Project FOMTOM

Y

Yoshee

First time out of the vault
This thread is the temporary design doc for Project FOMTOM, initial discussion for which took place here: http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=46660

I'll be posting excerpts from my design outline, eventually everything except the plot and content sections which contain spoilers. Feedback is appreciated, and i'll sometimes throw things out as 'would you prefer X or Y?'.

To start I'll just put out some general FAQ stuff, I'll post the first design doc parts tonight.

- What is Project FOMTOM?
FOMTOM is a completely new world map and massive gameplay tweak for FO3. There will be a new play experience from start to finish.

FOMTOM stands for Fallout: Monument to Madness, which is the working title for the mod.


- Where does it take place?
It is set on the East Coast, in the year 2200. It stretches from Southern Virginia to Eastern Pennsylvania and through to Massachussets. While the title would seem to indicate the importance of DC (Monument Madness anyone?), the meaning of 'monument' is not literal, and DC is neither the start nor the end of the game.

Other cities besides DC that are expected to make an appearance are New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and Baltimore. Locations such as the Naval Academy, Langley, Harvard, and Three Mile Island (alternate timeline), also are in the existing doc. Many locations not on any current map are being created just for the game as well (like Megaton and other postwar creations).


- Who is working on it?
Me, myself, and I, I'm not allowing any additional team members until the release of Episode I. I want people to see something tangible and my intended vision before they volunteer their very valuable time to the project. I also wield dictatorial powers because I want to build SOMETHING, and I feel the endless discussion on what it could be would ultimately slow down the possibility of anything being built.

Feedback is appreciated, where possible it will be utilized, but constraints of time and consistency of the mod will limit what can be used.


- How does it play?
It is within the FO3 engine, it will have first person perspective, it will have combination of VATS/FPS gameplay, and it will make use of most of the gameplay mechanics in the existing game. However, a lot of things will be heavilly tweaked, as described in more details in the other sections of the design doc.

At its heart, FOMTOM is a content mod, so I'm not interested in reprogramming it to be turn-based, or completely reworking skills to add new features like Gambling or Outdoorsman.


- What about SPECIAL and derived stats?
Most of the derived stats will be significantly rebalanced, and the attributes may be remapped to other uses. Stat checks will be used in dialogue (and yes, there will be a stupid path for INT <= 2), and more extensively in gameplay... such as perception and luck effecting random encounters. The general trend I will be aiming for is more variation, so the range of AP for instance from changing Agility will be much wider than the 2 or so AP per point you have now.


- What about skills?
I intend to use the full range of 1-100, and no I am not bringing back 300% skills (I think the concept is silly actually). I intend to make tag skills grow at double speed though. The range will remap so that at 25 you are considered competent, 50 proficient, 75 expert, and at 100 you are better than anyone else in the wastes. NPCs will have stats based on that standard, so if you encounter a legendary sniper you can expect him to have a small gun skill of about 90.

You should notice significant difference in your abilities at all notches of the skill level, for instance science will no longer be unlocked at 25 point increments, computers will use the full range of values for their 'can I hack them' check.


- What about leveling?
XP will be made rarer, and time to increase in level will be scaled upward. The design is to make variation in your character important, it will be very hard to powerbuild a jack of all trades character. If you play as a diplomat you will have a significant difference than playing as a bloodthirsty big guns thug. My intent is to make many character archetypes have a good gameplay experience, there is no 'one strategy fits all' approach to let you do everything.


- What makes it different from FO3 in general?
Location design will be radically different, settlements will be widely spaced and very heavilly worked in terms of detail and gameplay. A big trading town like the Hub will play very differently than a tight security army base, and the change in atmosphere should be dramatic. There will be very few dungeons, and whatever such exist will mostly be critter focused. Hostile locations will be highly scripted to have some level of organized (or purposefully disorganized) defense force.

The story design will be more ambivalent, communities will be more self-focused. The sense of good and evil will be highly avoided, to the point where karma is being removed from the mod. I'm not interested in guiding or helping the player, the dialogue trees will be very large and complex, but you could walk up to sheriff in Megaton and ask 'Where is my dad?' and be told 'I don't frickin care, I've got raiders to worry about fool.', meanwhile you could ask someone in a Raider camp and they might say 'Ya I saw him being shanghaied by Slavers'.

So the speech and story content is where I expect to expend a lot of energy, there will be a lot of possible paths, and very complex interweaving, but don't expect an answer (or the right answer) from everyone you come across. Some people if you bug them will probably just shoot you. I am devising about 6 wildly different personality types which I run all speech through, so at almost any point in the convo you can lean in multiple different ways along a slightly different spectrum than good, evil, neutral.
 
Ya, episode one will probably take multiple months, but I have no life so I need a hobby anyway!

I should mention episodes while I am at it:
- The game will be broken up into ten episodes, each episode will be released individually.

- Every two episodes, so Episode 3, 5, 7, 9, will be a 'reset' episode, save games will not be able to travel across those eps. Every other episode will be compatible with all previous ones (so if you played episode one and have a game going, you can keep playing that game after you download episode two, but at episode three you'll need to start a new game.

- An episode is basically a 50x50 square mile region (about the size of FO3), but I'm working on a 'location budget' for each one, so instead of a hundred plus locations in that space, I'd have 4-10 (depending on the complexity of each).

- Episode 1 has the added difficulty of containing all the gameplay tweaks that will be done (unless I find some emergency tweaks in later episodes that I have to make). It will also be the most content sparse of the episodes (it is away from the heavy developed cities of the coast).

- Episodes add new sections of world map, but they also add content to pre-existing locations. This happens on the 2 episode boundary described earlier, since it may include breaking changes. So if you played through say 'Megaton' in Episode 1, when you start a new game in Episode 3, you may have a considerably different experience (particularly in cross-location quest lines, time-dependent subquests, and of course the main quest lines).


Okay enough on that diversion, I'm basically spitting out my entire section from memory, so I should wait for the polished doc version before describing any more. The central point is: Episode One will probably take a few months at the least, it will be a complete playable chunk, but it will not be the massive world described earlier, it will be a roughly one tenth sized portion of it, and will have roughly one tenth of the storyline content. The full project is expected to take at least a year, so I am trying to emphasize that each piece is a complete experience (albeit smaller in scope at first).
 
As already said, it sounds greate!
But I'm a bit worried about "episode" idea. I would definitely prefer some demos and the main release, consisting of all the content. I think that it would be a torment waiting for next episode release. Of course it would mean it could take many months, maybe even a couple of years. No offence intended, and I really love your ideas. It would make Fallout 3 more... Fallout!
 
If your going to mod the captitol waste ok, or create a new city, ok (more work) but a neat idea. I'd start with one city and expand from there incrementally, otherwise your going to take more than you can chew at first. Take one bite at a time.

Yet, is your mod going to be a pain for me to use. I still haven't gotten the existing mods to use cuz you have to down load this FoMM then open it, and do some hokus pokus and get it to work.

Best to simply create one .Esp file I can simply download to my Data file and it works, easy and simple. If the basic person can't do that it doesn't matter how cool something is, its too much of a pain to get it to work.

I'm sure if I were you I'd wait till the GECK, and use it.

If you do another mod and want to expand I like the idea of expanding the capitol waste into the Commonwealth, which is not in the game but sounds cool. Perhaps have a means on the current map to go to a specific place and then use a 'fast travel' to the edge of the new area which is not geographically connected directly to the capitol wasteland, or a new 'U.S. Map' so that you can pick different cities and then 'fast travel there'. As you expand the game fill in the gaps between these cities so you don't have to fast travel there if you don't want to.

By the way, if your goin to create something like this please take a look at Darwin's World. There are many innovations which expand on key ideas of Fallout that would be cool in a Fo3 game. Things like the idea of a group of robots who either want to be worshiped by humans or living creatures or else left alone to create their own world. A group like the Metal Gods.

Also groups like the Clean Water Clans (a group of clean water traders), the Brethern who hate technology and destroy it much like the Mutants from the Omega Man.

Then you can add something like the Doomriders, basically raiders with a death to everyone wish but they are organized in a 'horde' much like the army of the waste in Road Warrior.

Basically there are many cool fleshed out ideas from Darwin's World (Such as Domed cities, droids, and the way they took the idea of the Master and transformed it into the Last God which I don't want to spoil the fun of what that is but after reading it and then learning about the master I think the Last God is a cooler version).

You can add a knighthood like the Knights of Route 66 who use shields like highway signs or stop signs, etc. and in this game might wield Shishkabobs. The Shield would give a good DR bonus (ie like +20 max durability).

Add things from Gamma World and Darwin's World especially from the weapons. Things like Masers, Atomic (particle) guns, and perhasp add Infra-vision to the game.

More creatures, something I read the original designers wanted to do, cuz the things in fallout only scratch the surface of funky stuff you can add to a post apoc setting game.

Create a forested area full of mutant plants, instead of becoming irradiated and bleak this small part nested between two hills became the Garden of Damned Plants or something like that, with funky mutant animals, perhaps mutant this into a mutanted Zoo and Arboridium since many buildings are still around who says the plants would not be and live off a modified photosynthesis where they literally are sustained by radiation thus the area has a constant radiation. The place would have some nice loot but be deadly (creatures, radiation, and mutant plants that can act as traps too)
 
I am considering a tech demo which will basically be Episode 1 light, but with all gameplay tweaks so I can test various mechanics out (and ask for more detailed feedback).

The episodes are probably more for my benefit than yours, it lets me pace things a little bit and makes it feel less like an all or nothing project. My hope is it will give me little bits of warm fuzzies along the way to keep up my energy on what I'm already envisioning as a year long hobby project. Also it will discipline my release cycle so I don't wander off and forget to finish things, or constantly do just the easy stuff and defer hard tasks.

I will not heavilly hype the episodic releases other than Episodes 1, 4, and 10 (complete)... and if players want to wait till its complete before starting I won't blame them given the issue about breaking changes requiring game restarts.

Anyway, even though the full section is not ready I'll go ahead and post this cheap-o image I've been using for my drafting:
http://www.screencast.com/t/RRM5OCJBp

Based on World Map Eps Zone Image:

Episode 1: NorthWest Region, contains starting location.

Episode 2: Philadelphia Region, contains Philadelphia and

Atlantic City.

Episode 3: Baltimore Region, contains Baltimore, Dover, and the

large peninsula.

Episode 4: Three Mile Region, contains Harrisburg.

Episode 5: North Central Region. North of New York, West of

Hartford

Episode 6: Hartford Region

Episode 7: New Yor Region, includes all of Long island.

Episode 8: DC Region and all land West.

Episode 9: Richmond Region, southern border.

Episode 10: Boston Region, northern border.

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Note this is just geography reference, and will not necessarilly correspond to final location positions or existence (for instance I currently have no plans for Richmond/Dover/etc).

The yellow lines were my five second borders between eps, in actually I'll either cut the line between eps on natural borders (rivers/mountains) or straight lines. So they will significantly shift.

I expect to release on every episode, but milestones:

Tech Demo: Pre Episode 1, world map exists, at least one complete location, all expected gameplay mechanics work complete. (This may actually take the longest part of development, as I'm hoping content will be more of a grind, whereas this phase will involve a lot of prototype work and research). I'm expecting to only release this to those who are interested in buggy work.

Episode 1: First general release, will contain a completely playable region, with all non-interregion quests completely functional. It will include the first 'month' of gameplay as well for the overarching time-locked questing (think FO 1). On its own it should be an enjoyable game, albeit much less content than FO3, but hopefully the subquests I have planned should be deep enough to sell the potential of the game. Also I won't leave any cliffhangers, if a quest is resolved in a later episode it will be added to the game at that point. The exception is sub-parts to main quest lines if they are self-contained (i.e. the mission is to get to Rivet City, and you can do that, but the next step is missing, I'll finish the get to Rivet City part).

Episode 4: The first main quest completes. Main quests are somewhat weird in my design, most would probably consider them highly developed quest paths. This is essentially my 'early exit' point, if I feel the game is good but I'm just not finding it very rewarding to work on, or other people don't seem to be interested very much, then I'll wrap up the loose ends and call it complete. I'm expecting by this point to have a game where people would feel they had a complete RPG experience, start to finish. This also is the point where I might actively try to recruit volunteers.

Episode 10: Well if it ends in Episode 4, what am I doing? Well if I'm making magic over here why not go above and beyond and create an epic mod! The last six episodes unravel any other 'main quest' lines I decide to create (probably 3 total main quests including the one that completes in Ep 4). The back six also contains some of the more spectacular locations people are probably excited to see, like the re-envisioned DC, New York, Boston (and the pre-commonwealth interpretation). At Episode 10 the game is complete.

Episode 11: A pseudo episode, no new world map, or main quest work, but I want to create a Fallout 2 style 'aftermath'. Also I'll trigger my own version of the end game slideshow (in some fashion or another). This is mostly to give some context to the player that wants to keep playing after the story is over, since I hope to provide lots of subquests and faction quests to keep people busy.


Anyhoo, enough on the release plan, we're miles away from anything right now! Gotta get onto the actual design doc work again.
 
I need the GECK for this to be feasible at all, if it is close enough to the Oblivion CS I think I'll have a shot.

I do agree release details are important, and will be an important part of my early work. I do not want the installation process to be laborious (and will provide an installer), however, I will not guarantee compatibility with other mods (I will do best to accomodate expansion packs). Central to my work is a completely new world location, which may be implemented with a complete world swap, or by claiming some region of the massive FO3 worldspace and warping the player into my mod. A central premise is that I do not want to support simultaneous play of FO3 and my mod, although I may offer a portal between the worlds depending on my implementation (with a strong suggestion that I may completely screw up the FO3 playing experience).

The mod will be built as one giant self-contained unit, and my core concern is making sure that you can completely remove the mod and have it not interfere with FO3, the expansion packs, or other mods. I just can't guarantee you can safely run it at the same time as those other games/mods (I will do my best though to try).

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The plan is incremental, however I'm starting from wide open space instead of the FO3 wasteland. The first bites however are gameplay tweaks which I'll be describing in more detail over the next week, many of which could be potentially applied to FO3 without the greater part of my mod.

I think the Commonwealth sounds cool as well (although my setting is pre FO3, and FO2 for that matter, so a Commonwealth prequel). As a fall back to the endless waste I am considering text event based 'fast travel' between locations (ala FO 1/2), with random encounters in between on small mini-maps. I'll know which approach I'm going with after I see what is out there in the GECK and mod community.

I'd like a link to Darwin's World or any other source material you think would be a good influence on my writing. I'm not above stealing good ideas, mwahahaha! Most of my theft is from literary sources and film at the moment. I am nervous though about content from other sources without credit, I'll steal mercilessly from stuff everyone knows about, but I require permissions from original artists on anything I think is truly original and hasn't been seen before.

Yes, the Omega Man, your going to tempt me into giving out spoilers!

My artistic abilities are somewhat limited, and will mostly be applied to architecture. So unfortunately it is unlikely that I will be adding new meshes for weapons or armor unless if I pick up a good artist along the way. I do intend to release my building meshes to the general public for use in their own mods once I finish their respective episodes. I also will gladly steal good weapons, armors, creatures from other talented modders who give me permission.

As an aside, no I am not including any form of nude mod (although I probably can't block others from putting one in there), and I will not introduce a child killing mod, unless I bring children into my mod (which I may just avoid entirely, you can do a lot of drama with just adults).

So in short, I do plan to trawl the mod community for good additions, but after episode 1 is well on the road to completion. By then however there should be a lot of cool creature and weapon mods to choose from. If other people build the art I'm certain I can find good uses for it, particularly more animals or character art.

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Sorry for drowning everyone in text, I will try to answer all questions as they come in, I have a tendency towards the long winded if I don't do an editing pass. Promise the design doc sections are much more consise!
 
Okay, sections are going to be out of order for a while, as I'm cherry picking ones I want more feedback on first. Feel free to propose additions or ask clarifying questions, this is the time to make changes if I'm going to!


SKILLS AND THEIR USES

Gameplay is mostly expressed through how the player develops and utilizes the Skills in the game.

- Every skill is a valuable addition to a character, and has an impact on the game.
- The full range of the 1-100 spectrum should have an observable effect on the Skills performance.
- A skill of 100 should be obviously different than 50 (relationship need not be linear though).

Barter:
- Impacts the price multiplier for buying and selling.
+ When negotiating quest prices in conversation, Barter checks will replace Speech checks. Also it will not be probabilistic, the option will appear if you can do it, otherwise you have only the basic option.
+ Will affect multiple parts of Caravan Quests.
+ Will allow 'bargaining' options in Negotiation Quests.

= Most things of value are either heavilly guarded or expensive, Barter skill will lubricate your journey through the wastes by making trading easier.
= To up quest rewards you generally have three options, use Speech if there is some clever trick available, use intimidation tactics if you can back them up (and you can bet you will be tested), or have high barter skill in which case you just naturally see the true value your work is worth. Barter is the only one that is safe, unless you received a 'no haggling' warning.
= Caravan quests are some of the most rewarding, but often are tricky to start/complete, high Barter by itself can complete 75% of them (and makes all such quests easier).



Big Guns:
- Impacts the accuracy and damage of Big Guns (mod this to accuracy only)
+ These weapons should have big accuracy penalty at range, but most should be super strong at short range.
+ At low skill levels you can barely handle the equipment (because its not just point and shoot style gear), and will have a hard time even at short range. Maybe instead of accuracy mod this to be reflected in AP cost as well.

= Big Guns are the heavy hitters of FOMTOM, pound for pound they should put out more damage per second than anything else.
= Big Guns are heavy, given mods to Strength/Carry Weight they should cause you to compromise somewhere else in your character (either boost strength, or change your kit setup).
= Ammo is scarce, so the skill may be an expensive one to support.
= Should be slightly harder to maintain than normal weaponry, given the extreme forces involved.



Energy Weapons:
- Impacts the accuracy and damage of Energy Weapons (mod this to accuracy only)
+ These weapons should accurate and lightweight, but expensive and difficult to use against energy shielding (if that mod works)
+ Skill level indicates how good you are at maintaining beam contact on a target. It is not a slug, the energy is applied over time, so a hit must be maintained to do damage. Yes I just made this up to differentiate Small Guns and Energy Weapons skill, so sue me!

= Energy Weapons, pound for pound, should do the most damage per pound of any weapon. If ammo-weight mod is implemented, the charges should be lightweight.
= Plasma weapons should be fairly strong but rare, since they were late pre-war era tech. Lasers should be comparable to Small Guns alternatives.
= Energy weapons should suffer lower rates of decay than other weapons, since they have fewer moving parts, and are better engineered.
= Equipment/ammo should be rare, but one cache or good trading trip should be enough to supply you for quite a while.
EDIT: = Energy weapons should be harder to repair than other weapons, because they are intricate devices that need specific spare parts.



Explosives:
- Affects the damage grenades due, and the ability to disarm traps (and atom bombs?!).
+ Impact the accuracy of throwing grenades only.
+ Make it harder to disarm traps in general.
+ High explosives ability will offer unique quest paths, involving huge booms of course.

= This is basically Throw + Traps. Traps are more prevalent in FOMTOM, and much harder to get around, and more likely to kill you (or cripple you).
= Grenades are useful crowd clearers, and if the combat mods succeed could be a valuable tool against entrenched enemies behind cover.
= The skill is reinterpretted in a third way, a general sense of oneness with 'boom', combined with perception checks you may be able to rig various scripted items to blow. If you fail the explosives check, you blow instead.



Lockpick:
- Affects picking locks.

= No change necessary. The value of this skill is that FOMTOM folk are a distrusting lot, nearly everything worth locking up, is locked. Sure you can kill whoever has the key, if you can kill them that is. And sometimes there is no key, particularly in the more 'scavvy' situations.
= Some quests are significantly easier if you go in through the back door everyone assumes is safe.



Medicine:
- Determines effectiveness of stimpaks, rad-x, rad-away.
+ Tweak the range to be narrower for those drugs.
+ More 'heal this' interactions in the game world.
+ Crippling will be significantly worst in the game, and cannot be healed by drugs. Medicine skill affects your ability to recover from being crippled without a doctor (you will still need medical equipment and somewhere to rest up).

= Healthcare in FOMTOM doesn't come cheap, and if you can provide it for others, you may be able to make some caps yourself.
= If the mod for 'bleeding wounds' is implemented, medicine + equipment will affect how quickly you can stop the hp loss. Without it you will get crippled from blood loss (if hp loss doesn't kill you first).
= Return of the first aid kit, depends on Medicine skill.



Melee Weapons:
- Determines the effectiveness of melee weapons
+ If possible, allow Melee VATS targeting of limbs.
+ If possible, allow melee weapon blocks.
+ Damage bonus for using melee weapons at higher skill levels.

= Melee weapons do not use ammo.
= If combat tweaks succeed, at hand to hand range enemies should switch to melee weapons (if it makes sense).
= Melee weapons should be highly effective at killing/crippling in close range if you have high skill.
= In a melee fight, blocking should be pretty important.
= Generally in FOMTOM, melee should always be scary, but a berserking melee concept character should be a terror to behold.



Repair:
- Fixing weapons/equipment.
+ Tweak it so weapons/armor can only be repaired at workbenches, with tools and parts.
+ Add a 'maintenance' ability, if you have high repair your equipment will degrade slower because you keep all your gear in tip top shape and do small fixes on a daily basis (we just don't see them!).
+ More quest options and interactable objects where repair can be used.
+ Repair can be used on various robot targets to heal them, like medicine can be used on characters.

= Repair is a bit overpowered and unrealistic. The workbench requirement means that it is something you can only really use if you have some quiet time with a good hammer and equipment.
= There still will be a lot of near broken junk in the wasteland, so although it takes more time investment repair can be a useful cap-generating skill, and a way to build up some solid gear for your character.
= Instead of finding exact copies of the weapon/armor, some of the spare junk floating around will be useful as generic repair items. Depends on whether repair can be modded to use a single source item for multiple target repairs.



Science:
- Mostly used for hacking computers.
+ Increase the number of science related quest paths/chats.
+ Science will also be used for brewing chems (assuming you have the equipment/supplies).
+ Science will affect what interactions are capable with robots/computers, master hackers should have more flexibility.

= Chemists can profit off their work, either in caps (chems are valuable) or through supplying themself by spending time and cheap ingredients to build up their own kit.
= Science checks are used pretty extensively on anything involving technobabble, biology, or macguyver like tricks. Similar to explosives, with perception checks it will let you engineer some tricks on the fly with certain interactive objects.



Small Guns:
- Impacts accuracy and damage of small guns (tweak to affect only accuracy)
+ Midway on maintanance difficulty.

= Small guns have always been pretty common in Fallout. FOMTOM will have scarcer ammo and guns laying around, but it still will be a solid skill for any starting adventurer.
= Specialists in the two other weapon skills may overall be at an advantage, but they tend to have to think more about supply issues.
= The skill is strong enough as is, it won't be weakened, but won't be any further emphasized than it already is.



Sneak:
- Affects sneaking, stealing, pickpocketing, and critical hits.
+ Picking pockets will be slightly easier.
+ Ramifications for stealing/pickpocketing will be much more critical.
+ NPCs will actually keep an eye on their stuff!
+ I'm a fan of Burgulary Quests.

= High sneak will be very useful for infiltration, most locations have some sort of defense patrol arranged, so remaining undetected can be critical.
= Common thievery is something I want to encourage, note that some characters will have higher sneak than others to make it more difficult to rob them. (need to mod sneak/theft success)
= Burgulary as a career should be interesting in FOMTOM, but beware that most locations are scripted to be unpleasant if you are caught. They also have scripting to try to detect you around the more valuable loot.



Speech:
- Used in speech checks.
+ Removing the probability of success from speech checks, you either see the option or you do not. Note, not all speech checks guarantee success, the dialog trees are complex!

= Speech is used more as a persuasion ability, and offers more eloquent speech options. For technobabble you need science, although you may need speech to get to the science check to begin with. For asking about more caps you need barter.
= Convincing people of things and dialog are important in FOMTOM. People are not very trusting, and they have their own lives and secrets they are trying to protect. Speech checks are a tricky game to play, but successful manipulation of situations through words may be the easiest path for many quests.
= Note, to avoid Speech becoming an easy button, the dialog trees are littered with red herrings, dead ends (literally), and the need to uncover information before you can make certain statements. It is also designed so that the same statement, in a different context, can be the key to victory, while most times it leads to you being attacked. That said, yes saving and reloading + high speech skill - probability = assured victory for any speech quest. Your just a very boring jerk if you do that! So congrats if you break the challenge of the game by essentially cheating, or rote memorization.



Unarmed:
- Affects punchin things.
+ Block ability.
+ Add VATS targeting of limbs.
+ Add damage bonus for high skill levels.

= Unarmed is treated much like melee weapons. On average it is weaker than a weapon, but you don't have to carry a weapon at all.
= Meant for use in a pinch, or if your a martial arts master, in general if you are low skill though I'd save it for roaches or last resorts.
= There probably will be a boxing minigame.
= Many locations get very nitpicky about carrying melee weapons, and may shoot you on sight for carrying a gun, but they can't take your fists from you! Also yielding in combat is more likely to be successful if you have no weapons in your inventory.
= Fist fights in bars are actually encouraged in FOMTOM, in at least one case you can legally beat someone up, as long as you don't kill them you can get a quest reward. Be sure to understand the local laws before throwing a punch! Murder, whether with fists or otherwise, is illegal everywhere though (well except a few places).
= If you can disarm an opponent, they will often yield rather than fight without a weapon. (depends on combat mod)
 
Ahh, yes. This reminds of one of those pipe dream mods I always hear about but never see. The scope of this is just plain too massive for anything you're suggesting. One person working on this? Bethesda took years with a huge team to design one city. The west coast? Please. I can see maybe some of the skill tweaks over a long period of time, but you have bitten off more than you can chew.
 
No problem, I'll just keep chugging along, if it fails it is not like you've lost anything more than the time you spend reading these posts. Feel free to disregard! Also another reason I'm not taking on teammates, it really is my own time to waste.
 
I think you're setting the hype train a liiiiiiittle too ahead of yourself (for example, before you've even started)
 
Being a programmer I know ambitious designs are dangerous, I also know that doing things at the right point in time take a lot less work than trying to fix it after the fact. Right now I'm setting up what I want to research, to me a complete design is important because I want to know what tools I'll have before episode one goes out the door.

If you read the skills section I already am starting to sprinkle in phrases like 'depends on ammo weight mod' and so on. I want to identify as many risk points as I can (other than sheer scope), and schedule research so I will know whether they will work or not. If it fails in prototype mode, then it gets removed from my toy box.

For the full mod I want to create, to me this is the best plan for completing it with the overall least amount of time and headaches. I'm setting up for a lot of stuff to be cut early before I get into the content development phase, and I'm publishing so much text so that with feedback from all of you maybe I can kill some ideas early in design.

Helpful comments would be: 'modding ammo weight will be crazy hard and probably take forever', or 'eh chemistry sets don't sound very fun'.

As for 'biting off something' I'm eager to test out dialog and location scripting as well, so I'll make a much more contained design for a FO3 map extension. One decent town, and maybe some sort of military base. It will not contain all of my gameplay tweaks because I do not want to research anything that would require rebalancing FO3 (for instance changing how VATS works).

I'll do that, something a bit smaller, but only because it will help me towards my larger goal anyway. This way you will all have at least one location in FO3 with decent dialog! But no, I'm not going to stop my process towards the larger mod I want to build, right now that includes massive design docs and creating research checklists (and gathering feedback).

If there is a concern that I'm wasting board space I'll go get some webspace and do all the posting over there, leaving this as a discussion thread.

Since I'm taking on an FO3 expansion, name two locations you would like to see in the game. Rules:
- One needs to be a settlement of some kind.
- One needs to be a hostile location, but not necessarilly a dungeon. Think maybe Paradise Falls like.
- Which corner of the world map would you like to see stretched, East is ocean so avoid that direction. Probably avoid the area around Raven Rock as well, so either SouthWest-ish or North.

If that is too much to take on, then please don't even bother with this thread. You'll have hundreds if not thousands of smaller mods to choose from in a few months.
 
You'll be done by the time fallout 5 is released, if you're lucky. In my opinion, you should focus your interests in more realistic scopes.
 
To be honest, the very existence of F3C seems to indicate a lot of the mods I want to make are possible. If we are all in a sharing mood, a great number of other mods would speed my development, and I'm sure some of my work would help others (I plan to share how to's on every technique I develop).

It seems I'm irritating people more than anything, so for now I can keep the design to myself and only mention it again when I have something to demo. Granted, by then it will have a lot more of my ideas set in stone, so I'll be less likely to take additions/revisions from the crowd. Not that I seem to be getting any on an article I thought would generate a lot of questions by now.
 
Dubby said:
You'll be done by the time fallout 5 is released, if you're lucky. In my opinion, you should focus your interests in more realistic scopes.
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Common maybe hes a no life and he can do it show him some love and support...

GO GO Yoshee :clap:
 
He need good weed dealer making all this location alone is crazy so gl and may the golden weed be with u :D
 
mrowa said:
He need good weed dealer making all this location alone is crazy so gl and may the golden weed be with u :D
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Its not that hard once you find buttons copy & paste :)
 
Way to go!!!

There are 100s of great examples of mods out there done by a One-Man-Army.
Just because companys fuck up on a regular basis doesnt mean everyone has to!

Im very much looking forward to your modification and really enjoy the episode idea. Its no harrassment to wait for a next episode. If it was how could you be able to watch a series on TV^^. People who played the new Sam&Max Episodes know what Im talking about.

keep it coming!
 
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