FOMODs: The Good, Bad and the Ugly

FOMODs are, depending on the description, either normal mod archives with a fomod directory or the contents of a fomod directory or both. The point of them, originally, was to provide custom installs for mods created for use with Fallout 3 and FOMM, the FallOut Mod Manager.

These are great in theory and even the API, see more on this later, is fairly easy* to use. It does a lot of things such as being able to very easily find and modify a value within the .ini files as well as to copy select files in based on values you provide to the user to choose. 

They require the ability to program in C# a little bit. Very basic fomods could likely be coded by those who don't know how to program coupled with a little luck and several forums' references. Being a programmer myself (albeit mostly in non .NET languages) I wasn't really fazed by the task of writing something in C#. The thing that bothered me was the lack of consistent documentation on how to make this all happen.

This is further more compounded by the fact that some fomod scripting techniques don't work for NMM where they do for FOMM. Remember that the NMM, or Nexus Mod Mananger, is still relatively new and needs some updating to fully and truly replace the wonder of FOMM, the Fallout Mod Manager.

The biggest draw to using the NMM is that you can one-click download and register mods from the website directly into your NMM. Another compounding issue with writing FOMODs that work with the NMM is that most FOMOD example code out there directly reflects Fallout 3 and commands that check versions of the script extenders like FOSE are not well documented for their New Vegas counterparts, a.k.a. NVSE.

Despite all this and a little plagiarism I was finally able to modify Breeze's New Vegas Males' FOMOD script to do what I needed it to for my Further Needs. The reason this is needed for my mod is to enable the correct HUD denoting the Waste and Hygiene monitors on the screen. The locations for these monitors varies if you're using the DarNified UI or the vanilla stock UI. Since I vastly prefer the former but can't expect everybody to be using it as well I must also support the later. 

One addition I'd like to add to my FOMOD script is the ability to extract the main hud file out of the BSA. I'll have to solve this issue before shipping since I am not sure that I'm free to inculde it in my mod given it's part of the files that come with the game (even though other mods do this already). I think I've figured this out... will write a new post once I've verified my technique.

That's all for now. I'll post some screen shots of the FOMOD installer form later.