Fallout 2 mod Party Orders add-on and NPCs Loot Bodies mod

[phobos2077]

But what about if multiple NPCs are just at the same distance to the player? e.g. My Ubersoldat character has CH 6 and leaves Sulik, Vic, and Cassidy outside of SAD. I go into SAD, kill all robots, loot all awesome guns (btw, am I the only one thinks there should be a laser rifle instead of plasma?), and take Skynet with me. At outside I try to "call" NPCs rejoining, but by coincidence they're all at the same distance to me. Now who should be left out? I know that's a stupid scenario, but it can happen.

I don't think it's important who will be left in this scenario (whoever will be last in NPC PID list), it's not a big deal after all. You can "kick" someone and take the right person if you want.

Question is, does it really make sense having such hot key? In what scenarios you want to leave your party behind except when testing some mods?

 

[NovaRain]

Question is, does it really make sense having such hot key? In what scenarios you want to leave your party behind except when testing some mods?

Like leaving NPCs in NCR bazaar then go bar-fighting with Hoss. If they're with me, they will join the fight and take out their weapons, which is bad.
Or leaving them in the Oil Rig entry hall, because I'm not going to fight Enclave troops and .223 minigun turrets on other maps.

But I guess there's not much usage for party wait/rejoin hot keys.

 

[jasper]

Also, is it possible to solve the bug in which the npcs resets their talking states if you talk to them when they are executing your commands? I would post a link to the report of this but I can't find it atm.

I don't understand, never had issues with this. A link would be nice and if solution is simple I might look at it.

Well, this is odd but after looking around, I can't seem to find the report anymore. Maybe it was on the RP wiki and then got removed or something because it wasn't related to RP. If I do find it, I will post it here. However, I remember the report was that at least Sulik got reset to his greeting speech if he was spoken to when he was moving around from a command from this mod. I have not yet tried this mod myself, and so I can not verify if it is true or not, I just wanted to mention it.

 

[phobos2077]

Have anyone tried to add buttons to the UI along with shortcuts? If not (and if it's possible), does anyone willing to do some drawing? I'm thinking about small panel with all commands as rectangular buttons (different icons) in several rows. It probably will only be visible with hi-res patch, when window width allows it (to the right of main UI, on top of the "belt").

 

[phobos2077]

Obviously, not everyone liked that you had to press CTRL for any hotkey now. And still there no free buttons left on the keyboard.
So I've finally found a solution: you can now define each hot key in either single number (like before) or in key combination format, like this:
29+30 (CTRL+A)

So I returned all hotkeys to what they were and change ammo key is now Ctrl+A.

New version: https://yadi.sk/d/va_8HEFBZKwGq

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

I made an improved version of the NPCs Loot Bodies mod. Might seem presumptuous, but given that I had access to a lot more advanced sfall features than @pelicano I think he'd probably agree.

The problems with pelicano's version, in my eyes, was on the one hand that it was limited: only two npcs would loot at any given time. Most importantly though, it was very arbitrary and frustrating: imagine spending an hour-long battle with Metzger's goons only to find that junkies have taken all the choice loot. You can't fight the junkies without antagonizing the entire town, so you're pretty much fucked. Anyway, in my version this all changed:

- whenever an npc kills another npc, he "expects" his team (i.e. himself and those fighting alongside him) to be able to loot that body after combat. If anyone tries to loot that body (and is noticed), then his team will initiate combat to keep that from happening.
- his team will also reserve the right to loot the bodies of their fallen comrades.

What this does is introduce an element of "fairness" to looting: no longer will the player be able to wait out a battle between a caravan and raiders to pick the raiders' bones dry after the caravan has done all the fighting. Conversely, the player won't have to worry that his kills will get compromised by junkie looters.

You can get the mod (it's just a global script, so put it in the script folder of whichever mod you're using) HERE.

I made a little video demonstration of it in action:

 

[MIB88]

Very nice. I have a question, though, brought up by your example. Sure, it adds an element of fairness/challenge. But, I would think that there would be some critters who would be... "immune" to that idea. Your junkie example seems like the perfect candidate. I would think that junkies would not have the good sense to stay away from looting certain corpses. Or ghoul crazies, perhaps. Or even the desperate homeless critters. Possibly even some critter who might think that he or she is just too tough to worry about being attacked. Any of these groups might choose to "poach" and consequences be damned. And, if the player loses out on loot due to a whole town potentially retaliating, well, that I would just consider that the price of survival in the wastes.

I haven't taken apart the script yet. But, would such a thing be possible: to turn off the team recognition for certain critters?

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Very nice. I have a question, though, brought up by your example. Sure, it adds an element of fairness/challenge. But, I would think that there would be some critters who would be... "immune" to that idea. Your junkie example seems like the perfect candidate. I would think that junkies would not have the good sense to stay away from looting certain corpses. Or ghoul crazies, perhaps. Or even the desperate homeless critters. Possibly even some critter who might think that he or she is just too tough to worry about being attacked. Any of these groups might choose to "poach" and consequences be damned. And, if the player loses out on loot due to a whole town potentially retaliating, well, that I would just consider that the price of survival in the wastes.

I haven't taken apart the script yet. But, would such a thing be possible: to turn off the team recognition for certain critters?

I'd like to implement something like this eventually, but only if I can first change the way hostility works in Fallout. A junkie trying to steal from a corpse after you've minigunned it down is (in theory) fine; him and the entire town suicide rushing you after you try to steal it back isn't.

A second thing I don't like about it is that it introduces a type of twitch gaming that doesn't belong in Fallout: after combat you'd have to click quickly on those corpses you want to loot before someone else gets there.

Btw, I'm working on a quick fix to make sure that you can't cheat the system by exiting map before they've properly looted everything: exiting will lead to everyone looting their loot targets instantaneously.


edit: to answer your question more concretely: I just looked a bit into it and it's not very simple to block out team recognition, so unless you make a very good case for it or want to do it yourself, it probably won't happen on my accord .

edit2: crap, also forgot to add the relevant header files.

 

[MIB88]

edit: to answer your question more concretely: I just looked a bit into it and it's not very simple to block out team recognition, so unless you make a very good case for it or want to do it yourself, it probably won't happen on my accord .

No, that is not my style. I would totally try to add in any changes I'd want rather than ask the creator of something to revise their work. I just wanted to know if you thought it was possible.

As an "oh-by-the-way", I think I am gonna go through certain maps in my mod and put junkies on their own team. I doubt a town would charge to the defense of someone attacking junkies... or junkies go to the aid of others in the town, for that matter... eh, maybe. Heck, I might have to come up with a way to put each individual junkie on their very own team.

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Eh, not sure if going on junkie massacres in broad daylight would go unmentioned. At the very least it should result in town reputation drops.

Updated the file with the source headers and the fix for map exit.

 

[CPL]

I made an improved version of the NPCs Loot Bodies mod. Might seem presumptuous, but given that I had access to a lot more advanced sfall features than @pelicano I think he'd probably agree.

The problems with pelicano's version, in my eyes, was on the one hand that it was limited: only two npcs would loot at any given time. Most importantly though, it was very arbitrary and frustrating: imagine spending an hour-long battle with Metzger's goons only to find that junkies have taken all the choice loot. You can't fight the junkies without antagonizing the entire town, so you're pretty much fucked. Anyway, in my version this all changed:

- whenever an npc kills another npc, he "expects" his team (i.e. himself and those fighting alongside him) to be able to loot that body after combat. If anyone tries to loot that body (and is noticed), then his team will initiate combat to keep that from happening.
- his team will also reserve the right to loot the bodies of their fallen comrades.

What this does is introduce an element of "fairness" to looting: no longer will the player be able to wait out a battle between a caravan and raiders to pick the raiders' bones dry after the caravan has done all the fighting. Conversely, the player won't have to worry that his kills will get compromised by junkie looters.

You can get the mod (it's just a global script, so put it in the script folder of whichever mod you're using) HERE.

I made a little video demonstration of it in action:

This is pretty cool. I look forward to trying it out. That was the reason I never used the original mod, because of random people taking shit.

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Another update (1.1) where I fix stupid oversights:

- you can no longer stop critters from looting by reentering combat mode.
- only humanoids (humans, ghouls, super muties, brain bots) will loot... it's no longer a dog loot dog world out there.

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Aaaand another update (1.2) where I fix another couple of stupid oversights, including to make sure that if someone starts combat against someone trying to loot someone and kills them then they loot the one they were trying to loot. Makes sense right .

My god, making these types of things watertight is tiring.

 

[Fox Wernicke]

Hey phobos, the download is gone. Reupload it?

 

[jasper]

I made an improved version of the NPCs Loot Bodies mod. Might seem presumptuous, but given that I had access to a lot more advanced sfall features than @pelicano I think he'd probably agree.

The problems with pelicano's version, in my eyes, was on the one hand that it was limited: only two npcs would loot at any given time. Most importantly though, it was very arbitrary and frustrating: imagine spending an hour-long battle with Metzger's goons only to find that junkies have taken all the choice loot. You can't fight the junkies without antagonizing the entire town, so you're pretty much fucked. Anyway, in my version this all changed:

- whenever an npc kills another npc, he "expects" his team (i.e. himself and those fighting alongside him) to be able to loot that body after combat. If anyone tries to loot that body (and is noticed), then his team will initiate combat to keep that from happening.
- his team will also reserve the right to loot the bodies of their fallen comrades.

What this does is introduce an element of "fairness" to looting: no longer will the player be able to wait out a battle between a caravan and raiders to pick the raiders' bones dry after the caravan has done all the fighting. Conversely, the player won't have to worry that his kills will get compromised by junkie looters.

You can get the mod (it's just a global script, so put it in the script folder of whichever mod you're using) HERE.

I made a little video demonstration of it in action:

Hello Jim. I love the concept with this mod, but I have to report a bug with the latest version.

If a party member is killed by say robbers or whatever, the game crashes every time. I have not experimented much with this such as killing the party members myself or such things but the problem vanished when I removed your mod. Just wanted to let you know. It might make a difference that I have phobos Economy and rebalance mod active at the same time, I dunno.

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Hello Jim. I love the concept with this mod, but I have to report a bug with the latest version.

If a party member is killed by say robbers or whatever, the game crashes every time. I have not experimented much with this such as killing the party members myself or such things but the problem vanished when I removed your mod. Just wanted to let you know. It might make a difference that I have phobos Economy and rebalance mod active at the same time, I dunno.

Thanks for the report. Did some testing myself but couldn't find any bug. Either it's a conflict with phobos's mod or it's something horrible that lingers on and is hard to test lazily...

 

[phobos2077]

If a party member is killed by say robbers or whatever, the game crashes every time. I have not experimented much with this such as killing the party members myself or such things but the problem vanished when I removed your mod. Just wanted to let you know. It might make a difference that I have phobos Economy and rebalance mod active at the same time, I dunno.

If you provide more details about your crash it will help. Like the exact message and savegame. Common crashes should have memory address in error message which may lead to a place in engine where problem occurs. (in Windows you can press Ctrl+C whenever you see a standard popup to copy message to clipboard)

 

[jasper]

I have to admit that I have grown used to the situation where if I install a mod onto a game and the game crashes because of it, that the modders in question have no use for the error codes, since they would only be of use to the original developers who knew the engine inside and out.

Well, I didn't take in consideration the fact that you two (jim & phobos) have really made this engine your bitch lately. How stupid of me.

Sadly, I don't know what the error said besides that it was the usual "fallout has referenced memory at [something] and memory could not be written" type of thing. The game would minimize first then close. The savegame is also long overwritten. But it was nothing wrong with the savegame as far as could tell and I never save in combat etc. Of note is maybe that it also crashed when my main character was killed (before the slide comes telling me that I have failed and all that). So it was not just party members. And it was 100% reproducible. It happened with humanoids and I am about 50% sure that it did not happen if anyone got killed by non-looters (geckos etc). I do have the "weapon drop mod" installed (via phobos economy mod) if that helps any? Maybe the script freaked out because the weapon got dropped to the ground at death?

 

[JimTheDinosaur]

Well, I didn't take in consideration the fact that you two (jim & phobos) have really made this engine your bitch lately. How stupid of me.

just phobos . But yeah, in general a debug log would be infinitely preferable to an error address, but I can hardly expect non-modders to have something like that handy.

Of note is maybe that it also crashed when my main character was killed (before the slide comes telling me that I have failed and all that). So it was not just party members. And it was 100% reproducible. It happened with humanoids and I am about 50% sure that it did not happen if anyone got killed by non-looters (geckos etc).

Yeah, all of this makes sense because the looting doesn't apply to party members (don't want to force the player's team to start looting after combat), or non-humanoids (geckos looting would be somewhat silly).

I do have the "weapon drop mod" installed (via phobos economy mod) if that helps any? Maybe the script freaked out because the weapon got dropped to the ground at death?

That does seem like a prime candidate for the crash, yeah. A large part in my mod is played by a "hook" that fires whenever an object is removed from someone, for whatever reason, so could be I didn't take into account exotic "reasons" like that, so I'll check it out, thanks!

edit: wow, yeah, I'm just now checking what happens in phobos's mod sources when a critter dies, including party members, and there's shit being dropped and destroyed (in the context of loot reduction) all over the place, that must be it.

 

[Fox Wernicke]

I have the strange sensation that the original non-function key style for the Party Order add-on isn't working, but I don't mind using the Shift key for making dude_obj pick items up where I can't reach 'em manually. That's a problem with stuff hidden under scenery objects.