Having hurt my brain over the last few days over this, I figured I'd impart my wondrous knowledge upon this board.
I've played F2 many times now, and each time I felt that there was a missed opportunity in the form of Miria/Davin. As you all know, they suck a$$. Some of you no doubt think that this is all to the good - they are MEANT to suck ass. Yes, obviously.
But consider the roleplaying potential that would be available if they were valid NPCs! They're obtainable from the start, with a bit of stress, so you could roleplay a married team.
Anyway. For those who wish to either mod these folks OR make their own NPCs from scratch, heed the following.
All the game NPCs have two forms of prototype. The 'base' and the levelup prototypes. Open data\text\english\game\pro_crit.msg and you will see that, for example, Sulik is mentioned seven times. One basic "Sulik" entry, as well as six "Sulik - Stage x" entries.
The basic entry is the character you meet and is also the NPC that cruises around with you. When an NPC levels up, the appropriate 'stage' critter is *COPIED* onto the BASE prototype.
As you're all no doubt aware, Fallout deletes all prototypes unless they are flagged as READ ONLY. This is because Fallout uses this directory as a temporary scratch directory for processing critters in the game. The game extracts the files from the DATs, screws around with them, then deletes them.
For Miria, I created six new levelup stages. At first, I was overjoyed when she actually levelled up - then , thinking that was that, I left it all and went on to give her more dialog and floating text options. Then she got hit bad at some point, so I looked at her HP... they'd reset to the basic value.
This is because I had extracted the base prototype and set it read only. Therefore, Fallout couldn't update the proto with the stage critter.
So... don't extract the base critter. If you want to modify the base critter, you have to pack everything into a DAT file, or else your NPC will forget the fact it has levelled up the next time you load a game.
So there.
If things seemed a bit vague there, sorry - I'm at work and am working from memory.
I've played F2 many times now, and each time I felt that there was a missed opportunity in the form of Miria/Davin. As you all know, they suck a$$. Some of you no doubt think that this is all to the good - they are MEANT to suck ass. Yes, obviously.
But consider the roleplaying potential that would be available if they were valid NPCs! They're obtainable from the start, with a bit of stress, so you could roleplay a married team.
Anyway. For those who wish to either mod these folks OR make their own NPCs from scratch, heed the following.
All the game NPCs have two forms of prototype. The 'base' and the levelup prototypes. Open data\text\english\game\pro_crit.msg and you will see that, for example, Sulik is mentioned seven times. One basic "Sulik" entry, as well as six "Sulik - Stage x" entries.
The basic entry is the character you meet and is also the NPC that cruises around with you. When an NPC levels up, the appropriate 'stage' critter is *COPIED* onto the BASE prototype.
As you're all no doubt aware, Fallout deletes all prototypes unless they are flagged as READ ONLY. This is because Fallout uses this directory as a temporary scratch directory for processing critters in the game. The game extracts the files from the DATs, screws around with them, then deletes them.
For Miria, I created six new levelup stages. At first, I was overjoyed when she actually levelled up - then , thinking that was that, I left it all and went on to give her more dialog and floating text options. Then she got hit bad at some point, so I looked at her HP... they'd reset to the basic value.
This is because I had extracted the base prototype and set it read only. Therefore, Fallout couldn't update the proto with the stage critter.
So... don't extract the base critter. If you want to modify the base critter, you have to pack everything into a DAT file, or else your NPC will forget the fact it has levelled up the next time you load a game.
So there.
If things seemed a bit vague there, sorry - I'm at work and am working from memory.
