Thug Stories

[lmalonsof]

How is life for a thug in Patriot City? What happens when you're working for Pinstripe and Minute Man comes to hit you and bring you in as a usual minion? Does crime pay in Patrior City?

http://rapidshare.com/files/145989472/thug.rar

This mod is set between Tombstone mod and my next Manowar mod (that is btw about to be released...) and tells the story of a thug called Sonny in Patriot City. The mod starts his first day out of jail...

Apart from one special appearance, don't expect any superheroes or supervillains here. You will find tons of action, that includes missions of murdering, extortioning, drug dealing...

I hope you enjoy the mod and any comment about it will be highly appreciated.

Art folder issue:
All the models included are in the
C:\Program Files\Irrational Games\Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich\thug\Art\custom_characters
folder. If something is not working, try to change them to the usual custom characters folder.

CREDITS
Scripts: Luis M. Alonso (lmalonsof, lmalonsof@yahoo.es) and Unkoman

Thanks to:
Unkoman for his help in everything related to this mod, that includes of course his awesome Jason Richter's skin.
Grenadier, Renegade, Interceptor and Texas Jack for their amazing ammo_gren (skin by Courtnall6),  male_suit_v2, male_suit_bald_tommygun, female_bob and thugtommygun meshes (and also their skinners).
Gogglepizzano for his incredible map packs (and other things not used in the mod but incredibly useful for the community).
The original authors of the maps converted by Goggle (readme file in every one of them)
The FFX team (Dr Mike, M25, TaskmasterX, Stumpy...)
The rest of the people that have contributed in any way with anything that I'm including in the mod and I'm forgetting. (I hope there's none, but anyway sorry if I'm missing someone)
And of course all the Freedom Reborn community.
Thanks for your help!

[bat1987]

Neat idea.

I`ll try this one for sure.

[USAgent]

Just installed it and can't wait to play it! 
Unfortunatly I get a crash then "alert: CTalkingHead::init,NIF has no main object, library\characters\thugtommygun\head.nif"  error as soon as the first cutscene starts.

[Previsionary]

you can easily fix it yourself by using a headnif that works with that mesh and putting it in the mesh folder...or you can just grab Ren's headnif off his site that'll work with all meshes if you don't want to wait/re-download.

[GogglesPizanno]

I got a few problems like that. Most of what Ive seen has to do with file paths being off.
So in that headnif instance, the path to the character mesh is the custom_characters folder, but its looking for the head nif in the library\characters folder.

I did a quick fix by just copying the custom characters into both folders.

The other issue I had is due to me having the game installed in a non standard directory.
So for those meshes that appeared as pink boxes, I looked up the templates in FFEdit and the nif path was set to an absolute path, i.e. C:\Program Files\....

My game isn't located there, so I truncated them down to the relative path and it all started working fine.

These are those annoying path problems that can often get overlooked because it works on one machine and not another due to install configurations. In any event most issues seem to be these kinds of things

As for the mod itself, I just started the first level and it looks good so far.
The only suggestion would be to possibly add some music to the levels -- liven it up a little.

[lmalonsof]

Thanks for the help Goggles...

Yes, I've been trying to take care of the problems with file paths... Honestly I couldn't fix it so I added this recommendation to the first post and the readme.txt file:

Art folder issue:
All the models included are in the
C:\Program Files\Irrational Games\Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich\thug\Art\custom_characters
folder. If something is not working, try to change them to the usual custom characters folder.

Thanks also for the music suggestion Goggles. I should have added some music, it improves the overall feel of the action... but I didn't take too much care with the mod. In fact this mod was done months ago and the plan was to release it a few days or a week before my Manowar mod. The Manowar mod is completed (except for a single mission, http://freedomreborn.net/archive/index.php?topic=48187.0) and I'll release it as soon as that mission works (again). However, I'll add music to the Manowar mod. Btw, I'm having the same art folder problem with the Manowar mod... suggestions?

[GogglesPizanno]

I actually would move your character models into the \Library\Characters directory, as it seems like the game looks for some assets there, so having them all in one place would make more sense, then open up FFEdit and change the template nif paths for all your custom characters to point to the relative location.

So instead of an absolute path:
"C:\Program Files\Irrational Games\Freedom Force vs The 3rd Reich\thug\Art\custom_characters"

Try a relative one:
"library\characters\<meshfolder>\character.nif"

This way the path matches all the other built ins, and it makes the path relative to the mod folder so it will work regardless where the game has been installed.

[detourne_me]

sweet! i really look forward to tryingthis mod out!  sounds innovative.

[UnkoMan]

Oh, sweet. It's out!

[Previsionary]

I just downloaded it and I hope to play it a bit later to give you some type of feedback, but my tip for you as of now is..."Always, always clean your folders".

I doubt it would be a 60 meg file if you would have removed all the material not pertinent to your mod.  ;)

ETA:

-there's a few grammatical mistakes.

-You're really going to have to suss out the ffedit template thing. The casual player isn't going to want to keep moving things around every time an error pops up like the headnif error or the pink box issue. Goggles pointed it out before, but for the way your mod is setup...character wise...your ffedit entries should look similar to this:

"custom_characters\thugtommygun\(NIF here)"

- Since I only played probably ten seconds of the mod, I can't say much more, but...I do remember the "it's my first day [...]" cutscene playing twice. I don't know if it was intentional, but it creates a jarring effect imo.

Ill put my critiques regarding the actual missions in spoiler tags to protect innocent eyes:

Mission 1:

[spoiler]
- I felt like I watched my character run around more in that mission than actually fighting anything. It started out with a pretty good trek across the streets and that kept up the whole way with nothing to surprise me or keep me interested along the way.

- I agree that music would make the mission a bit more lively

- You got a repeating mesh problem that you might want to try to fix. Maybe try using Conduit's fix or something?

- Is it possible for you to remove the arrows after finishing certain objectives? They just seemed to linger around until the target disappeared.

- Speaking of disappearing, I was well aware of every time Johnny disappeared from my screen. Maybe try to make it less noticeable?[/spoiler]

Mission 2:

[spoiler]
-I didn't finish this because of encounter 5. It's kinda long. I'd suggest shortening it from the 600 second timer because I got tired of fighting the same duo of cops and I ended up just standing around waiting for it to end...which it never did.[/spoiler]

Overall, it's a good effort so far and I'm glad you're actually going out and making campaign missions. I'll add more...eventually. ^^

[lmalonsof]

Thanks for your post Prev. I thought the mod went completely unnoticed.

In my opinion the main problem is the lack of beta testing of the mod. I'll try to do more beta-testing and fix the errors. Thanks for the feedback.

This take me to another point: Does anyone care about a new mod? I was about to release a mod about Manowar which is 100% completed but it's still no tested. I would release the mod if someone is still playing this game, if not I would put my efforts in other things. So if anyone wants to be a betatester for the Manowar mod, I'll PM him/her with the link of the mod. I'll open a new thread for that.

And related to the Thug stories mod, I'll take a look at what you're saying and if anyone is still interested in it I'll released a v2.0 with no errors and music.

[Blitzgott]

I will play whatever is released.

[the_high_king]

This mod didn't work for me.  Wierd :/  I was really interested in trying it out too.

Seems like the only way to play it properly was through a whole lot of re-routing this and that  :unsure:

[Previsionary]

lmalonsof, no worries. I would have posted more, but mission 2 never completed for me and I got...sidetracked. Anyway, if you can't find beta testers, you can use me as a tester.

high_king: if you're proficient in ffedit/mods, then you don't have to reroute anything.

[Blitzgott]

Like I told you via PM, I want to help you as a tester.

[Volsung]

 :unsure: My FFVTTR is not installed on C: So I'm quite interested in a V2 ^^;

[lmalonsof]

This weekend Queen plays in Madrid, 500 km away from Santander (my hometown) so I'll be all the weekend in Madrid and I won't be back until Thursday due to work reasons. I hope I can take a look at the mod and fix everything in 10 days (from next Thursday on) more or less, but be sure I'll release a new version without errors.

And thx for the feedback, I really appreciate it! :thumbup: