Trees of the Capitol Wasteland

[Jeoshua]

So somewhere along the line, I got to thinking about the reality people would face in the world of the Capitol Wasteland. The first thing that stuck out in my mind about the game being wrong in some way is the trees. Radiation being in the area simply isn't a good enough reason for the DC area to be a desert. Hiroshima has a green garden at Ground Zero, where the bombs fell. In our own world, Chernobyl is a green paradise. As it turns out, radiation is not as bad for trees as people are. Without man's influence, nature takes back over, no matter what kind of legacy man has left... to a point.

 

Looking around for some mod to take care of this, I found only one kind of tree mod out there, and it takes it in entirely the other direction. They make the game look like Oblivion. Green, peaceful, beautiful, serene. This wouldn't do either. So I've taken it upon myself to make a new mod which creates a realistic picture of what the world would look like after the bombs.

 

In the initial fireblast, all of the trees would be dead. Their husks would be embedded with radioactive particles and would not decay possibly for millenia. But the seeds would survive. According to USDA studies, the most common tree in the DC area is the Beech. Their hearty nuts would not burn up in the fires. Many of the seeds might have been sterilized by the radiation, but of course not all of them. In addition, not all the trees would be dead. Many of them would die but some would live, however scarred.

 

The ground would mostly have been baked into glass, but certain areas of fertile non-irradiated soil would have made it through, as Oasis proves.

 

Putting this together with a few hacked up speedtree models and exports, I give you this: Trees of the Capitol Wasteland

 

http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/1554/sandstorm.th.png

http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/3982/rarewastelandforest.th.png

http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/2914/closeupe.th.png

http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/384/screenshot16l.th.png

http://img810.imageshack.us/img810/3910/paradiselostl.th.png

 

Now, I want to remain as close to lore as possible, so as you can see this mod by no means makes all of the Wasteland into a green paradise. Quite the opposite. With only a few exceptions, the trees are not healthy. The smaller trees are Beech, fresh 100 year growth from the time after the smoke cleared on the now Wasteland. The taller, more ragged trees, on the other hand, are pre-war relics. Their irradiated branches are mostly dead, but still they cling to life.

 

You can also see that many of the trees are NOT alive. I do not plan on replacing them. Sometimes, dead is simply dead, and they will remain as a reminder of man's destructive nature.

 

What would you like to see in this mod? I want to remain as close to realistic as possible, yet also as close to lore as I can on as many points as possible. One thing I'm thinking of adding is squirrels. There is squirrel soup in the game, but no tree-rats? Unacceptable. Things like this are what I want to address in this mod.

 

What do you think?

[ClimbinSkwerl]

I like the Idea of adding some Squirrels but what about some birds? or maybe a tree Cutting npc? I can't figure out the animations or how to make him/her stay where I put it. I am trying to expand Oasis into the wastes and the NPC walks away and dissappears.

[Jeoshua]

As I understand it, the problem with a woodcutter, beyond animating them to cut it and whatever else you might need to do, is the LOD for the trees. If the tree is a speedtree model, as these are, the tree cannot be Disabled. If it is, the tree disappears but the LOD for it still appears from a distance.

 

Birds are more readilly possible to add than squirells, since there have been made models of them that aren't directly from Oblivion. Squirells exist in oblivion, but sadly if I were to port the models and textures and skeletons and whatnot from that game, I would not be able to release the file publicly on the nexus. I want people to be able to download the mod and play it without having to worry about intellectual property.

 

So if anyone knows of good, publicly available, Oblivion/Fallout/Vegas creatures that are not based on Bethesda's intellectual property (inspired is okay, ripped is not), I'd really appreciate it.

[BlackRampage]

Sounds and looks quite interesting imho.

 

I also agree with you that the "wasteland" should indeed have had a little more in the way of plant life. Of course there are quite a few mods which do just that but in my opinion they always tend to "overdo" it by making it a lush Oasis-like or even paradise-like environment. It's not that they aren't nice, in fact, many are absolutely stunning, but they throw lore-friendliness out of the window.

 

From what I've read and seen in your first post, it seems to me that your mod would be just right. (which is a rarity imho)

Personally I've always found the way plant life was re-textured in NMC's texture pack to be very nice btw. I'd say that if one would combine these, it would give a fairly accurate and lore-friendly view of what a "wasteland" should look like 200 years after a nuclear war.

 

As for animal life inhabiting the trees: I'd focus on squirrels. After all, where does squirrel stew come from otherwise? The same is true for iguana's btw, but that's already been resolved by the author of Marts Mutant Mod. :thumbsup:

Edited June 19, 2011 by BlackRampage

[Jeoshua]

You might notice one of the pictures I posted on my imageshack account has not one buy 2 iguanas roaming around, lol. They had to be there, otherwise we're all eating people-on-a-stick. Iguana Bits may have been people at one point, but the roasted-in-the-skin Iguana on a Stick was deffinitely as advertised, yes? Same with the squirrels.

 

The problem I'm running into with these little tree rats is just that I can't find an animated 3d model of a squirrel anywhere except Oblivion. As I stated, I want people to be able to freely download this mod without having to worry about copyright infringement. I'd be banned from the Nexus if I uploaded Oblivion squirrels in the mod. Not that I'd really miss the Nexus, but that means the mod would be declared contraband, too... and you'd have to go to "other sites" to get it.