Hi everyone! I just stumbled on this forum and feel like I just found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Just perusing the threads and it looks like you guys have a lot of good posters and a nice feeling of community.

I'm not what you would call a big time "gamer." I was in college in the mid 90s when the original Fallout came out. Even though I had left behind console gaming, not getting on the Playstation bandwagon and letting my Sega Genesis collect dust on a shelf, on a whim I picked up this quirky looking little PC game to use in the computer lab on campus. I was immediately hooked. I always liked the idea of the tabletop role playing game translated to a digital format... I didn't like fussing with all the maps and dice and such... but I was never fond of the medieval fantasy setting that 99% of the role playing games seemed to feature. Add in to the fact that I had inherited my grandparents' record collection which included the Ink Spots (and most of the music Fallout seems to feature) and it felt like this game was designed specifically for me.

Fast forward to now... After a career in the military both as active duty and as a contractor, health issues have caught up with me. I'm now semi retired and just attending school to finish an additional Bachelor's degree for fun. This one will be a double major in English Lit and History with minors in Classical Studies and Medieval/Renaissance Studies. While academia can be hectic at times, it does have a lot more lulls in the schedule for me to do other things... like gaming.

So, I picked up a desktop tower on clearance that had an i7-6700 processor, 8 gb RAM, and an NVIDIA card with 2gb VRAM. I have since added another 8gb of RAM and got a good deal (don't ask how) on a new NVIDIA 1070 with 8 gb VRAM. I just downloaded the DRM free version of New Vegas and ran the TTW installer. I've added a ton of mods, some of which I made on my own with minor tweaking, and I'm setting off on a journey through the wasteland!

@Larry Wowboy love your introduction, and you should upload some of those mods youve made to gunetwork for us to enjoy, also welcome to gunetwork have fun and enjoy the community

woww !!! this is a complete introduction, happy to see new member's here.
Be welcome in the community @Larry Wowboy , if you need something, there will always be someone to help you.
Good trip aboard GUNetwork airlines.

Hello, first of all I wanna salute you for your services in the military. I'm also studying English Literature and History, I hope you have a good time here and if you need anything especially when it comes to PCs and hardware feel free to shoot me message

Thanks for the kind welcome, everyone.

@bobbadan - My mods really are quite minor. I've never been heavily into graphics modding or adding weapons and armor. I like tweaking gameplay in a way that make sense to me.

On the play through I just started, I've made several modifications. Firstly, I never really cared for the decision to replace most of the skill books in TTW in the DC Wasteland with magazines. I preferred to simply reduce the skill points received back to 1. So, I painstakingly replaced them all by hand. (Only to later find out that there was a mod that did this!) Then, I tweaked the amount of skill points that are received on level up -- I wanted to receive 1 skill point per 2 points of intelligence -- so for example if your Intelligence is 6, you get 3 skill points on level up. Since this obviously nerfs the PC, I implemented a very rudimentary system of challenges that rewarded skill increases... so when the PC scores 5000 or so damage with a gun, the Guns skill increases. Right now I'm testing this out to see how it plays and if its worth pursuing. If I like it, I'd like to make the challenges more complex so that the thresholds increase as you level up your skills.

Another mod I'm still testing that I made on my last playthrough and seemed to work is a mod to disable the respawn attribute on various NPCs upon completion of a task. The two I currently have going are the Powder Gangers, who stop spawning if Eddie is killed and the NCR takes back the prison, and the DC Enclave, who stop spawning after you finish all the Broken Steel quests. It involved messing with a Bitmask, and I wasn't certain I was coding it correctly, but it *seems* to work ok. If this does work well, I may eventually throw together a simple quest that would involve destroying the Vats at Vault 87 and ending the Super Mutant threat in DC which would mean the Super Mutants would stop respawning.

If any of this sounds interesting, let me know and I can put it up for public testing when I'm happy with it on my end.

@NeoSnow - a fellow history geek, eh? I have to say, its been far more rewarding than my previous endeavors in the field of engineering. I'll take a day of debating over a piece of literature or history over sitting in front of a screen making models in Rational Rhapsody. What are your areas of interest?

And yeah, PC hardware is not my thing. I stumbled onto the site because I was doing searches on graphics mods. What is holding me back is that I really don't know what I'm doing when it comes to optimization. I feel like with my PC specs, I ought to be able to run New Vegas as smooth as butter, and yet when I tried to install texture mods, my FPS came screeching to a halt. I've looked over various guides (that sometimes contradict one another) and I'm still not quite getting the performance I feel I should. Any advice or links to some really helpful guides on getting set up to get the most out of your hardware would be appreciated! Thanks!

Welcome Larry !

These are very cool studies ! Next year, I'll start (if I pass my exams) history studies, it looks cool

Hello and welcome to the GUNetwork Larry! I hope you will share your mods in the future So... have fun and enjoy your stay here mate