What Makes Fallout 4 Tick?

[FaultyFalcon]

Looking for a basic understanding of what the mechanics of Fallout 4 are and how those mechanics are manipulated thru the Creation Kit. I am already familiar with object oriented programming have been doing it since it became available for visual basic. I have already looked at all of the articles on the creation kit wiki and watched a few tutorials.

 

In other words if you were the game architect and you were presenting this to programmers, they would want to know how all the objects would interact with each other.

[Reneer]

Essentially the ESM / ESP format is a big database. Each ESM / ESP files consists of records, and each record contains fields. Each record is identified within the ESM / ESP file as a 8-unit hexadecimal number (example: 00000014 is often the record / FormID for the player). The first 2 digits of the record / FormID are the load order placement, while the other 6 digits are the actual record ID.

 

Whenever the game wants to look up something, it needs the total record ID to first figure out which load order / file to look at and then the actual record to find within that file. When you modify a record in the CK it gets saved as 01XXXXXX and when that ESP file is loaded the record that you modified now points to YYXXXXXX (YY being load order) instead of 00XXXXXX. This is why the last ESP file loaded will overwrite previous edits made in prior-loading ESP files.

Edited July 27, 2016 by Reneer

[sLoPpYdOtBiGhOlE]

At this point expect lack of informative documentation on the relation of functions and forms that manipulate the game world and it's objects.

 

Even though the Wiki is better then nothing at all, it lacks a lot of the smaller between the lines details about what's what.

Often leaving you filling in the blanks and creating workarounds when things don't go as expected.

Logic gets you only so far and that logic often needs to be skewed beyond a normal persons logic to get things done in the game world.

 

Depending on your patience and mentality you'll more then likely feel yourself rage at times due to the shear frustration of lack of information or the quirkiness of a non mentioned issue in certain situations.

 

 

This in no different in any way to the other CK / Geck titles from Beth.

"Let the fan base work out the finer details for themselves"

Edited July 27, 2016 by sLoPpYdOtBiGhOlE

[FaultyFalcon]

Thanks for the information, any and all information will be helpful. My problem is that Besthdas process has not yet clicked, and I am not talking about papyrus it is the CK. For example: as a player when i walk up to a container there is a popup that has the options of take or transfer. In the CK what triggers that event to happen. I can't seem to find it, maybe I did but did not know what i was looking at. Something as simple as that should not be that hard to find one would think. It just seems that CK is not all that neat and tidy.

 

Just wandering do you guys use the CK or FO4edit?

Edited July 27, 2016 by FaultyFalcon

[Reneer]

The example you gave is basically hard coded / controlled by Scaleform within the game engine itself. There is no trigger event that you can look at in the CK for that specific thing because the CK does not integrate with the game UI in that way.

[FaultyFalcon]

What about capturing the event using papyrus?

[Reneer]

The Activate Menu (the thing that pops up when you go near an object that can be interacted with) doesn't have a trigger event. You can change whether it displays or not (by making an activator object), but you can't easily know when the Activate Menu appears. You can fake it by checking to see if the player is within activation distance and if they are looking at the object in question, but there is no way I know of to determine if the activate menu has popped up.

Edited July 27, 2016 by Reneer

[FaultyFalcon]

So one way to do this would be to setup a quest use the registerfordistancelessthanevent function, and then use the ondistancelessthan event to do whatever it is i would need to do.

 

I think it is starting to click for me.

[Reneer]

So one way to do this would be to setup a quest use the registerfordistancelessthanevent function, and then use the ondistancelessthan event to do whatever it is i would need to do.

 

I think it is starting to click for me.

That would be one way to do it, yes. :)