development thread Yuma Wasteland- project diaries

[laclongquan]

Is there anybody ever make Deathclaw attack with their tails? No?

So you definitely would need a new animation for that. No question.

[UndeadMartyr]

Yeah, figured as much.  It's not a huge priority, and in any event I'm not really adroit with blender.

[UndeadMartyr]

Just spent close to two hours extending a railroad track and highway into an neighboring cell and doing light terrain editing.  The settlement I'm planning, Winterhaven, is just a road and a power station.

Ironically despite feeling too large and empty I'm worried about space.  I've got ten cells west to cover the ten or so miles into California.

 

I'd really like to have non wasteland stuff to work with, I might download the Adobe brick mod off the resources.  Ruined buildings don't make sense for this settlement, it should be primarily post war construction, and not shacks either.

[laclongquan]

1. if you worry about space you might consider build it on height (or depth), 3D. Example is Fallout3's Citadel ground level (and citadel destroyed in Broken Steel) as well as Megaton. or the sky bridges over West side and Vegas East side in MoreMojave. Fallout 3 make use of this with various highway bridges, and mountains, but FNV drop that theme because it increase the load in each cells (more assets per cell).

If you dont want items in the sky, consider building it half-open sewer/tunnel. Like, with surface map, you attach a tunnel map onto that, with weathered openings (or bombed craters) to allow access

2. About rail track. You dont actually need train engine to run the tracks. The most basic, no-engine vehicle can run on them tracks is handcar, pump trolley, push trolley, which used human power to run at speed, as well as carry certain amount of baggage. THIS is the vehicle of choice in post apocalyptic novels when they rebuild stuffs and can not use engine.

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Handcar?file=Handcar.png

You can use that to link between two neighboring communities (villages or hamlet).

 

Edited August 5 by laclongquan

[UndeadMartyr]

The more advanced factions should generally be capable of matching at least 19th century technology is my rule of thumb.  Major issue with engines is resources, especially fuel, but NCR and up should be capable of making steam trains.  But handcarts would exist, certainly.  Rails would likely link the Vault with the river along the canal.  Several docks are present there along with a rail siding and rock crusher.  I very much want to give a sense of history to the post-apocalpytic civilization built up here.  River travel at least downstream is the most significant at this point I would say.

I've tried to incorporate verticality by exaggerating the river bank and the Fort Yuma hill, as well as adding a tunneler-caused sinkhole on the south bank.  I may add more sinkholes, and bomb craters besides.  The northern edge of the map is mountains, east too, but I haven't added them yet as I've been terraforming as I go.  The sewer idea pinged on my radar while I was exploring the San Fran worldspace.  There's a Ruined fort/bunker (well there's a lot of these) using a tunnel piece and several McCarran walls that I'm quite proud of.

Main reason for rails is moving heavy loads.  Main drawback is needing lots of metal.  Realistically most rails & buildings should've been torn up for scrap decades ago.  But 200 years is the timeline we are given, so we have to accept it past a certain point.

I am very consciously leaning towards post-post apocalyptic or even post-post-post apocalyptic.  The "Great War" has faded no less than the original great war (or Napoleonic Wars) has done in Europe, and for the same reason... war never changes.  Current conflicts preoccupy over old.

Winterhaven is basically a fortified city/walled town built by vault dwellers who were on Vault City/Big MT tech level but got knocked down a few pegs by the Brotherhood and a tunnelers invasion, and are stuck huddled in the ruins of their ancestors' annihilation, clinging on to the embers (basically they're dwarves).  Inside the walls is the cutting edge of civilization, pre war comforts together with post war science, at least on first appearance.  But outside?  War and barbarism, the legacy of bitter feuds and competition.  And no walls can keep out tunnelers or cazadores, to say nothing of the Legion or BoS....

I used the retaining wall and metro tunnel pieces to make a "city wall" of sorts, as a prelude to a separate derived worldspace a la Freeside.  I'd like to use the pristine prewar buildings on Nexus, and really build a sense of a city under siege, latent paranoia almost boiling over... bureaucracy also will play a role.  The main entrance will have a que of refugees seeking entry, delayed by incompetent robots.  Given the harsh environment I could darkly see some of them not surviving the experience...

[UndeadMartyr]

Is it possible to expand a worldspace beyond the borders?  Heightmap editing pnly permits me to work within 32x32.

Secondarily, a lot of the major settlements have mini worldspaces patented to the Mojave.  Is this good practice and what benefits are gained beyond performance due to NPCs etc.?

[madmongo]

I don't think it's possible just using the GECK. I've never tried it, but I think you need to create the RAW files using an external editor and then import them into the GECK. Then you can make the worldspace any size that you want. I personally don't have an editor that can handle RAW files, but then I haven't really tried to find one either.

However, I don't remember exactly where the limits are, but the game's physics engine completely breaks if you place anything too far in the X or Y directions. You'll end up with NPCs walking through terrain and all sorts of other bugs.

Interior cells have a similar problem. If you place something too far away from the origin, bad things happen, like everything in the cell ends up squished together in a big pile in the middle of the cell.

The mini worldspaces are used to get around problems with the memory limits of the game engine. Remember, it's a 32 bit game. No matter how much RAM your system has, the game can only use 2 GB of memory (4 GB with the patch). The original game also had to run on the XBox and Playstation, so a lot of the limits came from those systems as well and don't necessarily apply to a PC mod. I've never had any problems with memory in my worldspaces, so I've never bothered to use a mini-worldspace. So far I've made about a dozen worldspaces and I haven't had any issues, though the current mod I am working on (which may never get finished at the rate I am going) has 6 worldspaces and lots of stuff in it, and I get weird errors if I try to run my mod and TTW at the same time. If your mod only has one worldspace you probably don't need to worry about it.

[laclongquan]

Fire breathing = fire ant + armor item that cover its body.  

OR

= roboscorpion but tail was minimized, and equip fire/flamer creature weapon

[UndeadMartyr]

As I'd hoped blender, for all its foibles, is a fresh breath of air for me.

 

not my first rodeo with a steam loco, I got most of the way through an American 4-4-0 for Wild Wild West World back in the day, but I'm happy with how quickly this seems to be coming along.

There are some new areas I want to add on to the worldspace, and I've got the outlines for the main quests.  Apart from finishing the train, and perhaps the theater model a teammate made, I'd like to make a "turret" mimicking dudes shooting out of windows- would show up in a few western themed parts and possibly on the train chase sequence.

 

Is it possible to havok a chain weapon wielded by a human(oid?)  Had a nifty idea for an arena boss fight, and I could use similar animations/efforts on a tail for some creature.

Edited September 30 by UndeadMartyr

[UndeadMartyr]

Train is feeling pretty close to done, I still need more detail work and textures but the basic body feels good.

I still struggle to feel similar progress in the GECK.  I spent an hour or so expanding an existing Vault dungeon but interior design is not my favorite thing to do.  Storyboarding a bit helps- I want to have two ways down into the ruins to reach the reactor area, with both Vault 22 Spore carriers and feral ghouls a heavy presence, in addition to robots and turrets left over from the inhabitants.  This will be one of two main locations for BoS remnants, the other being the occupied shell of the city surrounding Vault 48.

Spoiler