TheMagician

Thanks for the suggestion, Shantih. Perhaps roll them into a pack of some sort, or into multiple packs based on race or something. I was thinking of just deleting the unpopular ones after a month or so if they don't get a lot of downloads just to keep the database manageable. It just seems like a waste to let them collect virtual dust on my hd. At the same time, I don't want to be 'that guy'. If anyone else has suggestions I'm happy to hear them.

I've been doing a lot of work with character customization in facegen and uploading my work as saved games. I'm making the characters for personal reasons (basically because I enjoy doing them) and thought I'd share them since they're already done and someone might find a use for them. I know a lot of people consider these as little better than the equivalent of mod "spam", though, and I don't want to annoy people so I'm wondering how people feel about it. Should I just keep uploading them, or is it just annoying? I'm fine with releasing them from my own site if they won't be missed here. I just honestly don't know whether their usefulness to others exceeds the annoyance they cause. Should I take them down if they're not being downloaded or just leave them?

Horror tends to work better when it's unexpected. If I'm walking through a crypt, I expect to find corpses, so there is nothing inherently disturbing about them. (They might be disgusting, but they're not really horrific.) If I'm walking through a parking lot and happen to notice a three-week old corpse in a parked car, I'm much more likely to be disturbed by it. The same goes for sound effects. A blood curdling scream on a battlefield is par for the course; the same scream in a park on a Sunday afternoon is chilling. Of course, you can err by going too far and end up with something which is silly instead of horrifying. The point is to always try to incorporate some element of surprise. It doesn't have to be loud and flashy, just out of place.

I'm not sure what the real limit is, but worldspaces theoretically can be quite large. The Mesogea mod for Oblivion uses almost 16x16 quads (a quad is approximately a mile across) and FO3 uses essentially the same engine. Above a certain number of quads the GECK tends to choke owing to memory constraints, however, so you have to create mods of this size in stages and it can get quite complicated. As far as foliage goes, the FO3 engine does use some speedtree assets (retextured plants from Oblivion) but it isn't possible to create new ones unless you happen to own a compatible copy of speedtree. Wasteland plants are typically static meshes which can be constructed in any modeling application, but they won't react to wind/weather. In other words, you can create the foliage, but it won't have the same quality as native foliage. Foliage can be automatically generated via region generation but it takes some time to get the hang of it. Also, the engine essentially treats foliage as any other static, so large numbers of trees are going to kill your framerate. One other issue you should be aware of before embarking on any large-scale landscaping project is that FO3 has a seriously unoptimized LOD (distant landscape meshes) generation algorithm. Creating any worldspace larger than a few cells across (which are 1/16th of a quad) is going to cost you processor time: a worldspace the size of the Wasteland is going to take you a couple of weeks of non-stop generation to complete (better hope you get everything just the way you like it the first time); I'm guessing that one the size of the Mesogea worldspace would take a couple of months. (That's just the GECK generating the files without any input from you.) If you are planning anything with majestic vistas, I'd recommend sticking with the Crysis engine. hth

I apologize for the abrupt ending. At the time I was writing it, the then-current patch for FO3 appeared to have put a serious dent in FO3 modding. I wanted to wait until the dust settled around the issue with persistent references for custom worldspaces before continuing. Then I moved on to other things. I had planned on getting into Unreal modding for a TC but recent computer problems have set me back a ways so I'm back on my old computer looking for projects I can work on with a 5-year old rig. I might look into adding to this tutorial but it seems like there are still a lot of problems with custom worldspaces so it might not be worth the effort. The LOD mesh generation process is prohibitive for most people making custom worldspaces (unless you happen to have a second pc you can run non-stop for weeks on end) and the issue with the floating LOD trees still seems to be plaguing even Bethesda (iirc). I recently found this tutorial on The Engineering Guild website which you might find helpful. It's a completely different approach, but it has some good info.