLOOSH. Both of them are knocked unconscious.

I'm still full of LOL.

 

[The Question]

This is gonna make me laugh every time I re-read it and am reminded. I was all Mission: Impossible, feelin' clever and shit as I walk up to this chick, and then...

Ulysses: "GERONIMOOOOO! Oh, hey, that's your uncle, huh? " SPLAT

 

[The Question]

Absolutely THE best summation of this game:

 

[blackfoot NAP]

 

[blackfoot NAP]

 

[The Question]

 

[The Question]

Walking north on the 15 past Quarry Junction with one of the base game's companions, a little pipsqueak-y girl named Veronica (voiced by Felicia Day). This supermutant (big muscle-y green dude) runs up, makes this noise like, "Blaaaa!" and hits her over the head with a sledgehammer. From behind. She looks at me, turns around, and kills the dude with one punch. The one punch kill wasn't the surprising part -- she wears a pneumatic gauntlet (called a "power fist" in game) and is pretty damned OP.

The funny part was the half second she just stood there staring blankly at me first, like, "Can you believe this shit?! O.O"

 

[The Question]

Have discovered a few optimization tools for Fallout: New Vegas.

One is the "BSA Decompressor" -- turns out that when Bethesda (the development studio behind Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4, and 76) compressed the game's .bsa archives, they did so using a compression method that both made the game intrinsically unstable and seriously hamstrung its performance. BSA Decompressor (shockingly) decompresses, then re-compresses, the game's .bsa archives using a more modern mechanism, eliminating both the instability and performance toll issues.

Second, is "Optimized ESMs". The second category of files used by Fallout: New Vegas are .ESM and .ESP files, or "plugins." Bethesda's .ESM files had serious problems -- understandable for a game which had a mere 18 month development cycle. "Optimized ESMs" cleans up the game's base files, removing sloppy code and references within them, which also provides greater stability and performance.

The last one is an absolute godsend for players who add significant numbers of mods to their game. A brief explainer:

The Gamebryo engine, as implemented in Fallout: New Vegas, is not LAA -- Large Address Aware. It was made for 32-bit processors, and -- as such -- can only access up to 2GB of RAM in its default state. There is a patch that makes it Large Address Aware; even then, it has serious limitations.

One of them is, it can only handle 143 "plugins" due to its original memory constraints. Lifting those constraints makes the engine technically capable of handling up to 255 "plugins." Let me explain "plugins" briefly:

Every data archive that accesses the game engine is a "plugin." Because the data "plugs into" the game engine. Simple as that.

The base game's data file -- which contains meshes, textures, scripts, etc. -- is one "plugin." Each of the DLCs is another "plugin." You can have up to 255 of those; the base game is one, each of the DLCs is another. That leaves room for mods. Lots of them. And yet...

Each "plugin" takes a toll on the Gamebryo engine. Imagine a game of "tug of war" with the game engine on one side, and the plugins on the other side. The more plugins you have, the harder the job is on the game engine, and the less performance you get out of it.

So...

Refer to my original post: I had (at that time) 252 "plugins" hooked into the game's engine. Almost at the limit. The game was... playable... but my framerate was measure in the mid-20s.

Enter zEdit; zEdit has a function called zMerge. What zMerge allows you to do is take multiple "plugins", pool all their data -- meshes, textures, audio, scripts, etc -- and create one .esp plugin for the whole lot of them.

Twenty-plus guns... one plugin. I can have as many mods as I want (well, still within limits, but a waaaay higher limit) and the game runs as smooth as fucking silk, despite that.

Now it's just a matter of editing the weapon stats to make them harder hitting and more accurate.

And, no, that's not a cheat -- because enemies in the game get the same weapons I'm using, which means my AR-10 that can put down an enemy soldier? Only if I see him first, because he very well might have an AR-10, too, and take me out with it if he gets a bead on me first.

 

[The Question]

Yes, I have this. Yes, it is as fun as it looks.

 

[The Question]

Semi-related tidbit:

Microsoft is a fucking scumbag company. Pretty sure we all knew that, but here's an entertaining example of that fact. It's usually advised that, for best gaming performance, you periodically go in and clean out your "temp files" -- for anyone who doesn't know, these are just random little text-based files left behind by various minor processes -- internet browser cache remnants, installer detritus, updater poo, and so on.

One other thing you want to do, for best gaming performance, is deactivate and/or disable as many unnecessary background processes as you can. Particularly, Microsoft Edge. Particularly, in my case, because I don't use Microsoft Edge.

Anybody remember back in the early-to-mid 1990s when Microsoft got slapped around with a massive antitrust action for making Internet Explorer a central component of Windows, which was deemed anticompetitive?

Guess what? If you attempt to delete the contents of your /%temp%/ folder... you can't. Not all of them; because the system will throw an objection at you -- that some of them can't be deleted because they're in use by Microsoft Edge. Even if you don't think Edge is running. Try it yourself:

Press Windows key + R, type in %temp%, hit enter. Press CTRL+A to select all files. Right click on them, click the trash can or Delete option. There you go.

And now try this:

With that window still open, hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE and select Task Manager. Well, huh! Where'd the un-delete-able files go?!

Fit me for a tinfoil hat, if you want, but the obvious conclusion is that Edge runs background processes, contrary to user choice, then kills those processes when the user takes an action that would make it possible to identify and disable them. I know, that sounds paranoid. That's why I gave instructions that will let you see it for yourself.

 

[The Question]

Amusing tidbit for today:

I had been running two mods on this morning's playthrough (actually, I'm running over 360 mods, but only 2 are relevant to this tidbit):

One is called, "Simply Uncut" -- which does pretty much exactly what it sounds like: it restores cut content back into the game -- some of which had been completed by Bethesda but cut for performance reasons (there was a lot of content originally in the game that just couldn't be optimized for Xbox in time, so it was cut from every version of the game), the rest of which wasn't as polished as the developer wanted it to be, and some which was only in the "concept art" stages but never progressed beyond that. Well, the mod team behind "Simply Uncut" restored all of it that could possibly be restored and/or finished and implemented.

One of those pieces of cut content was an NPC who was originally included as a potential companion.

Interestingly, this NPC is in the completed game -- but only as a corpse.

Full story:

You begin the game in a little town called Goodsprings, which is quite a few miles south of Vegas (this is also true in the real world; there actually is a Goodsprings, Nevada, about an hour south of Las Vegas. But I digress.) Typically, the suggested (safest) route you can take is to go south from Goodsprings to Primm, then east to Nipton, CA, then north to a town named after the one working lighted sign there, a hotel sign with the letters NO VACancy (caps represent the lighted letters) and consequently known as Novac.

However.

If, instead, you go north, you run into a tiny camp/settlement for a group of quarry workers, by the name of Sloan. You'll be warned against going any further north due to the presence of a pack of deathclaws (huge, fast-moving murder lizards) in the quarry just north of Sloan. If you persist in continuing north, you'll find the quarry on the west side of the 15. Ahead of you, you'll see a crane and two juvenile deathclaws -- one dead, one alive and standing over a human corpse. Kill the deathclaw (if you can) and examine the body -- it's the body of a powder ganger (gang of convicts who mass-murdered their way out of custody and stuck together to terrorize and extort the locals.)

On the body, you'll find 88 caps (game equivalent of dollars). This is important.

Now, let's re-run that last part, but here's the Simply Uncut version:

You approach the quarry -- there are two juvenile deathclaws near the crane, and no corpse. Again, kill the deathclaws, then approach the crane. Go around to the side that's facing away from you, and the same powder ganger is standing there, alive. His name is Hawkins, and he gives you 88 caps for killing the deathclaws that had him trapped and hiding back there -- same guy that was dead in the released version of the game. Then he runs back to Sloan. Catch up with him there and you can recruit him as a companion.

The other mod isn't nearly that complicated to explain -- it's a suit of combat armor and a combat helmet, known collectively as the "Road Fighter" armor.

Here's where the weird comes in. On this morning's playthrough, I recruited Hawkins. I outfitted him with the (extremely distinctive) Road Fighter armor and helmet.

Later, I disabled and removed Simply Uncut, because it was causing bugs. No more Hawkins.

Well, that's what I thought, anyway.

Much later on, I started the "Old World Blues" DLC. To trim that branch of the story -- it takes place in a worldspace which is totally inaccessible to base game NPCs -- for example... powder gangers.

Except when I get there, there's somebody else with me. Somebody who could not -- should not -- be there. Somebody wearing the Road Fighter armor set. It's not Hawkins... but it kind of is. Same armor I gave Hawkins. Same weapon I gave Hawkins. Non-hostile despite the fact that my character had a "Vilified" reputation with the Powder Gangers. But all he's named as is, "Powder Ganger" as the generic version of that faction's NPCs are.

So it was, and at the same time, was not a cut content character walking around. Didn't respond to commands or anything. Didn't engage in combat, even when the DLC's enemy NPCs attacked him. Couldn't be killed, wouldn't kill anything.

100% complete quantum superposition in software form. Schroedinger's NPC. lol

 

[The Question]

New mod-related tidbit, and a weird/disturbing/extremely amusing discovery.

There's a quest mod for New Vegas called "Coito Ergo Sum" (basically, "I Fuck, Therefore I Am." Haw.)

Superficially, it's a mod that lets you revive a pre-War porn franchise called Lollipopz. But there's... more to it than that. Weirder, and darker, but the 'darker' is almost horror-comedy. Early in the playthrough, you're approached by a sleazy little fucker who's passing out flyers for the brothel and tells you that it's looking for employees. Reaching the place requires you to fight through a modestly sized swarm of cazadores (giant, genetically altered tarantula hawks [a type of very, very dangerous wasp even in the real world]).

It's in the brothel's basement that things start to get seriously twisted. There's a computer terminal down there. Seated behind the computer terminal is a truly bizarre young woman, and standing behind her is a colossal sized mute fella in a gimp hood sporting a permanent hard-on. Apparently, the young woman, who goes by the moniker of, "The Handler" owns the fella, whom she has dubbed, "The Stag." And by 'owns', I mean refers to him as an 'it', and considers 'it' to be a weapon.

How is 'it' a weapon? Well, she has the guy fuck people to death for her viewing pleasure. Yup. She tells you, openly, that she masturbates while imagining this guy fucking people to death -- and only achieves orgasm while watching him do that very thing.

And it gets even weirder from there.

Like I said up above there, the quest is only superficially about running a brothel + skin mag + porn studio. A side quest involves solving the 200 year old murder of a porn star, because the young woman is obsessed with solving it. If you solve the murder, you can recruit her as a companion. And she brings her "Stag" along with her. You can give her any kind of normal weapon you'd give any other companion, but on occasion, she'll just point at an attacker and sic her slave on them, audibly orgasming as it attacks and fatally fucks whatever she sicced it on.

And all the characters from this mod are voice-acted. Not amateurishly, if not quite studio-quality-professionally.

Pretty sure that playing this mod is what watching a porn parody of Evil Dead 2 would be like.

 

[jack]

That sounds bizarre.

 

[The Question]

It is. It's also uproariously fucking funny. Watching a dude in a gimp hood go berzerk and rape-kill his way through a horde of psychotic junkies while they freak out in horror is something I never knew I needed to see in a video game.

 

[jack]

Pretty sure that playing this mod is what watching a porn parody of Evil Dead 2 would be like.

LOL Evil Dead is a wicked horror porn flick. Tree rape and lots of other fun things. Never saw 2 so I don't know what happened there.

 

[The Question]

Soooooo, in a further twist of Weird...

The young woman who literally gets off on watching people suffer and die?

She's a fucking robot. Well, a 'synthetic' in Fallout lore parlance.

 

[jack]

This stuff is interesting. I've never seen the game or how it works. It looks intense.

The Synths of Fallout.

 

[The Question]

Playing through a mod, this morning, titled, "The North Road." The quality of it is startlingly good. It actually feels like something on the same level as (if not for the most part higher quality than) the official content.

 

[The Question]

 

[The Question]

So here's an interesting mod.

A couple Youtubers named Mike... something or other, and his friend Zach did a whole series of Youtube videos of them playing New Vegas. A modder took voice clips of them from those videos and created a couple npc Companions for you in the game, made in Mike and Zach's likenesses.

Naturally, Mike and Zach decided to... play with themselves.