Random Spawns

[looloolooigotsomeapples]

With my experience, vanilla New Vegas loses it's unexpectedness while travelling the world after the 2nd playthrough. This is because just about every encounter is static. You are always going to encounter 2 Powder Gangers fighting bloatflies by Jean Sky Diving, and 2 a group of raiders waiting to ambush you near Helios One. To remedy this feeling of staticness, I have used Increased Wasteland Spawns. My problem with it is that what I want is to be able to travel the world and not know what to expect, not to increase the frequency of encountering things. So would anybody be up to making spawns occur much more dynamically? Of course, it would have to be within reason. You shouldn't expect to encounter much Fiends outside West Vegas, or Legionaries outside the Southwestern portion of the map. There are 2 ways I would imagine this working:

 

1. Spawns points are not removed or moved, but conditions behind them have a chance to change after it is time for respawning. So those 2 Powder Gangers are always there when starting the game, but after they are eliminated or you leave the cell, a different group of creatures or NPCs is spawned based on what makes sense for the area.

 

2. (This would be preferred, but I imagine harder to do) More spawn points are added, but things don't always spawn there. So while wandering, those 2 powder gangers might not spawn at all. Instead, perhaps a group of Goodsprings Settlers or a different group of Powder Gangers spawns on the other side of the road.

 

My GECK knowledge is limited to making tweaks and adding new items or NPCs, so I couldn't be that much of help, but I think this mod would become very successful if made.

Edited June 30, 2011 by looloolooigotsomeapples

[Mavkiel]

1) Probably the most dangerous way to go about it. Scripts either constantly running in the background, or your using the invisible quest method, not sure how well fnv goes for that. You'd still have to go through all the scripting to enable/disable creatures. Probably a couple other ways to get around the constantly checking scripts, but they'd have drawbacks.

 

2) Actually would probably be easier then 1. In theory all you would have to do is mimic the fallout 3 method. (Which had a random encounter system based on triggers). It'd still be a pain, but probably a more tedious sort of pain. Some scripting involved, but once you get the template down it'd be cut and paste for the script. You'd still have to hand place all the new creatures though. And alter the scripting template for each creatures name.

 

3) Most complicated system, again you would need scripting for each and every point. To enable/disable certain spawns at the very least, and to draw the random number to decide it. A little more effort and the second option could have been made.

 

*shrugs* Just commenting on how I'd go about it if I were making it.

 

edit: One improvement over the fo3 system I'd make is not having the trigger area immediately apparent. For example, walking to the fallout 3 supermarket and you'd always see something interesting. You could clearly guess that around that path was the trigger. I'd vary it up abit and have some things spawn outside the area your mucking around in.

Edited July 1, 2011 by Mavkiel

[looloolooigotsomeapples]

Interesting. I'm actually surprised the 2nd option would be easier. It makes you wonder why they didn't just keep the FO3 system and then tweak it so you wouldn't get attacked every 5 seconds.

[stevie70]

1) Probably the most dangerous way to go about it. Scripts either constantly running in the background, or your using the invisible quest method, not sure how well fnv goes for that. You'd still have to go through all the scripting to enable/disable creatures. Probably a couple other ways to get around the constantly checking scripts, but they'd have drawbacks.

for an easy effect, you could just use a script that can spawn, say, 20 types of creatures in some distance from the player, and condition them with a combination of GetRandomPercent (like in the vanilla vending machine script for example) plus some other more or less random stuff like weather, presence of tin cans in the cell or whatever you wish. you could even randomize what conditions are used that way, so i'm pretty sure you could quite easily acchieve a rather random impression that way.

wouldn't do anything about the always-the-same-two-powdergangers-thing though

[KenshinX12]

The only problem I see with this, is removing the vanilla set up npcs, is that it would take awhile.

 

Then you'd have to go about a script, that is activated once you get your equipment from Doc Mitchell.

 

 

Note: After I get New Vegas reinstalled (10% left on download, yay steam), I'll try my hands at looking into this.

 

I'm currently busy with a faction, so throwing them in as random spawns, would also be awesome.

Edited July 2, 2011 by KenshinX12

[hadoumastery]

Well... I admit I have the feeling too I wish there were some random spawns of.. heavily to medium armed enemies sometimes I hate that no NPCs or raiders are at all going around the wasteland randomly and none use the 12.7/50MG/or certain shotguns and automatic rifles or such things. Whats more is that non of them have combat armor at all, and in the original fallouts almost all raiders had leather, metal or combat armor at the very least, but instead the ones in NV wear cloth... Just seems to me that raiders are made too easy even when you do find some. One other thing I notice is that the variety of creatures lacks in vanilla (I remedied this with a mod, but it still bugs me they only show in certain areas) I tried using zombie apocalypse as a solution but after awhile it just gets annoying, it's just too easy to kill the zombies and it gets boring killing the same enemy over and over and over again.

 

 

-I did have a thought on possibly using the way Legion/Rangers spawn on you sometimes to kill you to make a method of sometimes coming across people, but I feel the bigger problem is that... every bit of land in NV is filled... meaning that there is really no place in the Mojave desert that is actually spacious like a real desert... save the ant pits. This to me also is a problem, if you have more land distancing between two areas you could make more spawns and even possibly make raider camps and caves like there were in the original fallouts and somewhat like fallout 3. But such a thing is difficult to do.. I suppose the easiest way to make something like this happen is to disable the borders in the game and make the Mojave outpost gate unlocked and take that giant mass of unused worldspace beyond it and make it full of stuff like raider camps and such, just a thought... Or the better option as stated before -putting more space between each location in the original worldspace of the game, but that would take some real worldspace editing skill, the kind that I don't have.

Edited July 2, 2011 by hadoumastery

[looloolooigotsomeapples]

The only problem I see with this, is removing the vanilla set up npcs, is that it would take awhile.

 

Then you'd have to go about a script, that is activated once you get your equipment from Doc Mitchell.

 

 

Note: After I get New Vegas reinstalled (10% left on download, yay steam), I'll try my hands at looking into this.

 

I'm currently busy with a faction, so throwing them in as random spawns, would also be awesome.

 

Good to know somebody is at least going to try. Kudos.

 

 

Well... I admit I have the feeling too I wish there were some random spawns of.. heavily to medium armed enemies sometimes I hate that no NPCs or raiders are at all going around the wasteland randomly and none use the 12.7/50MG/or certain shotguns and automatic rifles or such things. Whats more is that non of them have combat armor at all, and in the original fallouts almost all raiders had leather, metal or combat armor at the very least, but instead the ones in NV wear cloth... Just seems to me that raiders are made too easy even when you do find some. One other thing I notice is that the variety of creatures lacks in vanilla (I remedied this with a mod, but it still bugs me they only show in certain areas) I tried using zombie apocalypse as a solution but after awhile it just gets annoying, it's just too easy to kill the zombies and it gets boring killing the same enemy over and over and over again.

 

 

-I did have a thought on possibly using the way Legion/Rangers spawn on you sometimes to kill you to make a method of sometimes coming across people, but I feel the bigger problem is that... every bit of land in NV is filled... meaning that there is really no place in the Mojave desert that is actually spacious like a real desert... save the ant pits. This to me also is a problem, if you have more land distancing between two areas you could make more spawns and even possibly make raider camps and caves like there were in the original fallouts and somewhat like fallout 3. But such a thing is difficult to do.. I suppose the easiest way to make something like this happen is to disable the borders in the game and make the Mojave outpost gate unlocked and take that giant mass of unused worldspace beyond it and make it full of stuff like raider camps and such, just a thought... Or the better option as stated before -putting more space between each location in the original worldspace of the game, but that would take some real worldspace editing skill, the kind that I don't have.

 

I am pretty sure that spacing everything out more is impossible. Heightmap editing in the GECK (hell, worldspaces in general) is a big pain as it is. If it were possible, I'd love it though. More space to heighten realism is wonderful. Also, adding to the unused space has been done by someone before, but honestly, I thought it was rather random and didn't make much sense. Also, I don't think LOD for those areas are generated properly so things didn't load very well. Basically, doing it is expecting low quality.

[hadoumastery]

I am pretty sure that spacing everything out more is impossible. Heightmap editing in the GECK (hell, worldspaces in general) is a big pain as it is. If it were possible, I'd love it though. More space to heighten realism is wonderful. Also, adding to the unused space has been done by someone before, but honestly, I thought it was rather random and didn't make much sense. Also, I don't think LOD for those areas are generated properly so things didn't load very well. Basically, doing it is expecting low quality.

 

Well I have tested the mods that already use the area and they were very small, none went too far past the Mojave outpost. As for LOD, it works just fine, everything works very good, after all, it's still the same FNV world space, it's just space that wasn't used. But the bigger problem for me was how enemies rarely used anything that was in the game, I mean... combat armor and assault rifles seem common enough even for raiders to use and yet they don't seem to have anything but basic clothes.

And shotguns to me were even worse, shotguns are one of the most common things to have, and yet they don't have any except a crappy single or caravan shotgun.

 

NPCs need to be better equipped I think. And need to be a bit more randomized.

Edited July 3, 2011 by hadoumastery