Fallout PnP questions

Re: hmm where to start

GameDev said:
We arent aiming to be Fallout Online...which BTW people with millions of dollars are thinking is...wait for it....wait for it....a VIABLE idea. Call them sell out money whores all you want, but actual developers are more than toying with the idea.
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Actually:

1. Interplay does not have millions. Interplay has 28,000 in cash at the last notice and over 2.5 million in direct debts, not to mention the 10+ million to be paid over the coming years.
2. Interplay does not have any devs working for it right now.

PS: Rosh, why haven't you hit on "As the lakes and rivers were altered into chemicals, there was nothing for the skies to absorb. The rain simply stopped and there was nothing we could do about it."

Excuse me? Are you saying the H2O molecules are tansformed into chemicals? Because there's no other way for "the rain to stop" by "altering lakes and rivers into chemicals". If you haven't noticed, 2/3 of the earth surface is water. It might be a good idea for you to study the viability of your backstory a bit.
 
battlepoet said:
I don't think you're even a damn gamer from some of your responses, and hell, Dawn had more substance that site of yours.
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Being one of the people who has uh...heard of Dawn, this was by far the funniest thing I've read all day. It's true, too.

Kharn said:
PS: Rosh, why haven't you hit on "As the lakes and rivers were altered into chemicals, there was nothing for the skies to absorb. The rain simply stopped and there was nothing we could do about it."

Excuse me? Are you saying the H2O molecules are tansformed into chemicals? Because there's no other way for "the rain to stop" by "altering lakes and rivers into chemicals". If you haven't noticed, 2/3 of the earth surface is water. It might be a good idea for you to study the viability of your backstory a bit.
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Kharn, it's hard to tell where to start. The whole backstory is completely bullshit. It is as I've said before, a really naive mix of Battlefield: Earth and Terminator 3, but the Sci-Fi low-budget version. Those even have the same hype level and amount of leg humping of a more popular concept as this "game". Just wait until the general public sees "BioBorg" and awards scorn points for the complete unoriginality of some pretentious accountant. I suppose the idiot hasn't a clue about other planets in the same solar system, nor about a problem that faces many large cities today.

The rest of the poorly-composed backstory reads like it was written by the same people as Johnny Mnemonic, complete with science fiction that has little to no scientific basis. I'm surprised you didn't catch this interesting tidbit:

We’ve been living off machines for over a thousand years, but no one will admit it. And who are we to think we are any better?
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That is amusing, given the very poorly-written:

Have been since 2162 over a hundred years ago.
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So that means..1262 and maybe a bit earlier we've been "living off machines"? Okay, that's a good chuckle. It is yet another way to alienate more of the sci-fi audience.
 
It seems that GameDev is familiar with this. Quite the attention and drama whore, too. They still haven't found that hype only works on marketing depts and foolish consumers. Real developers don't care about the inane things, they care about the design. From a design standpoint, it's no wonder people don't care to follow the project as it screams of something a child would come up with. There's a load of features and "kewl thingz!" put into every place I can find mention of the "game" (not many), but little real evidence of any design present. It sounds more like a shopping list than a description of the real design.

The "design doc" is the purest form if humor. It goes into the most banal aspects without going into anything approaching design and how the design of all the elements would work together. The first time an open audience touches this game, flaws the size of the San Adraus will be clearly obvious. While it's nice to wax on about how the login would work (and it's interesting they only noted the extreme basics of it), taking a "kitchen sink" approach to design tries to splice an assumption together that it will even remotely work.

Most MMORPGs are simplistic, mainly because they have to balance for a lot of people. Something tells me they won't have to worry about that with this title.

So you then have a foolish consumer that is trying to act like a developer, and I have to say they are having a bit of trouble, at least with credibility. This bullshit has gone on for more than a year, especially when you look into this post at Gamedesign.net.

A quick-and-dirty plot point of our game is that there are two clans the user must choose at character creation: The Corporates, with high-tech domed cities, who thrust out the unmentionables to the waste, creating the other clan: The Outlanders. There will be 3 playable races: pure humans, MutaGens (mutants) and BioBorgs (cyborgs)
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Let me guess...it's "Fallout" because it's somewhat similar to Vault City?

Funny, I thought he said he was 33, here. In this thread, he not only professes his wishes to go to "game design school" (*snicker*), he claims to be 31. That's odd, I recall that he was saying that he's 33 in this thread. Given that was towards the end of the year, I'm sorry, but a full year hasn't passed yet, so it's highly unlikely that someone would have had two birthdays in that time period.

Another example of his experience as a "Project Lead".

Just think, in Oct. of last year, after advertising for it since earlier that year, the team was still a two-man operation. Not to mention, the amount of hype and garbage behind it, not to mention the outright dishonest lies.

We would be interested in someone who is in it more for the fun of adding to a great project than a pay-for-work scenario. Becoming part of the owning partnership would be in the works for those who put in great amounts of effort, however.
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You know what this says to anyone with experience? "DANGER! DANGER!" With giant red strobes flashing and everything.

Alfred, you lying sack of shit, come clean already.
 
by Roshambo -
Just because there was a car in Fallout 2 doesn't mean that there was many others all over the setting. There was a few notable mistakes, especially in the instances of FUEL.
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I'd say that an electric car isn't that far fetched for the Fallout setting. The difficulty in procuring tires, 180+ years after tire factories stopped functioning, is a far bigger plot hole.

There's more to the post-apocalyptic genre than Mad Max.
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Waterworld? :p

by GameDev -
As for your observation that fuel would eventually run out...uhm wow that's really an insight. You wouldnt think that maybe there could be storyline reasons written in to fix that?
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The rapidly dwindling supply of common fuels is a major part of both Fallout and Fallout2. (I ignore FO:T due to the fatal amount of plot holes riddling the game.) While these are not insurmountable obstacles (for example, ethanol produced from fuel stills loaded with excess crops, as I use in my PnP campaign) making them easy to acquire or widespread (or just flat-out infinite, as FO:T) lessens the link to Fallout.

by Roshambo -
someone would have practical knowledge of setting up a modern oil drill and refinery after the radiation disperses.
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Building an oil refinery that can seperateeasily usable fuels like gasoline, kerosine, and propane, from crude oil, is not especially difficult. Finding crude oil supplies that would be reachable with the neccessarily more crude technology available after a world-wide nuclear war, would be nearly insurmountable.

And in closing, since I find it hard to believe that GameDev would have his signature bashing the game he's purportedly promoting, whichever mod toyed with his account ... well, I'm wondering why they made you a mod. No matter how he deserves to be taken down a few pegs for obvious stupidity in game-writing, messing with his sig is childish and unprofessional.
 
BlueNinja said:
by Roshambo -
someone would have practical knowledge of setting up a modern oil drill and refinery after the radiation disperses.
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Building an oil refinery that can seperateeasily usable fuels like gasoline, kerosine, and propane, from crude oil, is not especially difficult.
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But it's something that requires experience and on-the fly decision making, which will not really work well, since the people who worked on such before would have to verbally pass down the knowledge, assuming that they survive. There's many aspects to the process that can't rely on some green idiot fumbling around, even if they had instructions and a crew.

And in closing, since I find it hard to believe that GameDev would have his signature bashing the game he's purportedly promoting, whichever mod toyed with his account ... well, I'm wondering why they made you a mod. No matter how he deserves to be taken down a few pegs for obvious stupidity in game-writing, messing with his sig is childish and unprofessional.
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That wasn't my doing, although it might have something to do with a bit of the hype vanishing from the C:O site. Too bad the title of "Captain Vaporware" is already taken.
 
by Roshambo -
But it's something that requires experience and on-the fly decision making, which will not really work well, since the people who worked on such before would have to verbally pass down the knowledge, assuming that they survive. There's many aspects to the process that can't rely on some green idiot fumbling around, even if they had instructions and a crew.
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With a few chemistry books and a copy of The Way Things Work, I could build one. It wouldn't be anywhere near as efficient as a modern refinery, but it would work, which was my point. There are a great number of things we take for granted (such as electric generators) which are not especially difficult to build crude models of. The problem lies in when you need to advance or improve on your designs, you need people with experience and higher education - something in scant supply in the Wasteland. Unless you're some MacGuyver. :mrgreen:
 
I'm an electronics and electrical engineer both by trade, through my experience with the US Navy. One of my favorite things was to re-engineer some pieces of gear so that they would run more efficiently. Then the 10% bonus kicks in for that. True, most people can make a simple little radio capable of Morse Code if they had simple instructions on how to do it (and most wouldn't know from the start, and still there would be idiots who couldn't put it together - marketing depts. We called them "Radiomen" in the Navy.), but I know how to make tunable UHF voice transceivers (it might help to have spelled it correctly the first time...). If there was a way to get in contact with the military after the bombs fell, that would be their station, as the public channels will be a complete mess for weeks.

On the same note, we're not talking about someone's cobbled-together jalopy or something that still runs on crude like the Clampett's set of wheels.

It wouldn't result in anything like these desk jockeys think it would be. It doesn't require much mechanical knowledge to know what running crap fuel (or even without the additives and treatments of modern fuels) would do to any engine that's equipped with a NOx system.

You would likely be dead as you were incinerated by the engine exploding down the fuel line or having pieces of the engine stuck through you, assuming the sudden reality of the stop didn't.

Ugh...the whole backstory of this game is starting to REALLY stink of "The Eye of Argon".
 
"Prepare to embrace your creators in the stygian haunts of hell, barbarian", gasped the first soldier.

"Only after you have kissed the fleeting stead of death, wretch!" returned Grignr.
 
Look at history. Think about the first people that started trying to pump up oil and refine oil and make gasoline and blah blah, I dont think they had very much experience in it, there has always got to be a first time for everything. i dont think people would sit on their arse and say "No, I dont got the experience to try this, I cant try"...eh, if that was the way of the human mind, then we wouldnt be discussing this now :P
 
Kahgan said:
Look at history. Think about the first people that started trying to pump up oil and refine oil and make gasoline and blah blah, I dont think they had very much experience in it, there has always got to be a first time for everything. i dont think people would sit on their arse and say "No, I dont got the experience to try this, I cant try"...eh, if that was the way of the human mind, then we wouldnt be discussing this now :P
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Stay in context, please. :)

The quality (much less quantity) of the fuel would have been highly in doubt. Either the vehicles would have been falling apart when sufficient detection/drilling/refining techniques are developed, or the cars would have mutated into something different in design and would hardly resemble their original design due to necessary repairs/modifications. NOx in a high-performance car with crap fuel and less than opportune conditions (i.e. fucked or no roads), means that you're going to have a lot of fun repairing axles and supports. That is, if the car and driver survive the impurities doing a number upon the engine to the point of ruining it easily.
 
Context? What context? :P

I have absolutely no idea what this project Omega is, or the NOX part of his project. I do know (somewhat) what it does to cars, and I also know (somewhat) what less-than-optimal fuel does to cars. My point was simply that it isn't impossible to make fuel.

Making fuel for the sole purpose of racing cars, after the apocalypse, is a FUCKING STUPID idea though. That fuel would be far better use running farming vehicles, to leave more manpower available for guarding the community and rebuilding. Or using as booby traps/ambush fires.
 
Oh, I fully agree. We were pretty much going onto the finer aspects of how this would hardly resemble Fallout at all, unless they mean...uh...something. We still haven't seen where, aside from a listed mob in the original advertising thread.

As for the NOx and other amusing garbage which leads me to believe that Alfred likely hasn't done any real automitive work, check out the latest news bit on the C:O site.

If Alfred really was paid to do what he claims, then he would undoubtedly know what an umbrella company is. Calling a development house an "umbrella company" is pretty hilarious.

On another nore. It might work for movies, but when you need to work around a backstory, cheese is not well regarded. There's a number of ways to create a vehicular combat game that would use resources, and without the likely tedium of having to farm to afford car parts and gas, a much more fun manner of presentation. It wouldn't require the completely absurd backstory, too. Once most of the media hits "BioBorg", they will cease to give the project much credibility. Which might explain why the site is pretty much dead.

On, about the electric car idea. With nukes comes something else that precludes that possibility unless it's a post-war model or a rarity that managed to survive. :)
 
Roshambo said:
With nukes comes something else that precludes that possibility unless it's a post-war model or a rarity that managed to survive.
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From what I remember from reading a lot of well-researched sci-fi stuff, the EMP blast from a nuke actually only affects twice the blast radius, if that. However, radiation can easily damage integrated circuits and transistors. If the car was designed to be shielded (as a military model likely would), or was in a rural area or a city small enough it wasn't targetted, it could have survived. And despite the 50's setting, even a gasoline car would have had electronics up the wazoo. Vehicles should be somewhat rare, in any case, but it's possible that you could cobble together enough working parts to get a decent car. Or if you knew enough about electronics, build something to replace the simpler electronic systems.

Of course, then your car might end up looking like the Delorean in Back to the Future 3. ;-)
 
If I remember correctly, a very high altitude burst would cover a huge area, as the ionised air current can fry the electronics of an entire area. This sort of attack would be quite likely in a real modern war. It isn't that hard to shield simple electronical equipment, but in a sudden nuclear holocaust, it would be likely that the installations where you might find military tech would quickly be reduced to smoldering ruins.

A car has bloody complicated wiring, but I don't know if you would be able to build a simpler system, or super system, like the chrysalis highwayman with no fuel or electronics.
 
A ground burst has a very SMALL EMP radius. However, once you get into the upper atmosphere, an EMP pulse can knock out a substantial number of US states at a time. It depends on a few factors, so not all things would be fried. Cities would definitely be put into a blanket coverage and pretty well taken care of. Buildings don't really give much protection from EMP from an aerial burst. Theoretically, it could also lead to a sight of the world's largest tesla coils.

Civilian electronics are supposed to be unshielded from EMP from manufacturer and have been (on a practical scale). So that means that a lot of things can fry. In the Fallout universe, electric was the alternative to fuel, but it was expensive. In the wilderness, with the remote possibility of any advanced vehicles, vehicles would likely be used by someone panicking and driven to their likely doom. Even if a vehicle was taken care of well and maintained in a vault, there's still the matter of fuel lastin in shelf life and quantity, and a decent roadway. It's funny how some kids think the whole world is paved.

Now let's see the brahmin cart battles! :D
 
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