Did Bethesda/Obsidian plan to add Fat, Muscular, Thin NPCs?

[leotheEliteMajor117]

I was always curious why almost everyone in Fallout games are always average their size. They're all averagely skinny and some are tall and short. I was wondering why some fat people and buffed people never came in to Vaults.

 

 

 

Surely there were dumbbells and some things that make your character muscular and make you fit but no one ever used those in Fallout's pre-war 1950's fictional era? There were not a single gym before the war? They were apparently rejected to go in the Vaults? I'm curious why Bethesda/Obsidian never added those type of people.

Edited May 31, 2019 by LabroLEO

[madmongo]

Fallout 1 and 2 were simple 2-D games, because that's all that computers back then could do.

 

Fallout 1 and 2 were made by Interplay. Fallout 3 was the first Bethesda Fallout. They basically took the game engine (based on Gamebryo) that they had used for Morrowind and had improved for Oblivion, and used that to build the Fallout 3 game and world. There was a lot that they had to change to convert from Oblivion to Fallout, since Oblivion is a sword and sorcery type game and Fallout is a post-apocalyptic gun game.

 

I seriously doubt that they even considered different body types, at least not seriously, because the game engine back then did not support body morphs, and making different body types using the FO3/FNV engine is a bit painful. For almost every outfit, you would have to create different meshes for every single different body type. You would also need the game to be able to pick the proper clothing mesh for that body type. That is a lot of work.

 

Theoretically they could have added body morphs into the FO3 game engine, but that too is a lot of work. There is also the question of whether something like that would run fast enough on the computers that everyone had back then. Probably not.

 

They did finally add in body morphs for FO4.

 

As for Fallout New Vegas, that was made by Obsidian, and Bethesda gave them an almost impossible deadline that they had to meet. There was no way that they could even consider any major game engine changes or multiple body/clothing mesh options.

 

I personally created different body types for my own use. I have sort of a character overhaul of my own that has skinny, normal, and fat people, and I have modified several NPCs to use these body types. Most of the people in the wasteland to be skinny and malnourished (especially the fiends, since I thought they should all be skinny heroin-addict type of people), where people on the Strip or in better settlements where they have enough food and water are normal sized. I only have a few fat people, and they are the wealthy elite inside the casinos, since they are the only ones who can afford to eat enough to become overweight. Since this is for my own use, I haven't taken the time to create all of the different outfits or set up the scripting that would be required to swap out the outfits for the different body types that they are equipped on. But it can be done, even with FNV's limited game engine. It's just a lot of work.

 

If you have some basic 3-D modeling skills, it's not difficult to create different body types and modify clothing to fit them. I did it for my own little kludge of a mod, but I personally don't have the time or desire to do it properly for a releasable mod. If you want to create a couple of buff NPCs, just give them a custom race with your own custom buff body type, and modify an outfit or two for them to wear.

[Radioactivelad]

Bethesda's engine has had primitive morphing before, found in the Race entries, stretching the model horizontally and vertically. (This is how Oblivion had tall, thin Altmer and short, wide Bosmer.)

 

This had been consciously removed in the Fallout 3 edition of the engine. Height (Vertical stretching) now has the same effect as Scale, and Weight (Horizontal stretching) is non-functional.

 

The obvious problem is that any NPC that you wanted to give a distinct body shape would also need its own race, similar to how we already have Old and "Raider" versions of the four playable races.

 

Still, it was better than nothing. Maybe someone could restore this functionality; A lot of things I used to think would've been impossible have come/are coming to pass.

Edited June 27, 2019 by Radioactivelad

[harimau93]

agree, gamebryo can't do such thing since bethesda never even develop the morphing system into their engine. you could say why in the hell Elder Scrolls there is none fat people or something like that right, maybe very thin people that fit their role as beggar would do nicely for immersion.

 

but hey, even Fallout 4 did have fat, muscular and thin type morphing body races.. they still can't do crap since old man/ woman NPCs doesn't look like old people. well maybe in their next game they can do this right I hope...

[Thaiauxn]

I have some insight into this now, because I'm experimenting with a couple plugins I bought for Unreal for a new game I'm prototyping, and I can assure you, trying to do this in the GECK or CK would be a nightmare.

 

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/slug/character-customizer

 

And the two I bought:

 

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/slug/character-customization-male

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/slug/character-customization-female

 

Using Morph Targets in Unreal is similar to the way the EGM system works in GECK/CK, but it makes, uh, sense. And you never have to f*#@ with a forest of incomprehensible nodes in your worthless nif format, just focus on painting correct weights and shader targets in an easy to use FBX file. All your morph targets are handled by the Engine, not the Nif with support by the engine that's hard coded.

 

Your scripting guy can rig together this solution in Unreal in a few weeks of experimenting and developing, and master it over time with help from the hard won lessons of other Unreal devs and workshops focused on just this topic in Unreal.

 

In CK? You're at the only company on Earth developing solutions on this pipeline. It's just you in the dark struggling with an antique meh format on an engine with no node based approach to shaders and zero (none) scripts that handle mesh deformation or vertex blending and shading of this type, blending the normals for multiple body and skin types with one mesh as a morph target slider introduces skin folds or wrinkles.

 

There are body sliders for these games made as mods, but that likely they took approaches OUTSIDE the engine to make it work.

 

It's not that devs don't want other body types, it's that it require so f*#@ing much work that it's almost an entire development cycle just to have that feature. It triples your budget, easy, and requires specialist team members. Just using one standard body type slashes your budget and reduces the cost immeasurably.

 

Having males and females already doubles the cost. Adding body types quadruples and exponentially increases it for every feature after that, like destructible limbs and modular outfits.

[SirTwist]

There is a few mods, not sure where, that you can use to modify bodies, and what not. What comes to mind are Body and Race morph mods. There is an experimental CBBE/Bodyslide mod available, but not on Nexus. You may want to do a bit of google searching for it. I do recommend reading about these mods first, before trying to use them. While the game engine itself can handle some modification to the body, I believe that since Fallout 3 and New Vegas became more of an FPS with RPG elements, that there are limits to things in these games. However, if you want to, check out the cbbe and bodyslide project, elsewhere, and try to get it to work, and even help out, if you can.

[Jacksonelhage]

since bodyslide is compatible with nv, it cant be out of the realm of possibility. one could easily generate bodies and outfits for many different body types. only issue then is making sure characters get the right clothing meshes.

 

theres also been some experiments with individual bone deformation over on LL, so maybe check there (with an adblock, preferably. or not, yknow, your choice.)