Wasteland Salvation - A Death Alternative

[Athanasa]

Input Requested!

Please post your ideas, potential post-death scenarios.

Stuff you'd like to see in the mod, stuff you'd like to have the option to disable.

Dying Sucks
I think we can all agree that dying sucks. Bang! Your camera and control are yanked away as your lovingly created character turns into noodles and slow-mo flops to the ground. Would you like to load an earlier save? You do have a save less than two hours old, right?

It’s immersion breaking through and through. The sudden camera change of death (why can’t we die in first person, collapsing into a heap as the screen goes dark?) followed by the obligatory reload screen yanks you out of whatever world you were in, especially if your previous save isn’t recent. You can’t just slip back into the mindset you had before. It’s suddenly about, “What did I do before I died? Will X item spawn this time? Did I remember to check this place or not?” What may have been atmospheric exploration and enjoyment becomes a rush to get back to where you were before.

If only there was some alternative to that cold, impersonal interruption of play. Something that adds to your gaming experience, something that both encourages and punishes risks.


Faction Based Rescues
Wasteland Salvation intends to travel in the footsteps of the popular “Death Alternative” mod for Skyrim by BralorMarr, expanding upon its concept and growing.

The basic mechanics of the mod will remain the same – you ‘die’, and some sort of event happens that moves you away from where you die with some sort of penalty. The Inns from DA are replaced with Settlements and bandits are replaced by raiders. Such events would include being robbed by raiders, being rescued by companions, teleported to the safety of the Institute, just plain dying anyway, and many more scenarios. Penalties could range from loss of equipment, items or caps to crippling of limbs and other negative effects (survival mode).

The chances of different events would be various factors, including companion affinity, proximity to local settlements, settlement population/happiness/defence, quest progression, location of death and – of course – user settings, amongst other things.


A Game Changer
Adding an alternative to simply reloading an old file and replaying the same content again add options and depth to gameplay and mod choices. It fundamentally changes the balance of your game and how you play it.

Mods and settings that, while tempting, were previously too lethal now become an interesting challenge rather than a Reloading Simulator. Settlements and their residents become valuable investments, a safety net for your survival. Happy companions are loyal companions – more likely to risk themselves to save you while at your side, but also to venture out from their assigned settlement to search for you.

Your choices of equipment and supplies for exploration may change (if robbing is enabled). Do you risk raiders taking your best gun and armor when you venture into a new area, or you do you travel light to scout the area in case you get caught? Perhaps you store some of your equipment in a safe place nearby, to return to it if needed.


Planned Features
1. Fully voiced NPS reactions / comments (edited audio)
2. Unique (ish) companion events
3. Influenced by main and side quest progression
4. Integration into Settlement system (see design docs)


Design Documents
[x] Death Events
[x] Penalties for Death

[x] Proposed Mechanics

[x] Potential Issues, Bugs and Incompatibilities
Commenting is enabled for all documents

Albums and Snippets
[Album] First Forays into CK - Creating a Medi-RV


Roles / Help Needed
The more the merrier and the faster this thing gets done.
Script Wizard
Voice Line Splicers – Athanasa
Creation Kit Cell / Interior Designers - Athanasa?

Creation Kit World Stuff
Creation Kit Event Wizards

 

Tools Used and Thanks

FO4 Voice File Reference Tool

Audacity

FO4 Creation Kit

BlahBlahDEEBlahBlah

Edited November 29, 2016 by Athanasa

[Athanasa]

Blergh! Re-scanned through the 2000-odd vanilla Deacon lines to see what could be spliced and rejig how I actually log what I've done... then a quick scan through the 2500-ish Danse lines. Just to match up with what I'd done before. But hopefully, when it's all done, I can dump a .zip file with the spreadsheet database of the voice lines and the lines themselves for modders to use.

 

And thus, good night.

Edited November 10, 2016 by Athanasa

[Athanasa]

For this evening (and tomorrow's) work list is poking Raider dialogues and maybe trying to throw some sort of cell together in CK. No CK poking, "Error Signing In" messages. Sad times.

 

Also, have a Top Tier Professional Artist (TTPA) storyboard! Which I may or may not make a terrible slideshow version of while playing voice files. (Anyone know where I can get in-game SFX and how to apply muffle filters on Audacity?)

 

 

1: Player gets shot, fade to black. Generic heartbeat / "you're dying!" SFX, all sound is muffled.

Teleport to another tiny cell, to avoid having to deal with the NPCs that shot the player. If you don't edit them they won't bug out, right? Fade to black is actually disguising a loading screen.

 

 

2. Wake up to see companion watching over the Survivor with a flare in the background.

Permanent flare object, if that's possible? As it's all in micro-cells to prevent meddling with the outside world, spawning / unspawning can be done really quick and dirty - potentially just hide the flare off-camera and teleport it to the appropriate location, rather than actually despawning/spawning it?

 

http://i.imgur.com/Ai4ZIRF.png

 

3. Start to hear muffled sounds of a Vertibird approaching, fade to black. Fade out of black looking up at Vertibird, dust swirling everywhere, maybe coughing, rotors are loud. Fade to black once more.

Fade to black before it lands. Maybe never actually have it land at all? Use cheeky "You're unconcious!" intermissions to hide anything that might go wrong to just avoid the issue. Is it hard to script or make the AI behave? Just blackscreen it! They'll never know.

 

http://i.imgur.com/VVyDzcv.png

 

4. Fade back in wherever you're ending up.

 

End location being another small cell area - a hospital of some sort, added by the mod. Small size of the area allows it to load quickly during a "black out" patch.

In case of long loading scenes, maybe play some background voice lines of people talking around you? Just to hide if the loading screen goes on longer than expected (maybe on lower end machines)... but really, loading somewhere smaller than Cambridge Police Station shouldn't take long.

 

Edited November 11, 2016 by Athanasa

[Athanasa]

Throwing a 'progress' update out here, because that's a thing you do when making stuff, right?

 

Started poking around with CK making interior cells for the Settlement hospitals - small, enclosed spaces seemed like a good place to start learning to use CK.

 

Let me just say this - my god, it's hard to find what you want on there! "I remember once seeing this one thing in a hospital somewhere..."

 

And it's even harder to actually design something that looks good. Not too 'junky', but also not too orderly. Which is made harder by naturally wanting to make everything nice and square and organised, which just looks unnatural and weird.

[damanding]

Looks like a fabulous idea. I wish you luck with it! :)

[chucksteel]

@Athanasa,

 

If you don't know about it yet, learn to use the "Object Editing Pallet". You can find it under World/Object Editing pallet.

 

It allows you to create lists of clutter objects, building tiles and just about anything you want to frequently use in your cells.

 

Once you have an object in a list you simply hold Ctrl + Alt and click on the render window. The object will then appear and you can position it as you need.

 

Also with clutter objects you can set rotations (for randomness) a hight to be placed (I tend to set that about -20 to -40). With the havok sim running you can then drop in clutter objects that will fall to the ground. They will bounce off of other objects collisions to get a random look with things not being neatly stacked in rows.

[genolune]

This would be great for Survival mode, which I just started playing to get ideas. Otherwise, I'm lame and just use god mode, because I'm too lame to ruin my fun with death.

[Athanasa]

This would be great for Survival mode, which I just started playing to get ideas. Â Otherwise, I'm lame and just use god mode, because I'm too lame to ruin my fun with death.

Survival mode has been very see-saw for me, varying from not challenging at all to instant death on the same settings. Hopefully a mod like this would allow me (and others) to use more of the realism type mods (locational damage, weapon rebalances, even "health flattening") without them being too punishing, or at least not frustrating reload spam.

 

I've got five days holiday (well, three days surrounding the weekend) to poke at this. Mostly experimenting in CK and trying to catch a code monkey or two.

[Athanasa]

@Athanasa,Â

Â

If you don't know about it yet, learn to use the "Object Editing Pallet". You can find it under World/Object Editing pallet.Â

Â

It allows you to create lists of clutter objects, building tiles and just about anything you want to frequently use in your cells.Â

Â

Once you have an object in a list you simply hold Ctrl + Alt and click on the render window. The object will then appear and you can position it as you need.Â

Â

Also with clutter objects you can set rotations (for randomness) a hight to be placed (I tend to set that about -20 to -40). With the havok sim running you can then drop in clutter objects that will fall to the ground. They will bounce off of other objects collisions to get a random look with things not being neatly stacked in rows.Â

Thank you, you're a saint!

 

(Apologies for double post, Phone can't handle the rich text post editor)

[chucksteel]

Here are some more tips.

 

Tip #1

 

Place an object in the render window, I'll use a wall tile for example, Hold Alt and scroll your mouse wheel. The form will then change to other forms in it's family. It wlll eventually change to another family of objects but many wall tiles have 12 or more related tiles for different damage and looks.

 

Tip #2

 

Select the same wall tile and hold Alt + Shift and scroll the mouse wheel. The objects material swap will change and you can scroll through any the object has attached to it.

 

Note: This obviously doesn't work for objects that don't have material swaps.

 

Tip #3

 

when going to edit material swaps go to File/Preferences/render window and turn off the selected object color. The default green (or if you changed to another color) makes it a real pain to see the material changes.

 

Hope this help.