Willow - A Better Companion Experience is a mod for Fallout: New Vegas, created by llamaRCA and Nivea.

1. Willow A Better Companion Experience Program
2. Willow - A Better Companion Experience
3. Willow A Better Companion Experience
4. Willow - A Better Companion Experience
5. Fallout New Vegas Willow - A Better Companion Experience

Willow is not the usual girl companion. She is a story-driven character with over 1200 lines of voiced dialogue. She enriches your gameplay experience with her complex companion behaviors and her resp.

Description:

Willow is a girl companion added to the NV gameworld. She has over 1200 lines of voiced dialogue. There are other characters involved in the quests in the mod, and they are fully voiced as well, although primarily by game assets. The main purpose of this mod is to provide you with a story driven, complex companion. Willow is mostly meant to be enjoyed as a character who travels with you, however there are a couple of quests to do as well. She has a main questline, composed of two quests, that every player will see. There are two additional side quests and three challenges that every player will have an opportunity to play. Another side quest and challenge may or may not be seen by every player. It depends on choices made by the player.

Willow can be found in an abandoned tent that I've erected on the road South of Primm between the Nevada Highway Patrol Station and the Nipton Road Reststop (see picture ). Willow has a backstory that will be revealed to you through conversations, her Idle Chatter and journal entries. Her tagged skills are Speech, Barter and Survival. Her weapon skill is Small Guns. You will receive a perk automatically when you hire her, the Silver Tongue Perk, which will raise your Charisma by 1. There are opportunities to earn another perk and various other rewards are given to the player throughout the mod (armor, weapons, etc).

My let's play of Fallout New Vegas with the Willow companion mod.-Website: http://Tripl. Willow is not the usual girl companion. She is a story-driven character with over 1200 lines of voiced dialogue. She enriches your gameplay experience with her complex companion behaviors and her resp.

Install with Nexus Mod Manager.

Report problems with download to [email protected]

Converting Fallout New Vegas Mod: Willow - A Better Companion Experience to Xbox 360 (RGH, Jtag, Devkit)

This is a project that I’ve been working on off and on for about 3 or so months. It was mainly to get an understanding of conversions and things of that nature, but seems to work almost perfect. (Do note I haven’t playtested/debugged everything in this mod, just the main stuff)

Before we get started I want to point out that her hair isn’t the one in the mod. This is because of many conversion issues I faced. Put bluntly: she was bald and lagged the game severely with her hair for some reason. I tried exporting the nif and creating a new one and other things of that nature, but nothing worked.

Another important thing to note is that I am using “NVWillowv97-3-41779” so it’s not the latest one to date, but it’s the one I started and finished my version of the mod with. If you use this as a tutorial you should be able to convert the latest mod just as well.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

What you’ll need:

- The Willow - A Better Companion Experience mod (http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/41779/?)

- The Xbox 360 SDK [For converting audio files, and packaging DLC] (I can’t provide a download link to it for legal reasons. But it’s not hard to find.)

- BSAopt v2 or later (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/247/?)

- An audio conversion tool which can convert .ogg files to .wav (I’m using the paid software Xilisoft Video Converter)

- Fallout New Vegas on Xbox 360 [You need the Xbox 360 versions of Fallout - Meshes.bsa, and Fallout - Textures.bsa]

- Two .bat scripts I wrote [Optional, but makes things an extreme amount quicker when converting audio] (http://www.mediafire.com/?8f4ccn5lxnhh14t)

Getting Started:

Let’s start by opening the Willow mod files to see what we’re working with.

We’ve got loose files (the meshes, textures, and sound folders), an esp, and an archive (bsa) to work with. So the first thing we should know is that Fallout New Vegas will freeze on the Xbox 360 if we try to use a bsa other than the Fallout Xbox 360 type. So we need to extract the contents of the bsa. That’s where BSAopt comes in.

Launch the version of BSAopt that’s for your computer.

Press the “Browse” button at the top

Find the bsa location and select “Open”

Now select the “Browse” button on the bottom

Go to the same directory, but this time press “Use Folder”

Now press “Unpack”

Everything is in loose files now. Another thing we should note is that BSAopt’s Xbox 360 bsa packing is limited to Fallout 3, which is semi-compatible, but differs a lot too. So most thing won’t work properly packed into a bsa archive. This means that we’ll have to create these folders inside of our Fallout New Vegas game directory. But we’ll do that later, when all the files are done converting.

Normally you’d put all the files onto your Xbox about now and create a DLC file with the esp to start testing compatibility, but luckily for you, I’ve already done it! However if you were to put it on your Xbox right now, you’d find something similar to this:

She looks normal for the most part right? Well, except for the fact her hair is gone, and she lags the game to an unplayable amount.

This is where the process of elimination comes in and we start messing with files. “What happens if I delete this then restart the game?” “Does deleting this fix or change anything?”.

If you plan on doing other mods like this, delete things, then restart the game. Don’t just go to the title menu, because things are still loaded into RAM and stuff, so it doesn’t give you accurate results. You need to actually dashboard and restart for it to clear and give you accurate results.

Via the process of elimination I was able to come to the conclusion that her hair was the cause of the problem, both lag and baldness. Assigning her a new hair texture (ddx format) did nothing either. Eventually I tried assigning her hair from the game’s files and it worked.

Back on Track:

To fix this baldness/lag issue, we’ll need our “Fallout - Meshes.bsa” and “Fallout - Textures.bsa” folders.

To get those we’ll go to our games directory where Fallout New Vegas is, and under the Data folder grab “Fallout - Meshes.bsa” and “Fallout - Textures.bsa” and transfer them to our computer.

Now open up BSAopt again and press the “browse” button on top like last time:

Just like last time, select the bsa and press “Open”

Press the “browse” button on the bottom, go inside the folder where you want to extract the files and press “Use Folder”

Then Press “Unpack”

Now do the same thing for the other bsa archive.

We can go into the Fallout - Meshes folder now, and go to the directory:

Fallout - Meshesmeshescharactershair

And we can select any hair we want from the files. I went with the “hairbun”. Make sure to copy the 3 files when selecting your hair. “-.nif”, “-hat.egm” “-nohat.egm”.

For example when selecting hairbun, I would copy the files “hairbun.nif”, “hairbunhat.egm”, and “hairbunnohat.egm”.

Let’s go back to the Willow folder where all of our loose files are. Then in there find the directory:

NVWillowMeshescharactershair

Paste the hair meshes you found in this folder. Then delete the “hairalita” files. “hairalita.nif”, “hairalitahat.egm”, “hairalitanohat.egm”.

Rename your new Xbox hair meshes accordingly.

For example: Rename “hairbun.nif” to “hairalita.nif”

“hairbunhat.egm” to “hairalitahat.egm”

“hairbunnohat.egm” to “hairalitanohat.egm”

Now we do the same thing for the textures. Go under our textures directory then go to:

Fallout - Texturestexturescharactershair

Then we find the textures for the hair mesh. In my case: “hairbun”

We only need to copy the files “(mesh).ddx”, “(mesh)_hl.ddx”, and “(mesh)_n.ddx”

For example, in my case, they would be “hairbun.ddx”, “hairbun_hl.ddx”, and “hairbun_n.ddx”.

Now we go back to our Willow directory and find the path:

NVWillowTexturescharactershair

And paste the .ddx files there.

Again we delete the hairalita files: “hairalita.dds”, “hairalita_hl.dds”, “hairalita_n.dds”

And we rename the .ddx files hairalita.ddx (keep the .ddx extension)

So for me:

“hairbun.ddx” to “hairalita.ddx”

“hairbun_hl.ddx” to “hairalita_hl.ddx”

“hairbun_n.ddx” to “hairalita_n.ddx”

If we were to transfer these new files over to the Xbox, we would notice 2 things.

1 - The game actually runs smoothly now

2 - She has a bald patch on her head

The bald patch on her head is because .egm files glitch out when they’re outside of a bsa archive. So to remedy this we need to open up BSAopt again.

I find it best if you only pack the hair meshes and textures.

ie. “hairalita.nif”, “hairalitahat.egm”, “hairalitanohat.egm”

and “hairalita.ddx”, “hairalita_hl.ddx”, “hairalita_n.ddx”

However you need to maintain the folder structure. So your folders should look like this:

DataMeshescharactershairhairalita.nif

DataMeshescharactershairhairalitahat.egm

DataMeshescharactershairhairalitanohat.egm

DataTexturescharactershairhairalita.ddx

DataTexturescharactershairhairalita_hl.ddx

DataTexturescharactershairhairalita_n.ddx

Those should be the only files inside these folders.

Now in BSAopt go to the top “browse” button, go to inside the simulated “Data” folder with the Meshes and Textures folder. But this time press the “Use Folder” button. We’re using that button on the top “browse” section this time because we’re building a bsa archive instead of unpacking one.

So we need to tell it what files to use, then on the bottom “browse” section, we’ll save it with a name and bsa extension instead of pressing “Use Folder”.

Click the bottom “browse” button, then locate the directory where you want to save the bsa and give it a name. Make sure to include the .bsa at the end of the file name then hit save.

One last thing to make sure of before you press “Pack” is that you’ve selected Fallout 3 (Xbox 360) as your game, and Set your Compression to 0 (off).

Now you can press “Pack”

And you should have your packed bsa in the directory you chose.

Now we can make the DLC, which will include this bsa and the esp. The rest of the files should stay in the Fallout New Vegas game folder for compatibility reasons.

To make the DLC, click the page icon on the top bar, and select “Content Package' on the pop-up that appears. Now I’ll try to explain these:

Content Package Name - Name of DLC file

Project Directory - Project Directory, I recommend making an empty folder just for this.

Title ID - Unique game identifier, Fallout New Vegas’s is 425307E0

Name of Game - Name of game

Publisher Offering ID - Secondary DLC Identifier. I set mine to 0000000 because it’s my first Fallout New Vegas DLC file. Every DLC under a single game should have a different Publisher ID

Activation Date - Activation date, leave alone. Doesn’t do anything.

Dashboard Icon Image - 64x64 image. I usually just take one off the internet and resize it if I need to.

Willow A Better Companion Experience Program

Content Type - For DLC always choose 'In-Game Content”

Click “Next” until you get to this page. Then just enter your Content Package Name into the text boxes.

Click “Next” until you get to this page. Right click on “Contents” and select “Add File”. Go to your esp and select it. Right click on “Contents” again, go to your created bsa and select it. Then make sure your console is connected and press the install button (outlined in red). If your console isn’t a devkit and can’t connect to XLAST, XLAST saves a copy of the DLC files in folder you selected as it’s “Project Directory”. The DLC goes under:

Content0000000000000000425307E000000002

Before you jump back onto your Xbox to test this out and see how far we’ve gotten, you have to go into your files on your Xbox and delete the mesh data for hairalita.

So go in your Fallout New Vegas game directory on your Xbox and under:

DataMeshescharactershair

And delete “hairalita.nif”, “hairalita_hl.egm”, and “hairalita_n.egm”

But make sure to keep the hairalita textures in your Fallout New Vegas game directory.

And Presto! Just like magic, she now has hair.

But we’re not done yet, we still need to convert the audio files over.

Now you may know already that we have to convert the audio to an xma format. However I want to warn you now, that if you use a program which was in this thread (http://www.thetechgame.com/Tutorials/id=2781/tut-jtag-rgh-how-to-mod-fallout-3-pc-type-mods.html) that’s called “xmaencode' it will not work. It uses the old type of xma format, just plain old xma. You want to make sure you use the program called 'xma2encode” which uses the xma2 programming. “xmaencode” may have worked on Fallout 3, but from my tests it doesn’t work on Fallout New Vegas. “xma2encode” should be included with your Xbox 360 SDK, provided it’s a relatively new release.

Let’s get converting! Everything from here on in will be in the “Sound” folder. So we’re done with the “Meshes” and “Textures” folders

First thing you want to do is go to your “Sound” folder. Under Soundfx should be fine if left alone. The Xbox 360 is able to decode wav files, however there is no real guarantee.

To convert the ogg files to wav, I’m not going to cover this, mainly because I’m using paid software, and the software I’m using is extraordinarily easy to use. And if you’re using another piece of software, it’s likely to have a good amount of tutorials and/or ease-of-use.

Converting from wav to xma on the other hand, is more difficult and much, much more time consuming, but I made it easy for you guys by making you a batch script to convert them. Just copy xma2encode from your win32 directory:

Program FilesMicrosoft Xbox 360 SDKbinwin32

And paste xma2encode inside of the folder with your wav files. Then place the batch script “xma2encode_batchWAVtoXMA” with them also. Run the batch script and wait, and watch as it effortlessly converts all your wav files to xma.

Willow - A Better Companion Experience

42 files converted from wav to xma in a matter of seconds.

You still need to delete the wav files manually, but that can be easily done by just typing “.wav” in the search bar, selecting everything then deleting them.

Here’s a copy of the batch scripts in case anything happens to the download:

——————–WAVtoXMA——————-

for %%x in (*.wav) do xma2encode %%x
pause

——————–XMAtoWAV——————-

Willow A Better Companion Experience

for %%x in (*.xma) do xma2encode %%x /decodetopcm %%x.wav
pause

——————————————————-

And that’s that. 3 months of side work in one post. I hope you enjoyed and learned something! Although I don’t expect any actual results from anyone, because this type of modding seems dead.

But as I’ve said before, modding knowledge should be free. And hopefully this’ll be able to help out someone who’s been working on a similar type project.

Willow - A Better Companion Experience

I leave with a download link, and one last screenshot of the mod.

Fallout New Vegas Willow - A Better Companion Experience

Download Link: (https://www.mediafire.com/?l043xsexvruzlcs)