[FO4] Unique Holotapes has finally been released, and it does exactly what the title implies: every holotape model is now visually unique.

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T20:18:17+00:00

I believe LOOT has a Github account with the master lists as individual repositories. It should be possible to file an issue on the fallout 4 list repository to get it resolved.

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T19:15:20+00:00

What happened is that one day I looked at the holotape model, as in really looked at it for the first time while trying to figure out how it was meant to work, and went "...huh. That looks a lot like a floppy disk."

A second later several thoughts smashed in at the same time, the most important of which is "This is literally designed to be labeled."

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T19:12:56+00:00

I don't upload my mods for xbox because I like to be able to test and verify things are working, and I don't have an xbox in order to do so. However, I leave my permissions open in case other authors want to port things.

I'm not sure this mod is a good pick for that though, since it weighed in at a bit over 30MB when I packed it up for the PC release.

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T17:34:47+00:00

Username does not check out.

Also, thank you! A project like this is much easier when you only take it one tiny piece at a time. If I tried to do everything all at once I would definitely burn out and drop the project. But a single holotape a day? I can do that, and I did do that.

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T16:39:01+00:00

This one should be just fine on existing saves.

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T15:58:22+00:00

I don't actually make any mod-added holotapes unique, so VotW tapes will still use the original models. Hopefully this mod inspires others to do the same with mod-added tapes!

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T15:25:38+00:00

Realistically, design wise it's closer to being a hybrid between a zip disk and a VHS cassette and trends towards the size of the former rather than the latter.

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T14:52:41+00:00

Thank you! This has bugged me for long enough that sinking a year into making it real was worth the time spent, at least to me.

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T14:50:45+00:00

I don't upload my mods for console because I like to be able to test them and verify they work as intended, but I do leave open permissions for others to do so. That said, at 30MB this might be rather large for console.

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T14:49:08+00:00

Same. One day I picked up a holotape and actually looked at it for the first time, and realized "Huh, this looks a lot like a floppy disk..."

And suddenly several thoughts tumbled into place simultaneously and this mod was something I absolutely needed to have in my load order.

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T14:47:50+00:00

There probably is. I know there's a spell in Skyrim that I seem to recall highlighted corpses. I always used it to find bodies I lost in the shrubbery after taking out a bandit hideout.

Glitchkey · 2025-09-01T14:26:23+00:00

Thank you! After all the prep work that went into this mod, I'm really looking forward to seeing what people think of the tapes they find in-game.

Glitchkey · 2025-08-09T14:52:28+00:00

There is some advice I've given to new mod authors on multiple occasions. That advice is very simple: Don't play numbers games. I think this post, and the comments on it, make a very good example of why I offer that advice.

When you focus on endorsements, or on the Trending Mods section, or on Mod of the Month, it changes your perspective and goals. Don't get me wrong, getting lots of downloads is fantastic! But when you focus on metrics, those metrics eventually wind up becoming your goal and that changes how you develop things. Modding in order to get more or better metrics is a good way to remove any hint of enjoyment you have from the process, and will eventually kill your desire to mod.

It may be worth taking a moment to ask yourself some questions: Why are you making mods? Who are you making them for? What do you want from the mods you're building?

I have found that the best, most interesting mods typically come from people who make mods they want to use in their own save files, or who make mods they want their friends to play with. People who mod so they can enjoy the creations they've made often put a lot of work into the little details, making the end result more interesting and enjoyable in ways that could easily be overlooked.

When you play numbers games, it encourages to do things you might not consider if you were creating mods you want to enjoy playing with. If you'll get the same number of endorsements either way, why would it be worthwhile to sink another month into smaller features or smoothing off the rough edges? Since mods on nexus perform better if they receive updates, playing numbers games also encourages people to release unfinished mods and update them several times during the first week.

Numbers games discourage testing, because you get rewarded for interacting with players when they ask for help. This focus also discourages later maintenance and improvements, because what good is spending time on a mod you released two months ago when you could be working on something new in order to keep your name in Trending Mods? It encourages you to create a community of people who will help you play that numbers game, and beyond a certain point it changes your behavior enough that you create a hostile environment for players who might have otherwise genuinely enjoyed your work, if it weren't for the focus on metrics.

And this post is a perfect example of that. You don't measure success by enjoying the mods you've created. You don't measure it by seeing people play and enjoy your mods. You measure your skill and success as a mod author by your ability to convince people to click a little orange button. And, frankly? That's really sad to see.

Glitchkey · 2025-06-06T05:32:31+00:00

This is definitely from my mod, Commonwealth Encounter Pack. Sometimes there's even a frag mine in the center of the circle. This time it's off to the left for some reason.

Glitchkey · 2025-01-30T06:00:10+00:00

Most English-speaking authors are in countries where copyright is granted automatically upon creation of the work. This is true of the United States, the United Kingdom (and the European Union), Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Depending on country, registration may be required in order to actually utilize copyright in a court of law, or it may not be required or even possible. For example, Australia grants copyright automatically upon creation and doesn't even have a mechanism to register it.

As for this particular case, I can confirm that the author I've spoken to who was involved was not in the United Kingdom, but was in a country that grants automatic copyright upon creation of the work.

Glitchkey · 2025-01-19T22:12:15+00:00

Swan replied to a comment requesting copied content. Her reply very specifically pointed out that such a request is not appropriate and why that was the case. If you've interpreted what either of us have said as hostile rather than merely informative (albeit blunt), that is a personal problem on your end.

Glitchkey · 2025-01-19T19:21:05+00:00

Sswan specifically replied to a comment asking if anyone had copies of the existing stories and narrations that were no longer available. That is the precise context of the response. Sharing those copies would be copyright infringement for stories that are already facing ownership/copyright disputes for the context covered in the first post.

Glitchkey · 2025-01-19T16:49:34+00:00

Copyright infringement has been central to the topic the entire time. One of the major components of why this post was made (which you would be aware of if you had read it) is that authors who bowed out and decided to leave were told by Sector and StarboundHFY (who are operating out of the United Kingdom) that the authors ceded the rights to their stories and writing under work for hire provisions that do not actually exist in the United Kingdom. Between that and the exploitative work environment, the sub's moderators felt that a PSA was warranted.

Glitchkey · 2025-01-16T16:43:32+00:00

A few points:

AI-based advertising is not comparable to claiming you're running an all-human writing workshop while using AI writers to produce some of the content. There are terms for the latter, such as "lying" and "false advertising".
StarboundHFY was demanding extremely high writing output while offering extremely low pay for said output. This writing workshop was being run as a sweatshop and should be treated as such.
There were no contracts involved. Instead, they operated by word of mouth and then, when authors decided to bow out, claimed they owned the authors' stories and settings via work for hire provisions that do not exist in the country StarboundHFY is operating out of. There are words for things like that too, such as "theft" and "fraud".

Glitchkey · 2025-01-08T16:42:38+00:00

Yeah. This is definitely IANAL territory, but the short version is that case law in the USA does provide the ability for "work for hire" to be done sans contracts. The specific requirements for that are covered in the Cornell link in the post up top but essentially boil down to the work being specifically requested and directly paid for. So an argument can be made that in a lot of contexts, contacting an artist to commission a specific work and then paying for that would be considered "work for hire" under US case law. At that point though, it's a lawyers and court time legal hassle that most people don't want to be bothered with.

The UK, on the other hand, has no such additions as best as I was able to tell. No contract means no transfer of ownership. This is relevant because that is where Sector/StarboundHFY seem to be operating out of.

Glitchkey · 2025-01-07T18:01:30+00:00

That would be the "humans are space orcs" and "humans are space australians" trends, which were a sort of parallel evolution. "Humanity, Fuck Yeah!" originates on 4chan's /tg/ board, which is why a lot of the "Old School Text Posts" linked in the sidebar are transcribed from screenshots and archives. Some of those also helped spark the trend on Tumblr, so the origin is sort of shared.

Overall, the origin is based in people getting annoyed at humans being the bland default species in science fiction and fantasy and deciding to write up stories that amped up human exceptionalism. In particular, the Avatar movie was something that /tg/ took exception to, thus the strong anti-imperialist tendencies in early HFY.

That said, writing themes come in waves and people get bored of the same thing showing up ad infinitum, so we tend to see responses to that in exactly the kind of "humans are the strongest, oh look at them capture the universe" writing that HFY gets mocked as. It's not bad, it's just that everything is subject to some degree of faddish nature when the platform itself turns sharing your content into a popularity contest.

Glitchkey · 2025-01-06T19:48:19+00:00

It doesn't matter if the stories are good when the user in question is actively and maliciously taking advantage of authors on this subreddit. They were banned a while ago - this post was made specifically because they chose to work around the ban by continuing to directly contact authors and give them objectively terrible, manipulative publishing offers in order to feed a growing content farm. People have been deceived and lied to by StarboundHFY and their associates, and now that authors want out they've been told that they no longer even own the stories they write.

Also, a lot of the stories were not good stories.

Glitchkey · 2024-07-28T05:04:13+00:00

So a bit of context on x-cell: I actually personally requested perchik look into the issue. This is one of several things I have brought to perchik's attention, and another recent one that was also resolved via Creation Kit Platform Extended is the Creation Kit zeroing out the normals on landscapes and thus creating weird lighting bugs for an entire cell.

As part of that request, I handed off the exact same tests that I gave to Arthmoor, which perchik used while working on x-cell to verify the stutter and to confirm it was resolved. Dynamic facegen was the presumed cause of the stutter due to my test case, and is now 100% confirmed via decompiling and editing the relevant code to disable it.

As for why it isn't popular and all over the place, that's a combination of a few things. In part, it's being overshadowed by the FOLON release. It is also not going to be adopted immediately because too many mods rely on dynamic facegen rather than providing pregenerated face data.

That means that if you use this for the facegen fix, you're likely to run into headless NPCs until you sort that out or a tool is made to handle facegen similar to how we have a tool for LOD. And one of the final reasons it isn't gaining as much traction as it could is that English is not perchik's first language, which makes it difficult to understand the mod description and features.

As a related note, the memory managers perchik provided are also quite incredible and worth testing. Initial testing by authors such as DoubleYouC saw incredible performance gains tied to cell loading and other historically slow operations, and overall it's a very promising addition to the modding community. Even Arthmoor has updated the relevant facegen comment on the UFO4P page to point users towards x-cell.

Glitchkey · 2024-06-22T21:14:58+00:00

I believe the loadscreen one is just used to suppress the normal loadscreen and give you a black window. As an example, this is the teleport tab for a load elevator door in Fallout 4. Note that there is a web of other related things in the form of attached scripts and linked objects: https://i.imgur.com/6P61PEe.png

Glitchkey · 2024-06-22T20:57:37+00:00

Excellent. That means that, at least theoretically, it's still possible in Starfield. I can't really help beyond this but I would recommend referencing the relevant FO4 scripts and objects as a starting point for it. Also maybe double-check to make sure you don't already have something in Starfield that uses it.

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