Snap-to-grid settlement objects

[stebbinsd]

Once I have a single floor tile in place, it's a breeze to have every other floor, wall, and roof tile snap to each other. But getting the initial floor tile to be in an optimal position is always a pain in the butt. We're in the apocolypse; making the best and most efficient use of what little real-estate we have to work with is the whole point of the franchise!

 

There is already a game franchise out there that makes this whole "efficient use of space" thing easy as pie. The Sims, as well as the SimCity franchise, are prime examples. They did it first; they did it right!

 

In those games, everything you can build will always be on a square. The items you build never overlap those squares. By placing two "road" tiles next to each other, the game recognizes what you're doing and will make a longer road texture.

 

My houses can all be in a nice row, and can turn 90 degrees, and I never need to worry about whether i'll have enough room to fit any new houses or landmarks because I can just count the squares to tell if I have enough space.

 

In Fallout, the problem is increased tenfold when you realize that a lot of these settlements have really odd angles for their borders. The worst offender here is Tempines Bluff, whose borders are actually the shape of a hexagon, but its east and west corners are actually about 150 degrees! Trying to set up rectangular concrete walls around my cities (so I can concentrate all my defense resources around a single "entrance/exist" area), I'm always going to have some unused space simply because of the awkward shape of the settlements borders, and that bugs me because I'm supposed to be making optimal use of real-estate.

 

This would likely be a huge endeavor, but if it can be done, I'd like to see a similar mod for Fallout 4. First, make sure that all the settlement borders are always at 90 degree angles. If the borders are not rectangular, they should at least be exclusively 90 degree angles, so I can easily create concrete walls to protect my settlements.

 

But even more importantly than that, I'd like there to be an invisible grid in settlement mode. The squares in this grid would be the size of a small concrete wall (which is, itself, 1/8 the width of a standard shack floor or 1/4 the width of a small shack floor or standard water pump). Every floor and wall in the game would snap to this invisible grid if there was nothing else nearby to snap to, though, if there were other floors or walls, they would snap to each other first; this grid is just to get the ball rolling on my settlement. Meanwhile, the crops, terminals, beds, chairs, surfaces, containers, generators, and everything else in the game would snap to the grid also, just like when building homes in The Sims, although they may have to use more squares in the grid. This would allow me to have small, but efficient, patches of farmland that take up ONLY the space they need and not an inch beyond that. I could have entire rows of generators that are packed together juuuuuuust right so as much space as possible is left for other projects.

 

Anyone else second this request?

[damanding]

I think you would need to completely re-write the game engine to accomplish this.

[aesfocus]

not the engine but nearly everything related to building which is kinda what OP is talking about but that's a like... insane task. Sanctuary is not 1 cell in game, its 10 I believe, my own sanctuary mod altered something like 13 cells so I could have lots of brambles and no decals or trash. None of the cells are straight. After that the cell markers would all need altered, all quest markers re-tooled. Then the entire build system. The grid system is... I mean you might be able to make a HUGE mesh like the helper meshes but this is straight up an overhaul mod that would take minimum hundreds of hours.

 

While yeah its a neat idea, it isn't something I see as..well I would even say feasible but one can dream, a 'mod' that would happen soon. SO 2 things, you can kinda get this by jury-rigging various mods together, there are straighter boarder mods, there are also a lot of snapping unit mods, things like SNB and Snappy House Kit also have mesh helpers. There are even snapping dirt mods! Then mods like Vanilla Extensions and when I'm done my, furniture will snap. The issue with crops is the vanilla land isn't flat so trying to have it snap doesn't make sense, no one wants crops 5ft in the air. which is point #2. This is a lot of work, with a lot of heavy moving pieces. When I say a lot of work, I mean it. So if this is something you really want to see I would highly suggest learning some very basic modding and starting in. Stuyk(the one who made alt settlements and SMH)has some good tutorials about snap points. Because there isn't a single part of hundreds upon hundreds of meshes that wouldn't need work.

 

<3 good luck

[Ethreon]

Or you could use PE like everyone else :wink:

 

And this is not SIMS, if you want a decent building sim go play that. Fallout engine is really not fit for this kind of mechanic. So no, I'm not behind this request. It's as unrealistic as asking for water displacement.

Edited December 29, 2016 by Ethreon

[somethingbrite]

I hear ya about the initial struggle to build orderly fortresses and settlements when you come from a Sims or Minecraft background. I too found it a struggle and indeed I still find some aspects frustrating (no straight vertical conduit or conduit snap to wall/ceiling for example)

 

However, from an immersion perspective orderly rows of square buildings would not look quite right. Loose collections of skanky shanties is more the vibe.

 

As for Tenpines bluff. (and any other settlement for that matter.) while building a wall might feel like the right thing to do the game engine is a little flawed in that mobs will just spawn through walls anyway and indeed your settlers like to go walkabout and may find themselves trapped outside of those defenses during an attack.

 

I tend to build high and place roof gardens on top of a central building. This allows my turrets a clear line of fire across open ground. (and hypothetically all my settlers ought to be busy on the roof.) - but in truth I have had deathclaw attacks at Starlight Drive when my farm there was on the ground and the deathclaw threw some settlers around and stomped some corn but that was about it. Nobody died and the corn grew back, so it doesn't really matter.

 

Don't place too many turrets either. If your defenses are too efficient they end up killing all attackers before you get a chance to kill anyyourself. - and the game mechanic treats this as a fail and this makes the settlers whine.

(that in itself is counter intuitive. I've built a super efficient defensive structure that vaporises any enemy before they get a step beyond their spawn, all the enemies are dead before any of the settlers have had a chance to react....and yet they whine! They should be celebrating my engineering genius!)