Old developer

[TapperIRL]

Hi guys.

 

I am an old PC programmer with time on my hands as a result of an illness. It's been years but I am still interested in all kinds of software. I am also a game nut especially Fallout. My question is if someone like me wishes to get into modding and has the time to invest, where do I start. What software will I need. I have all the graphics and audio stuff and I did some 3D max work years ago. Can you point me in the right direction? I am most interested in Fallout 4 as a target platform to devlope mods for. I know the official kit will not be out until 2016. Any help will be most welcome.

[Moksha8088]

Right now an interdimensional chest that will link to all settlements, so junk piled into one chest will be available in its other settlements interdimensional existence would be great. As would a Mark IV Stealthboy which has an indefinite charge and will produce 100% invisibility and stealth would be great as well.

 

 

The creation kit you mentioned will be useful when it is released. It will help reduce the risk of mod-induced game crashes. FO4edit will also be essential to check for errors. Nifscope is available for download from somewhere. You might want to go to the Steam Workshop and also ask around. The problem there is that they might demand the rights to your mod if it gets built. The mod authors on the Nexus sites have also been known to give friendly advice and the ones on the Nexus Fallout 4 forum have already gotten their feet wet.

[TapperIRL]

Thanks so much for your reply I will follow your advice and see what follows. I am only interested in keeping the old brain cells working and having fun making some cool stuff.

[obobski]

I'm not sure what Fallout 4 looks like "under the hood" (and the GECK is not out yet, so that's a limitation on making many types of mods), but if it follows anything like the last few games from Bethesda (from Oblivion forward) there will be degrees of similarity in terms of how the GECK/CK works, and what kinds of things you can and cannot easily do. You might consider, if you own one of the older games (like Fallout 3), playing around in their GECK/CK just to get a feel for it. You can do *a lot* with just the Bethesda resources (e.g. making new NPCs, entire quests or questlines, adding new locations, etc), but being able to do your own model making and such lets you create your own resources that can further extend "what you can do" (e.g. you could make your own armor models from the ground up).

[Vagrant0]

Best suggestion I can offer is to look at Skyrim or FO3, and familiarize yourself with some basic modding for those games since they use essentially the same engine. In particular Skyrim would be of value since it is more recent and uses the new engine specific scripting language Papyrus. Tutorials for Skyrim modding are also fairly easy to locate for a large number of topics.