JasonCantrall Posted August 31, 2017 Share Posted August 31, 2017 What program or programs can I use to learn how to make mods and also what will I need to do in order to create mods offline. Hopefully a guide that is made for dummies.... lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dubiousintent Posted August 31, 2017 Share Posted August 31, 2017 (edited) Nothing so simple as "a program". Mod creation takes a lot of learning, work, patience, and commitment. Start small and build your skill set gradually. Please see the wiki "Getting started creating mods using GECK" article. You may want to also see the 'Solutions to "Garden of Eden Construction Kit" (G.E.C.K.) problems' entry in the "Troubleshooting" guide on getting GECK setup. Good luck! -Dubious- Edited August 31, 2017 by dubiousintent Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JasonCantrall Posted August 31, 2017 Author Share Posted August 31, 2017 Nothing so simple as "a program". Mod creation takes a lot of learning, work, patience, and commitment. Start small and build your skill set gradually. Please see the wiki "Getting started creating mods using GECK" article. You may want to also see the 'Solutions to "Garden of Eden Construction Kit" (G.E.C.K.) problems' entry in the "Troubleshooting" guide on getting GECK setup. Good luck! -Dubious-Thank you. I will have limited to no internet capability for about three months. Will this be able to be done with no internet or would I be wasting my time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dubiousintent Posted August 31, 2017 Share Posted August 31, 2017 Without reliable internet access, I would say you are wasting your time. There are SOOOO many things you have to constantly search out answers to. That article is primarily a listing of tutorials on various topics, with some occassional "tips" of lessons learned to supplement. Each tutorial is going to lead you to others or terms or commands you have to look up. I can safely predict you are going to want to be online daily. Given your situation, I would suggest you perhaps review (or download that article, though it is updated constantly), choose some small project to start with that only requires you to learn one tool such as a mesh or texture editor, and work on that offline. Get started before you go into "blackout" and try to obtain all the related materials for later, and then just work on getting familiar with that tool with one or two small, simple projects while you are away. There are many different techniques you have to master in each tool. -Dubious- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JasonCantrall Posted August 31, 2017 Author Share Posted August 31, 2017 Without reliable internet access, I would say you are wasting your time. There are SOOOO many things you have to constantly search out answers to. That article is primarily a listing of tutorials on various topics, with some occassional "tips" of lessons learned to supplement. Each tutorial is going to lead you to others or terms or commands you have to look up. I can safely predict you are going to want to be online daily. Given your situation, I would suggest you perhaps review (or download that article, though it is updated constantly), choose some small project to start with that only requires you to learn one tool such as a mesh or texture editor, and work on that offline. Get started before you go into "blackout" and try to obtain all the related materials for later, and then just work on getting familiar with that tool with one or two small, simple projects while you are away. There are many different techniques you have to master in each tool. -Dubious-Bummer. So with that said it is going to be very difficult for me to learn how to do this. There are times I will go 6 months with no internet (3 months at a time). even as long as 8 months all depending... Thanks for all the info.. I will look at it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmongo Posted September 1, 2017 Share Posted September 1, 2017 The main tool is the GECK, and the GECK is very buggy and very non-intuitive. For example, just about every program since the early days of Windows uses File->New or File->Open menu options, but not the GECK. You are presented with a Data option, and it's not at all obvious that to create a new file you select the master files that you want and simply do not select an active file. It's also not at all obvious what master files even are, or that you need as a minimum Fallout.esm as a master for your mod. This is step 1 of the GECK, and it is completely non-intuitive, and it shows just how non-intuitive the GECK is overall. You will need to go online and search forums to figure out how to do things. Another good example - if you try to create your own worldspace and do what seems intuitive, you'll crash the GECK, probably twice, with no idea why. Poke around online and you'll find that once you create a worldspace, you can't edit that worldspace's heightmap unless you save your mod, exit, and re-open it, because for some reason if you don't the GECK will crash. The second crash comes from the GECK crashing if the hightmap's minimum height is too low, and ironically, the default heightmap that the GECK creates has this problem. So if all you do is create a heightmap, make no changes to it at all, and then save it, you'll crash the GECK. Figuring out stuff like this without online help is going to be very, very difficult. The GECK will create mods, but it will not create assets for those mods. If all you use is the GECK then you are limited to the assets that come with the game, or assets in modders resources that you download before you lose your internet connection. If you want to create your own assets, you need a 3-d modeling tool like Blender or 3dsMax, and you need a texture editing tool that can handle dds files like GIMP or Paint.Net. You'll need to install a dds plugin for older versions of Paint.Net and for all versions of GIMP, but otherwise just about any version of each will work.You need very specific versions of Blender or 3dsMax with the right versions of the nif import and export tools installed or they just won't work at all. The wiki that -Dubious- maintains and linked to above has links to all of the correct tools. Note - Blender is free. The version of 3dsMax that works with Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas is not free. I personally use Blender, due to the cost. There's an online resource called Blender Noob to Pro which is excellent. If you want to learn 3-d modeling, download Blender from the wiki link, download Blender Noob to Pro in pdf format, and go have some fun offline. For dds files, Paint.Net is very intuitive and easy to use. You can probably figure that out offline with no help. GIMP is a bit more powerful, and more popular, but also is a bit less intuitive and more difficult to learn (IMHO). One important note - games in general (not just Fallout) require textures to be on even power of 2 size boundaries, so 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024, or 2048x2048, etc. Don't try to use a texture that is 300x412. Large textures like 2048x2048 look nice, but if there are too many large textures in an area, you can crash the game or slow down the frame rate to a complete crawl. Importing a nif into Blender is easy. Exporting something that you created in Blender to a nif is a bit more difficult. If you don't get the export options right, you'll either crash the GECK when you try to assign the nif to an object, or the object will either crash the game or simply won't appear (or will be invisible). I've never been able to find settings in the exporter that work properly for armor/clothing or creature skins. I've always had to edit those afterwards in NifSkope to set the shader flags properly so that the item isn't invisible in-game. NifSkope comes with the nif tools that you'll need for 3-d modeling. It's reasonably intuitive, but you need to understand what all of the fields it modifies are for, and that is probably going to require a lot of time on google. Sadly, there is no real "modding for Dummies" resource out there. The wiki that -Dubious- maintains is probably your best single resource, and it links to all sorts of resources all over the place. There is no central repository of information that has everything that you need. The GECK is just too non-intuitive and difficult to use. I've often said that I think the GECK is really a vault-tec experiment designed to test modder's frustration levels. Good luck. Modding is fun, but also can be frustrating and infuriating at times. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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