More useless knowledge

 We're hardwired to want to learn new skills. This can so often be a trap.

Game modding gets deep, fast. Even just dropping third-party mods into Skyrim or Fallout 4 gets complicated quickly.

Want your character to have a clean pair of pants? Well, there are mods that add some "pre-war" clothing in. But what about that cool bomber jacket? Well, oops, it was designed to be AKWR compatible and the Vortex Mod Manager won't install it. The Armor and KeyWords Resource is designed to make it easier to organize clothing items, especially those that can include the Railroad's "ballistic weave", but AKWR depends of Fallout Script Extender, which is an off-site tool that has to manually un-gzipped and compiled...

And forget heels. Because Fallout 4 was never designed for heels, so you need to use a modified skeleton, which requires multiple other script extender tools, which comes bundled with extended physics you are required to put in because otherwise Vortex barfs, oh and they are all organized around third-party body/skins, which are only partially compatible with each other...

And using third-party mods is nothing on how deep the rabbit hole gets when you try to build your own mods.

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My first mod, made in FO4edit because the Creation Kit requires all sorts of hoops of signing up and membership and so on at Bethesda Net, including installing an entire package that tries to force you to boot through them instead of Steam, changed one number on another mod.

My second successful mod was to allow you to manufacture a battery out of a spare fusion cell you could use to power things around your settlement instead of running wires everywhere. I have a thought for the super-charged version; the Friendly Atom, which you construct from a mini-nuke and is 1-point power supply with a huge radiant distance.

At least that won't require I learn more new skills and/or download even more tools.

See, the Bethesda games use something called a nif file. In the Poser world, the polygon mesh is an obj file that just sits there in the folder. The rigging and IK and morphs and so forth are all external.

In Bethesda world, everything is folded into the nif. The official Bethesda generator models, for instance, have a spot on the nif that is designated as "wires go here." If you do something like attach generator behavior to a desk fan (a broken third-party mod I tried out) the "attach wires" animations play, but the wire never attaches.

Similarly, the animation is baked in. In the case of the desk fan, all that modder did was create a new ACTV item and attach it to the nif of an in-game static object. Which, as it turns out, had animation burned-in; it automatically goes through the entire desk fan spinning and pointing when brought into the world. And, no, the wire doesn't attach.

My genny was built on the in-game model of a fusion cell gun ammunition. I was able to get it to radiate power, be workshop constructible, and to make a sound when "switched on." But I can't stick it to walls; I'm assuming that's another nif property that an object that is normally found lying on the ground doesn't have.

One of the things that excites me is that the nif file also has a designated "sit" area, and the third-party nifScope will create a wire-frame NPC to show you how they would interact with the object. With that, and plugging in the "trigger animation file" behavior, you could have settlers go up and sit on, lean against, lie down on, or even operate any arbitrary mesh.

One of the mods in my stack right now adds constructible versions (aka you can build them in Workshop mode to add them to your settlement) of various static props with animation triggers attached. Turns out a good in-game test is to speak to your current companion and tell them "check that out." It amused the heck out of me to see Cait, the Irish pugilist, sit down on a chair that had a typing animation flag on it and she was perfectly placed to start tapping away at a computer monitor I'd placed on the nearby table. (And you can use these yourself, too, although the third-person camera isn't optimal for watching how the animation looks.)

A different mod attached animations to designated scavenging stations which means settlers can be assigned to them. The funniest one is a pre-war car, which returns a small amount of salvage to your settlement if a settler is assigned to...wash it (I'm assuming it uses the "clean counter" animation).

See, that's the problem. Once you've started, you get filled with ideas about "what could I do with this?" One thing I'd love to do (and distribute as a mod, although it is probably done by others already) is to make a larger and more classy water purifier. There's those pumps you clean up for those greenhouse robots, so there's an in-game model already that could be used...but to make it really cool, you'd want to edit the nif so it requires the business end to be submerged in water. And add some animation so you can tell when it is running...

That's the thing; when you start crawling through the editors, you see all these cool things mentioned and you wonder what it would look like, sound like, behave like if you were to build that into something...

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Meanwhile over in the other "useless skills" I'm gearing up to record a piece that is going to require I play bass, electric guitar, flute, alto sax, trumpet, trombone, violin, chin cello, chin bass, snare, bongos, and shaker... (It also has toms and hat, plus barisax and bass 'bone but I'm not crazy....)