Tony the Wookie

If you really want this to be a thing, but you can't do the technical mod stuff, you can at least create a clear and precise design document, write the stories, and organize a team website. If you can write a compelling story that is very, very, very detailed. Don't underestimate how important the detail is, I almost put very 4 times to emphasize it even more. There is no value in a vague story, because then the modders have to do all the work to make it complete and most just aren't because they can easily just do their own story. But if you make it good and unique and detailed then eventually someone will come along and want to mod without having to do the hard work, so if you have the hard part of the story done, they just might want to join. Coming up with a very nicely done design document to present you ideas, plans, what specifically you want these modders to do, and the story of course, and then pitching it to as many modders as possible would likely get you at least a few modders that will try to help you. It will probably be pretty popular around here when the game is still new. Fallout New Vegas is kindof dead by now and Skyrim has a lot of good modders that will hop over to the next new thing. It seems like there will be people out there looking for a project but can't write or organize a team themselves. If you seriously mean it when you say 'anything in my power' then read this... http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131632/creating_a_great_design_document.php ... or just google 'Videogame Design Document' and then do it. And lastly, a good team website is key to getting people to want to join. Keep it simple but easy to communicate and for everyone to have access to any information they need in an instant, not having to email so and so and wait for a reply. I personal like... https://www.proboards.com/ ... it is real simple to build, just take a time commitment that most modders don't want to take away from their time modding. Do this stuff and you have a chance. Not saying it is a sure thing or will be easy, but you said you would do anything, so this is the anything you must start with. Takes nothing besides a notepad and the internet. Edit: Also, artists hate spending hours and hours going around the internet trying to find reference images of what they are going to make. As a 3d modeler myself, I would love it if someone would just go gather up the images of what they want from every possible angle and just delivered it to me in an email. I would take someone like that on my mod any day, it would leave me more time to art.

I am not an expert on this, but I have always believed that the processor had a lot less to do with performance than the graphics card. And it is an i7, so it is 4 cores with multi-threading, so you aren't running junk or anything. So my opinion is it should be totally fine, but like I said I haven't played the game and I am not an expert, just a common user. Can you overclock with your motherboard? That i7 should be able to be overclocked to meet the recommended.

I don't have New Vegas or the GECK anymore since I fresh booted my computer. If you can get me a .obj file for the Fallout base body or whatever body type you want to use, I can sculpt the dress real easy. I don't have Nifscope either though, so you would have to put it into the GECK yourself.

Upgrades? That sounds more like a complete overhaul.

It is easy to forget about mods... when you are on a website... dedicated completely... to mods...

I can't speak for 'people' as a whole, but I can guarantee you there is no way I'll be playing Fallout 3 or New Vegas mods ever again. I don't think it is worth modding for a small niche audience of people who still play a game 7 years later. Edit: And DLC size mods are just a bad idea in general unless you are really, really good and you have friends that are also really, really good and really, really loyal. Anytime I see someone use that term I shudder a bit inside. Quality over quantity. It is better to make something small that is good than something huge that isn't.

If you are going to spend money on a new PC, you might want to take into account future proofing your stuff so that 4 years from now you still have a processor and motherboard that will handle top notch games. GPU and RAM can be replaced without much forethought, but replacing a processor means rebuilding the whole thing basically. Just something to keep in mind, rather than just looking at the specs for one game today, what about games next year? Yeah, you're right. Would be nice if I could run Fallout 5 in the future on the same PC without upgrading to much ^^ I think I will invest more in a processor and a motherboard and not so much in RAM and GPU since they can be replaced when its necessary. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2955293/hardware/skylake-review-intels-6th-gen-cpu-arrives-with-nice-presents-for-gamers-and-enthusiasts.html 4 ghz out of the box and built to be overclocked. I personally want to get one with an overclock friendly motherboard and then not overclock it yet, because nothing needs anywhere near that today. But, two years from now when they release an i7 that runs at 4.7 GHz, I can then overclock my older i7 to 4.7 GHz and get more years out of it. If I had got a better motherboard with my 1st generation i7 I am currently running, I would have been able to overclock it to surpass the recommended stats for Fallout 4, but instead I am barely on the edge of the minimum... But anyways, the 6th generation 'Skylake' i7s will be using the new DDR4 ram motherboards, so 4 years from now you will still be able to find ram and upgrade it. It was hard for me to find 8500 DDR3 ram 6 years later because my motherboard wouldn't support anything higher, which would have been super easy to find. Ram upgrades are cheap and videocards are plug and play, so you don't have to worry about future proofing that stuff. 16gb of RAM is less that $90 and modern games only require half that. I personally only run 12gb of the 16gb set I bought, but that is just my motherboard again not being optimized for dual channel over 8gb but supporting triple channel at 12gb. There are certain cons of running SLI with your videocards, but it is at least something worth looking into. If you build a rig that can support SLI and get one top notch videocard for expensive today, then 2 years from now when your videocard is no longer looking like the top dog anymore, you can buy a second or even third of that same videocard for MUCH cheaper this time around, and then run BOTH of them. So basically doubling your GPU for about $150 as opposed to scrapping your old card and buying a $300 GPU. Also, last point to not forget, since clearly you are on the Nexus Forums it is safe to assume you want to mod this game, so don't limit yourself to what can play Fallout 4 now... Skyrim with some of it's crazy graphics mods requires a lot more out of your computer than Skyrim out of the box. Modders are not usually the best at keeping specs low, so I would assume that certain builds of modded Skyrim would have higher recommended specs than Fallout 4 has. There is no way my computer now will be playing all the Fallout 4 mods that will be available 2-4 years from now.

It meets the minimum for Fallout 4, I haven't played the game to tell you how well it will perform though... since it hasn't been released... The 750 Ti is not exactly a high powered graphics card, so I wouldn't expect to be playing it on 'Ultra High' settings or anything. But that being said, I love how insanely efficient that card is, I have put it in many computers for clients back when I fixed computers as my job, and I will actually be running one of those on my 6 year old PC with an anemic power supply to play Fallout 4. It only uses about 50 watts to run that card, you don't even have to plug it into the power supply, it gets power directly from the motherboard. Genius design in my opinion, just not a gaming powerhouse card. I wouldn't pay a whole lot of money for a rig running a 750 ti though, because that kind of shows that they designed it to run on a small power supply. If you are getting a good price on it totally go for it. I am typing this on a computer running a 750 ti and I love it, but I use it because it was a super cheap way to keep me from having to scrap my 6 year old pc for a new one... Don't go spending $1,000 on a rig running a card like that. In the 6 years I have owned this computer I have spent less that $200 upgrading it to stay moddern, if that gives you any idea what kind of range you are looking at. Are you looking for a 'cheap right now pc' or do you have the money to look at something a bit long term that will still be working 5 or 6 years down the line?

If you are going to spend money on a new PC, you might want to take into account future proofing your stuff so that 4 years from now you still have a processor and motherboard that will handle top notch games. GPU and RAM can be replaced without much forethought, but replacing a processor means rebuilding the whole thing basically. Just something to keep in mind, rather than just looking at the specs for one game today, what about games next year?

It probably has something to do with the alpha channel of your texture. I don't have the Skyrim Creation Kit in front of me to really know, but a lot of game engines will use the R,G,B and Alpha channels for particles. If the texture you put in did not have an alpha channel defining the shape of the trail, then it would be read as black as in not there at all. The alpha channel is just a black and white channel, so if you can access it with your image editor, just put a black and white scribble there, make sure you export the image with the alpha channel on (I forget the specifics of doing this on a Bethesda game, I have been working in Unreal too much...) and then plug in the image and see if it works.

Seems like over 90% of the people who played the game did not have those issues bad enough for it to effect them one bit and infarct enjoyed the game enough to give it a 9 or 10 out of 10... So maybe you are just over sensitive or over negative or something, not really any of my business though. I will leave you to your little pity party, I have wasted more time here than I should ever have, it is taking time away from my mod.

I don't think it is going to be one of the greatest games by any reach. I just expect it to be a pleasant game. A pleasant game that will let me mod and do my thing. I just can't see any logic behind calling Bethesda games unplayable on release. I can speak first hand and say that Fallout 3 was very playable start to finish, 80+ hours right out of the box. I played the game, no issues. And there is no possible way in the realm of logic, that Skyrim could have been even half as bad as people on this topic are claiming, because if people were not able to finish it, they wouldn't be online giving it 9 to 9.5 out of 10 reviews. If it wasn't complete and bug free enough for the average person to enjoy it, there is no way that there aren't thousands and thousands of people out there giving the game 2s and 3s and bringing that score down. The simple group sourcing of data makes it incomprehensible that even 5% of the people who played Skyrim found it unplayable. 20 million copies, and probably 20 thousand at the very most modded it. The Xbox version averages a 9.4 score from fan reviews. That doesn't mean it is the best game ever, or even a good game. But it is 100% impossible for it to be as bad as these guys claim and still get that high of a score. It has to be at least a half decent game to get that. So between my first hand experience playing Fallout 3 day one out of the box, and my second hand knowledge of a large database of knowledge of how people responded to Skyrim, and then the fact that I can't find any evidence supporting the fact that the game wasn't playable day one other the the whining of a handful of people who seem to be natural born buzzkills... My logic can only come to the conclusion that the information presented in the topic by the Bethesda hate club is completely inaccurate.

Fallout 3 never crashed on me until I started loading up mods a year later, never once crashed on me on Xbox. Never got stuck in the floor, never had a quest ruin my ability to finish the game, never had anything I would spend even a second complaining about. It worked for me as well as millions of other people. My modded Fallout 3 game got stuck in the ground a few times when I played the Point Lookout dlc, but that has also happened to me in Mass Effect and many other games I have played, nothing that a quick load and 2 minutes of re-playing something doesn't fix. Plus, that was a modded version of the game. Xbox version, no issue. I played that game a lot, it was fun at the time. Hasn't aged well, didn't enjoy New Vegas nearly as much, though that might have to do with me being much more busy during that time in my life. Fallout 3 came out my senior year in highschool, and I was only going to school 2-3 hours a day because I had all my credits besides senior English, so I had time to kill while my band members and girlfriend and other people I hung out with were stuck in class. Left me a lot of time to either play games or play guitar by myself. Didn't play much Skyrim, I'm not really into the whole dungeons and dragons thing, and I spent 2011-2012 working on a now defunct videogame I was really passionate about making. But 20 million people buying it and the average person giving it a 9 out of 10 on Xbox without mods is just too much evidence slapping me in the face to believe it is totally broke and unplayable. But I'm no developer, I have tried to be a developer and have been on many projects that failed because of financial reasons. I plan on being a developer in time, I have worked with many professional developers, I have learned from them, picked their brains, gone to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco so I could work with the tools and gain more knowledge. I have professional game programmers I eat lunch with and hang out from time to time. I didn't work on Crysis, I ran into some guys that did early in the morning before the actual conference started, and they showed me how to work with their engine at their booth, then I went home and built stuff in the engine for my portfolio so I could apply for a job there. I got lots of free hats and shirts from them, they had too many and didn't want to lug the boxes back across the Atlantic with them. But I was just a guy that was hanging around in the right place at the right time. I am no developer, but I am more than familiar with the struggles of many different game engines, I have poured years of my life into projects that got delayed and eventually canceled because of a snag in the way Unreal can handle stuff. I've had 3ds Max files I spent weeks on get corrupt and become totally lost, I've worked with Zbrush back before it actually worked right. I've made maps that look amazing until I go to compile them and then the whole thing breaks, turns black, and the only way for me to get it to work eventually is to rebuild it in a new file. I've duct taped and patched together and fudged things in so many crazy ways just to get something working that I sometimes wonder how any of it ever stayed together. I am no developer, but I have been around enough to know that the problems you see using Bethesda's creation kit are the same problems you see with any kind of tool you use to make videogames. I can show you a quick overview of what exactly I used to do in Unreal, I won't show any of my team projects on a public forum, but this particular example I made from scratch myself to show to potential employers what kind of workflow I had. It isn't up to 2015 standards by any means, but if you want to see my current work you will have to wait about a month until I announce my current project to the public. So long story short, there are glaring issues in Unity, Unreal, and CryEngine as well as Gamebryo. I am as in the dark as you are when it comes to any of those other engines, but logic would tell me they are probably just as flawed as all the rest. I'm no expert, but that doesn't mean someone like Signette who doesn't even know what a game engine is or does has any authority to tell me how out of date it is and that professional game programmers 'probably' cannot upgrade it. You should really stop needlessly bashing stuff you don't understand and trying to bring others down when all they are trying to do is design a gigantic open world game for everyone to enjoy. Why not join the other 99% of people who buy a Bethesda game and love it, as opposed to throwing a pity party? Why not choose to be happy?

People don't steal ideas, there are way more than enough ideas out there to last modders 100 lifetimes. It is implementation that matters. There is never any guarantee someone won't do what you are doing, videogame developers go into a 3 year multi million dollar cycle knowing this. That is art, you can either love it or leave it. So no, you can't protect your idea, you can only protect your actual assets you make. The actual stuff you write is protected, someone can't copy and paste something you write into their mod without permission, but the ideas inside are not.

There is no way Unreal could handle it or anything close. The games you mentioned aren't even close to the scale of Skyrim... Crysis 1... really... that game isn't even 1/10th the size, and it doesn't even have the kind of scripts that need to run in an open world type game, because it is a simple FPS made to look pretty and not much else. I like the guys at Crytech, real nice people, they gave me lots of free hats oddly enough... but they only really do one thing, and that is visuals. Have you ever opened up the Unreal Development Kit in your life? It is great, but it is a totally different animal from the very start. Assets are organized and optimized for level based building, not open world. It is that way from the very core of how you put together your files. The number or scripts running in Skyrim is staggering, while Borderlands has much less, not to mention they had to break the world into different load areas because it was already too big, and it isn't even 1/4th the size of Skyrim. It seems your problem with Bethesda is the lack of a good physics engine and the fact that they run way more scripts than anyone else and things break as a result. Both valid points, but way off of what you are blaming it on. None of this has to do with an outdated engine or anything close to that. These games aren't broken on release, millions of people buy these games, take them out of the box, and play through the whole thing without any issues and never once mod it. Modders are a huge minority of who plays these games. The non modders are the ones rating these games a 9/10... People don't give a 9/10 to a game that is broken and unplayable. I'm not a fan of the whole dungeons and dragons thing, so I don't play much of TES and I don't mod Skyrim. But I played through vanilla Fallout 3 on Xbox the week it was released and PC not much later and didn't have any problems to complain about. New Vegas was far more glitchy than Fallout 3 ever was. Fallout 3 had a weak engine that needed updating, that's why it was so difficult to make any lighting look good. I know what a weak engine looks like and that was it, Fallout 4 stuff is not. I know fundamentals when I see them. But things are never how you want them to be when building videogames. Do you think game developers always have the most up to date tools they want? No... They work with what they have. Unreal and CryEngine and Unity are no magical fairyland without frustration either, Have you ever tried to program breakable platforms in Unreal 3? It is enough to make you want to hit your head against the wall and pull your hair out. What about working with new animations in CryEngine, does that sound easy? Well, it's not... The whole game industry is duct taped together with whatever they can get to work, you would still be complaining if Bethesda had adopted Unreal 4 and somehow magically made it handle all the open world scripts without burning a hole through your computer, because Unreal 4 would also cause modders problems, just slightly different ones. Go find some stuff to compare modding Skyrim to, and then tell me how busted it is. If you can't understand anything else that I have said, remember this. Making videogames is not easy. At least not if you want to push the envelope. You should be glad there are people like me out there, somebody has to build these videogames so that you can tear them apart with ignorant statements. If tearing other people down makes you feel better about yourself, then I am happy for you. I personally would rather enjoy Fallout 4. To each his own I guess. Sorry, but I don't have any more time to teach you, I must get back to my 3d modeling.

When I was in college, I was too busy... well... going to college... To be on a laptop.

It isn't just the hype crowd that gives Bethesda games high scores. I was at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco the year Skyrim was released, and it was held in high esteem by other game developers. It is really just a small minority of whiny little fans who expect to have them both make the biggest game ever and also have it as thorough in every way as the 20 hour videogames they buy for the same exact amount of money. The average person is hyped for Fallout 4, it is going to be huge and bring a lot of joy to a lot of people. You can sit here complaining and be left out of the fun if you like, but is your ego and desire to bring others down so great you want to miss that? Really? Seriously, I wish you guys the best of luck. I can't really stick around the defeatist vibe this conversation has brought, so I will leave you guys to your chat while I go rejoin that happy, excited people in the real world.

If you can't sit upright in a chair for more than an hour without pain, you should probably see a chiropractor and physical therapist... How do you keep a job? Looking down all the time, however, gives you bad posture.

Have you ever met a professional videogame programmer?

I have a feeling that you don't quite understand what a game engine actually is... Havok is a physics engine, totally different discussion there. Animations and how the character reacts to the world is all just a script. A complex one when games get much more complex, but it is still just a script. If input 'W' key is pressed by player, then character 'player' will move foward 'x' amount of units while 'walk' animation is played. Then you have to program in an ease in and ease out value so that the player doesn't just start and stop without momentum. Then you have to write some code to blend animations so that you don't get an abrupt change from 'idol' to 'walk' in an unnatural fashion. Then you write more code about what happens when the player's collision box runs into another collision box. You can start writing stuff like, If the player's mass is greater or equal to 'x' then object will move, if else (if not) then the player's momentum value returns to '0'. It is all just complicated script layered to trigger movement of objects and to blend from animation to animation. I have done it from scratch in Unity and did the animation work while a programmer did it from scratch in Unreal. Your real complaint should be that you don't like Bethesda's animators and/or programmers that created this for Fallout. Though I have yet to see anything game breaking about it in Fallout 4. I do agree that Fallout 3 was done pretty bad. The conversation with the Vault Tech guy at the door looks pretty much how it should look, he moves naturally, the camera angels are good. When the player runs to the vault with his wife, her running is natural and fits. The generic crowd has some weak animations as the bomb goes off, but that is just filler crowd, who cares, nobody will notice that stuff. The super mutants seem to walk with presence, the generic guards in the preview walk totally how they should, the battle scenes at the end of the e3 trailer cut from one to another too quick for me to give an assessment of them. On the next trailer with the Minutemen battle... The player talking to the dog looks great, the dog running is natural. The fight against the raiders looks pretty average to me, I liked the dog mauling the guy animation. The Preston Garvey conversation looks like a Mass Effect 3 conversation, and I love Mass Effect 3. Getting into the power armor... simply amazing... The guy getting gunned down by the machine gun, I'm not sure what more you could ask for there, it was great for what it was. The power armor feels so heavy! This is actually a pretty amazing gem among a lot of average and solid stuff. The power armor looks great in VATS. The Deathclaw fight... "it's too obvious that animations and overall world interactions hardly changed since like Morrowind" really.... really.... The Piper conversation looks good too. I do hate the dismemberment, you have a very good point with that, but other than that part it looks great. It isn't Black Ops 3 or anything, but there is no way a game on this scale could ever be on that level. Who cares that the engine is based off of Gamebryo? Obviously it is updated, and is looking great. It doesn't look like Unreal, but the Unreal Engine or the CryEngine aren't going to handle a world that big with that much open world stuff going on. They would crash with that much stuff and Bethesda would have had to start putting in load screens and making interior cells separate world spaces. I'm not knocking Unreal or CryEngine, I love working in both those engines, they are very, very pretty. But Bethesda makes games on a scale that is soooooooo much bigger than they are designed for. If the game has issues it is NOT because the game engine is too weak, because none of the other ones you listed could host a game this size either. If the game has issues it is because they just made the game too damn big for their own good. That is what Skyrim's main problem was as far as I can tell (didn't play a lot of Skyrim, but never ran into any bugs when I did). Like I said, I've worked in Unreal a whole, whole lot, I went to GDC and learned the CryEngine from a couple guys who worked on the Crysis game, I've built games from scratch in Unity. This isn't the first game engine I have worked with, and my opinion from what I can see in the trailers is that it looks damn good. Obviously I can't say how easy it is to work with since it hasn't been released yet, but there are no reasons for concern with anything I have seen to date.

Speak for yourself. I have watched and re-watched every trailer out there and I find Fallout 4 to look very pleasant. Not spectacular or awe inspiring or anything like that, just simply pleasant and inviting and what I look for when I play a game. I love how nice and soft the lighting is on the characters, how when the Vault Tech salesman at the door moves around you get the most subtle shadow from his hat coming across him in the most natural of ways, an untrained eye would probably never notice these kind of things however. It feels like getting back to the fundamentals to me, not overkilling it with super high res textures that have too much baked in lighting and too harsh shadows. I love that Bethesda isn't trying to meet the 'Game Industries' standard of beauty and they are taking a step back and having simple textures that give my eye a rest. It isn't what is expected of a next-gen game, but who wants to be the guy that always does what others expect of him? To me it is like eating cookies you grandma baked as opposed to getting dessert at a fancy high end restaurant. Something about it just feels comfortable and right. Don't get me wrong, I love working with Unreal and its lighting and shader systems, and it is obviously the better engine when it comes to making things look pretty. But that isn't the kind of game Fallout is. And just FYI, animations and player movements don't have hardly anything to do with what game engine you use. You can build that stuff from scratch in any engine, granted I have only ever done it in Unity, as I am a 3d modeler and not a programmer who wants to mess with the inner workings of the Unreal Development Kit or the CryEngine... I'll save that for the real programmers, I would probably break something...

Sounds like it takes everything that is fun about videogames and throws it out the window in favor of pure frustration. Wouldn't touch this with a 20 foot pole if I was paid handsomely to do so.

If you take modding out of the equation, I have always been the type of gamer to sit back and gather up my skills, strength, forces, supplies, or whatever the valuable assets in any particular game are. When I play games like Total War or Civilization, I am the guy that sits back and doesn't fight anyone while I spend my time researching better tech, because I find great pleasure in being the pacifist that accumulates the most powerful forces in the game, and then becomes unstoppable. Normally I would play games in that manner, and I would have so many weapons and skills accumulated by the end of Fallout, that the last quests would seem too monumentally easy. But modding comes first to me, and I want to have my mod released as soon as possible. So that means playing through Fallout 4 in less than a week.

I would buy a desktop and save myself the physical strain that using a laptop puts on your neck and shoulders. The human body was not designed to use laptop computers and tablets.

I personally think that the only game ever made that is even close to as good as Mass Effect 3 is Mass Effect 2... All other games seem to be missing something after playing those 2. My brother is a big Dragon Age fan, and I have seen him play through those games many, many times... to the point where he burnt out my Xbox... Haven't owned a console since. Never felt like playing them myself, the game engine looked very bland compared to Unreal (I love the Unreal Engine) and the gameplay looked kind of boring. However, I don't think anyone would debate that Bioware is on the cutting edge of interactive dialogue, and Bethesda is basically just trying to keep up with where Bioware was years ago. But on the other side, I have played games that were out of date and had bad graphics even for the Playstation 2 days, and they had no pre-written dialogue at all, not even one voice actor. However, through the dynamic of the gameplay they created characters that I remember more than any character I ever encountered in a Bethesda game. Look up Romance of the Three Kingdoms X for PS2 if you are interested in that kind of thing. I caught myself about 2 weeks ago retelling a story that happened in that game 10 years ago... The fact that I remember that really tells you something about letting the gameplay speak for itself as a character develops. Though I also think part of it is the scale, and shifting the focus away from the 'go save the world' mentality to the 'community' mentality. But that is a whole different discussion for a totally different day.