Belated Merry Christmas to Megamodders.
Eccentric are the meanderings of the modding path. I fired up the Megamod (2.44) to check one minor matter and somehow the next thing I knew I was wading hip-deep through the Brotherhood of Steel areas quagmire. I fixed a number of script problems, though what exactly is supposed to be happening plot-wise in these areas is murky business and I generally left untouched any matter not self-evident. In particular, the
intended requirements to join the BOS are incomprehensible to me, so I left things as they were on that count: the Chosen One must complete quests for both Martin and Burke to peaceably access the bunker. Completing Burke's delivery quest to Dr. Steel activates the elevator and allows entry, but unless Martin's quest to find the lost patrol is completed BOS soldiers in the bunker will attack the player on sight. Another matter that made no sense to me was the current state of the "attack on the BOS base" event. My opinion based on gameplay and looking at scripts was that (likely due to numerous past problems) MIB88 intended the Chosen One's active participation in this event to be disabled. I took this a step further and entirely disabled the event. There was no problem per se with the mutant attack occurring off-stage, rather than with the Chosen One's participation, but a serious problem occurs later when the Chosen One is teleported into the bunker to receive a (now undeserved) reward and all the soldiers in the bunker turn hostile. Until more serious thought can be given to how the attack should be handled (something I wasn't ready to do), deprecating it entirely is the only way to guarantee at least some valid adventuring opportunities inside the BOS bunker. This certainly leaves a number of theoretically available quests in the BOS bunker not available, but at least given my fixes here the pc can have a few adventures there rather than practically nothing at all.
Files available here. Use at your own discretion and risk, as these files were not in any way prepared in consultation with MIB88. Backup your original files before using any of mine. To use the files in the download, unzip the download and copy the files from the download into same-named folders in your Megamod 2.44 installation (overwriting existing files).
Summary of changes:
Scripts
--aitem6, bsitem6: added environmental armor to poison gas protection and fixed float text error due to duplicated line numbers in msg.
--bosbartn: can now be meaningfully interacted with, Dr. Steel delivery quest can now be completed.
--bosburke: Fixes to Dr. Steel-Barton delivery quests and changes to facilitate adventuring inside the BOS bunker.
--boskliff: can now be meaningfully interacted with, offering quest to Den outpost.
--bosmdoor: a change was necessary to fix the Dr. Steel-Barton delivery quest series.
--bosstore: can now be meaningfully interacted with, added some supply depot mirth.
--door: One might be hard pressed to actually find a door in the game that uses this script. I included it as a reference for modders, since most standard door scripts are broken. Dozens if not hundreds of wood doors are incorrectly portrayed as metal doors in standard game scripts, which may be important to mad-bomber characters since locked wood doors are meant to be blown up with only one explosive rather than two or three.
--ectrappr: I use this in my own games, but it certainly won't be to everyone's taste or sense of humor. If you don't want to use this in your game, at least check out the bugfixes for mundane stuff (trappers selling golden skins at regular prices and trouble with trapper restocking times shamelessly swiped from killap, troubles with Miria and Davin not present on the map, etc). Want to know why I don't release more of my own mods? Because most of the stuff I make is just like what's found in this script-- and I'm certain the world is simply not ready for my eccentric antics.
--epasteel: fixes to Steel-Barton delivery quest.
--vivltdor: can now use Oil Can from Tin Woodsman encounter to help loosen the stuck doors.
--vivltdr2, vivltdr3: The way these doors work never made sense to me, so I changed them; also, some minor bugfixes.
--wcbrnbot: Robobrain is a favorite of mine, so I spent a few hours on this one. Numerous bugs were fixed, and many other procedures were optimized. Among many other things, there should be no more trouble with Skynet forgetting his combat AI settings when loading a saved game. The only bugs now remaining with Skynet should be ones related to events inside the SAD maps, but fixing those will have to wait until all the SAD maps and scripts are brought up to the latest killap UP/RP standards. For those who keep track of such things, this wcbrnbot uses only 16 local variables.
Text files
--If not associated with an included script, then some language errors were addressed (could be grammar/spelling, could be a translation result that was unhelpfully vague, or a translation that was a stereotypically blatant example of ways non-native English speakers talk and write that also immediately identify the speaker as a non-native English speaker from Eastern Europe or Russia. I don't mean this as a derogatory evaluation-- the mistakes are entirely innocent and do not denote a lack of intelligence as even very bright folks from that part of the world tend to use English in these ways that native speakers find quite uncanny. Western Europeans, Indians, and Asians also all have their own unique and consistent ways of mangling English. I'm too old to learn any new languages, but if I did I'm sure I too would make mistakes that native speakers find funny, it's just the way these things happen.
--Fixed line numbering error in worldmap.msg that may result in announcement of Dead Mutants special encounter displaying as "Error."
Another problem in the Megamod is related to Cassidy-- his base proto is incorrectly set to use Marcus' AI, with the result that Cassidy will frequently "forget" some of his combat AI settings during map changes or savegame reloads until he levels up the first time. This is easy to fix, but not prudent to include in a download-- too many people tend to get confused about what to do with a base proto and just stick it in their patch folder, then come here and complain that problems were the result. In any case, anyone familiar with the mapper will likely want to take 30 seconds to fix this for their own game.
And to whoever put those three free suits of Advanced Power Armor
in unattended shelves in San Francisco: SHAME ON YOU! The specious spectre of Monty Haul already looms too large over a game far too easy for such shenanigans.
Over the holidays, I was actually working on a 2.45 release. I want to fix a few more things. But, I hope to have a release before this month is out. Here is the latest summary of changes (with thanks to Drobovik for pointing out some of these bugs):
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