Pre-war DC

[Marcman52]

I'd love to see a mod which essentially "cleans up" the DC ruins and puts it back into its working self, pre-war, possibly a few years before the Great War.

 

The city would be very populous (full of people walking around) with open diners, cars driving to and from places as well as a working metro!

 

I would like someone to do this since, in my opinion, it would be awesome to see what life was like in the Fallout Universe; with its amalgamation of 50's and futuristic technology in a thriving city. Of course, this would require an entire reconstruction of DC, but it is possible, isn't it?

 

I think this has been suggested before once and would agree with the previous OP that it is a great idea. Would anyone be up for it? :P

 

Thanks in advance!

[Ladez]

. Edited October 15, 2013 by Ladez

[helloguy1232]

1. No one knows what Pre war life in Fallout is like.

 

2. It would require tons of work.

[charwo]

Honestly, given the modular design of the meshes and such, it's more than possible to do this....In theory. It would require a ton of work. Here are the problems graphically:

 

1. Clean up all exterior building designs (not hard)

2. Rebuild the road system

3. Retexture the cars

4. Retexture the items

5. Clean up the building interiors

6. Retexture the Brahmin to cows (not just getting rid of the second head, but generally making them healthy) and retexture the Yoa Gui to black bears

7. You'd need A LOT more pre-war clothing styles (though I count that as an opportunity I would relish)

 

The good news? The Green World mods, Tranquility Lane and to a lesser extent everything in Operation Anchorage sim is prebuilt. There's also a lot of modder's resources for prewar stuff.

 

World Design:

It is possible with time and effort, to remake the Pitt, Point Lookout, Adam's Airforce Base and the Capital Wasteland into their pre-war states, With the Green World Mods, the work is halfway there. But there are design issues:

 

1. Like in the Tranquility Lane mods, most items will be there, but not for the taking. If you go into the Super Duper Mart, there will be food items like CRAZY! But you won't be able to take or interact with any of them. It'll be eye candy alone.

2. You will have to design the airport that Megaton got the planes from. Finding a place that cannot be directly be on top of Megaton might be difficult, but if it's a regional airport, then yes.

3. In all honesty, to do it right, you're going to have to take an honest look at what the actual geography of the Capital Region is, as it is now, because the Wasteland represents 200 years of nature reasserting itself. I could be wrong but I don't think the the foothills of the Appalachian mountains are that sheer. Could be wrong though and not necessarily needed.

4. Not only do you need to connect the subways, you also need to make firm connections on which lines stations like Jury Street and Bethesda Metro actually fall under. Doing real world research should allow logical placement, but still.

5. The DC inner city areas are actually interior locations with skies. It is possible to port those locations into the Capital Wasteland Map, but it will be tricky and may require a shift in scale in the DC area. So be it. We all know that the Capital Wasteland is not strictly built to scale.

6. If you do this, a lot of locations that are totally destroyed will have to be rebuilt. For locations like the White House, that's easy, cause we know what it looks like. For places like Fort Bannister and Early Dawn Elementary School in Chevy Chase Plaza, more imagination will be required.

7. Most of the interiors that exist in Capital Wasteland will not need to be redone, because a player will have no reason to go there. The conceit of a pre-war mod (or even game) is that exploration and scavenging will be almost non-existent, and combat will be much, much rarer.

8. Radioactive water must be taken complete our of the game. Rad-Away should be much more rare and more expensive. But people popping Rad-X like candy would be cool.

 

The good news: The DC_Interior Mod provides decent floor space models for most all of the downtown area. They would need to be populated stocked and cleaned, but they are there.

 

AI:

1. You have to reconfigure the AI to work on Pre-war money, and bottlecaps to be worthless. In practice, this requires more than sound effect and texture substitution: It requires that barter be taken completely out of everyday transactions. Barter might be important in back alley deals, corporate raiding or pawn shop deals, but as a rule, a grocery does not barter on prices of food stuff. You take it or leave it. Most of purchasing interactions would be one way: a screen to insert money into a machine or a teller to buy a subway ticket, at the Super Duper Mart barring quest items, the way to purchase things would be to go to the checkout line, talk with the cashier and that would bring a prompt where you'd buy the food there.

2. You have to make combat much, much more difficult to do. Not in making the civies tougher, but actually giving the player reasons not to fight and slaughter. I would suggest looking at the Masquerade points system from Bloodlines as a basis. Or just heavily restricting combat options.

3. You need to have a shitton of driving automobiles with their own schedules. In theory this is easy: bare bones you could port the concept of GTA III's traffic engine. Although program compatibility and licensing issues would come, the groundwork has been already been done. I would highly advise that the player not have any ability to drive, but the character can. I mean that the player has no control over the character as they drive to their destination, other than to look around and enjoy the scenery.

4. Human enemies will need to be rare, and hostile animals almost non-existent. This is actually a good processing power trade off: More moving things, but much more scripted, and less animals.

 

In General:

You WILL need to make tough interpretation decisions of the pre-war Fallout universe that the writers up to now have skirted. How TV's worked, how crap-saccharine the pre-war world actually was and for whom, everyday levels of American militarism, how much the Enclave represents common pre-war thinking (although I'm pretty sure the canonical explanation is actually, they tried to make the American public as xenophobic, jingoistic, imperialist and nasty and them and more or less completely failed), where the carrier that became Rivet City was an on-duty ship in 2077 or a WWII museum ship. You would have latitude to decide whether to include the Korean, Vietnam and WWII memorials, discussing the apparently retro computing of 2077 and why it was that way (there are actually three or four good, mutually exclusive interpretations) as well as making definitive interpretations of the history of Fallout's Cold War. I can explain all of that in detail, but in general, you will have to think long and hard about how to interpret that world.

[oblivious12123]

Given the resources to do so, I could have a go with this. The game has meshes and textures for pre-war houses and all its accessories as well as one of the types of car. There are also mods on the nexus which do some of the work already: Fellout and GreenWorld clear up some of the "wasteland" feel. There could be problems creating the DC downtown because of how muddled it is and how there are a lack of resources for it.

 

Some of the resources I will need are:

• Clean Pre-War outfits.
  
• Intact buildings (e.g. skyscrapers, townhouses).
  
• A single $1 bill mesh (To replace currency immersively).
  
• Clean textures for existing objects.
  
• Voice actors (Optional).
  
• Other people to work with.
  
• LOTS of time.
  

 

Once I get people to work on textures/meshes I can start cleaning up the capitol wasteland.

[charwo]

Honestly, I would be on board for that in theory. I'd be willing to learn the things I'd need to learn. However: I think the best way to start (beyond having a plot), is to make a demo of the pre-war Point Lookout. I'm serious: Of all the maps in Fallout 3, there's the least to do with Point Lookout, if you're playing with Badass Wasteland Reclamation. Don't focus on NPCs, don't focus on new meshes and such. Just rebuild the Point Lookout resort, make some model interiors out of the Houses that have been restored, spruce up the Cathedral, rebuild the road system, and perhaps hardest of all, restore the Calvert and Blackhall estates to their former glory. In all honesty, I'd be willing to do a lot of the gruntwork if this looks promising (restoring the Road and rail network topside, cleaning out the subway tunnels, cleaning out/up the interiors of whatever houses that will be needed) but I'll need the meshes and textures, and to be sold on why this thing is being made. And we don't necessary need a plot per se, if this is going to be some kind of modders resource.

[oblivious12123]

Honestly, I would be on board for that in theory. I'd be willing to learn the things I'd need to learn. However: I think the best way to start (beyond having a plot), is to make a demo of the pre-war Point Lookout. I'm serious: Of all the maps in Fallout 3, there's the least to do with Point Lookout, if you're playing with Badass Wasteland Reclamation. Don't focus on NPCs, don't focus on new meshes and such. Just rebuild the Point Lookout resort, make some model interiors out of the Houses that have been restored, spruce up the Cathedral, rebuild the road system, and perhaps hardest of all, restore the Calvert and Blackhall estates to their former glory. In all honesty, I'd be willing to do a lot of the gruntwork if this looks promising (restoring the Road and rail network topside, cleaning out the subway tunnels, cleaning out/up the interiors of whatever houses that will be needed) but I'll need the meshes and textures, and to be sold on why this thing is being made. And we don't necessary need a plot per se, if this is going to be some kind of modders resource.

 

Point Lookout seems like a good place to start. It's already got a husk to work from and it's not too big. I can take a gander at it when I get some free time.

[AlbinoPolarBear]

I have actually already started working on a mod like this, but it's far from finished. I downloaded two pre-war car modders resources, so I have intact models of every car in the game.

I'm currently working on repairing the roads, wich takes a lot of time. Big Town is the only place so far that is almost completely restored (only need to clean up the interiors and add new ones).

Andale is pretty easy to clean up to and is almost done too.

Springvale: 50% cleaned up.

Canterbury Commons: 50% cleaned up.

Fairfax Ruins: Almost done. Just need to repair all the houses.

I'm also trying to restore the Metro system with working trains (not moving trains... that would be impossible).

Might even try to restore the Monorail system. Would be possible but very hard to do.

 

I'm replacing the Brotherhood of Steel with the US army. Remove the Enclave completely. Replacing Raiders with various street gangs. Maybe add a Chinese spy faction, a police faction and a citizen faction.

 

Also, I recently found a farm animal modders resource for Oblivion (you can do that right? Use modders resources from Oblivion in Fallout? Or is that against the rules?), wich contained a cow model and I am trying to add Brahmin animations to it.

I also changed the year to 2077 (wich is kinda pointless, because you won't notice it...)

I will eventually post some pictures.

[scottym23]

Honestly, given the modular design of the meshes and such, it's more than possible to do this....In theory. It would require a ton of work. Here are the problems graphically:

 

1. Clean up all exterior building designs (not hard)

2. Rebuild the road system

3. Retexture the cars

4. Retexture the items

5. Clean up the building interiors

6. Retexture the Brahmin to cows (not just getting rid of the second head, but generally making them healthy) and retexture the Yoa Gui to black bears

7. You'd need A LOT more pre-war clothing styles (though I count that as an opportunity I would relish)

 

The good news? The Green World mods, Tranquility Lane and to a lesser extent everything in Operation Anchorage sim is prebuilt. There's also a lot of modder's resources for prewar stuff.

 

World Design:

It is possible with time and effort, to remake the Pitt, Point Lookout, Adam's Airforce Base and the Capital Wasteland into their pre-war states, With the Green World Mods, the work is halfway there. But there are design issues:

 

1. Like in the Tranquility Lane mods, most items will be there, but not for the taking. If you go into the Super Duper Mart, there will be food items like CRAZY! But you won't be able to take or interact with any of them. It'll be eye candy alone.

2. You will have to design the airport that Megaton got the planes from. Finding a place that cannot be directly be on top of Megaton might be difficult, but if it's a regional airport, then yes.

3. In all honesty, to do it right, you're going to have to take an honest look at what the actual geography of the Capital Region is, as it is now, because the Wasteland represents 200 years of nature reasserting itself. I could be wrong but I don't think the the foothills of the Appalachian mountains are that sheer. Could be wrong though and not necessarily needed.

4. Not only do you need to connect the subways, you also need to make firm connections on which lines stations like Jury Street and Bethesda Metro actually fall under. Doing real world research should allow logical placement, but still.

5. The DC inner city areas are actually interior locations with skies. It is possible to port those locations into the Capital Wasteland Map, but it will be tricky and may require a shift in scale in the DC area. So be it. We all know that the Capital Wasteland is not strictly built to scale.

6. If you do this, a lot of locations that are totally destroyed will have to be rebuilt. For locations like the White House, that's easy, cause we know what it looks like. For places like Fort Bannister and Early Dawn Elementary School in Chevy Chase Plaza, more imagination will be required.

7. Most of the interiors that exist in Capital Wasteland will not need to be redone, because a player will have no reason to go there. The conceit of a pre-war mod (or even game) is that exploration and scavenging will be almost non-existent, and combat will be much, much rarer.

8. Radioactive water must be taken complete our of the game. Rad-Away should be much more rare and more expensive. But people popping Rad-X like candy would be cool.

 

The good news: The DC_Interior Mod provides decent floor space models for most all of the downtown area. They would need to be populated stocked and cleaned, but they are there.

 

AI:

1. You have to reconfigure the AI to work on Pre-war money, and bottlecaps to be worthless. In practice, this requires more than sound effect and texture substitution: It requires that barter be taken completely out of everyday transactions. Barter might be important in back alley deals, corporate raiding or pawn shop deals, but as a rule, a grocery does not barter on prices of food stuff. You take it or leave it. Most of purchasing interactions would be one way: a screen to insert money into a machine or a teller to buy a subway ticket, at the Super Duper Mart barring quest items, the way to purchase things would be to go to the checkout line, talk with the cashier and that would bring a prompt where you'd buy the food there.

2. You have to make combat much, much more difficult to do. Not in making the civies tougher, but actually giving the player reasons not to fight and slaughter. I would suggest looking at the Masquerade points system from Bloodlines as a basis. Or just heavily restricting combat options.

3. You need to have a shitton of driving automobiles with their own schedules. In theory this is easy: bare bones you could port the concept of GTA III's traffic engine. Although program compatibility and licensing issues would come, the groundwork has been already been done. I would highly advise that the player not have any ability to drive, but the character can. I mean that the player has no control over the character as they drive to their destination, other than to look around and enjoy the scenery.

4. Human enemies will need to be rare, and hostile animals almost non-existent. This is actually a good processing power trade off: More moving things, but much more scripted, and less animals.

 

In General:

You WILL need to make tough interpretation decisions of the pre-war Fallout universe that the writers up to now have skirted. How TV's worked, how crap-saccharine the pre-war world actually was and for whom, everyday levels of American militarism, how much the Enclave represents common pre-war thinking (although I'm pretty sure the canonical explanation is actually, they tried to make the American public as xenophobic, jingoistic, imperialist and nasty and them and more or less completely failed), where the carrier that became Rivet City was an on-duty ship in 2077 or a WWII museum ship. You would have latitude to decide whether to include the Korean, Vietnam and WWII memorials, discussing the apparently retro computing of 2077 and why it was that way (there are actually three or four good, mutually exclusive interpretations) as well as making definitive interpretations of the history of Fallout's Cold War. I can explain all of that in detail, but in general, you will have to think long and hard about how to interpret that world.

 

When I read that idea I had goose bumps it was so great. I can almost envision a mod like this being created but I try not to because I know the odds of a flow blown Pre-war mod is slim to none. However despite my overwhelming support for this, I think you got a little carried away from the original poster's goal. He didn't want to completely revamp the entire fallout world, just the DC ruins. That would take A LOT less time and preparation because half of the problems and world design just wouldn't be needed at all (such as the subway system since if you're stuck in a person's memories then it's probably true you can't deviate from what he was doing as in go to certain locations like the subways, so they can be avoided all together). My suggestion would to get the meshes and designs to just revamp the DC area that was original asked in this topic and then branch off of there to what you're saying.

[charwo]

Fair enough! But that's a lot of work for a linear and fairly non-interactive mod. Even Anchorage had a boatload of shooting and a backup squad to mix it up.