Standalone Character Creation Tweaks
This is mainly intended to bring attention to the fact that, thanks to the awesome decoding efforts of the FO4Edit people, you can add standalone hair colors, skin colors, and presets to the game (no need for replacers anymore).
The initial problem was that FO4Edit couldn’t fully copy the Race records that allow for character generation (it could do monster ones like Cat, Deathclaw, etc.. just fine, but not ones like HumanRace and ChildRace). The update to FO4Edit was over a month ago, but I haven’t seen any mods that make use of the fact (what few mods I have seen that mess with presets, hair, or facial features are all replacers).
I decided to go ahead and upload the handful of ones I made myself to test things out. There are two versions:
1) just hair colors and presets (5 new colors, 3 female presets, and one male preset)
2) hair and skin colors, and presets (same as 1, plus 3 skin colors)
Because of the way the game handles things, disabling this mod will still leave you with a changed skin color, but won’t leave you with a modded hair color. If you disable this mod without changing back, you can still change your skin color like normal, no issues result from doing so afterwards instead of before.
Known Issues:
The only problem I ran into was that, if I was playing around in the skin tone selection too long (particularly if I quickly scrolled up and down), I would get a CTD with “R6025 – pure virtual function call “Error” reported. I never ran into it when navigating the skin tone screen by arrow key, and it seems to happen much more often when looking at that menu after saving a game where you changed it.
This is not strictly limited to my mod, as I was able to reproduce it after disabling all my mods and starting a new game. It generally took longer on a new game (to the point that no one would trigger it accidentally – I was scrolling up and down for about a minute when I finally got it to happen on a new game, at original character creation screen). Starting a new game with my mod active, and selecting my new skin tones, didn’t cause the problem any more often than without my mod. Barring my tests with a brand new game (not loaded from a save), I used slm 14 to make the changes. I did try using slm to change features after creation but before saving, and it didn’t happen any more often than on initial character creation. That said, I didn’t use the in-game “reconstructive surgery” doctors, so it is possible that doing so reduces the risk of hitting the bug. In any case, always try to avoid the mouse wheel when selecting different skin tones after initial character creation, with or without my mod.
Tl;dr, the “R6025 – pure virtual function call “Error” CTD is a problem with the vanilla game, my mod just makes it so you are more likely to use the menu that triggers it. If you are worried, download the version without skin colors, as I was completely unable to replicate the problem in any menu but the skin tone menu.
Note: In some last minute testing, I couldn’t get the bug to happen again, even on a save game where I had already completed the game (over 5 days gameplay time), that has been loaded with half a dozen different mod configurations. Not sure if it’s because I repaired my Visual C++ installation through Steam (the 2012 version of Visual C++) or what, because I was still able to cause the bug immediately after doing the repair and restarting my computer. I’m going to leave this warning here, just in case, but it might just have been my computer/particular installation of Fallout 4 that was the cause.
This mod is essentially complete, and I am unlikely to be making any changes to it. I’m also a college student so don’t be surprised if it takes me a while to respond to comments. I tested this mod as thoroughly as I could to make sure there weren’t any problems with it, and baring the vanilla bug it helped me discover, I found nothing.
Everything below here is related to the workings of the mod, so if you just want the things my mod adds, and aren’t interested in using it to make your own, you can ignore it:
The female presets are ones that already existed in Fallout4.esm, but weren’t activated. The male preset is just a duplicate of one of the vanilla ones, and is more so you can easily find where to add presets with “Hide no conflict rows” enabled (because the Race record is ridiculously huge).
Skin colors are fairly easy to add, as the colors seem to map directly to the RGB values entered. The only thing I am unsure on is the Template index value, but I think you will be fine using anything higher than the numbers I used (the highest value I saw in the vanilla version was in the 1800s). The “TINL – Total Number of Tints in List” field near the top of the record doesn’t auto-update, but I didn’t even notice it until I was getting ready to upload, so I don’t think it really matters much.
Hair colors are much trickier, as the game seems to read those differently, and so you need to have certain values to get certain colors. For instance, setting red and blue to 0 and green to 150 gives you bright yellow hair (a lot of combos seem to just give bright yellow). Hopefully people better with this kind of thing than me can figure out an easy way to add colors, because there were several colors I just could not get. The final value (currently “Unknown”) definitely has an effect. Hair colors are the only color records in Fallout4.esm that don’t have 00 in that field, and all vanilla hair colors have either 3E or 3F.
It should also be possible to add new facial features (new scars, tattoos, etc…) as well, but those records have some strange fields that I don’t understand. There seems to be a pretty clear pattern, so it probably won’t be too hard to figure out, but I spent too much time figuring out some working hair colors as is. You can add conditionals right in the race record for those, so you can (for instance) make it so you can only add a certain tattoo or scar after completing a certain quest, or if you have a certain item in your inventory, or even if your average settlement happiness is high enough (not sure on the last one, there is a global value for settlement happiness, and a way to get the value of a global as a conditional, but I’m not sure it works
The race record also controls things like face texture set (so you could add all kinds of interesting texture bases – robotic, insanely wrinkled, etc…), attacks (how likely an a melee attack will stagger, how much stamina, even new attacks if you can figure out .hkt files), what effect an injured bodypart has, what equip slots are available, and many other fun things. Hell, it even lists all the biped object slots you can set an armor piece to use, so it might be possible for someone to add new slots (so you could, for instance, wear five rings and not have them use any of the slots the base game uses.
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