Things I've learned while working on DARC (Daedalus Advance Recona

[Xaranth]

Being somewhat creative, obsessively organized, and often at loose ends, I tend to build 'Player Housing' mods for about every modable RPG-like game I play. Hey, it's fun, right? And it makes the game more entertaining for me. And because I'm detail-oriented and like immersion, the mods have to fit in with the game world and have some sort of story (even if only in my head) behind them. So I created the DARC for Fallout.

 

And I've learned quite a bit of useful and trivial stuff along the way, even though the second version of the DARC Bunker is barely a quarter finished. So, in no particular order, the most important lessons I've learned so far: (All lessons are taken from the VAULT tileset.)

 

First Lesson: The Fallout Lighting Engine Sucks

 

Corollary 01: The Best Way to Light a 3x3 Room is with Ambient Lighting.

 

Call me OCD, but I find it extremely distracting to see, on the floor, a light glow with no visible source at all. And in Fallout, lights shine right through walls if they're large enough. And any light source large enough to brighten the corners of a three by three room in fallout will bleed right through the sides of the walls into the room next door.

 

There's a corollary to the corollary here, but I don't want to get too layered. Suffice to say that the second best way is with four Radius 320-Fade 0.6 lights on the corners of the center room tile.

 

Corollary 02: Be Aware of Your ImageSpace!

 

My wall has a frest dent in it from me BEATING MY FOREHEAD AGAINST IT because everything was greenwashed. It wasn't until long after I'd 'finished' lighting the entire bunker that I discovered my ImageSpace had a greenwash over everything. Aesthetically, this was NOT pleasing. At all.

 

Corollary 03: A (Very) Few Large Lights Are FAR Better Than Many Small Lights

 

The performance impact of a dozen lights in a large room is horrid on my mid-range laptop. The frustrating bit is that large lights bleed through and that irritates me.

 

 

Second Lesson: There is a Hotkey (-) That Allows One to Batch-process a Group of References

 

I would discover this after individually setting Enable Parent and Emittance on 96 references: one at a time.

 

Third Lesson: The Internet is a Strange Place

 

One can start out with

Light Infantry

and end with

Ladies' Evening Dresses

. Very quickly. Internet, I love you. Also, the dress does not come with the girl and they look at you weirdly when you ask.

 

Fourth Lesson: The GECK Wiki Is Your Best Friend and Your Worst Enemy

 

The Wiki is highly useful when it has what you want. But absolutely useless when it doesn't. And there's about a fifty/fifty split whether it will or won't have what you want.

 

Fifth Lesson: Cipscis is The Most Awesome Person Ever

 

Sixth Lesson: Pick a Mascot For Your Mod

I was beginning to start decorating the DARC Bunker and I found that the wall art available in the vanilla tilesets leaves something to be desired. So I thought about it, and decided I would add my own DARC 'Mascot'. And if you choose wisely, finding and managing decoration of your mascot can be a wonderful stress relief. Trawling the internet for good

Bettie Page

pictures is a lovely diversion.

 

Seventh Lesson: FNVScript is EVIL

 

Switch/Case? Arrays? Loops? Strings? User-Defined Functions? Passing parameters? That dent in the wall? FNVScript's near-crippling limitations are responsible for half of it.

 

Corollary: Flinging Your Computer Through the Window is Not An Approved Troubleshooting Step

 

Nor does it actually solve problems that are rooted in the limitations of the language you are obliged to use.

Final Lesson: It is VERY Hard to Design a Pure 'Vanilla' Mod

 

One of my goals with the DARC Bunker is to create a mod that would work with an 'Out of the Box' version of F:NV, requiring no DLCs or Community Mods. I'm near to giving up, though I haven't yet, because it is basically impossible to do anything interesting or clever without

NVSE

.

[CaptMitch]

Very nice and funny post. Although i have not got into making worldspace as of yet i am currently making the Danielle Wagner Companion Mod which has a ton of advanced scripts so i know your frustrations. I also tried to make this mod NON dependent on 3rd party software and the limitations made a couple dents in my walls also.

Through my web searching i found many useful things to help me with the Geck.

 

Such as:

Fallout: New Vegas Commands / Functions

cipscis

 

If you ever want to design the worldspace for the Danielle Wagner Quest let me know ;)

[Mishaxhi]

Despite what your peers/roommates may say, shouting at the screen does sometimes work.

[TrickyVein]

Interesting. I've noticed strengths and weaknesses in using the editor after years of modding for Unreal 3 and previous Unreal titles before moving on to Fallout. Actually, there are mostly weaknesses when compared to using Unreal technology. It is often frustrating just how little control the user really has inside of the GECK. We need a separate tool, NifSkope to truly be able to create original and fresh content for the game. Even for something as simple as modifying the texture of an existing model or creating a new material from existing textures.

 

Imagespaces and " modifiers are fun. I quite like using them, and find they give you a great amount of control over how you want to set mood. I'd keep playing around with them. They are similar to using post-processing volumes inside of Unreal Ed.

 

Gamebryo's lighting system is quite sub-par, I do agree. It is also horridly inefficient (when creating light sources inside of the GECK) and unduly burdensome on your system it seems. There is virtually nothing I like about it, except for the fact it provides a more-or-less smooth and dynamic transition throughout a day cycle - something which you would have to be very clever to implement cost-effectively for a large outdoor space using Unreal technology. For interiors I much prefer baked lighting and using BSP geometry for flat surfaces like floors and ceilings. At least the lighting of static-mesh objects isn't vertex-based inside of the GECK. You can achieve some pretty good results though, despite these issues.