Adding some society to the settled wasteland.

[justintheunsunggod]

Let me start out by saying that I've never done a mod, never retextured an item and beyond installing them, have zero mod expertise... therefore, I have no idea how difficult this would be.

However, I have noticed something about the Fallout world that I find to be odd... With some notable exceptions (a few of the Vaults and Tenpenny tower in particular) the world of Fallout is a sh**hole...

"No kidding, it's post apocalyptic." Right? Wrong... I'd go as far as to say it's post post-apocalypse and while downtown DC would still be ruins, twisted metal, piles of bricks and so forth, why would a long-term and high-resident settlement like Rivet City still have pockets and corners of filth?

 

I know that the wasteland needs to look and feel like a world that is in ruin and being constructed again from the broken pieces. But frankly, you'd think that these settlements would be liiiittle more cleaned up. To put things in perspective for you, think specifically of certain imagery, the toilets in any and all given settlements, the relative lack of decoration in any large city, the piles of trash in the Preservation Society's Museum, the actual living section and the isolation chamber of The Family. Also, compare lived-in houses to those out in Minefield...

 

It would be amazing to see a greater variance to the wild wasteland vs. the settled wasteland. More decoration in houses, cleaner furniture, not broken and clean toilets, less trash, all-in-all, slightly varying levels of cleanliness to different regions of the world because even with different mods in place to increase lights in civilized areas and to decrease the monochromatic color scheme, the wasteland is still overly interchangeable... Much like real life where you can just tell how well-to-do areas of a city are, one should walk into Megaton or Rivet City and be able to tell that it's been settled into for years and know that the caps are flowing.

 

Specific ideas to further explain my vision:

 

*Fix and clean the toilets in settled areas... a huge step.

*Makeshift though obviously permanent sidewalks in Megaton, no need to tromp through the mud.

*Are NPC's always there? Is the area ever under attack? Does the local lore indicate any longevity? Then why is there rubble?

*The area just outside of Megaton makes no sense, it's not defensible, it's not maintained and the trade caravans use it constantly... A better wall to funnel in any potential threat directly to the front door and a maintained dirt road would be much more logical.

*Slightly mismatched would make sense, but cabinets with broken doors in any given settlement doesn't.

*A huge help to making an area feel alive would be the addition of windows that light up at night and more lights in general. Porch-lights, makeshift streetlights, even communal firepits that get lit at night... humans are desperate for sources of light.

*Areas with little kids need some kids drawings.

*Less grime and less dirt in settlements, this in particular would vary, Tenpenny Tower would be spotless and have new paint, Rivet city might have some areas of rusty bolts but is clean and has some posters and lights around to try and spruce up the place... etc etc.

*(A lot of customization here as well but...) Some objects that indicate hobbies and living in general would be amazing... Makeshift or restored washboards, painting easels, musical instruments, woodcarvings... etc. Stuff to show that the NPC's are alive rather than give an artificial sense of life to the area.

 

 

See what I'm sayin'? Any other ideas, comments, questions, "keep dreaming kid"?

[Werne]

That type of thing would require a lot of work, and I'm not just talking about retexturing. Some things that are used in Megaton, Rivet City, Tenpenny Tower etc. are used in many other places. Let's look at a simple cabinet, it's been used in more than 500 places. Or a metal table, more than 800 places. A small change can have a huge effect.

 

Also, there are some mods that clean up Rivet City (don't know about other cities) by removing the trash from the floors, putting clean instead of dirty old sinks etc.

Edited September 18, 2011 by Werne

[justintheunsunggod]

That type of thing would require a lot of work, and I'm not just talking about retexturing. Some things that are used in Megaton, Rivet City, Tenpenny Tower etc. are used in many other places. Let's look at a simple cabinet, it's been used in more than 500 places. Or a metal table, more than 800 places. A small change can have a huge effect.

 

Also, there are some mods that clean up Rivet City (don't know about other cities) by removing the trash from the floors, putting clean instead of dirty old sinks etc.

 

Trust me, I had thought about that very thing and though some of my suggestions are much more work-intensive than others, I still like the idea of a little refurbishment. I also figured there would be some sort of mod out there that did at least a portion of what I imagine, I've yet to come across one that takes into account all settled regions.

For simplicity's sake, let's ignore some of the larger fixes that would require new meshes and heavy amounts of custom content and focus in on things that ARE a matter of copying most preexisting item info and doing a little cleaning up of the texture. Things like said simple cabinet. Rather that use 1 cabinet in 500 places, I suggest 1 cabinet in 350 places just as it is and another similar cabinet with ghetto, wasteland appropriate fixing of cabinet doors in the settled use of 150 cabinets... or do I oversimplify?

 

Even as just a starting place, could specific location items be replaced with a cleaned-up and maintained though mostly copied version of the regular item?

I also must ask, how much could you copy-paste from the usual cabinet, chair, glass, etc if all you wanted to do was make an alternative and cleaner-looking item?

[Werne]

Retexturing is not a big problem, most things like cabines and tables have clean and dirty textures already created by Bethesda but implemented in small numbers in places like Tranquility Lane.

And yes, objects can be replaced without disturbing objects of the same kind in other parts of the wasteland but only if they are not linked to any quests.

In geck I can make an Identical twin of an item or an object, replace the texture and then get an identical item/object with clean texture.

 

Well, you gave me an idea, I'll take a look and see what I can do about cleaning the major cities.

Edited September 19, 2011 by Werne

[HSovieticus]

I do not think that the people of the wasteland would be concerned so much with cleanliness. They are rebuilding society, not maintaining it.

[justintheunsunggod]

I do not think that the people of the wasteland would be concerned so much with cleanliness. They are rebuilding society, not maintaining it.

 

Excellent, the voice of dissent... I've been waiting ;)

I wholeheartedly disagree, looking at the Fallout world, there's... no decoration or cleanliness in most homes. Society has always had one, the other or both in common (cleanliness generally being the variable admittedly). In this particular instance, both would almost certainly be the case. If you're building a society to be better than the wastes, then --in essence-- juxtapose the two ideas. The wasteland is colorless, piled in rubble, has latent pockets of radiation and irradiated water sources, etc. So, the opposite and almost certainly the goal, would be?

And besides, to top it all off, if nothing else, my idea is to give the Fallout world as a whole more variance. Simple as that. After playing for a few hours, everywhere looks like everywhere else --even after getting rid of that obnoxious green tint to everything. So, I figure making the shining beacons of society a little shinier couldn't hurt. To top off my argument, the idea is already partially in place anyway! Bethesda designed certain portions of civilized life to be cleaner and brighter than others to show a difference in quality of living. They just only really did it to Tenpenny Tower. The people of Fallout act like any modern day citizen with a bit of 50's-60's culture thrown in for good measure... We value cleanliness, the peak of the quality of living (Tenpenny) is clean and bright and decorative, then no one else seemed to get that memo.

 

 

 

 

Yeah I got the memo right here. I just forgot this one time but since they don't ship out til Friday it's not really a problem...

 

*Edit* And I love that... Everyone up and down will insist that the goal is to rebuild society. 200 years after the fact? Really? Then you'd better search out the pre-war ghouls, because these folks are all at least 2 generations away from anyone who even saw society pre-war. Nah, if one were to imagine forward from there, society would never build the same way again. Think of all the factories that they no longer have and are forced to reinvent.

If you can't tell, I have a strangely obsessive hobby when it comes to post-apocalyptic societies...

Edited September 20, 2011 by justintheunsunggod

[justintheunsunggod]

Retexturing is not a big problem, most things like cabines and tables have clean and dirty textures already created by Bethesda but implemented in small numbers in places like Tranquility Lane.

And yes, objects can be replaced without disturbing objects of the same kind in other parts of the wasteland but only if they are not linked to any quests.

In geck I can make an Identical twin of an item or an object, replace the texture and then get an identical item/object with clean texture.

 

Well, you gave me an idea, I'll take a look and see what I can do about cleaning the major cities.

...

Really? Haha, I honestly didn't expect that. Thanks a ton :D

 

I'm chronically coming up with ideas that are "just not feasible" so I've kinda gotten used to hearing, "Yeah, that'd be cool, but it's not gonna happen, seeya." Well cool... In the mean time, I'm going to continue my crash-course lessons in using geck!

[HSovieticus]

Well, you have a point. I'm not looking for a big debate at this moment (maybe another time), but I do have a few things to say. In a world where society is in pieces, there would almost definitely be a lot of very different attitudes towards "decoration and cleanliness," and so there would probably be places that are cleaner than others. But the capital wasteland is not really the most civilized place in the Fallout universe. They live in constant struggle against raiders, mutants, and other creatures. Even hunger and thirst is a daily struggle for a lot of them. So, although some of the settlements could be a little tidier, and perhaps more festive, I think the whole point is to show how our way of life depends on the forces of production. You can also see a similar phenomena by comparing the poorest neighbourhoods to those of the rich. It is not quite as pronounced as it used to be, at least not in the west, but it is telling of something deeper. By human nature, cleanliness is not the highest priority, with a few obvious exceptions (like the lab or the hospital, where special concerns take precedence). Decoration, as you call it, is another thing. It probably ranks higher than cleanliness, but not quite as high as some of our base concerns. That said, I would agree that most societies, or, almost all societies that have actually existes, make use of certain types of decoration in order to lift spirits, even when the community struggles with those more basic concerns (in fact, probably because of it). Yet, any community that had to deal with the things that most Fallout 3 communities do, would not waste any valued resources towards that end. So I would say that it would be appropriate to decorate those communities a bit, but only in the most logical, practical way. I also think that a community like Rivet City is actually more concerned with raising the living standards of the rest of the wasteland to their own level before raising their own standards, which is a good thing.

[justintheunsunggod]

Well, you have a point. I'm not looking for a big debate at this moment (maybe another time), but I do have a few things to say. In a world where society is in pieces, there would almost definitely be a lot of very different attitudes towards "decoration and cleanliness," and so there would probably be places that are cleaner than others. But the capital wasteland is not really the most civilized place in the Fallout universe. They live in constant struggle against raiders, mutants, and other creatures. Even hunger and thirst is a daily struggle for a lot of them. So, although some of the settlements could be a little tidier, and perhaps more festive, I think the whole point is to show how our way of life depends on the forces of production. You can also see a similar phenomena by comparing the poorest neighbourhoods to those of the rich. It is not quite as pronounced as it used to be, at least not in the west, but it is telling of something deeper. By human nature, cleanliness is not the highest priority, with a few obvious exceptions (like the lab or the hospital, where special concerns take precedence). Decoration, as you call it, is another thing. It probably ranks higher than cleanliness, but not quite as high as some of our base concerns. That said, I would agree that most societies, or, almost all societies that have actually existes, make use of certain types of decoration in order to lift spirits, even when the community struggles with those more basic concerns (in fact, probably because of it). Yet, any community that had to deal with the things that most Fallout 3 communities do, would not waste any valued resources towards that end. So I would say that it would be appropriate to decorate those communities a bit, but only in the most logical, practical way. I also think that a community like Rivet City is actually more concerned with raising the living standards of the rest of the wasteland to their own level before raising their own standards, which is a good thing.

Haha, good points for sure... and definitely some parallels in our arguments actually. And yeah, I agree, how safe a place and how available food and water is definitely affects exactly HOW clean or decorative a place would be. But... for simplicity's sake, (especially because I'm a useless newb when it comes to actually creating a mod) I think a general sprucing up wouldn't hurt haha. I'm pretty sure we actually agree a lot more than we each think though... because trust me, I would never even remotely contest that the lives these poor buggers live would be day-to-day needs for sure. (And I really think I may be crazy...) As I typed that, my brain went, "What about the lady in Rivet City who specifically says her day to day job is cleaning? She's obviously not worried about starving, she eats at the restaurant every day!"

 

*sigh* Tried to be civil, sorry, my craziness just won't put down the debate apparently haha.

[CoreXion]

This is actually similar to an idea that I have and have been working on. Right now I'm having an issue with a program not saving new textures, but I'm hoping to have that resolved in short order.

 

I have some ideas on how to implement the ideas you put forth, but as Werne stated, it will take some time.