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[WIPz] Announcing Echelon: A California Worldspace Mod

IglooGreenHouse

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IglooGreenHouse

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http://i.imgur.com/1zdiOUv.jpg

 

 

I’m looking at something I don’t understand. Like how you can stare farther and farther down, at a tree, a branch, a leaf, the veins out of its stem, you look smaller and smaller but there’s always more to see. That’s how this place is. That’s what it feels like. A post office, letters stamped nine cents on the ground, addresses to places I’ve never even thought of but I’d heard the names. Never thought they were real.

-Peter

 

http://i.imgur.com/JS2vyHV.jpg

What is Echelon?

 

Echelon is a feeling, like loss, of leaving the known human world behind and replacing another. It’s a breach of the invisible barrier between where people can live, and where they’d once lived. It’s been a half-century since the nuclear war. Fifty-years since the combined forces of the Soviet Union and United States turned the world into a sum of ruined parts, and those places long abandoned; the cities and industrial centers hit by the bombs remain places of death for all those who don’t belong. On the West Coast the descendants of survivors of the nuclear exchange live in feudal city-states and fight wars for food and clean water. In California a civil war between the northern and southern half of the state claimed thousands of lives. This is the world of Echelon, brutal, beaten, betrayed by humankind.

 

http://i.imgur.com/wgQlpbX.jpg

 

What is Echelon: California Wilderness?

 

This mod is an interpretation of a novel I finished writing about a year ago. It is currently unpublished. I have published two novels in the past, both post-apocalyptic. This mod is therefore not lore friendly in the slightest. You won’t see NCR Rangers in Shady Sands,or the Enclave, or any of that, that’s not what this mod’s about. This is an alternate history of a Cold War apocalypse. Right now the mod consists of a handful of locations placed within a large geographic world space, comparable in size to Fallout 4’s Commonwealth, if not slightly larger. The heightmap is generated using topographical data collected from the ASTER ll satellite program, made available on the USGS website.

 

How do I play Echelon?

 

There isn’t much gameplay at this point, though there are a few spawned enemies, notes, locked loot containers, etc. If you want to see the world travel to Drumlin Diner and find the new door, which will teleport you to Bodega Bay, or you can use the console command:

 

cow echelonoverworld -50 -3

 

(make sure to turn on God Mode, it’ll spawn you in the sky.)

WARNING: World is not fully navmeshed, dismiss all companions before traveling or you may have issues.

 

From there go west or east to look at a few built up locations. Kill some raiders, find

some hidden notes, safe keys, and unique items. Nothing is complete, everything

is in some way, shape, or form a mess, and there are zero quests. All of that

will change. To install the mod just extract it as you would any Bethesda mod to the data

folder.

 

This mod requires Far Harbor.

 

KNOWN ISSUES/BUGS:

 

-Object LOD is limited, with black textures on at least two houses and missing Far Harbor LOD meshes and textures...I'm working on it.

 

-Companion Navmeshing issues, general navmesh problems.

 

-Fast travel is buggy, and often times leads to eternal loading screens.

 

If you find any other major issues please let me know.

 

http://i.imgur.com/qcuTMwm.jpg

 

What do you want Echelon: California Wilderness to be? Where’s the mod headed?

 

That’s a complicated question. My hope is to work on this mod in the same way I work on a writing project: I set myself goals based on what I’m interested in accomplishing at a particular time and go from there, with the distant completion point only being as important as it pertains to my daily work. I can’t promise that this mod will ever be a sprawling 30 hour questline like Falskaar was for Skyrim, though I do see myself working on it for a long time to come.

There are a few differences I can already see between making this mod and writing a novel:

 

-Modding requires vast libraries of technical knowledge that I don’t yet have, my success on this project is based almost entirely on my ability to learn what I currently don't know.

 

-The world, the story, the characters are already solidly packed in my mind. I hope to talk more about this in future updates. Echelon (the novel) was a very large project for me, and translating it into this three dimensional environment is sure to be a

surreal experience. It's going to be less about building a world, and more about interpreting an already established one.

 

-Unlike writing a book, I hope to collaborate with others on this project, and part of that collaboration means taking my ideas to places I didn’t expect, and letting others have influence over the shape and personality of my world. (And

likewise be influenced by other people’s ideas.)

 

What I want is this: to make a mod both faithful to my book and unique to itself, and to feel satisfied that it offers a full, complete experience as a video game.

 

http://i.imgur.com/HGVwM7U.jpg

 

May I help in some way with your mod?

 

Glad you asked! Yes. I’m not looking to organize a huge team at this time, in the style of the Cascadia Seattle team of other equivalent groups, because I’ve been inside enough of those groups to know that the bigger the team is, the more likely they are to collapse in on themselves. However, if there are people who want to contribute I’d be happy to work with individuals on specific goals. I’m open to most types of involvement and time frames for involvement. Want to design your hometown in game and then move on? Great! Thought of a quest you’d like to put into a project somewhere? Good too. Want to stick around and work on this project for the long term? All acceptable. Please send me an email at [email protected], message me on reddit under my user name: innappropriatehaiku, or message me on the Nexus forums under the name igloogreenhouse. (Don't ask, a twelve year old with a dumb gamertag pays the price eleven years later.) Be sure to include the type of work you’re interested in doing in the header of your message, like this:

Level Designer, looking to make caves and houses

(Or)

Environment artist, looking to make native plant textures

 

Then please give a short bio of yourself, followed by a description of your past projects and experience, with links to your work as necessary. If you don’t have any experience please give me a full paragraph describing what sort of work you’d be interested in doing and why.

 

Areas where I’m currently most interested in finding people to join the Echelon team (If you have other ideas please message me):

Flora, Fauna Artists – For a distinct California feel. Before long I’d love to have some proper redwood trees in game.

 

Level Designers – City, World, Environment, and Interiors especially.

 

Quest Designers – For both Novel themed quests and individual side quests not novel related, but still within the Novel’s lore (world).

 

Concept Artists – A little bit of everything. Looking for a distinct post-nuclear feel separate from traditional Fallout.

(Though I don’t want to talk too much about this right now, if Fallout 4 is high science fiction Echelon is low science fiction with a sprinkle of magic-realism.)

 

I would also like, if possible, to get on board a few veteran modders: not for the purposes of doing work for my mod mind you but for technical support; individuals who would be willing to volunteer their names so I might ask them questions I’d have along the way. Sometimes getting the answers you seek on the internet is daunting, and I’d appreciate the hell out of a few reliable people I could turn to for some Creation Kit and general modding questions. If you’d like to be one of those people let me know.

 

Nexus link: http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/15332/?

 

Bethesda link: http://mods.bethesda.net/#en/workshop/fallout4/mod-detail/1972378

 

Short Gameplay Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xqC-TPOFOs

 

Thank you very much for taking a look at my WIP mod,

 

Christopher Pearson

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IglooGreenHouse

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Some info about the map I'm using for this mod:

 

http://i.imgur.com/fscZOjJ.jpg

 

The above image is a rough scan of my heightmap taken inside Worldmachine. Though it might be hard to make out, this is a topographical representation of Northern California. It goes northward to the California/Oregon border, eastward to the Sierras, and southward to the Central Coast, stopping around San Louis Obispo. If you look hard you might be able to make out details of the San Francisco Peninsula, Monterey Bay, and of course the Central Valley; an important lore-related location.

-Why does the terrain look slightlyoff? Why isn’t it exactly accurate to real world terrain?

Because,very simply, that’s boring. In order to give the terrain a necessary facelift I altered it in several ways, and as a result parts of the coastline and important landmarks are significantly washed out. (You can barely point to San Francisco for instance; it’s almost as low as the ocean.) This has a minimal affect in game, most of the close terrain will be modified anyway.

-Is the Central Valley under water in game?

Thankfully no, but…it almost is.

-Will you further alter the terrain?

Only from within the Creation Kit. As far as I’m concerned, other than minor alterations, LOD generation stuff, etc this is the heightmap I’ll be using. It is the white blank canvass from which the world will be brought to life.

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