Mojave Meanderings and Wasteland Wanderings, The Fallout "Where are you now" thread Options

[SubRosa]

I have had more than one female character come out looking male! Sometimes I even stop playing a character because I cannot get them to look right.

I have been thinking of renaming Annie to Annie Ley Oak, if that helps any...

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jan 4 2015, 03:08 AM

[SubRosa]

Annie has spent the last few days killin' Power Gangers and stomping on mutant bugs. Yesterday she cleared out the prison and ran back and forth to the Mojave Outpost to get Primm a new Sheriff. Today she headed east, and found the mess of Nipton. Lots of Legion killing ensued.

Annie also upgraded from her M14 to a more modern Colt M4A1 Carbine. I don't really like how FO3 and FONV do automatic weapons, but I found JIP Selective-Fire, which gives you the ability to select between single fire, burst fire, and full auto modes with any gun that is normally full auto in the game. I really am loving using the Colt, and switching between single shot for bugs, and 3 round bursts for two-legged varmints.

JIP in turn required The Mod Configuration Menu for FONV. I had no idea there was a version for FONV. I have MCM for Skyrim and love it. So I was glad to add it. JIP also needed User Interface Organizer, which I added as well.

That is when I started getting CTDs after about a half hour of playing, when I never had them before. I figured it had to be one of these mods I just added. So I got rid of UIO first. JIP Selective Fire seems to work without it, at least using display option 2, which puts your fire select down next to your ammo count in the interface. I ran the game for an hour without a CTD, so it looks like that was the culprit.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jan 5 2015, 04:41 AM

[mirocu]

I love that carbine though I wouldn´t use it myself. To me it doesn´t fit into the Fallout universe...

[Renee]

You sound like Jack Reacher, with all your knowledge of guns. One of these days I should try making a Jack Reacher for Fallout 3. He'll be non-DiD; because it doesn't matter how hopeless a situation is, Jack Reacher never dies.

I also love the mod config menu in Skyrim. Makes things so much easier.

This post has been edited by Renee Gade IV: Jan 5 2015, 06:10 PM

[SubRosa]

Who is Jack Reacher? Was that a Tom Cruise movie?

[Renee]

Who is Jack Reacher? Was that a Tom Cruise movie?

Yeah, he's supposed to be the same guy, although I don't think Cruise does Reacher justice. I picture him more like a guy with an Army crew cut, since he is an ex-military policeman. I read a few Reacher books this fall. A co-worker lent me her copy, and I got hooked for awhile.

Anyways, one of the things I like about his books is he always comes up with some creative ways to escape bizarre situations. And he knows a lot about guns, to the point that it makes it interesting for somebody like me to understand. So maybe I'll make a character based on Jack Reacher. He'll be unkillable, as the guy in the books seems to be.

[SubRosa]

Well, I am still getting that CTD after about an hour of playing. So it wasn't UIO after all. I am wondering if it is the FONV Stutter Remover, which I also installed recently. When I started playing FONV again a few days ago I noticed a definite stuttering problem. The Stutter Remover cleared it up after capping the FPS at 60. I think I made a few other tweaks with it as well. So I reinstalled it just with the FPS setting, and I'll see how that works. I may need to tinker with some of the settings. I remember I had to make a lot of changes to the Oblivion version before I got it working well with that game.

On the other hand, the newly renamed Annie Ley Oak has pushed farther east into the map. She has cleared out the prison and everything west, all the way down to the bottom of the map. She even visited Nipton and declared war on the Legion.

The last few nights she has been crisscrossing the ridge between the prison and Novac. Her first time was through Primm Pass, where she had a nearly heart-stopping encounter with the Deathclaw that lives there. She found the rest of its family nearby, and put her grenade launcher to use. That was really close too! Needless to say, she is minus a whole lot of stimpacks now.

She headed back west after looping south around Nipton, then back east again through Scorpion Gulch. She ended up near Helios One, and decided to lend a hand there to get the power going. Then she headed south to Novac. She has been lending a hand around there, and I last left her on the way to the Repconn facility to look into the rumors of ghoul-trouble.


This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jan 7 2015, 05:52 PM

[Lopov]

In my case FONV SR caused frequent freezing that lasted for anywhere between 10-20 seconds before the game "unfroze". When I removed it, freezings were gone immediately.

She even visited Nipton and declared war on the Legion.

That's a must in your every playthrough.

[SubRosa]

After reinstalling the NV Stutter Remover with the default settings, and only changing the FPS cap to 60, I have not had a single CTD, even after leaving the game running for several hours while I watched tv. So that took care of business.

Annie spent the day 'splorin' around the south of the map. Most of the time was spent in Camp Searchlight, where the space suit she got from the Repconn Test Site came in handy. It has the same armor as Reinforced Leather, and the same rad protection as the Advanced Rad Suit. Still with the way the FO games cap your Rad Resistance at 85%, I still went through a lot of Rad-X and Rad Away.

But in the end Annie was able to return the ghoulified Private Edwards back into NCR service. She also teamed up with the Prospectors in the basement of the ruined church, got them some rad suits, and raided the Police Station and Fire House with them. The biggest radscorpion I have ever seen was in the latter. But big or small, Annie will whack them all. In the end the Prospectors turned on Annie (of course!), so she had to kill them too.

One thing weird is happening. In spite of Annie having killed more legionaries than the Celts, Germans, and Parthians combined, Caesar's Legion does not attack Annie on sight. Instead they still turn up green on the hud until she attacks. I wonder if it is something to do with that mod I installed that delays the legion assassin teams? So far she has not had one attempt yet. I am using the one attack every 10 days .esp, and I know it has been longer than that since she killed them all in Nipton.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jan 10 2015, 03:08 AM

[SubRosa]

I did some looking though the quests in the Fallout Wiki, and I am guessing that the Legion is not automatically hostile because of a quest in the main questline. It looks like after you kill Benny you have to go to Caesar's base to do something with the platinum chip. Or you have to go there to kill Benny if he gets away in New Vegas. So I think they keep the Legion neutral to you, even if you are Vilified, so that you can walk in and do the quest.

I have only had one character who ever got far enough in the main quest to kill Benny, and that was Lonesome Dove. I never went beyond that, so I never really noticed before.

In any case, I disable the mod that delays the Legion assassination teams, and sure enough, one immediately turned up. Afterward I still found the other Legionaries in the Wasteland to be neutral though. So I turned the mod back on, since they get really annoying after a while.

In other news, Annie Ley Oak has finished exploring the southern area of the map, cleaning out Cottonwood Cove and the all the little caves around there. She even made a trip back to Dead Wind Cavern, which she never went inside before. The Deathclaws outside had nearly killed her. But Annie had picked up the CZ57 Avenger, and wanted to try it out. So after smithing up about 400 rounds of ammo for it, she went Deathclaw hunting.

Annie wasn't that thrilled with the minigun. It runs out of ammo too quickly, sprays it all around too much, and I spend too much time not shooting while it winds up. After having a premonition of danger - I reloaded from the previous save - she went back to work with her M4A1 Carbine. About 500 rounds of 5.56mm Armor Piercing and 50 or so Stimpacks later, she had cleared out the place.

But, since the Colt had proven its worth with AP rounds, she headed north afterward and visited Quarry Junction. She also stopped off in Primm to repair E-DE, just in case she needed some backup. Things went better out in the open, where she had plenty of time to see the Deathclaws coming. If I stick to VATS, I find the M4 does quite well against them. The AP rounds completely bust their armor, and even though I modded the rifle to do less damage, it still puts out a lot of bullets, with good accuracy when in burst mode. But once the action points run out it gets more diecy. E-DE had to take one for the team at one point, and I had to do another reload to save his 'life'. One swat from the Deathclaw Alpha Male had killed him. The next time out I did better, and kept E-DE alive.

Now Annie has cleared out the entire map south of Goodsprings, across Sloan, the 188 Trading Post, clear to Hoover Dam. Except for Utobitha, which I think is next on the hit list. She has started exploring the north east area too though, around Bitter Springs. So she might finish that first.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jan 11 2015, 07:50 PM

[mirocu]

I could so make a fun caption for that minigun pic!

[SubRosa]

I could so make a fun caption for that minigun pic!

That will have to be my next pic for that thread!

Last night Annie finished up 'sploring the far north-east, all around the ranger station up there, The Devil's Throat, Camp Guardian, and so forth. She went all the way west to Raul's Shack. Thanks to her rescuing Raul from the clutches of Tabitha in our previous edition of the Annie Chronicles, he was there to repair her gear.

She discovered Vault 34, but did not go too far in due to the radiation. Annie will have to go back to Novac to pick up her space suit before tackling that one. Instead she continued to explore around the eastern outskirts of Vegas. Annie ran into more Deathclaws around the trainyard, and EDE kept getting killed by them. So finally she sent the robot back to Primm and handled things herself. She found the clinic and got all cybered up by Dr. Usanagi. That took all day game-time! Afterward she mosied on south, and ended up outside the Gun-Runner's kiosk.

btw. This is probably the best online map I have found of FONV. The little red and blue squares are each map location, and if you click on them, they will take you to the article on them. They are really small though, so you have to be careful not to click on the background picture around them.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jan 12 2015, 10:13 PM

[mALX]

I could so make a fun caption for that minigun pic!

That will have to be my next pic for that thread!

Last night Annie finished up 'sploring the far north-east, all around the ranger station up there, The Devil's Throat, Camp Guardian, and so forth. She went all the way west to Raul's Shack. Thanks to her rescuing Raul from the clutches of Tabitha in our previous edition of the Annie Chronicles, he was there to repair her gear.

She discovered Vault 34, but did not go too far in due to the radiation. Annie will have to go back to Novac to pick up her space suit before tackling that one. Instead she continued to explore around the eastern outskirts of Vegas. Annie ran into more Deathclaws around the trainyard, and EDE kept getting killed by them. So finally she sent the robot back to Primm and handled things herself. She found the clinic and got all cybered up by Dr. Usanagi. That took all day game-time! Afterward she mosied on south, and ended up outside the Gun-Runner's kiosk.

btw. This is probably the best online map I have found of FONV. The little red and blue squares are each map location, and if you click on them, they will take you to the article on them. They are really small though, so you have to be careful not to click on the background picture around them.

As much as I like EDE, he does kind of loud you out so you can't sneak up on a Deathclaw and get a crucial shot in before the fight is on. I used to give Veronica "Pushy" to wear, and stay hidden on a high wall while she went in and belted it out with the Deathclaws,

Ooh, that Tabitha quest was a ball of fun, going up that Black Mountain!

That Gun-Runner Kiosk bleeds my finances dry so I can never afford the surgery I want - OH! Have you ever robbed that kiosk for the Caravan Company? Do they know it was you even if you are not caught? I was afraid of losing my supplier, so just never completed that quest, wondered if anyone else had done it and what happened.

Great Interactive map!

[SubRosa]

I never did do any of the Crimson Caravan quests. I didn't much like the lady that runs the place. She kind of gave me the creeps the first time I talked to her, so I didn't want to work for her. I peeked in the wiki, and see that I had the right idea. She is not a very nice person...

I have spent tons of money at Gunrunners with other characters as well. I believe that is where Lonesome Dove bought her Anti-Material Rifle and all of its mods. That cost a pretty cap! But since with Annie I am using a modded rifle, I haven't been buying anything. I have been selling. So even after getting all chromed up by Dr. Usanagi, she still has about 30k caps leftover.

I never was able to reply in the pic thread, but I modded her carbine to make it more accurate. I think the spread they give weapons in FO3 and NV is ridiculous. A while ago I made a FO3 mod to reduce the spread of all guns. I made the automatic weapons a 0.7 maximum spread, and I think 0.2 or maybe it was 0.4 minimum. That makes them a lot more reasonable. I made Annie's M4 Carbine 0.7 Max /0.2 Min spread. That gives her decent accuracy at short and medium range, and sometimes she can make good shots at long range, but not always. That way the sniper rifles still rule their niche of one shot kills from long range, but the assault rifles are actually useful when closer than that.

The JIP Selective Fire mod I am using also reduces weapon spread when you are in single shot and burst fire mods, which helps too. Annie almost always uses one or the other. It is very rare for her to actually go full auto on anything.

Annie finally got around to clearing out Vault 34, and there was quite a bit of good loot in the armory (which was a pain in the neck to get to). It has both the Assault Carbine, which is full auto, and the Marksman Carbine, which is single shot. It also has the All-American, a unique Marksman Carbine. The A-A is single shot, but still has a really high fire rate. It's damage per second was listed higher than Annie's M4, which is full auto! It also has a scope, and looks to have almost no spread. So it is a great sniper rifle and up close gun. You should try that one out mALX.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jan 14 2015, 01:39 AM

[SubRosa]

Annie Ley Oakley has been exploring in and around Camp McCarran. She did some bounty hunting, and brought 3 Fiend heads back to Major Dahtri. She also met some of the other NCR troops in and around the camp. I was pleasantly surprised to hear a familiar voice come out of Lieutenant Boyd. It's Serana! a.k.a. Laura Bailey. I kept expecting her to say "Yes, what did you need?"

[mALX]

Annie Ley Oakley has been exploring in and around Camp McCarran. She did some bounty hunting, and brought 3 Fiend heads back to Major Dahtri. She also met some of the other NCR troops in and around the camp. I was pleasantly surprised to hear a familiar voice come out of Lieutenant Boyd. It's Serana! a.k.a. Laura Bailey. I kept expecting her to say "Yes, what did you need?"

Okay, I was answering these two posts when my laptop graphics card crashed (after the last Windows update) - I lost everything (so trying to remember)


I never knew that about Alice McLafferty! Gee, she seemed so nice to me, I must not read people well, lol.

So I googled her, and WOW! What a history/character she is! Plotting, manipulative - dear gods, the guys at Black Isles really know how to make a character deliciously gray! Their characters walk a fine line between ethics and motives and the blur between is neatly unclear as to whether you can actually call them a villain - Bethesda should study how they do characters, imho.

Now technically, the player actually does this too, pandying up to the NCR, Caesar's Legion, the Khans, Yes Man, Boomers, and Mr. House - all the while deciding behind the scenes who they are going to be backing in the big battle.

Me, I wanted everyone there for it, but each faction tries to force quests on you that ruin your rep with the other factions.

The only faction I really didn't care about keeping on my side was the ones with the fancy dress for Veronica - did not like them at all, lol.

What a fun game that is. I'll have to fire it up once I get some time to play. I haven't even played a single game on the new PC yet.


Oh, I'm pretty sure that vault has a special gun on the set of blocked steps before you get to the Armory, is that the gun you are talking about?



* Ooh, great idea reducing the spread - it was ridiculous! You could stand five feet from someone and let fly on them and not even hit them with a carbine in Fallout 3 - I never bothered with anything but selling them in NV, figured it wouldn't be much different. Great idea you had on fixing that, much needed!


** That Anti-Material rifle with incendiary bullets is my favorite gun in the game, lol. It saved my neck a few times with deathclaws.




*** Now, it has been a while since I played NV, and I haven't played DG yet, but did see King Coin's vids - I never recognized that voice, how could I miss it? What a great catch that was, you were right of course !!! I was highly impressed by Laura's resume, what a great job she does!


I always wonder how these voice actors are found, I mean someone like James Earl Jones is going to be automatically noticed for his voice, but these people whose voices are studiously normal - how are they found? Is it like the acting jobs, where they go on "cattle calls" and audition?

(don't worry, I'm not thinking about becoming one, my southern fried accent would keep me from being hired even if I wanted to,

[mirocu]

It´s ridiculous how much the weapons spread the bullets, at least in FO3, so reducing that is a must. Thankfully someone at Bethsoft was kind enough to make a mod and send it to me. He also fixed the minigun so it fired as it should; fast as *****!

[SubRosa]

Annie Ley Oakley has been exploring in and around Camp McCarran. She did some bounty hunting, and brought 3 Fiend heads back to Major Dahtri. She also met some of the other NCR troops in and around the camp. I was pleasantly surprised to hear a familiar voice come out of Lieutenant Boyd. It's Serana! a.k.a. Laura Bailey. I kept expecting her to say "Yes, what did you need?"

Okay, I was answering these two posts when my laptop graphics card crashed (after the last Windows update) - I lost everything (so trying to remember)


I never knew that about Alice McLafferty! Gee, she seemed so nice to me, I must not read people well, lol.

So I googled her, and WOW! What a history/character she is! Plotting, manipulative - dear gods, the guys at Black Isles really know how to make a character deliciously gray! Their characters walk a fine line between ethics and motives and the blur between is neatly unclear as to whether you can actually call them a villain - Bethesda should study how they do characters, imho.

Now technically, the player actually does this too, pandying up to the NCR, Caesar's Legion, the Khans, Yes Man, Boomers, and Mr. House - all the while deciding behind the scenes who they are going to be backing in the big battle.

Me, I wanted everyone there for it, but each faction tries to force quests on you that ruin your rep with the other factions.

The only faction I really didn't care about keeping on my side was the ones with the fancy dress for Veronica - did not like them at all, lol.

What a fun game that is. I'll have to fire it up once I get some time to play. I haven't even played a single game on the new PC yet.


Oh, I'm pretty sure that vault has a special gun on the set of blocked steps before you get to the Armory, is that the gun you are talking about?



* Ooh, great idea reducing the spread - it was ridiculous! You could stand five feet from someone and let fly on them and not even hit them with a carbine in Fallout 3 - I never bothered with anything but selling them in NV, figured it wouldn't be much different. Great idea you had on fixing that, much needed!


** That Anti-Material rifle with incendiary bullets is my favorite gun in the game, lol. It saved my neck a few times with deathclaws.




*** Now, it has been a while since I played NV, and I haven't played DG yet, but did see King Coin's vids - I never recognized that voice, how could I miss it? What a great catch that was, you were right of course !!! I was highly impressed by Laura's resume, what a great job she does!


I always wonder how these voice actors are found, I mean someone like James Earl Jones is going to be automatically noticed for his voice, but these people whose voices are studiously normal - how are they found? Is it like the acting jobs, where they go on "cattle calls" and audition?

(don't worry, I'm not thinking about becoming one, my southern fried accent would keep me from being hired even if I wanted to,

The All American is a different gun that what you are thinking, I think. It is at the very end of Vault 34, in the armory.

Voice-actors are like any other kind of actors. There is a documentary called I Know That Voice that is all about voice actors, and how voice acting started with the old WB cartoons like Bus Bunny. Basically you start by doing plays and the like in high school, maybe go to acting school, do auditions, get noticed by someone, and then you are off. I think once a person gets their foot in the door as a voice actor, they start to make a name for themselves in the VA field. If they are any good at least. Then other directors or film companies start looking for them. Laura Bailey's first real job was doing voice work in anime, and she's done a lot of work there. I noticed a lot of Japanese computer games in her resume as well, like one of the Final Fantasy games. So she probably went from anime from there, then to western games like Skyrim.

[SubRosa]

Annie has been exploring the area west of Vegas for the last few days. She found Jacobstown, and did what she could to help out the local super mutants living there. It seems like they should be an official faction, like the Power Gangers and Khans are. It would certainly be neat if you could recruit them to fight against the Legion in the end game.

She has gone all the way south to Vault 19, and had to clean out a pack of deathclaws around the outside. She actually found the vault by a backdoor, going in through a cave near the Whittaker Farmstead. A lot of Power Gangers inside said they wanted to surrender to the NCR, but couldn't. Naturally the game would allow me to say "Hey, just walk out the door I came in through!" Annie eventually ran across Cooke, the mastermind behind the prison escape, and naturally she killed him. that turned the rest of the Power Gangers hostile, so she had to kill them too. Oh well. I read up on the Wikia that there is indeed a quest to get the Power Gangers to surrender. So I went back to a previous save and tried again. The dialogue to start it was buried under a mountain of other repeated lines, so it was really hard to get to. But once I did, Annie was able to pull it off, and get them to surrender peacefully to the NCR.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Jan 18 2015, 01:42 AM

[mirocu]

Looks like you´re having fun out in the west, SubRosa


But how about the east? Eh? Eh?