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Project Brazil: First Impressions

fallout logo
Project Brazil is a new full game modification for Fallout New Vegas created by Brandan Lee. Four years in the making, it doesn’t just put a new shine on the Mojave, but is, effectively, a completely new game set in California. To run the mod you have to start a new game and the intro movie sets a great tone familiar to anyone who played the original Fallout. Things started to become ominous pretty quickly, though, when the opening credits listed a handful of “writters”.

The opening monologue was decent (in that the acting and quality did not offend), but the animation was super choppy and distracting. When all of this introductory material is setting the tone and conveying to the player, not only the story and setting, but attempting to convince them that this mod is worth their time, it is surprising they left the opening animations like that. In the long run, not terribly important, but perhaps evidence of a more general problem, especially when you combine it with what was the most depressing for me: the audio quality and voice acting.

Let me start with a quote from Lee: “It contains nearly 5000 lines of professional quality voice acting recorded in my media studio with friends from the local film, TV, radio & live theatre industries.” It sure as fuck doesn’t sound like it.

In the first ten minutes I encountered 5 characters; all sounded like they were recorded on different microphones in different spaces. The opening intro by Coach Bragg (voiced by Roger Owen) sounded, as I said, decent but quiet. The second person I encountered was Dr. Kevin Rossman (Duke Standberry) and, while well acted, the audio quality was poor, like he was speaking into a $20 computer microphone, and he was also too quiet.

At this point, I turned up the voice settings and turned down all the others.

Next, I met Johnny Matheson (Dan Ziffer) and, wow, he…should not act. Along with the terrible performance, my isolation and amplification of the voice audio quickly revealed why Lee chose to keep their audio so low. When you turn the volume up to something like you would expect from the original game, the background “studio” noise and other unpleasant artifacts are overwhelming. And, while the voice audio was uniformly low, there was still a distracting amount of variance, with some lines being louder or softer than the previous line.

And this is the first ten minutes. The game may be wonderful, but players can’t immerse themselves when the spell is constantly being broken by bad animation, acting, and audio quality. I’m going to continue, but I’ll be turning the voices off and going all text if it doesn’t get better quick.

I feel bad about critiquing something this guy and his friends probably spent thousands of hours on, but…just putting time into something doesn’t make it good, unfortunately. Ask M. Night Shyamalan.

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Adding master files to Skyrim plugins

If you are trying to create a plugin that overwrites and/or depends upon another plugin or you are getting a bunch of duplicates in the Creation Kit instead of the overwriting you expected, you will need to set the above ESP as a master. The simplest method is to use TESVsnip. Open your plugin within the program and right click it to “Add Master”. Once this is done, you can open the dependent plugin in the Creation Kit and work.

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Skyrim: Fixing Missing Riften Housecarl

If you side with the Imperials and the jarl is replaced with Maven Blackbriar before you become a thane, you will never become one and you will never get your housecarl, Iona. The following commands will enable Iona and the housecarl package for Honeyside. I recommend you only use these once you purchase Honeyside.

To enable Iona:
prid a2c93
enable

To enable the housecarl room:
prid c7f1a
enable

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Nightwatch Glyph Toolkit Bosses

Only certain bosses drop Nightwatch Glyph Toolkits. Below are the ones I am 100% certain of. You may notice a pattern. From these results it appears, in a given dungeon, the first, second, and fourth bosses are the only bosses that have a chance to drop Nightwatch Glyph Toolkits.

Droppers

  • Polaris #1
  • Polaris #2: Blarbane Sorceress
  • Darkness Wars #2
  • Darkness Wars #4: Unbound Ak’ab
  • Hell Raised #1
  • Hell Raised #2: Corroder

Non-Droppers

  • Hell Eternal #6: Eblis
  • Hell Eternal #5: Iscariot, Cassius, Brutus
  • Hell Raised #3: Hardwired Fleshtank
  • Darkness Wars #5
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Nightmares: A Guide to Tanking Polaris

Tanking in a Nightmare dungeon is rarely straightforward. Even an experienced tank can be confounded by what to impair, what to dodge, and what to shrug off. This is the strategy I have used through dozens of 6/6 runs through Polaris. That doesn’t mean other strategies won’t work, just that this works for me and will probably work for you.

First, these are my Actives and Passives for Polaris. This really forms the core of my abilities in all dungeons and so is a good starting point for any tank looking for a Blade/Chaos build. As for equipment, I personally favor 700-750 Block and the rest in Defense, but I’m not going to defend that except to say that the Ur-Draug almost requires a high block, but more on that below. For Polaris, I run with just short of 400 hit and I rarely miss an impair.

Continue reading →

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The Secret World: Target’s Target is working

Back at launch, there was no way to get your target’s target. Whenever you tried, it would just return your target. I recently retested it and I can report that you can now get your target’s target as expected and reliably, it seems. I say “it seems” because in the instance of code that I am using that function there is some buggy behavior occasionally that I haven’t diagnosed yet. But let’s assume it works fine and celebrate.

Example:

function GetTargetsTarget(offensive_target:ID32):ID32
{

var target_char:Character = Character.GetCharacter(offensive_target);
var targets_target:ID32 = target_char.GetOffensiveTarget();
return targets_target;

}

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“No Badges”: About the Code

“No Badges” is a little mod for The Secret World that hides the SP and AP icons once you have maxed their respective pools. The floating icons are called anima wheel links and the little numbers attached to them are called badges. So why is the mod that removes anima wheel links called “No Badges”? Because you didn’t know what an anima wheel link was until I told you. There is nothing else in the game called “badges” so I chose that description. Moving on.

The code, as it is now, is entirely ghetto. It is a few lines in OnEnterFrame that continuously checks the number of points in each pool and hides the respective icon if the pool is maxed. The mod didn’t start out that way, though. I tried to be a little more sophisticated. I didn’t use OnEnterFrame at all. All the actions were associated with signals.

For example, whenever you got an AP or an SP, the mod received a signal. I tied a function to that signal that would check if you were maxed in a pool and, if you were, to hide the anima wheel link.

This worked fine and was a simple, unobtrusive, low overhead bit of code. Except when you zoned. When you zone your character gets destructed and remade. There are signals tied to each event and I tried to use them. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I’m not sure of the order of things following a zoning event. Its possible “No Badges” received the signal of the character being created before the UI had created its anima wheel link icons. That would cause the mod to attempt to remove an icon that wasn’t there yet and then the icon to be rendered afterwards, with no action done to it. That’s what I’m guessing. Could be something else. By this point in the development, I was ready to move on.

Below is a copy of the source with some additional comments.

NoBadges Source