Modding ideas/suggestions

Slaughter Manslaught said:
- Add more variety for and of weapons. Think Pistols and Revolvers: Pistols fire fast and carry more ammunition, but jamming is disastrous. Revolvers do not fire as fast and carry low ammounts of ammo, but they rarely jam, if they jam you just need to cycle the cylinder, they are a little more accurate and carry more firepower. Any weapon not consistant with Fallout would disappear or be changed.
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sigh....
revolvers are more accurate? thats absurd. also, that pistols fire faster is a bit of an iffy statement- it really depends on the gun and your amount of skill with it. revolvers rarely jamming is another thing that i think you're mislead on, any gun that has the chamber open to the environment is more likely to jam or fail to fire.think about it, if you drop a revolver in the dirt versus a pistol, which will fare better? if pistols jam, its generally because the particular gun is unreliable or there is a problem with the magazine.


ranting aside, i would like to see a variety of ammunition in the game similar to fo/fo2, though it would be a bit of work reworking how ap ammo acts differently than normal...
 
Brother None said:
Oh god oh god oh god someone remove those goddamn minigames and replace them with skill checks

They're f'ing horrifying.
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Yeah, or stupidly you can't even try to unlock the door, when your skill is too low, which means the Luck is not needed in the game a t all.
 
Just to start out with, I'd like V.A.T.S. refined further to include not only different firing modes for your weapons like the ones you had back in the original games, but also a system for movement. Namely, charging the enemy or dashing to cover. Also, is it too much to ask for the ability to target specific body parts with melee weapons?

Plus, if you're particularly brave, let's take that idea to its inevitable conclusion: I'd like to see enemies have morale reactions to the tide of a battle. Suppose I jam my flaming sword into both of their legs utterly crippling one after the other with two effortless swings, and I'm making ready to finish them off with the third. Suppose as well that I've done the exact same thing to all five of their buddies and that they're the last one left. Now if they were barely sentient super mutants or feral ghouls, I wouldn't begrudge them flying into a bout of pure dangerous-when-cornered-and-desperate frenzy and hurl everything they have at me, yanking out pins of all their grenades and trying to bludgeon me with them, for instance, but if I were to do this to a Raider or another human, I'd like to see them fall to their knees (they should be there anyway if both of their legs have been reduced to red party streamers) and start begging desperately for mercy. Then I want the option to sheath my weapon and engage in conversation with them in which they start sobbing, begging for mercy, offering money, food, water, smokes... sex if they're women? Servitude if they're men? Everything they call their own if you just please, please, please, please don't kill them! Then you can get the high Karma option to forgive them and let them go, after which they run as fast as their pathetic legs can take them and are never seen again, the neutral Karma option to put them out of their misery, and the super evil Karma option to torture them, taking their means to placate your murderous rage, and then killing them anyway. Either way, you get just as much EXP for taking these options of dealing with them as you would for just killing them, but with the added bonus of Karma and, here's the important part, roleplaying and immersion opportunities galore!
And that's just one possible morale outcome! I want it to permeate into the AI completely. Like for instance, if you effortlessly slay half their company, I want to see them scream stuff like "Fall back! Regroup!" "Jesus! What is that thing?!" "Charlie! He killed Charlie! I'm gonna' end you, you rotten bastard!" "Sheila! What are you doing? Get out of that monster's line of sight/arm reach!"

And suppose you effortlessly destroy a company of five Raiders down to the last one who you brutally torture? The Raiders should be their own quasi-faction that you have a reputation with, so that word of your brutality or alternately, your merciful nature spreads among them. Soon enough, as you gain levels, they'll start putting up more of a fight and answering your specific fighting style. If you're a notorious sniper, then when they see you on the horizon, they'll shout out "It's the Vault Dweller! Get 'em!" and all pull out their melee weapons and charge you. Contrarily, if you're a melee dude (all three of you out there) then they'll do their best to keep their distance and shell you with grenades and take pot shots at you. That means you have to always outsmart your enemies because they'll always be trying to outsmart you.

There are lots of ways to make the game more challenging without just tweaking hit point levels or worse, the way Oblivion had you staring down people equipped with the rarest and most powerful gear in the universe before you were half-way through the game just because you had the audacity to figure out how to one-shot the rubes in fur armor early on in your life. If Raiders begin to notice other camps being slaughtered by this one man army, they're not going to spontaneously decide that now is the time to break out better weapons which they were holding back on before. They're still going to be equipped with the same gear, and humans can only have so many hit points, each. What they would do is try Zerg tactics to overwhelm you. "A hundred caps to the one who takes him down! Let's get' im!" Then you get to reconsider your life's options as you're staring down fifteen Raiders who are very peeved by the fact that you've been exterminating them three-by-three lately.



These ideas are all pretty lofty, and may not be feasible with anything short of abducting the game's original programming staff and ordering them around, but modders are a resourceful bunch, and I'm pretty confident that the tools we need to make our dreams for this game a reality are there, even if they're very well hidden. Now what's odd is that refining V.A.T.S. and adding a morale system to combat is actually one of my less radical ideas for improving gameplay.
 
Ok, The game is good ... just not that "fallout 1 & 2" kind of good.
I have nothing agains the view being FPS. It's Fallout, i will play this in a 2D - 8bit if they make one ...
I've been seeing this forum for some weeks and i don't think you all noticed the BIG BIG flaw of this game.
There are some that we all want resolved:

the items
we need a greater amount of guns, it would be good if it was the same as in FO2.

the bullets, also like FO2, there should be 2 or 3 types of each caliber AND they should have some weight, because right now i have more than 1000 of each and 90 missiles and that's just ridiculous and lowers the game dificulty

All the guns should have enhancements, like in the UFO aftershock or jagged alliance 2 game, not as simplistic as FO2 weapon upgrades.

the VATS
we all agreed on the melee and unarmed beeing able to select a part to hit. Also, there must be a sneak sillent kill option not just the sandman perk (that's a great great perk).

Have, as said before by others, the eyes and groin parts in vats.

And now the BIG BIG flaw:
the quests. They are few and worse: they don't have 1/3 of the sarcasm and that dark humor we find in the other FO's.

This phrase is the real reason why we find the game just not good enough. the more i think it, the more i believe in this:
it's not the view, not the items, not the vats. It's the quests.

[/b]
 
zodman said:
This phrase is the real reason why we find the game just not good enough. the more i think it, the more i believe in this:
it's not the view, not the items, not the vats. It's the quests.

[/b]
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I think you honestly may be onto something there. I haven't finished the main quest yet, but I've heard many things about its distinct lack of epic and/or awesome. The end of Oblivion's main quest was pretty incredible. I mean [spoiler:7ef0ea65e6]Sean Bean turned into a friggin' dragon, for pity's sake[/spoiler:7ef0ea65e6]!

Improving the quests and adding new ones will be a massive undertaking, however, even if we don't ultimately decide to touch the main quest and just add to the secondaries. Would you propose adding more settlements, as well, or just fleshing out the existing ones with more people?
 
  • Cars don't blow up
  • Diagonal running animation
  • Item descriptions
  • Less death-prone Dogmeat
  • Better swimming animation
  • No more minigames
 
TheFlyingBuddha said:
Hah, even in Oblivion modding there's still no really good way to get around the minigames. Though I would definitely prefer skill checks too, I have to say the minigames for FO3 are actually not *that* terrible, though the silly 4 mistakes then you get locked out of the terminal thing was just stupid because all you have to do is quit out of after three errors and start again. They needed to come up with some sort of hidden mechanism for it or keep track of your failures.

Just be happy there wasn't one for disposition. :-)
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I've got Oblivion modded for Morrowind-style lockpicking and persuasion
 
There shouldn't be crap like this

"You need 50 lockpick skill to do this!"

That totally makes the Luck skill useless.


We need to change the Pip Boy! We should be able to make this new POS less "click and click" crap. It's too much of clicking, too many menus seperately.
 
Hello everyone at NMA-Fallout,

This is my first post here, though I been lurking for some time.

Please make a mod to disable that 'fast travel' feature. It ruins the whole immersion and feel of game for me, just like vita-chambers in Bioshock did.
 
Hello everyone.

This is quite the long one, but please hang on :P

I've read every post in this thread and I agree with like 95% of it all, except that one guy with the wow-dots or whatever.
I agree with you on your points and I would also like to point out that this guy is awesome in his remarks. Read that article, please.

My opinion is of the same as yours: Make it more like FO 1&2, REALISM, Fatman, Exploding cars, quests suck, more of this less of that blablabla.
BUT MY POINT IS:

Can it be done?

Let us look away from the fact that we do not yet have the proper (promised!) tools to achieve what we consider the realFallout 3. We all love the previous fallouts, but we also love our OWN parts of those games. And we feel that the game should be improved to be more like fallout 1 and 2, but is it not really more like what you feel is fallout 1&2?

I, for instance, would like more realism and guns. The schematics-based improvised whacky-gun is a great idea. But it was also an idea not completely explored. Where are ingredients like Dynamite, TNT, screws, bolts, scrap metal (shrapnel), metal tubes, C4 and whatnot? Why not allow us to combine and make “real” weapons like Molotov’s or improvised grenades or IED’s? But then again, the whole weapon-degrading system – and combat-system overall – is generally FUCKED UP. A pistol does not degrade into worthlessness after 100 shots or even 10,000 dammit!
Before I go on rambling my opinion on what should be modded/patched into awesomeness/improvement, I would like to point out that these are all MY opinions and NOT yours OR the public’s. So the NEW question is:

Should it be done?

Think of it. Is your opinion on improvements what others generally feel as well? If that is so, then I gladly give you my vote. But if not, then I am pretty sure it will never happen.

But our real problem is not what people feel should be done, but whether or not they’re actually going to do something about it.
THAT is our problem. THAT is what we must consider. Should it, can it and will it be done?

“Improving this, removing that, enhancing this and deleting that.” Blahblahblah
INSTEAD of babbling on on what is good and what is not (and should be modded correctly) explain instead HOW it should be done - or even better, do it yourself. Out of a critical "will-people-actually-like-this?" kind of eye and evaluate if it is really worth the trouble, for the mod makers and the public.

I do not have any skills whatsoever with modding, but I am 100% available for constructive criticism and ideas - oh so many ideas - but I still cannot do shit about it. I can't mod, I can't texture, I can't program etc... All I can do is give ideas. But I don't like it when people just shit out crazy ideas and tell people to do this and do that.

Think about it yourself:
Can you do it?
If so, do it.
If not:
Think about it, how would you carry out doing this and improving that? How would someone remove the god-forsaken cars and their nukes? How would someone "improve" the weapons of the game? Just edit .ini files and be happy? Reverse-engineer the whole fucking game? DO WHAT, EXACTLY?

This post ended in a mess, but then again I am a mess right now. :P

So please, PLEASE: STOP BEING SO CYNICAL!

THANK YOU
 
I personally LIKE the minigames (yes I know *GASP*) h-o-w-e-v-e-r I am playing the game on the 360 which has analog controllers so you can slowly turn the tension wrench (screw driver?) to be able to keep from breaking your bobby pins.

That said I think a skill check would be GREAT maybe something where each lock/computer has a varied skill required level and the game rolls to see if you are even capable of attempting it.

Like your skill = 50, but the required skill to be able to use this is a variable between 25-80. The game then rolls a skillcheck to see if you can attempt it, if the roll drops between 25-50 then it lets you do it, but above that and the lock jams. The top end number (80 in this case) would be lowered dependent on your Luck stat, also if you fail your luck stat could proc something similar to a 'saving throw' where if you make the saving throw the lock does NOT jam, but you still fail to attempt to pick it.

I like the minigames, they add a bit of immersion to the game, however once you reach the required level to pick a lock its no longer about luck/skill and more about how many bobby pins you have.
 
feasibility of modding (without an SDK)

So, not to rain on anyone's parade, but I've been messing around with the game data files with my good old hex editor, and trying to make oblivion-style "plugins". The good news is that the plugins load, and you can AddItem things from the plugins to use them in game. The bad news is that they don't actually work right. Currently, newer files don't override the main Fallout3.esm even if they're newer; additionally, items in .esp files don't connect properly to other game entities. This means that, for example, if you copy the power armor verbatim into a .esp and load the .esp version in game, you don't get any of the bonuses (which are handled by linking the armor to an "enchantment" that says to raise strength, lower agility, etc.).

As far as I can tell so far, this basically means that the only way to mod the game data is to edit the main Fallout3.esm directly. While this can be done (I've done it, and you can in fact make all the power armor in the game suck less), it's not portable; I can't post 300mb of data online for people to download, and even if I could, you could only use one mod at a time, with no way to merge them.

For those of you who know how to use a hex editor, some things I've discovered about the data files that might be helpful:

1) byte order is reversed in the files; this means that "10 00" in hex is equal to 16 in decimal, and "00 10" in hex is equal to 4096 in decimal. When you're editing values, keep this in mind.

2) for armor (ARMO), the DATA field contains 12 bytes. The first two seem to correspond to the monetary value of the item, and the last two correspond to the weight of the item (multiplied by 100, I think).

3) for armor, the DNAM field (4 bytes) contains the actual damage resistance (again, multiplied by 100)

4) the EITM field contains a reference to an ENCH (enchantment) object that's associated with an item. This is what gives an item special properties, like skill/stat bonuses, etc. The ENCH in turn has a list of IDs and ITs; the IDs reference particular modifiers (eg. strength bonus), and the ITs specify ammounts (at least, the first few indicies do; I'm not sure what's in the rest of the 20 byte string).

It is possible to mod power armor to:
1) give you a meaningful strength bonus (eg. +4)
2) remove the agility penalty (or convert it to a bonus)
3) add a "weight limit increase" with an amount that matches the weight of the armor, so it doesn't actively decrease the amount you can carry.

Unfortunately, you have to modify each type of power armor separately (eg. BOS, Enclave, outcast, army, lyons, etc.), and I haven't been able to get any of it to really work properly as a plugin, so there's no good way of distributing it.

If anyone else here has any ideas about ways of getting plugins to behave properly, please let me know, as I'd love to release "good" powered armor to the world at large. Maybe someone who knows more about modding Oblivion can help, though the modified Oblivion tools I've tried using seem only partially functional with Fallout 3.

Hopefully this information will be helpful to other people trying to mod this game, and maybe start moving this conversation in a more useful and productive direction (instead of just a wish list).
 
Excellent work, Arisian. Like Coituz implied (Oh, I just got the joke of his name. I see what you did there.) understanding the hows of this stuff will give the idea people the tools they need to elevate themselves from the soapboxes to actually delivering on their jib.

Have any of you discovered a way to remove the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. point cap in special cases so that the Power Armor, for instance, can still benefit people with 10 Strength by elevating them to literally super-human levels?
 
I haven't found any direct encoding of stat caps so far, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. It's possible that the caps for SPECIAL stats are hard-coded in the engine, rather than in the data file, though, in which case there's not much we can really do unless the devs give us some better tools. Editing data files is one thing; editing binary executables is another. There are people out there who have experience with that kind of thing, but I'm not one of them. As I said, though, I'm not sure yet where those caps are handled, so it's hard to say how feasible changing them will be. My guess, based on my in-game experiences, is that they were designed to be "hard" caps, so there's a good chance that it may be very difficult to relax them (just because the devs would have seen no reason to make it easy to do so if they never envisioned having to).

That said, I think it should be possible to simulate many of the effects of higher strength; you can add "enchant" parameters that increase max carry weight, increase unarmed and melee damage, etc.

Again, all this comes with the caveat that I currently only know how to do any of this in the main fallout3.esm data file. The version of TESsnip that's been designed for fallout3 (comes with the Fallout Mod Manager) is great for viewing the main data file, but it doesn't seem to work for editing it; when I try to write an edited version to disk, the next time I run the game all the terrain is gone, and everyone including the PC falls for about 10 seconds before hitting the "bottom of the world" and dying.

If you're going to modify any files, I *strongly* recommend making backup copys first, so you don't have to re-install the game when you mess yours up :)

A standard hex editor works for modifying fallout3.esm, but it's slow and painful to try to do anything complicated with it. And again, using the plugin framework isn't working well for me; if anyone has a reliable system for creating functioning plugins, I would love to hear about it.
 
Here's a screenshot of my current power armor mod; all done editing Fallout3.esm with a hex editor.

PowerArmorBoost.jpg
 
Improving the quests and adding new ones will be a massive undertaking, however, even if we don't ultimately decide to touch the main quest and just add to the secondaries. Would you propose adding more settlements, as well, or just fleshing out the existing ones with more people?
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I liked what Coituz said and even more of that link he posted.
like him, i can't help in modding the FO. The only thing i can do is to give some ideias ..... better than nothing, i guess ...

My disapointment with the game started with Oblivion. I loved Oblivion nearly as much as i loved the FO 1&2 almost 10 years ago. of course i started to compare all of them to FO3. BAD MOVE!

FO3 have 1 main quest with 10 to 15 hours lenght and 17 side quests.
I don't remember exactly but i think oblivion had around 8 cities and in each city aroud 5 side quests. More than this they had 5 guilds and each of them more or less 10 side quests and they allowed you to rise up in the guild. Also, they had freeform quests and again they were bettwen 5 and 10 quests. Last but not least, the main quest took not less than 20 hours to finish.
Almost 100 quests in Oblivion to 20 in quests in FO3.

If at least they were 20 quests but in FO 1&2 style .... but noooo, it's 20 FO3 quests in Oblivion style. Little sarcasm and little or none dark humor....

I understand that it is a wasteland and it would be unreal to place more settlements but the one existing have only 1 or 2 side quests. there are many unused NPCs that sole purpose in life is giving you information. they could give us quests and at the same time could keep the game reallistic by not overpopulating a wasteland.

Also oblivion had the guilds, FO have factions. Each faction could have more quests and maybe rise up in the faction.
I keep thinking in the slavers. ohhhh the quests would be filled with that dark humor in the FO style .....

A final thing: it's amazing that a FPS with this environment and mood doesn't even try to scare the player once ....
 
One more thing: why can't we make turrets our allies? for a average science skill guy i understand the turret attacking everyone, but the top science skill guy, like me, should be able to turn them into allies, right?
 
zodman said:
One more thing: why can't we make turrets our allies? for a average science skill guy i understand the turret attacking everyone, but the top science skill guy, like me, should be able to turn them into allies, right?
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Hack their terminals... if there is one nearby... You can either disable the turret or make it attack enemies. Idk if you can make it don't attack you tho.
 
I think the hunting rifle should be made to fire 5.56 like in the original games. it makes no sense at all that it shoots the same round as the anemic .32 pistol (which is not even a pistol to begin with but that's a different issue)
 
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