The Great Desert Beyond

[fallingstar238]

Has anyone ever done anything, mod-wise, with the massive desert beyond that locked gate at the Mojave Outpost? It's f'ing enormous!!!! It's the size of the whole rest of the New Vegas world, if not larger! I just now on a whim decided to tcl through that gate, and there is an enormous amount of explorable space, that you can walk around in. Granted, the area is rather empty and boring, what with it being nothing but empty sand dunes, but it is still fully explorable, and seems to me has massive potential. A modder or dedicated group of modders could make a mod the size of the base game in that space, given enough time and the right skills. The only thing about that, though, is that it is the same world space as the rest of the game, so a large mod of that sort could decrease performance, unless worked around in some way. Still, though that seems a small obstacle for the great amount of potential space that could be used there. It's crazy how passionate I am about this empty desert!

 

 

I don't know the first bit about mod making, though, so it's possible that I'm overestimating this desert's potential. Doesn't change my sudden love of this place, though!

:D

[SayinNuthin]

The best I've (recently) seen is MyGoodEye's EPIC! Warzones mod which seems to use most of the empty space for a series of heavy duty, pure combat scenarios. I'm currently trying to learn modding out there myself at the moment, playing with the landscape settings to try to achieve almost the opposite of Warzones. A huge empty space what will convey a sense of desert to the player - and if that sounds boring as hell, well here's the facts, deserts ARE boring... a lot of empty space with not much in them :laugh:

 

But.. here's a thing I've discovered. The base textures out there are absolute minimum. In the GECK go to the edge of the Pip-boy map and start dropping Static items about the place and your mod's .esp barely notices in terms of size. You have 71Kb, drop some more things 74Kb, a load more things 81Kb etc. However as soon as you touch the base landscape textures on just a few cells, start introducing grass textures then your .esp's size jumps up. Changed 4 cells landscape values and the .esp became 251Kb... just four cells...

 

Which implies if you were to change the landscape of 'large' empty areas the size of the mod would become huge therefore a subsequent burden on a players system, no? Then there is 'generating' LOD to stop things swimming into view of which I understand nothing! Except it's a substantial task.

 

I really like it out there, I find it spooky in a way that no other location in the game achieves. It has a palpable atmosphere of it's own closest to that which Stephen King describes in his 'The Langoliers' story. a world waiting to happen or that has happened and been left behind... OooOooOhh... :laugh:

 

My thoughts so far and what I'm going to try to do is described here

[fallingstar238]

I read a bit into your thread, and I must say I love your ideas, especially the wild wasteland stuff. I agree with you as well, that it should remain mostly desert, as that is what made me fall in love with the space to begin with. To be honest, if I had any clue of how to mod I might be inclined to try and collaborate with you. Keep it up, good sir, and you have yourself a fan.

[SayinNuthin]

and you have yourself a fan.

 

Well that might be handy when the temperature hits the hundreds in the desert... :laugh:

 

I loved the idea of the Wild-Wastland but there wasn't much to it was there? Given the vast quantity of material to draw inspiration from..

 

All that material, all that space (shugs) but if there is some profound technical reason that this 'concept' is unfeasible (of which I'm quite possibly ignorant) I really hope one of the experts here will simply tell me! . . . As opposed to letting me discover it the hard way.