Building a new region and town - any USGS heightmap import help?

[Tostitos]

I've been working on this for a while, until I realized my heightmap was scaled wrong. Now I need to start the landscape over.

 

I wish there was a standard procedure for workably and reliably importing real world terrain. I've been using USGS downloads, TESannwyn, and then GECK, and I've only gotten that to work a few times. Trial and error or random chance. Sometimes when heightmaps import at all, they're horribly bugged. This is what I got and now have to discard for something properly scaled:

 

http://i37.tinypic.com/5yrn6f.jpg

 

I'm showing this so you know I actually do my end of things, not just asking for help to suck it all up without doing any work. I've got my eye on a 4x4 (16) quad section of terrain that would work pretty well. I want a way to import the most detailed terrain possible, although that only matters for a few of those quads. I can clean it up, but if it's totally wrong, it's going to take me months to sculpt it properly. This is because there are certain geological features that I want to replicate.. hard to explain but it's a big part of doing this. I'd guess that anyone else who wants to post-apocalyptize a city they've lived in feels the same way.

 

I'm willing to pay a little for having a proper heightmap imported. If any of you have experience in this area, let me know. Other than that, I'm interested in learning how to do first person cutscenes, like the birth scene.

 

The mod - more of an addon location, actually - takes place shortly before the Chosen One of FO2 destroyed the Enclave. Partly because that makes sense, plot wise, and partly because waltzing in with a power armor and dual miniguns would be retarded. There won't be a Vault. There will be many bunkers and fallout shelters. There won't be Brotherhood of Steel. There will be jittery and xenophobic military clans. There will be trailer parks with mutant inbreds, inbred mutants, and cannibals. There will not be manga-style armor or guns cribbed from current FPS games.

 

The player starts near the interstate. Working their way south, they find a pocket of wasteland survivors who have managed to carve out a life, one that is threatened from the outside and in.

 

The two hour nuclear and conventional exchange that wiped the world almost clean didn't strike less populated areas as hard as everywhere else, although over the centuries, the difference between being scoured by fire and the wasteland became moot. I mention this only because I think having too many large standing buildings might seem a little off to some. The idea of standing but abandoned chernobyl-style ghost towns intrigues me. Overall I will be drawing heavily from FO1 and 2, mostly FO1 though as for the level of civilization. I haven't played the earlier wasteland games, but just reading up on them can give you a great flavor impression.

 

I think many modders don't take advantage of the rich options available: humanity has been struggling to survive for two centures. Showing the equilibrium reached contrasted to the chaos that threatens to take it away can be very impressive. Bethesda set a very very bad example with their cities, just plopping people down with guns and food and water and with no reason why. They did do some other things very right, and I'm going to do my best to make a Bethesda-quality setting with that familiar Fallout feeling of desolation and discovery, never knowing what you'll stumble over next.

 

The wasteland is a messed up place, after all:

 

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/4517/gravesw.jpg

 

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/9666/quarry3.jpg

 

Some places you will be visiting:

 

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/1695/sany0228c.jpg

 

My first layout sketch. Megalomart became Omega-Mart. Minor spoiler if you look at the image and read everything, though.

 

Omega-Mart City: the biggest and best "community" around, built up inside an Omega-Mart Supercenter. The massive pre-war box store has held generations of survivors who turned it into an indoor town. The garden center now is used to grow mutfruit and other vegetables (through a cobbled together system of hydroponics and other gardening techniques), the parking lot houses a small tent city and the brahmin pens, shelves have been turned into internal walls for rooms, everything is turned into living or workspace.

Most of the survivors in the area who chose to stay rather than move on in a doomed trek to find unburned land banded to the Omega-Mart in the very first days from the war, and as the ragtag group grew from a few dozen to fill the box store, they developed a rather Vault-City attitude towards outsiders.

 

http://i34.tinypic.com/23r03o6.jpg

 

This is a placeholder I was fooling around with before I found out my overall terrain scaling was horribly wrong. The sense of scale in that screenshot is correct though.

 

Without enough space to hold all the survivors of the wastes, Omega-Mart is awkwardly trying to maintain a position of being something like a fortified feudal city with serfs hanging on around the edges, and tension is rising among non citizens who camp in a tent city around the town. You arrive just as everything is about to snap.

 

The town holds high ground and has the best natural defenses for miles. A north-south gully mostly seperates it from the road next to it, and this gully continues down past the derelict Omega-Mart, and a guard shack has been built out of what once was a fueling station at the corner of the lot where the road rises and joins.

 

It's close enough to the interstate that caravans can pass through and trade, and far enough away that being ambushed on the way is still a worry.

 

Derelict Omega-Mart: the abandoned smaller (non-supercenter) Omega-Mart that was closed down before the war. Some kind of superstition keeps people out. Has a ravine/creek out back, might have sewer connections and ghouls. There's some really neat terrain behind it, and an old diner in the parking lot.

 

The shopping center / strip mall across the road (C in the sketch) from the Omega-Marts has equally complex terrain. Right by the road there's a steak n shake ( B ) that has retaining walls that would make it very hard to attack from the road. Then there's a furniture store, a few strip mall stores, and a k-mart. I've planned out uses for everything except a few of the strip stores. Closer to the road there's some random buildings that aren't really connected to the parking lot, and at the end of the parking lot there's a drug store that is also very well positioned as a natural fort. I'm sure it'll be important.

 

 

http://i34.tinypic.com/5zi9p0.jpg

Current map.

 

Overwatch Hotel: an extremely battered four or five story hotel. Chinese infiltration forces emerged from their fallout bunkers after the bombs fell and charged through the south in an effort to reach the ocean and a chance at a return home. When they reached this part of the country, national and state guardsmen were out of their shelters for a futile attempt at disaster recovery. The guardsmen used the hotel as a forward command post and stopped the chinese, at great cost. Maybe if less of them had died, they would have formed an organization to rival the Brotherhood of Steel- but they didn't. Their descendants still lay claim to the hotel, but mostly use it as an observation point to coordinate caravan escorting to and from Omega-Mart.

 

Park: not revealing where I'm going with the regional park.

 

The Strip: a cluster of budget motels and fast food restaurants reworked into a loose community. Most of the residents have moved on to the Omega-Mart, but a few stragglers will remain behind, set in their ways.

 

Campground: inside the dead forest that borders Supercenter City. Mutated bears will be a danger.

 

Hidden Pines Trailer Park: I discovered this on google satellite maps. I had no idea there was a trailer park there, it's well hidden. There will be andale-type goings on here.

 

Spa Factory: One of the Fallout 3 developments that I actually embraced is the use of factory buildings. Pretty straightforward here, haven't put a Retro-Future twist on it yet.

 

Bombed out convoy: part of the battle that scarred the Overwatch Hotel still lives on in the form of rusted out hulks of trucks and cars.

 

Quarry: this is actually a spectacular area similar to the raider home base in the Capital Wasteland. I look forward to representing it properly.

 

Junkyard dig site: a giant scar in the earth and filled with destroyed construction and dirtmoving equipment.

 

The road that crosses the main road, signified by skulls and a red line, is going to be a sea of craters, radioactivity, wrecked cars, and unexploded ordinance as a reason for the people living in Omega-Mart not to move south and loot the town dry. You can get through, you just can't bring much back easily, and no one has set up a proper route for movement. This may be a quest point- taking dynamite and blasting a new road through the rubble, or helping someone else do it. Past this road will be the second half of the city, a dangerous place indeed.

 

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/5513/convoyg.jpg

Random piece of landscaping.

[SpeedyB64]

I think I'm your man here, I have done a lot with height maps. I have a few diagnostic questions:

 

Is your height map appearing the right size in the world? Too small/too big?

 

Is it offset correctly (is the middle of the map in the middle of the worldspace or is the corner the center (TESAnnwyn default)

 

correcting size issues is fairly simple, you just make the image you are using bigger (my Phoenix project used a 2048x2048 image, which made a pretty large world space)

 

if the offset is off then you have to set the cell offset in TESAnnwyn (it was -64 and -64 for mine I think, it will be different depending on the size of your world)

 

after I got my world space in I had to do a lot of smoothing and repairs, I had to smooth the entire landmass and fix a bug that sometimes raises the left and bottom edges of the land (so that you won't see it in the LOD) there where also a couple of squares moved up and down oddly so I had to fix that.

 

hope that helps, if you need more detailed info feel free to ask :thumbsup:

[Tostitos]

That makes sense with the TESAnnwyn offset, that was one of my problems. I'm not going to resize my existing heightmap, in the hopes of acquiring a more detailed version. Also I'll be re-sampling a larger area.

 

Some of the things I want to demonstrate with this are Falloutverse-canon settlements and loners. In FO1 and 2, people banded together into communities just to survive. You had the occasional recluse or wanderer but for the most part, you needed to be in the closest thing to a population center, even if it was only 30-40 other people. None of this nonsense with "Towns" of six or so people. Arefu, I'm looking at you. In FO3, "danger zones" are way too close to the "agricultural" zones. This would only work in a heavily urban environment such as NYC or LA, or an area with a much larger population base, such as we saw in Bosnia / Serbia. Otherwise, there's no inertia to hold the boundaries, so to speak, and suddenly everything is very dangerous in an extremely chaotic way, way worse than even Beirut. Except, no one is living or set up as if it's that dangerous. Who's going to live where a raider can walk out of his comfortable fortified hideout for five or ten minutes and be on your doorstep? Two people living out under an overpass in a town of their own? C'mon. If they had some sort of resource they were capitalizing on or a reason for being there that made sense (treasure hunting, hiding from bounty hunters, etc) it would work. Mostly it doesn't.

 

In FO1 there was a similar situation with raiders and shady sands, but the difference was the raiders had located themselves strategically to prey on the town and caravans, and the town proactively worked to put an end to it.

 

I rationalized all of this away by deciding that the Brotherhood in DC had thrown everything into chaos with the war against the muties, and that things were simply crazy with no further explanation.

 

For a realistic location, there needs to be a balance between the necessary resources for survival, and imminent death. People aren't going to stick around if they're likely to all become raider trophies (barring a strong attachment to the land like Danny in Blood Diamond) and they aren't going to spread themselves thin over the area unless it's safe. If it isn't safe, they're more likely to fill up a small area and dig in. That's another thing, humanity for the most part has a very strong tendency to conquer and rebuild, which contrasts with the raiders and outlaws who simply want to plunder and destroy. That's part of the great beauty of Fallout, humanity taking a crap situation and dragging themselves out of it with rusty scraps of a lost world, and a bit of ingenuity. In FO3, no one seems to be doing much of anything except for the Brotherhood, some scientists, and the people who built Megaton and then quit doing useful things.

 

There'll be some form of farming. Organizing hunting and defense patrols. Brahmin dairies. A system of currency. Law and order. Banks are a logical development down the road although ATMs won't exist, unless you're in a near-totally rebuilt civilization or finding broken units in the ruins of a city and extracting credits/cash from them. There should be at least SOME greenery. Not a lot. Just some, like in FO2.

 

Now, having most of your region living in a small area might make the rest of the place seem a bit empty and boring, but that allows for other places to be dangerous and rarely visited. It allows for raiders to have routes that pass close by (instead of having a base) and it becomes plausible again. There's always a few recluses and wanderers, but the wasteland is a lonely place. They wouldn't be out by themselves if the risk wasn't worth the reward- perhaps one of them has a hidden still to produce liquor for selling, or tends a hidden garden, or hunts and returns with meat.

 

All the better to fill it with hostile and dangerous and mysterious encounters that also won't accidentally wipe out your carefully populated village.