All the Empty Space!

[kiresagara]

If you noclip beyond the normally playable map, especially westward, there's miles of open walkable normal play-space with absolutely nothing in it. There's so much empty space in fact, I think the total of empty space on the entire physical NV map may actually be greater than or at least equal to the confines of the invisible walled play area.

 

Personally I think Bethesda got lazy when they made NV, but I'm grateful that they made it much easier to mod than FO3.

 

Anyways, just throwing that out there that there tons of open area outside that map that's a perfectly usable game environment, only empty, there's even randomly generated terrain variations. Almost like they planned on having the play map much bigger at one point.

[JimboUK]

I thought of putting a load of mobs out there but decided against it because it may well be used for DLC making anything using that space redundant.

[Interfer0]

If you create your own worldspace it starts off as 0,0 as you scroll around the world grows quickly. Just zooming out will change your world from 1 space to 16. Which sucks immensly when you have to LOD mesh your landscape. I am sure there is a limit, but I think it is mostly a random generation outside of the main area.

 

It much easier to create a worldspace and work with it then to expand the map. If you create to world mesh so everything doesn't look weird, it take days to run. My world is 79 spaces compared to the thousands of NVWasteland. and my computer crashes after nine or ten hours of trying to mesh.

[fronzelneekburm]

I'm taking some advantage in my current "enclave mod", but more because i like the idea to not interfere too much with existing content. I am more doing it because i think offering a way through the canyon wreckage doe not ruin the look of the rest of the game. I simply never liked the FO3 mods that placed a skyscraper besides megaton or so, i am more into "extending" the game than "changing it".

 

 

But after working a bit with the "unexplorable" lands they are partially more of a pain than fun. After all experiences i had I'd say "A new cell is easier to use than an existing one". For example the landscape behind the train wreckage - you can enter it with tcl and see its basically a giant empty valley that seems to be perfect for modding. What you cant see is that the Nav/LOD mesh ends here and unless you extend it you come up with being able to place buildings there but not able to see them in game, simply as they are "out of the map" for in-game. Also the problem with that valley is that it is HUGE. Which is of course cool and impressive, but it also means that you have to place LOADS of stuff there to not make it look artificially empty. I plavces bushes, rocks and crap until my hands were bleeding and it was barely noticable in this enormous landscape.

 

And one of the worst problems is that due to the missing navmesh the player can really wander nearly unlimited through the far mountains. In the end i ended up just placing fences to limit the area drastically and placing some stuff at the border of the navmesh to have a "background scenery". Beware of the vast landscapes...

[McclaudEagle]

I was working on a short lived mod to drastically increase the size of the explorable game world. Trouble is, filling all the landscape is a daunting task and most likely took at least 10 people at Obsidian to make it. Then, you have to perform the dreaded task of LOD, which on some PC's, can take at least 10 hours. Oh, and can't forget the NPC's, scripts and other stuff. I had aimed to increase the explorable world by at least 5 miles in each direction.

 

All in all, it'd take a very long time to complete.

[FluidFire]

How do you guys think Bethesda managed to have 10 or so people working on the same thing all at once? I don't understand how they could have everyone all working on modding the same world all at once. They must have some insane version control / merging software to bring together all the bits & pieces that each developer/artist is working on.