Leadpipe

This is it. You might skip the whole heightmap generation thing and start with a flat terrain mesh as there are landscape editing tools within the GECK that you can use to detail the area. It's under the World menu as Landscape Editing. It's difficult (and incredibly time consuming) to get detail using the heightmap. Still go through those steps, but leave the heightmap flat. Another pitfall is default water level, but that's easier to correct.

Popping in for an update: A trend I'm noticing while working on this is that while I try to shape what exists in terms of tilesets and objects into what I had envisioned, new shapes start to form and things get out of hand very quickly. What I mean by this is that what had originally started as a plan for 1 worldspace and 3 major interiors has quickly turned into 3 worldspaces and 6 major interiors (so far). As such, I'm beginning to be extremely efficient at navmeshing and fairly efficient at creating non-specific interiors. This should serve me well, as this mod has ballooned into something that will be (hopefully) smaller than the official expansions out there, but comparable in size. As such, don't hold your breath, waiting for this. I fully intend to finish it, but it's going to be a long time coming. I don't think I'm going to post a whole lot more in terms of pictures, to keep a sense of exploration about it. The exception will be, of course, when there are problems that I can't figure out. Those are (thankfully) coming fewer and further between, but I'm sure will flare up again when I around to questing, scripting and AI, though I'm not sure how 'visible' those will necessarily be. I've got the water thing figured out - turned out to be fairly simple (though tedious), but it pays off when you're done. I never used to understand developers jerking themselves off about how good their water looks, but now I have some sympathy for it. I'm currently fighting a CTD problem with that exterior metro station cell seen in my last set of screenshots. It would seem that a cell adjacent to it is approaching the memory threshold for exterior cells, which must be based on objects that it has to render in adjacent cells, so I'm converting that to its own worldspace to try to work that out. If anyone reads this and has any experience with CTDs in an exterior, please let me know what your pitfalls were. Anyway, if nothing else, this is just to inform you all that I'm still sloughing away at it. And, as always, if anyone has anything they'd like to contribute/see in this mod, let me know. I think I'm going to end up having to request graffiti and signs somewhere down the line, so, if you've got nothing else going on, check back in a month or two. I'll probably have more specifics.

This tutorial Is what I used when I started screwing around with additional worldspaces. Here's a couple of things I found while working with worldspaces: 1) You'll have to generate the terrain mesh at least once. You can do this through a heightmap, but there are tools within the GECK to alter the landscape once you've got it, so don't worry too much about getting the heightmap perfect. Be prepared to wait a VERY long time (the tutorial says it can take up to 12 hours, but I've had it go as long as 5 days). 2) Water level is something you'll have to play with. My first four attempts at creating a worldspace resulted with everything under water. It's a simple thing to go into the worldspace properties and adjust the water level from there. 3) You can extract the existing terrain meshes from the meshes.bsa file. I forget the directory exactly, but it should be something like landscape>LOD. There are a few worldspaces in there, most of them flat. From there it's a matter of renaming the folder to match the name of the worldspace you created in the GECK (see tutorial for more info on that). From what little duplicating worldspaces I've done, it would seem it copies objects and landscape texture painting, so you'll have to spend a LOT of time removing things. I haven't experimented with this, myself (maybe someone else can fill me in) but you could be asking for a world of hurt playing around with this approach. I understand that the game doesn't tolerate a lot of deleting from vanilla cells. 4) Be mindful of how much stuff you cram into a small space. At the top left of the window it will tell you how much of available memory you're using, and the border will change color (first to yellow, then to red) as you approach and breech the threshold. This can lead to CTDs when entering certain cells in your worldspace and a lot of headaches (which is what I'm fighting now). I think that's all I've got for now. I'm sure more will come to me as I work on my mod again later tonight.

I take it you're going for a bit of a primitive or tribal aesthetic with this. With that in mind, it would not be unreasonable that one would make armor out of Mirelurk carapace, or (if they're particularly grisly - one might assume they are if they're doing deals with raiders) super mutant hide. Super Mutant skin may be a bit rarer of a commodity, but it would be a good source of leather when it can be obtained.

Just popping in to apologize for the hiatus. I'd like to say I was busy and have been working diligently, but the honest truth is that Dragon Age: Origins turned out a bit more immersive (and longer) than I had expected and I lost a lot of time there. I've only recently gotten back over the hump of twaddling around in the GECK and can now get back to actual work. The upside is that I've lost that sense of having bit off more than I can chew - that sort of nightmare hallway experience where the further you go down, the longer the hallway gets. In any case, I'm hoping my time off in BioWare territory will be constructive as playing around in the GECK totally broke the FO3 experience for me. (It's still a beautiful game, but once you know how the sausage is made...) It's given me a bit to think about in terms of depth of character interaction and variation. Anyway, I hope to have something to show in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

doing some more digging about the icon problem, it would seem that if I turn archive invalidation off, some modified items' icons show up fine while others show up with PipOS Error -26 [File Not Found]. For further information, I have selected a texture for these items. The problem with turning off archive invalidation is that it screws up the textures on other objects. I'm not sure I'm making progress... Edit: I've sorted it out. Evidently, extracting the textures using BSA commander requires changing hex of the .bsa (as it was designed for Oblivion - or so I understand). I've found a more recent utility and have since sorted out the problem.

Just thought I'd post up an update and a question. If you're interested in what's going on in my mod, read on. If you're the sort of smarty-pants person who is keen to answer a question or point me in the right direction, skip to the end. I'm still filling out the worldspace, and if I had to do it over again, there's a lot I'd have done differently. I'll include some pictures below. http://i885.photobucket.com/albums/ac59/LeadpipeStudios/ScreenShot129.jpg http://i885.photobucket.com/albums/ac59/LeadpipeStudios/ScreenShot122.jpg http://i885.photobucket.com/albums/ac59/LeadpipeStudios/ScreenShot127.jpg If you've been following this thread, that hat might look familiar. As well, Randy there might have a change of wardrobe unless I can figure out how to make his left arm as African American as his head. http://i885.photobucket.com/albums/ac59/LeadpipeStudios/ScreenShot132.jpg http://i885.photobucket.com/albums/ac59/LeadpipeStudios/ScreenShot130.jpg Not much to say about it. It's just filling up the world with places that might be interesting while playing with the tools I've got. Let me know if you've got any questions. A problem I see on the horizon and something I've noticed a number of mods overlook is water reflection. I'm not asking for advice on it yet, as I haven't started trying to solve it (though if you have any gotchas that you've seen I wouldn't ignore them). What I mean is this: http://i885.photobucket.com/albums/ac59/LeadpipeStudios/ScreenShot119.jpg In vanilla, they took great care to make sure that the water reflects nearby objects. It's something people take for granted and I've seen a lot of water that looks like this: http://i885.photobucket.com/albums/ac59/LeadpipeStudios/ScreenShot121.jpg with no reflections, the water looks flat. Something I'll have to be mindful of that going forward. Resume reading here: I've begun integrating some elements from other peoples' mods because I'm getting tired of the same few items and I'm looking for some variety and individualization. I've contacted a first round of people, and I'm about to set out on a second round here later tonight, but if you've done something and you'd like to see it integrated into a mod, let me know! (PM please) Apart from that, I'm starting to run into a problem with those items that show up in the inventory. Here's what I mean: http://i885.photobucket.com/albums/ac59/LeadpipeStudios/ScreenShot133.jpg I had to murder poor Willy for that screenshot, so I hope you appreciate it. In any case, I took as an example keys from in the game and used the texture path Interface\Icons\PipboyImages\Items\item_key.dds in the Inventory Image field, but I get that problem you see above. I've done some searching and I found some nice tuturials about how to make the image itself, which is not the problem (I'm trying to use a vanilla image in this case, and for the record, I've extracted that file from the textures .bsa). Maybe I'm just bad at separating the wheat from the chaff, but I couldn't find any promising leads in my search results. The only thing I can think might be causing the problem is the hex editing that I had to do in order to extract it in the first place. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know, as I've run to a level of frustration with this. I've even got a whiskey variant that causes a CTD. In any case, if anyone's got anything to say, please let me know.

Can't be arsed, sorry. I only stumbled upon your question while trying to find a solution to a problem of my own, but if you load up GECK and open those junk items, it should list where the pipboy image is... Hang on, I'm curious now: nterface\Icons\PipboyImages\Items\item_junk.dds - that's just for the firehose nozzle, but they should all appear similar to this http://i885.photobucket.com/albums/ac59/LeadpipeStudios/miscitem.jpg

I don't know if I can help too much, but I know another person seems to have done something similar to what you're suggesting in the quest mod The Telescope It might be worth downloading that and having a look at what he did.

Yep, I hadn't modded anything before, myself before diving into something large. While that isn't recommended, it can be done. There is a bit of a learning curve and the tools are a bit buggy, but it's a pretty accessible system and pretty open, too. Some mods are absolutely astounding, Enhanced weather comes to mind. Besides, this forum and the official Bethesda forums are filled with smart folks who can answer questions or direct you to the search function if it's FAQ worthy.

wild-ass guess here, but it might be a matter of archive invalidation.

Tostitos, although I mostly agree with you, Fallout is also a game of laser weapons and all that silliness. I personally prefer the cobbled retro aspect of pipe rifles and the rest of it in the game, but even the orginal Fallout had a Gatling Laser. I think the lore, design, or whatever permits all forms of weaponry. Carry on arguing for your personal taste, but please stop with this "doesn't belong in Fallout" line of argument. Besides, I think OP wants to play with modeling, texturing, and the GECK. I think the intent is to see what he and his tools can do and what the engine is capable of handling.

So I jumped the gun on importing the hat because it's great and I didn't want to wait to start using it. This took me down a strange and winding road with the sideways hat thing and copious use of the search feature. I eventually got it working and the next blurb is the sad story of how it was so. Skip to the next part if you're not interested. So, I imported the object by hand using the meshes and textures provided and just recreated the hat as I saw it. It worked until I put it on a character, then it went sideways. Update facegen didn't work so I did some more digging and found that I needed a .egm file to orient the hat and that I'd need a particular utility to do that (I think it was conformulator). So I go about digging in all the .bsas extracting all the .nifs and .tris and so on that I'm told I need and plop them into the utility and it doesn't work. Not that it exported a file that doesn't work, it simply doesn't work. I've encountered that a few times as I'm using Vista 64 bit. At this point, I say, "[expletive deleted] it, I'm just going to fake it and see what happens." So I go back into the meshes .bsa and pull out the default human head .egm, rename and relocate it to conform to the rest of the hat data and Bingo! It worked. Now, I've got two questions, WTF did I do that worked? and how did you get that hat working without a .egm file in the first place? Edit: lol, bad words get replaced with *ban me*

I'm not here to say that it couldn't be done, but it would be tough to manage, and something to put on your C.V. if you can pull it off. There are already semi-random mechanics in the game for enemies and loot. It uses a leveled list and generates depending on the player's level when he loads the cell. As to terrain generating, the tools in the GECK are pretty buggy as it stands with manual external terrain. Interiors might work a bit easier, but it would take some real doing.

To be honest, I don't really have the time for it, but it will be quick. If you're willing, I'll tell you what you need to do: These instructions will be deceptively long, but I'm trying to be detailed to avoid confusion. Load up GECK. Go to File>Data Select Fallout.esm and press OK Next, go to File>Save As and save your plugin before you get too carried away. Once that's done, you'll be looking at the default workspace. The bottom left window is where you'll select the space you're working in. It will probably be easiest to find a nearby interior and navigate to the place in the wasteland that you're talking about. (All the wasteland cells have coordinates, but they're not often very descriptive). In order to do that, here's what you do: In the bottom-left window, make sure "Interiors" is selected and find an interior that's close to your location of choice. At the entrance, you'll see a semi-transparent yellow (or sometimes red) box with a pyramid pointing into the cell. This is your COC marker. Basically it's your spawn point when you enter a new cell. Double-click on that and it will ask you if you want to view reference marker for whatever number it's assigned to that instance. Say yes, and it will load the other side of the door. From there, navigate to your location and start deleting the things you don't want there. Once you're done clearing toxic waste, hit save and load it with your other mods. That should do it. PM me if you've got questions.