Vault 201, declared final beta and need things to fix

[mfree80286]

Well, after 6 months of learning curves and a DEEP dive straight into a massive project, my first mod is up and I have a problem.

 

I've been working on it and playtesting so long that I'm concerned I'm blind to some of it's issues, and have gotten startlingly little technical feedback. I know it's functional, but I also know it *has* to have fixable issues, there's no way it's as good as what I was after ( "DLC grade" ) given how much I had to pick up on the run.

 

Specifically, scripting needs improvement; I got it working but it's only functional, I never got my head around animations and using states rather than hardcoded actions, so the look/feel suffers a bit. I will *gladly* take suggestions, or even outright repairs (and you'd be credited for that, no issues sharing glory here). There's also some strangeness with a few of my customized items since I had to ride on vanilla meshes, never managed to interpret Blenders' UI and only picked up enough NIFSkope to be able to point to a new texture file.

 

The area and number of cells also means that it's so big that I literally do not have enough time to adequately playtest all the ways in and around. All the teleporting between cells was checked multiple times, but there are so many locked doors and one-way routes that I could have missed leaving a key somewhere important. There are *purposeful* dead ends, but I'd found one situation early on where coming into a room from the 'back way' left the player well and truly trapped, and obviously those are suboptimal situations.

 

So... up for a challenge? This is the last session of bug-fixing before I call it final and move on to a couple of expansions to this mod, and I don't want to start any of those before this one is well and truly nailed down.

 

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/23634

[SMB92]

I'm curious to know, have you tested your interior when it has been filled with objects? How is performance without building objects? I'm just interested to know how you went about setting up your cells, because many don't consider the new precalc system when building these sorts of mods.

 

Maybe I'll find some time to have a looksy over the weekend :)

[mfree80286]

I have not done any heavy building tests, no. I have done basic feature testing with a few builds... there are images of a running 'mini-settlement' on the mod page./

 

These cells stem directly from the experiences I had with Vault 88 and troubleshooting an occlusion culling issue with frame refresh failure, causing a hall of mirrors effect. I figured out the max distances trying to get that fixed, and then selected dimensions for these cells that shouldn't approach anything problematic.

 

As far as building the cells... they're pretty straightforward concrete boxes. I'm not sure what you mean by a new pre-calc system, I've not worked with any of the other Fallout versions. After I cleaned the navmesh, checked it, and generated cover and waypoints, I did run the precombined geometry and visibility routines. All that was necessary to be able to build on the concrete floor and get settlers/provisioners/companions in and out.

 

Performance 'empty' though, pegged at 60. Wouldn't make sense to not be running flat out, there's very little "there" there. Game runs above 50fps pretty much everywhere but the vault core, warehouse, and physical plant... those regions are extremely object heavy but I did try and occlude things with planes and cut back on the shadowed lights. I'm running an i5-2320 with 12gb and a slightly hobbled RX470 8gb (PCIe 2.0 is limited since Haswell architecture/potato-esque motherboard).

 

EDIT:

The rest of the cells, the non-buildable ones? I actually can't remember if I've precombined those or not. I think I tried once in the warehouse and crashed the CK, and then again and managed to royally hose up a vanilla interior cell (normality restored there, no issues). Everything worked well enough in playtesting that I didn't pursue it, but it was still necessary for the buildable regions.

 

And yeah, I actually did forget things. There are a couple dozen separate interior cells, for work of at least an hour a day from Jan 9 until I uploaded the current version May 31... almost 6 months straight. It's why the changelogs are so nitpicky, to remind myself :)

[SMB92]

Precalc = precombineds + previs. Just wanted to know if you actually went as far as to do that. I rarely see interior spaces that have this properly applied.

 

I personally want to see or have some sort of Vault mod like the Basement Living mod. I have almost been tempted to start building one myself, but I hate doing anything finicky in the render window in CK, like building stuff (I'll stick to my marker placements and precalc patches thanks lol).

 

Anywho, good to know hat your mod is quality made in that sense. I'll get around to looking at it when I actually start "playing" the game again (rather than just testing my mod).

[mfree80286]

Oh yeah, where it really counts everything was decked out to the hilt... meshed, covered, waypoints, and by your def, precalced.

 

If you want to just dig in it, you can't really screw anything up... there's no questline, no magic scripting. Just the activation scripts for the 15 rooms (and 1 bonus), and a couple scripts for managing airlocks, teleporters, and one creepy little easter egg. You might find yourself stuck somewhere due to not having a key, but hey.. that's what console unlock is for :smile:

 

I was *very* programmatic with naming, so if you want to poke at the building cells they're levels 1-4 and sectors A-D, so you get 'coc Mod01Vault201vltL3SA' or L4SD and so on. L1SA isn't buildable, the crew already got to that and it's loaded up with enough items that I was concerned that if I made it buildable some nasty performance issues could crop up.

 

Every cell already has 1000 power with radiance over the entirety and registers 100 water, they're literally ready to jump in and start dropping stuff. Never did figure out power over snap points though, but a vault connector to the existing power connector (it's on top of the power control box, which is just a dressy cover that matches equipment outside) and some select/drop on the atrium floors should cover you.

 

Each cell should fit a grid of 30x46 vault parts , 10 or 11 stories tall... or whatever else you want, that's why precalc was important. Otherwise nothing would snap to the floor.

 

The whole thing was made for these reasons:

1 - provide a ton of vault-style building area

2 - cover for itself through backstory and 'realistic' structure and location

3 - satisfy further any story hounds with a nearly complete documentation of what happened to the crew through written diaries, notes, and terminal entries (with technical sensor logs that back everything up)

4 - provide for a fully underground travel method that's to scale with the surface

5 - fill some holes in the vanilla story (it's tied in to the CoA, very early Enclave activity, and why the Institute has their relay/how it works)

[SMB92]

Sounds real good man :) Im a bit of a story hound myself, i like my lore content and explanations for everything. I also like pitch black interiors aka realism a lot. Not sure if anyone still appreciates those things anymore, everything about hentai these days o.O

 

Its a bit of a shame the modding scene for this game is a bit dead atm, a lot nice mods starting to get worked on but people have already left the game :/ In comparison to skyrim anyway, i'm not sure that game will ever die

[mfree80286]

Found/fixed an issue with some of the custom misc items where they did not appear in inventory preview or examination; this was due to a missing preview transform.

 

Anybody got anything else? Also dumped all the custom items in another mod as a resource pack, just search 'vault 201' and you'll find it.