A big project - Philadelphia

[eviljezuzz]

Let me start off by saying that I am a very new, inexperienced modder and I realize this project is more ambitious and probably more than I can handle.

Anyways here is the idea:

Philadelphia Project is a DLC sized project where the player can travel to Philadelphia. I'm vaguely aware of the lore saying that Philadelphia is a crater but I haven't found any realy evidence of this only a log from fallout 3 stating that the city is "ruined" but lets face it, so was DC and Vegas.

 

The city is run by raiders similar to the Pitt. The "criminal" factions of the area are working towards making the city a sinners paradise under the command of a charasmatic leader.

 

Some of the factions:

BOS
Enclave Remnants
Raiders
Slavers
Vault Dwellers

The leader of the area, in an attempt to minimize casualties, has divided the city up. Each faction guards its borders viciously. Despite, the attempt the larger raider and slaver factions still prey upon the lesser factions.

 

I have some storylines outlined in my notes but what I'm really looking for here is interesting ideas. Any quests, NPCs, storylines, advice, help, anything you may have to offer I am accepting. Again I realize what a massive undertaking this is for someone so new with almost no experience and I don't expect this to come to fruition over night but this is a project I really want to work on in my freetime and I feel like it is a project that I can learn a lot from working on.

[RoyBatterian]

Start making mods is the best advice I can give. Bookmark the GECK wiki and keep it open. You may want to check out Seddon's channel on youtube for tutorials, as well as the few that Beth put up. There's a plethora of information available in these, bethesda's and obsidians forums as well as other places I can't mention here but they are pretty easy to find. Truancyfactory is also an excellent blog with tons of great information on it.

[jcdenton2012]

Just opened up Google Earth and am looking at the city. What's your overall plan for the mod? By that, I mean, how big surface area wise do you intend to build the actual city, and what theme are you going for the actual cityscape? Do you want to make it buried under snow and frozen, or traditional Fallout ruins? These are all really big questions you have to ask yourself.

 

OK, time to talk shop. Just by looking at Philadelphia in Google Earth, I can assure you that the 8 main skyscrapers in the skyline could be fabricated by me in less than 3 days. That having been said, I don't really have time to dedicate fully to any project teams so the skyline is about all I can dedicate should you want it.

 

My advice would be to open up google earth and start planning stuff out. The hardest part when building a city in the GECK is properly scaling it. In this instance you'll need to scale Center City West to University City just across the river. If you can get that right then you can cherry pick what structures you want to place as you spread outward from Center City West. In my personal experience, its best to scale the big stuff first so that you don't accidentally start building large and unnecessary road nexuses. Furthermore, its never wise to plan on adding "every" prominent building for two important reasons. CustomBlds eat up cell load since each skyscraper will consists of anywhere from 50-150 individual pieces, the cell processing power can and will be easily consumed by these pieces adding up as you place them in close proximity to one another. To that end, you should plan on dividing your city into separate worldcells with the city center being its own personal worldcell. Your main world cell where the city center is represented will be a "dummy" of the actual city center placed on another world cell. This works the best because data is rendered horizontally on the worldcell plane, so if your actual city center is on a separate landmass, you can build and process a far more detailed rendition than if it all existed in the same worldcell, where it would be forced to share cell load processing power with whatever you choose to surround the big overly designed skyscrapers with.

 

In the words of CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow, "Did you savy that?" :laugh:

[NellSpeed]

Something you might try: write one quest, set in the Mojave, and mod it. Make it as detailed or simple, as morally complex or as good-evil as you want. Include at least one NPC-- make sure you really like them.

 

That'll give you a better idea of what your strengths are going into a bigger project; and more importantly, if you want help from other modders, it'll give them reason to listen to your bigger ideas.

 

(Oh, and keep caffeine and the headache remedy of your choice on hand.)

[eviljezuzz]

Just opened up Google Earth and am looking at the city. What's your overall plan for the mod? By that, I mean, how big surface area wise do you intend to build the actual city, and what theme are you going for the actual cityscape? Do you want to make it buried under snow and frozen, or traditional Fallout ruins? These are all really big questions you have to ask yourself.

 

OK, time to talk shop. Just by looking at Philadelphia in Google Earth, I can assure you that the 8 main skyscrapers in the skyline could be fabricated by me in less than 3 days. That having been said, I don't really have time to dedicate fully to any project teams so the skyline is about all I can dedicate should you want it.

 

My advice would be to open up google earth and start planning stuff out. The hardest part when building a city in the GECK is properly scaling it. In this instance you'll need to scale Center City West to University City just across the river. If you can get that right then you can cherry pick what structures you want to place as you spread outward from Center City West. In my personal experience, its best to scale the big stuff first so that you don't accidentally start building large and unnecessary road nexuses. Furthermore, its never wise to plan on adding "every" prominent building for two important reasons. CustomBlds eat up cell load since each skyscraper will consists of anywhere from 50-150 individual pieces, the cell processing power can and will be easily consumed by these pieces adding up as you place them in close proximity to one another. To that end, you should plan on dividing your city into separate worldcells with the city center being its own personal worldcell. Your main world cell where the city center is represented will be a "dummy" of the actual city center placed on another world cell. This works the best because data is rendered horizontally on the worldcell plane, so if your actual city center is on a separate landmass, you can build and process a far more detailed rendition than if it all existed in the same worldcell, where it would be forced to share cell load processing power with whatever you choose to surround the big overly designed skyscrapers with.

 

In the words of CAPTAIN Jack Sparrow, "Did you savy that?" :laugh:

 

At this point I'm mostly putting pen to paper. Trying to make a rough guide to follow so I'm not completely stumbling through it. I'm familiar with some of your work and will definitly accept your help when the time comes if you are still available when that time comes. You have certainly given me some things to consider going forward.

 

Something you might try: write one quest, set in the Mojave, and mod it. Make it as detailed or simple, as morally complex or as good-evil as you want. Include at least one NPC-- make sure you really like them.

 

That'll give you a better idea of what your strengths are going into a bigger project; and more importantly, if you want help from other modders, it'll give them reason to listen to your bigger ideas.

 

(Oh, and keep caffeine and the headache remedy of your choice on hand.)

I will give this a try. I understand the reasoning and I agree. Thank you for the advice.

[madmongo]

Creating a new worldspace is one of the most painful things that you can do in the GECK. It's not very intuitive, and if you just dive in and try to figure it out without knowing a lot of the tricks to it, the GECK will just crash on you. Even if you do everything right, the GECK will still often crash on you. Worldspace creation is extremely time consuming and buggy.

 

A few tips that I learned along the way:

 

First, create your new worldspace in the GECK (click on world at the top, then world spaces), and as soon as you have created it, save your file, because the GECK will probably crash at the next step. Now, create a simple heightmap. If you use the default height of 0 and just raise and lower things as you'd expect, the GECK will crash. You have to offset everything by 5000 or so. What I do is use the random noise feature with a frequency of 100, an amplitude of 50, and an offset of 6000. Click on generate and this will create an almost flat worldspace. Save at this point, though the GECK still might crash on you. Then, edit the heightmap again and put in all of the hills and mountains and dig down a bit for water areas (like the Delaware River in your case). Now you have an extremely unrealistically smooth world that at least has the rough heights on it. A topographic map of Philadelphia might help, but you don't want to follow it too closely. Instead, what you want to do is create a mini-Philadelphia that captures the essence of the city without actually duplicating the city. Save your work often. The GECK likes to crash a lot.

 

Next, go back into the heightmap editor and again use the randomizer, this time with a higher frequency like 2000, a larger amplitude like 200, a base offset of 0, and click on addative and subtractive, and hit the random button again. This will add a lot of bumpiness to your landscape and will make it look a lot more realistic.

 

Here's an important note. A worldspace goes from -32 to +32 cells in the X and Y directions, for a total of 4096 cells. If you use a large portion of that worldspace, you will have to navmesh all of the parts that you use. There's an automatic navmesh generator in the GECK that is supposed to make this easy for you. You just tell it what area, and it will automatically navmesh those cells. The problem is, IT DOESN'T WORK. More often that not, it will lock up the GECK with a repeating popup error that says simple "Get Jean!". Occasionally it will attempt to navmesh outside of the area that you selected, completely screwing up any other navmeshing you might have done in the area that it stomps all over. DO NOT USE THE AUTOMATIC NAVMESH GENERATOR. It will totally hose your mod. This means that you have to manually navmesh every cell. If you can navmesh on average one cell per minute, navmeshing 4096 cells will take you 4096 minutes, which is just shy of about 70 hours. If you work on it for 2 hours per night, it will take you about a month. And that's only for the navmeshing, and the only way you'll average a cell per minute is if you us the navmesh generator tool for most cells. Be forwarned that this will also often lock up the GECK. Do not use the navmesh generator tool (the little question mark thingy when you click on navmesh and bring up the navmesh toolbar) on cells that contain things like cave entrances or SCOLs.

 

Needless to say, this is extremely painful, but this is what is required to make a city similar to the DC ruins in Fallout 3. And that doesn't include adding all of your buildings and objects before you do the navmeshing.

 

What a lot of people do is they cheat. They don't make the huge DC wasteland style worldspace. Instead, they create a flat worldspace and just do the inside of the city, sticking to the downtown area so that you can use buildings to take up most of the space (much less navmeshing) and you can put rubble in between the buildings to further narrow down the usable portion of the worldspace. If you want to create a huge DC style area, then be prepared to spend many months doing so, especially since there will be some learning time required to figure this stuff out in the GECK. If you don't want to commit that much time to the project, then consider using the cheater mini-city method instead.

 

Speedy's resources has building parts that can really help you create downtown areas, and there are some buildings in the GECK that you can use too. Anything that you can't find you'll have to create yourself, and that requires learning how to use Blender and nifscope and all of those fun things.

 

Good luck!

[jcdenton2012]

In my personal experience, your going to have to do most of your navmeshing by hand in order to get anything approaching a decent result. However, even then you will end up going over everything again and again to fix triangulation errors since the GECK will likely flag everything you do as "wrong" when its clearly perfectly fine. Navmeshing, more than the design work, will be the most time consuming thing you do.

 

I also highly recommend The Speedy Resources due to the brick building parts. If you intend to design any generic brick buildings for your mod then you will require those segments. Overall, the thing which will take quite a long time during the design phrase is dedicating to memory all the prefixes like utlcat (utility catwalk clean version), pittcat (DLC The Pitt rusted catwalk version), redced (red cedar tree), stuff of this nature. I know pretty much all of this by heart... but it took a while to memorize it. Once you know what everything is and assuming your a good visual thinker, you start coming up with combinations to synthesize stuff that doesn't actually exist in the GECK.

 

LOD is another primary concern. Uh... there is no good way of saying this but Chucksteels work is thus far not definitive, but you can find his LOD resource here http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/36693/? If your waiting (like me) for a definitive edition before polishing off several projects... then its going to be a while. Thus far, no DLC textures have been converted and the process will hangup around the paradisefalls stuff when you render the LOD. This is mainly because Chucksteel can't post the converted DLC textures because Nexus would remove the content due to piracy claims... which is slightly annoying... because that stuff would be bloody helpful for people like me...

[eviljezuzz]

@jcdenton2012 If you are still looking for something to do in your free time, and have nothing else you are working on right now, I will need city hall done. There are many images of philadelphia city hall and as a key structure it will definitely be incorporated in to the final project. If it proves to be too much to take on or you don't have time for it I will understand.

[jcdenton2012]

Sure, just looking at it I can tell most of it can be snapped together using bld12s