Geck release question

[gunslinger6792]

New locations would be godsend, this game needs a real towns/cities worse than Skyrim did. Diamond City and Good Neighbor desperately need to be expanded. I can't wait to see what other people do for brand new locations and how they implement them.

[jeffglobal]

 

 

 

Lots of people (including myself) have little interest in building settlements...

 

 

Count me as another.

 

Beyond creating house mods, I want to create new locations that have nothing to do with Boston or even the sole survivor. The engine would lend itself really well to creating a variety of different environments. Just poking around in NifSkope reveals a lot of streamlined tech and new tech.

 

 

Tricky, what do you see in the nifs I don't see? (I'll take a list, and check them twice.) I'm also thinking your avatar of the bird burning was done in PS but Idk if it was with a plugin or not, like making the Movie posters for the Mockingjay films...

 

Now that I think about it, we can add meshes for environments and building and stuff too? If we uploaded that to the nexus, wouldn't their overhead for servers as we downloaded stuff like that just be prohibitive? Idk how ppl handled it with Skyrim...cause I saw whole new areas and stuff.

 

We should start considering creating a system for collaborating with other modders, if ppl want to make new environments. That seems like a big undertaking. Took me two hours to make a little chopping knife...

[TrickyVein]

@jeffglobal, I never did much Skyrim modding, so my perspective of what the new .nif format in 4 has to offer comes from New Vegas modding. There are some cool improvements, other things that are sort of a drawback, and particularly which make creating new content for the game challenging. It was bad enough in Skyrim with not even having proper tools for exporting into bhkCompressedMeshShape.

• BSLightingShaderProperty can now reference a "FloatController which means being able to transform, rotate and scale texture sets instead of just single textures, heretofore only possible through BSEffectShader.*
• Fire effects and lights can be added onto .nifs just through using BSX flags and specially-named nodes.
• Since the game uses materials, it isn't even necessary to define texture sets.
• Unfortunately, the new NiTriShape format seems to roll the previously separate NiTriShapeData into its own properties, so it's not possible to quickly swap "data into/out of nodes for quick importing. The new format also makes impossible adding/removing vertex color arrays.
• Collision hasn't been decoded and probably won't be in the foreseeable future because 64 bit havok tools aren't publicly available.

The last point is like a nail in the coffin for actually creating new environment pieces. Being able to walk on the surface of things is pretty important.

 

But yeah, pretty much literally everything you see and interact with in the game is a .nif. Creating new tilesets and environment pieces isn't far removed from creating weapons and armor, and it's probably simpler to do. A static object doesn't need a whole bunch of special nodes or BSX flags. The landscape hasn't significantly changed probably from oblivion-era. You could import the same 16-bit RAW heightmap into the GECK, Creation Kit and I guarantee into the Fo4CK, too. Skyrim land data records can be read in Fallout 4, though the number of textures per corner/cell seems to have been reduced.

 

In short, it will be possible to create new lands for Fallout 4, but it will require more work than in Skyrim, not to mention in New Vegas, which is turning out to be the last Bethesda game anyone had proper 3rd party modding tools for :)

 

*BSLightingShaderProperty and BSEffectShader were known as BSShaderPPLightingProperty and NiTexturingProperty, respectively in the NV-era gamebryo engine.