UndeadMartyr Posted June 24 Author Share Posted June 24 Might be easier to just verify and start with vanilla. I want to start navmeshing and quest scripting, working with interiors as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UndeadMartyr Posted July 3 Author Share Posted July 3 What's 200 hours get you in the GECK? For me, it's a worldspace of 828+ exterior cells in various stages of completion, plus half a dozen interiors needing clutter, lights, navmesh. There are broad sections of the map- even a map much truncated from my initial plans and desires- that need further work. The north in particular is very empty of content and objects, even with the recent work I've put into it. But the skeleton of an alpha build is there, if still naked- much like the interiors in the Broken Tower, the sandbox walls are closing in, the sand is filling up, but the toys need to be placed. I estimated that it would take me around 200-250 hours or so to complete the exterior cells, another 50-100 for the interior cells, and about the same for everything else. So far I'm feeling fairly confident on that, and optimistic on the generalized timetable for exteriors to be done by summer's end, interiors in fall, and a release by the new year. But the uncertainty is maddening- I have experienced this before, with a solid beginning and direction, but the hardest part is bridging a gap from beginning to middle to end. That is why I started with interiors, and working on filling the empty areas near Fort Yuma in the north. The ultimate objective is a new world- a DLC-sized post-game expansion with an involved main quest and numerous side quests. Simply placing objects around Fort Yuma- fences, pipes, trees- has forced me to consider the place itself as a setting, the people involved past and present, the basic question of how to fill the space with things to do or explore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmongo Posted July 4 Share Posted July 4 200 hours in the GECK gets you to the realization that the GECK is really a secret Vault-Tec experiment designed to test modder's frustration levels. Flushing out an entire worldspace to make it interesting will take longer than you think. Trust me. Been there, done that. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UndeadMartyr Posted July 5 Author Share Posted July 5 Oh, I'm aware. Having spent two+ hours on a sidewalk section not even directly relevant and/or aligning power lines or railroads within a single cell... yeah. I spent like five hours on an industrial warehouse and its shattered concrete parking area and I regret absolutely nothing about that. It looks too nice. (Fun trick- gently angling the Pitt dlc concrete blocks with both snap-to functions disabled to open gaps and adding in some rubble looks really cool). I'm especially proud of that recent addition and also the entire downtown area, which looks and feels amazing. It is very difficult to fight the urge to expand any further than I already have, or spend ten+ hours per cell (there are literally hundreds....) exquisitely detailing cells in need of it. I've got an idea for a side quest from clutter- setting a destroyed fence and a wrecked car off a hill made me imagine an old cold case murder with the dead ghoul Detective present at rhe scene, suicide note and revolver in hand. Got the stages sketched out and it gives me an excuse to start cluttering at least one of the existing interiors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UndeadMartyr Posted July 21 Author Share Posted July 21 The quest I began is not complete, and there is little from the 20 odd hours that seems "photogenic" enough to describe or display, but I have made several interiors and started a quest. For Reasons I won't likely be putting quite as much into this for the next two weeks, but my main concern is getting the basic questlines, interiors, items, and the like into a state where (along with the exterior cells) I can consider an alpha/playtest release, ideally by year's end. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UndeadMartyr Posted August 2 Author Share Posted August 2 Coming back to this and I'm wondering- I'd like to walk through the quest script stuff, then maybe add some additional Main quests specifically a VR arcade. I'm also considering dipping my toes into texture work, or looking into creatures. What I'd really like is a team member, or failing that to get some kind of alpha release by year's end. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
laclongquan Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 (edited) On 6/24/2024 at 8:18 AM, madmongo said: One thing Bethesda is really good at is shrinking things down while keeping the essence of what they are representing. The vaults are supposed to hold 1,000 people. The vaults in the games are just a tiny representation of that. The same with locations. Las Vegas is HUGE compared to what you get in FNV. This is the difficult part. You have to figure out how to condense everything you want down to a reasonable game size. One thing drove me crazy about Fallout vaults is their not obeying basic default design for capacity Vaults in a way pretty similar to submarine. This is the biggest submarine with capacity for 160 people living several months Now imagine a facility for 1000 people in closed condition, for centuries. You would need 10 subs like that, maybe more, for spare capacity during emergency along that 100 years. Ehm, no vault ever have that kind of space. They always feel like a small district school. For comparison, think of Umbrella's The Hive under Raccoon City. Yeah, The Hive sounds about right. --- If we really want to squint, the combo of Citadel surface + citadel ring A+ ring B+ Lab floor is about right for a vault space. it's not enough for 1k citizens, but we can squint and believe that lie. Edited August 3 by laclongquan 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UndeadMartyr Posted August 3 Author Share Posted August 3 It's one of those things where you just kind of have to roll with it. At the least, having an area like in the TV show to imply extra depth isn't a bad idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmongo Posted August 3 Share Posted August 3 20 hours ago, UndeadMartyr said: I'd like to walk through the quest script stuff, then maybe add some additional Main quests specifically a VR arcade. I'm also considering dipping my toes into texture work, or looking into creatures. Retexturing things is relatively easy to get into, and with a bit of creativity you can create some really good things. For creatures, there are two different "steps" in the learning curve. The first is how to create a new mesh and rig it to an existing skeleton. For example, I have made robots and have rigged them to the human NPC skeleton. I have also rigged floating things to the Mr. Handy skeleton and have rigged a wide variety of robots to the robobrain skeleton. The second step is creating your own skeletons and animations, which is much more difficult. Animations in particular are very poorly documented, and I had to figure out a lot through trial and error. There are a lot of hidden gotchas that aren't documented at all, such as the fact that there are apparently hidden things in the animations that are stored in the GECK but you aren't given access to. If you have a looping animation for example, and you use the default loop tags in Blender, that won't work properly in FNV. If you go back and fix them in the animation kf files, they still don't work properly in FNV. You have to give the animation a different name and re-assign it in the GECK so that it picks up whatever hidden settings you are missing and don't have access to. The end result is that I would name my animations things like MyAnimationA.kf and MyAnimationB.kf until typically somewhere around MyAnimationK.kf I would finally get it all sorted out, and once it was working correctly I would just rename it to MyAnimation.kf and that would be the final version. A lot of the tutorials out there also assume that you have to start with an existing animation and modify it. You don't. You can create a new animation completely from scratch. There is a reason you don't see many new animations on the nexus. So, my advice to you is that if you want new creatures for your mod, stick to retextures or rigging new meshes to existing skeletons. Otherwise you have a lot of work ahead of you. Creature meshes and clothing are essentially the same thing as far as the game engine is concerned. Once you learn how to do one, you know how to do the other. The only difference is that you have to set the shader flags differently if you include human bits in your mesh for clothing, like if you create a T shirt outfit that has bare arms visible. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UndeadMartyr Posted August 3 Author Share Posted August 3 Creature wise the two new things I'd like are a giant firebreathimg turtle (could be done off fire ants, no reason it cant have an extra pair of legs) and rideable horses. Also spiders, but there's a modders resource on nexus. At some point I'd maybe like giant birds/dragons with human riders. Everything else is a retexture- geckos, cazadores, deathclaws. For the turtles I think that I'd like them to have a tail that can attack as well, which probably needs a new animation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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