Seeking advice for building and overhauling interiors and worldspaces (best practices, no-no's, workflow advice, etc.)

[Deleted127869753User]

For the past five years I've been on-and-off working on a mod that rebuilds many of the interiors and select exterior worldspaces throughout the game to be more sightly, spatially consistent, lived-in, and interesting. A lot of this has involved flipping doors such that the handles are oriented correctly, matching windows to exterior placements, shrinking interiors that have inexplicable TARDIS geometries, providing a bunch more clutter and environmental storytelling, supplementing NPC schedules, and doing fun things with notes and terminals.

 

Though some of these have come out concurrent to my own project, I've found inspiration in mods like The Great Mojave Interior Overhaul (Lime's design sensibilities in general), New Vegas Landscape Overhaul, MoreMojave, Faram's various casino overhauls, and of course (recently overhauled) classics like NV Interiors and AWOP.

 

I've had basically no prior experience with modding or game design outside of this project, so it's been a massive learning experience for me, and certainly a massive undertaking as well. In the process of this, I've had to start from scratch something like four times. There's always been some fatal flaw in my approach that I discover too late and forces me to scrap the whole thing except for the general designs I've continued to iterate off of. I've had to learn the hard way not to delete NavMesh or references. I'm intimidated by the scope of things that can go wrong.

 

So I'm soliciting advice from anyone who has experience with level design in the NV engine. I'm really passionate about my ideas to spice up and amend NV's fairly lackluster world design in ways that the aforementioned mods haven't yet. But I don't want to risk doing so in an amateurish way.

 

It isn't as though I haven't gotten better in the past five years, but it's clear my lack of formal knowledge in any relevant skills, combined with a lack of time to adequately learn any, has really stifled what I'm capable of here.

 

Is there anyone willing to just expound a bit on their own approach to designing levels in this engine? Things you've learned to avoid, shortcuts you've learned to utilize better, general workflow advice, etc? I suppose my biggest question is just what is the best way to go about completely redesigning an interior, right down to replacing the foundational static wall and floor panels? What's the best way to adjust, supplement, and remove NavMesh (I feel like I've only half-figured this out)? What's the best way to ensure compatibility, and stability as well for that matter?

 

I appreciate anyone's time!

[madmongo]

When adding lots of stuff, pay close attention to texture sizes. High quality meshes with lots of triangles don't seem to bother the game engine much, although I suppose it's possible to have performance issues on an old potato PC. But textures are what get you. It's very easy to run the game out of memory using a lot of high resolution textures.

 

Adding a lot of different lights in one area is an excellent way to completely kill the game's performance. Try to avoid it.

 

Lots of NPCs running AI packages in one area will also slow the game engine down quite a bit.

 

Personally, if I am just adding stuff and not making major structural changes, I'll just modify the existing cells. When doing a major redesign though, I'll usually make new interior cells and then just change the doors to link to the new interiors. For example I redesigned the interior of the H&H Tools Factory in North Vegas and used completely new interior cells. One issue you can run into doing this is that it can break other mods. I had to make a compatibility patch to a mod that placed something inside the tool factory.

[Radioactivelad]

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional, and all my level-design-fu comes from making/reflecting on my own New Vegas Mods and playing other's New Vegas mods (and commercial games) critically.

 

Often the "Tardis" effect is just simply that the interior tilesets you'll have to work with aren't up to the task of perfectly matching the exterior. Improvements can be made by Kitbashing or "kludging" as I like to call it, but there's only so much that can be done without entirely new assets. Every facet of game design is just smoke-and-mirrors anyway; focus on improving the illusion instead of trying to make it "real". (For that matter, the exterior buildings are often too small to create an interesting interior space.)

 

 

A common thing I see in a lot of mods is not varying up the light sources they use. Often times I've seen cells use something like IndLightNeutral, exclusively throughout an entire warehouse or using glowing radioactivegreen mushrooms to light an entire cave section. The musical equivalent of that would be this infamous Saxophone Solo: https://youtu.be/Pt76-vvCGWs?t=50

At first you might think it's creating a certain mood, like a lot of blue-ish lights might make a place feel "cold", But the more time you spend with it, the more the one-note nature of the lighting becomes, and the more visual fatigue and boredom you're going to instill in the player.

 

I like to maintain a certain level of "consistent variety", like In a hallway, I'll use a Cool colored light, while in the actual rooms connected by those hallways, I'll use a Warm color. This is by no means a strict rule, but it's a general guideline I follow.

 

It's important to maintain some variety in an individual space too though. I consider this one of my better lit scenes: https://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/images/119015

 

There's three main colors in this scene: Orange, Yellow, and Brown. Notice there's a sort of progression here:

Directly in front of the person holding a rifle is a orange light that casts on all the nearby piping and concrete. Directly above them is a yellow light that doesn't reach as far, but is quite bright. Finally, behind them is the neutral brownish-black of the cell's inherent lighting. All this combines to create depth in the scene, which makes the space more interesting visually.

 

To pick on a mod you've cited as an inspiration in your OP, I think this scene is terribly lit: https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/130/images/70165/70165-1607516415-51383127.png

 

Now, I don't know if this is actual lighting edits made by that mod's author, or if it's just a result of their ENB ( I hate ENBs for this reason, among others), but that doesn't really matter: If wasn't for that one darker corner, this space would look *completely flat*. No variation in brightness, only a nigh-imperceptible variation in color by the sun coming through the window. The hyper-contrast on the character, (straight up Black Crush really) presumably the result of not being directly lit by any of the light sources, is also not a good look.

 

This scene from that same mod takes in to account many of the things I just discussed, and as a result, looks significantly better: https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/130/images/70165/70165-1608596445-1163842209.png

 

In the previous example of a "cold room", I would put deep orange or red lights somewhere as an "emergency light" or the pollution of some other electronic equipment. This accomplishes three things:

 

1) It adds variety to the scene.

2) The "warmth" of these minority lights actually makes the "cold spots" feel even colder.

3) It's a good way to signpost a potential area of interest for the player. (So many mods that leave important items like keys in generically lit rooms would benefit from this.)

Edited October 29, 2021 by Radioactivelad

[Deleted127869753User]

Snip.

 

Valuable optimization tips. I've definitely not been showing enough restraint with the amount of lights in an area - will have to learn to cut back. I'd only once considered the trick of creating new interiors and simply redirecting the teleport doors. I'd dropped this for the incompatibility problem, but in hindsight it's probably no more incompatible than the very messy approach I'd been taking instead. Certainly solves the issue of deleted NavMesh/references better. Perhaps I'll just do that, yeah.

 

Snip.

I really love this lighting breakdown. Though it echoes a few things I've already figured out (I love Lime's interior designs in general, but I agree his sense of lighting is very static), there are definitely new perspectives here I hadn't considered.

 

Also, "kludging" was another thing I'd only briefly considered doing but dropped just because it seemed too messy to me. That was probably just me being neurotic. It really is impossible to tell unless you're smashing your face against the geometry. Would really solve a lot of problems I've been running into if I just took this approach, huh? Great little tip.

 

On something you briefly mentioned, one of the things I've really noticed about New Vegas' interiors is just how often they're significantly bigger than the exterior would indicate. It really happens pretty much most of the time, and it definitely is hard to work around. I've found that it's an interesting creative challenge, though. The bulk of my shrinking work has been focused on the Novac motel rooms. I find this appropriate because motel rooms usually are quite cramped, and it isn't as though there's a whole lot that six tiles can provide to level design that four tiles can't already. You'd be surprised by how navigable it still is. In the end, I also came up with a creative solution to allow the player to have a bigger base by simply caving in a wall to another motel room, effectively doubling the space to work with.

 

I should probably drop the obsession on other fronts, though. For instance, the ranch houses in Novac have just been impossible to work with. Four tiles, despite being consistent with the exterior size, really does look incredibly crowded in an interior space that's supposed to actually look like a long-term residence. I'll have to just make more concessions going forward.

[JimboUK]

I'll just underline what madmongo said, you really need to watch the lights, they'll drag the framerate down more than anything else. When we made this we wanted to have very dark nights but we also had a large area that needed to be well lit, we put in a ton of lights and put them on a timer so when the sun goes down the lights all come on. The combination of the very low ambient light and the multiple light sources looks great but there's a problem, as soon as those lights kick in the frame rate tanks and with too many NPCs it can become unusable. That said don't just rely on ambient lighting, that on its own looks bland and unappealing.