Project FOMTOM

Well, moving on I've decided to spare the more detailed sections for now and start on a bullet list, if something catches the public eye I can pull up the full excerpts.

Right now I'm designing two research projects.

1. Location test:
A small extension to the FO3 worldmap, I'm thinking to the south of Zone 8. It will meant be as a playable part of the FO3 world, although all storylines will be self-contained (all quests can be completed within the confines of the zone).

I'll be testing location design with the GECK, scripting possibilities I want to confirm are possible, dialog, and hopefully develop some sort of good habits for building things up.

My intent is to avoid incompatibilities with other mods, other than ones that add objects south of Zone 8 I guess, and once it is in the wild I hope others will find it a nifty little experience and further expand it with other mods.

2. Gameplay test:
A prototype world map (giant flat square about the size of a zone), containing a bunch of test sets for various gameplay tweaks. This mod will probably be incompatible with other mods, and will be the basic engine that FOMTOM is built upon.

I'll release it to anyone interested in being a guinea pig, but it is not meant to be played as a FO3 mod or have real gameplay. Probably the only fun sections will be the combat tests, and my XP fountains (just walk up to a quest machine for xp, so I can quickly level up to test different character builds).


With the release of both if I learn anything of value I'll put up a howto guide so others can copy (or improve upon) my techniques.

Anyhoo, coming up shortly is my character creation bullet list, containing my wish list for stats, skills, derived stats, perks, leveling and XP distribution. It is meant to be dissected or added to, and is not a promise that all features make it into the mod!
 
Please suggest additions/retractions to my character creation list, please recall that everything I'm intending to research needs to get on the list in design, I want my research phase to be mostly chopping/implementing, not random wandering.

CHARACTER CREATION RESEARCH DOC:

STATS and DERIVED STATS:

All Stats:
- Rebalance impact on starting skills

Strength:
- Rebalance Carry Weight to a wider range
- Transfer Unarmed from Endurance to Strength
- Rebalance Melee Damage (stronger?)

Perception:
- Remove compass markers affect
- Add checks to random/special encounters on world map
- Add checks to notice details (depends on uncertainty mod)

Endurance:
- Increase importance of Rad and Poison Resistance
- May need to rebalance health, although the spread looks good

Charisma:
- Disposition Rolls need to have more importance
- Effects number of Followers like FO2
- Only affects characters that care about looks/charm

Agility:
- Increase the AP spread, rebalance to fit combat mods
- Study how it effects movement
- Add dodging back to the game?

Intelligence:
- Rebalance skill point spread downward, probably 5+INT
- Reduce use in dialog, skills = intelligent chat
- Opens up the stupid game at low intelligence

Luck:
- Add checks to random/special encounters on world map
- Have it effect 'lucky loot'
- Increase the 'All Skills' bonus, lucky characters have a slightly easier time at everything at the start
- Other stats should have clear observable bonuses to gameplay, luck is more variable.
- Luck has a linear effect on rolls (i.e. 1=10% luck, 9=90%) in general.
- Luck 1-3 is tiered bad luck, at 3 additional bad luck event scripts will start to run. At 1 the rarest bad luck scripts will run. The tiers are non-linear (i.e. 1=10%, 2=30%, 3=60%).
- Luck 4-7 is neutral luck, no tiered events run.
- Luck 8-10 is tiered good luck, similar distribution as bad luck. Note a luck of 10 triggers rolls on the 8,9,10 tiers inclusively.


Derived Stats:
- In general, the spread will be widened. How you spend your stat points will lead to more diverse characters than in vanilla FO3.
- Details are dependant on combat mod testing. Want to allow all types of characters to succeed in the game, however, non-combat types will actually need to follow non-combat techniques (no pure-diplomat builds gunning their way through a raider base with ease). At the same time, don't want to hamstring play to artificial paths, so generally stats will probably be designed based on an attrition philosophy... as in you can fight as a diplodude, but the expense in ammo, health, and equipment will grind you down faster than a soldier.


SKILLS:

All Skills:
- Initial starting values based on stats will be revised, generally in a downward fashion. Starting characters will be considered green recruits.
- Growth rates will be adjusted, also tag skills will return as double growth, however starting bonus may be reduced to 10%.
- 1-100 are used in the game, so some locks will take 5 skill, others could take 96 or 33.

Barter:
- Test modifier to buying/selling, tweak if needed.
- Used for negotiating checks in speech, this includes:
+ Requesting higher quest rewards
+ Hiring followers price
+ Offering packages of items in exchange for some quest reward.
+ Hiring caravan guards
+ Bribes
+ Anything involving caps for something

Big Guns:
- Increase the impact on accuracy of these weapons, incur penalties without skill.
- Impact rate of weapon decay upon use?

Energy Weapons:
- Increase the impact on accuracy of these weapons, incur penalties without skill.
- Impact rate of weapon decay upon use?

Explosives:
- Affect throwing accuracy
- Affect the roll to disarm any trap
- Offer explosion interactions with scripted items

Lockpick:
- Alter lock skill levels, min threshold to pick, higher skill level over threshold should effect error rates (lockpick mod)
- Implement uncertainty mod, if you are not over min threshold for a lock you cannot tell what skill level you need to pick the lock.

Medicine:
- Reduce range of impact on drugs
- Offer more healing rolls in game dialog
- Bring back first aid kit
- High impact on recovering from crippling without doctors
- Allow as dialog option to heal Followers (with kit and meds)

Melee Weapons:
- Allow VATS targeting with melee
- Damage bonus for high skill
- Improve use of blocks in game

Repair:
- Require repairing equipment to occur at a workbench
- Expand the notion of 'parts' that can be used for repairs
- Impacts the rate of decay of using weapons/armor
- Repair interactions with scripted items (Megaton pipes)
- Repair robot followers (with tools and parts)
- More makeshift weapon schematics

Science:
- Alter hacking levels, min threshold and higher skill level should effect error rates.
- Implement uncertainty mod
- Science interactions with scripted items
- Science 'workbenches' to brew chems (with supplies)
- Modify options available on computers

Small Guns:
- Increase the impact on accuracy of these weapons, incur penalties without skill.
- Impact rate of weapon decay upon use?

Sneak:
- Tweak sneaking and picking pockets effectiveness
- Tweak sneak criticals to match other combat mods

Speech:
- Remove probabilistic nature of speech rolls, you either get it or you don't.

Unarmed:
- Tweak blocking ability
- Add VATS targeting
- Add damage bonus for high skill levels


LEVELING UP AND XP

- Raising level cap to 25.

- Difficulty of acquiring levels will be slightly harder than FO3. Particularly the early levels, later levels might grow at a slightly lower rate to avoid backloading the XP distribution. Probably a log curve will be used as the basis.

- Game has less skills points from intel, no points from bobbleheads (although some bonuses may be returned in other forms), and much fewer points from skill books (243 books is overkill, think more like 50-ish).

- Still deciding between perk per level, or every two levels (starting at 3).

- XP is distributed on a budget per episode. There is the theoretical max, and then the estimated practical level which is much lower. The budget is broken down based on related skill, combat, and quests. The budget will be flat distributed across the eps, but early episodes will only use a portion, the excess being moved forward for use in new quest lines appearing in that region in later episodes.

- XP budget is designed for maxing the character near Episode 9 (if they are pushing the practical maximum), and will likely not be reached at all unless the player does an extensive playthrough.

- There will be repeating random encounters that do not count towards budget, so determined levelers will always be able to reach cap.

- In general, finding XP will be hard, there are fewer grind opportunities, and more quests or complex locations to tackle. So XP will probably come in big chunks, with a slow trickle from normal gameplay.


PERKS

Perk values will need to be tweaked based on derived stats and combat modifications, however the tentative list:

- Black Widow/LadyKiller
- Intense Training (at higher level requirement)
- Swift Learner (one way to beat XP budget)
- Comprehension
- Educated
- Entomologist
- Iron Fist
- Bloody Mess (at lower level)
- Demolition Expert
- Fortune Finder
- Gunslinger
- Lead Belly (note healing needs significant tweaks)
- Toughness
- Commando
- Rad Resistance
- Scrounger
- Strong Back
- Animal Friend (may be reimaged in meaning/title)
- Finesse
- Here and Now
- Mister Sandman
- Mysterious Stranger
- Nerd Rage (may be retweaked to Adrenaline Rush)
- Night Person
- Cannibal
- Fast Metabolism (if reworked to fit healing mods)
- Life Giver
- Pyromaniac
- Robotics expert (minus shutdown?)
- Sniper
- Adamantium Skeleton
- Chemist
- Cyborg (no skill bonus)
- Light Step
- Master Trader
- Action Boy (revamped by combat mods)
- Better Criticals
- Chem-Resistant
- Tag (higher level requirement to reflect cap change?)
- Concentrated Fire (if it survives combat mod)
- Ninja
- Solar Powered
- Awareness (if I add uncertainy mod with VATS messages)
- Bonus Rate of Fire (for AP in VATS, maybe in FPS mode?)
- Cautious Nature/Explorer (improves encounter rolls)
- Magnetic Personality
- Snake-Eater


That is the list derived basically from FO3 and FO2. I am considering additional perks. Note that everything from prereqs to effects is subject to tweaking, and that I am purposely avoiding anything that adds to skill points.

If anything I'm leaning towards a perk per level, because I like the idea that you come up with some silly realization about life fairly often. Also I think it can increase the variability of character builds, especially if I make perks harder to obtain in general (no one build fits all perk reqs as in FO3).
 
Just a friendly advisory but, how about you start actually making and releasing mods first... before you go all gung-ho on planning them. Mmk?

If that doesn't suit you, have you thought about instead of trying to perform your own one-man-army project, that your skills(?) might be put to better use by joining already existing projects?
 
I like the one man army approach since it reduces things down to one point of decision, and one point of failure. Managing a team can be difficult.

Besides, I've already stated I would assist the F3C effort once it is ready for dialog/location work.

I will not be releasing anything until I have the GECK, I want to study the tools before I start hacking away. I've also been playtesting other mods to see what has been achieved so far and guide my design thoughts.

As for gungho on design, well it is the plan I'm working off of, you don't need to take part! If you think this stuff is bad you should see my story outlines, you'd have me committed to the loony bin by now.
 
Well now that we got the GECK time to have some fun. First order of business appears like I got to fix dialog systems so I can actually write quickly around their stupid character limits. I'll be sure to release whatever tool I make for it (I might just code an app to spit out whatever solution I make, cause I have a lot of dialog work to do).
 
Yoshee, how are you doing voice acting for this massive piece of content?

I love the idea though man. Let me know via PM if you need voice acting, I can probably record some.
 
I am doing mostly text, I am debating whether to voice act certain characters, or whether having one character voice acted out of a hundred would just be too weird to work.

So anyways, mostly it is heaps of text, if I use voice acting it will mostly be for the high impact characters like leaders or unique stories. I would like to explore rather interesting uses of the in-game radio.

I am hoping I do not have to deliver one sentence at a time, I will be very ticked if its hard to read, even if i get an automated tool for entering the text so its easy for me. I'd like at least a small paragraph per click.

Throw me a line after I do my location mod...

Speaking of which, now that GECK is here, now is the time for basic location creation. So the plan as it is:

One Town, yes an entire town! It won't be epic in size, but it will have a couple stores, bar, bank, and houses. Don't have a name for it yet, but the general feel I will be shooting for is a small town on the edge of the big city that is trying to build itself out of the gutter. So you will see a little more lively trading going on, the start of some cottage industries, and of course tension and cooperation between local residents.

There will be no massive storyline bombs, it will be a nice location to visit, trade some of your loot for other stuff, and a jump off point for a few local quests contained in the surrounding area. It will also have a house mod where I will be testing upgradable location designs (i.e. the house goes from a shack to a two story house to a small fort through script events).

The other location will be a raider camp built within an abandoned factory. I will be testing some of my combat scripts here, but not my full gameplay tweaks. One key one is weapon holstering, if you go in unarmed (that includes not having your fists out), they will give you a chance to live. This place is more designed as a combat scenario, but it will have its own small plotlines and characters to interact with (if you don't kill them all on site). The quirk of this location is security systems, I will be testing out a variety of traps, alarm systems, and scripted character actions to see if some of my larger ideas can be worked out.

Besides these two locations there will be a bunch of wasteland, mostly empty with some scattered loot and scenic art.

The quests and characters are still being mocked up, but I'm mostly going for a Wild West sort of theme for this one.
 
Yoshee, I understand a need for a design doc, and so far that's what you have given us so far. Forget the naysayers even if this is a HUGE endeavor. Not that they don't have a bit of worry over a project this big. The fallout community has seen many such projects started and never a mod released.

That doesn't mean don't go for it. Its better to dream than settle for mediocrity. That said there are a few mods you shouldn't worry about until much later. Why? Because others will do them.

Such as ammo mods, targeted melee in Vats, weapon mods ect. All these will probably be out with in a month. At least version 1 of them, and probably sooner than that.

I don't see voice acting as a problem just send out some requests and then pick some people to record some scripts once your ready for them. I'd be happy to assist in this as recording one set of dialog is rather quick and easy. You just need to list out what types are needed. IE:

Old man voice.
Old woman Voice.
Old smokey man voice
Old smokey woman voice.

Middle aged man voice....

young man voice.....

Nerdy (technobabble) voice male & female

Nasaly man & woman voice.

british voice male & female.

you get the idea. If enough people volunteer you can have multiples of each type.

Again wait for your scripting is done then send out the request.


I like the fact that you have two end points getting to and completing everything you want up to episode 4 will be a huge accomplishment. And I hope you get at least that far.

I do have one thing that I really don't agree with and that's replacing what's already there. I think you will be better off not compromising any of the original Fallout 3 scripting, Dialog. Start Fresh outside of the main map. Maybe adding an NPC in megaton to point to the starting portal. If you do want something to be done with megaton for instance COPY the whole town and place it else where. Outside the main map and isolate it from everything else with just portals/warps to and from. I haven't gotten into the Geck yet so not sure this is as feasible as I think it is.

I do wish you every bit of Patience, Luck, Persistence, Stubborness, and Gremlin free scripting possible.

Rao
 
I don't let the naysayers detract too much, but I was getting a little testy that I acknowledged it and was still getting the same thing repeated to me over and over.

I am waiting for the community to sort out various bits and pieces. Given the importance of dialog in my mod I've decided to start there on my own tool, as well as location creation (to help me learn whats already in the GECK). I've already seen a number of gizmos come out that are easily tweakable to my own interests.

Voice acting will come out way later in the process, probably not until I am nearing episode one completion. If I do it at all, it will be select characters (so maybe one out of 20 named people). I'll be sure to post out details when its relevant.

My ideal setup is complete isolation from the FO3 game world, as long as I can guarantee no damage to the FO3 assets (so you uninstall my game, or switch your modules, then you are right back to vanilla). In the worst case, the worlds will be side by side, but will have only one connection point (a jump there/back portal). As much as possible I want to avoid clobbering existing content since I think that will help with combatibility in general, as well as with other mods... I just don't want the player playing that existing content! The chief concern is balance, it is hard to build tension if players are coming in at level 20 with shoulder launched nuclear weapons into my game balanced for a level 1 to 25 progression.

More details on the town design:
- I am experimenting with 'house scripts', essentially a house belongs to an NPC, and it has its own disposition towards the player. If you somehow obtain the house from the NPC (say killing them), you can sleep in their bed, raid their junk [still have stealing karma penalty], and use their containers without them respawning.
- I'm practicing detection scripts with the sheriff, so if you are actively brandishing a weapon, he will initiate speech and demand answers, then launch into combat where appropriate.
- I'm working on at least one scripted event that is triggered when you have been in town and talking with various people enough times.

Question for the audience on spoilers (for the location test):
- Do you guys want my cheap-o bitmap of the town map?
- Do you want screenshots as I build up the locations?
- Do you want character briefs (no quest spoilers, but personality blurbs)?

Obviously for the full project I won't be releasing any such information, but if people want to see more details of how I'm creating the location test step by step, thats cool to me.
 
If you design tools that anyone can use release those. If you design new map areas, release those (before you populate them with towns and such.) Or not, since you want your areas really wide open. That should leave plenty of area open for expansion. Other than that release what you have time to. You already have a big job and unless you want to release milestones you really shouldn't take time away from your main goal.

Edit: I was running around looking at the Beth forums and have been following this thread.

http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=924826

And this came up.




Alathan Wrote
I may have some good news, friends! I've been talking to Lightwave, author of TESAnnwyn...... and he is considering creating a version of TESAnnwyn for Fallout 3. This would be an immense boon for this project and others like it, because TESAnnwyn makes it real easy to import RAW and BMP heightmaps into the TESCS. He doesn't have Fallout 3 yet (but I'm tempting him to get it) so there's no timetable on when (or if) this happens. But when I know something, I'll be sure to post it here.

In the meantime, I'll be doing all of this one piece at a time. Stay tuned, folks...
Click to expand...

Just thought you should know so that the work isn't doubled. [/url]
 
Got a bit dejected and real world projects were calling. But anyhoo, carrying on with the project at my own pace, currently at the following:

- Have my own little safe and secure worldspace with a workable rough terrain to represent the piece of America I want. Still working out my 'layering' technique at which point I'll start building up the landmass.

- Worked out numerous character and location scripting techniques. Dialogue may be annoying, since I have a whole lot of 'continue...' options, but at the same time I've come up with a couple of conventions that might make conversation awesome as I worked on overcoming some of the adversity.

- I've been avoiding gameplay tweaks for the most part because I've been far outpaced by the general community. At the moment I'm considering that the gameplay will basically be me contacting some of the bigger mods, asking permission to use their tweaks, and performing a few slight mods here and there. I'm in the camp of if I can't please em, join em, but I'll still be fairly selective of which mods I integrate.

- Most of my gameplay focus has shifted to story, balance (making all skills useful and if possible adjusting the ratings to have a wider spectrum of usefulness to promote specialization), and use of nifty scripting to make locations come alive.

- The story is shifting a bit from FO3, basically it is set after FO2 and other than some cosmetic references, the story is best considered an alternative history of the east coast.

Mod highlights:
- Quick travel through a motorcycle (which you interact with like an NPC a la FO2). You can use it to all cities and major locations in the mod. It cannot be stolen or stolen from (it will store some capacity of equipment).... but you need to do some work to obtain it and you may elect to lose it as part of a quest.

- Every house/shop has an owner, you can take over just about any building in the game that is not a 'dungeon' (i.e. place for mindless violence only). Ownership can transfer to the player or between NPCs via scripted events (the simplest being kill everything, although people will hate you for it).

- The 'building' idea is a core gameplay mechanic for my town design. People protect their stuff in the Wasteland, violently. Thievery is a lucrative but dangerous career. You can also run shops, either by acquiring an existing business or forming your own in particular quest lines. The general premise is you acquire supplies according to the business type, and it will be replaced for caps over time according to a business script. On the other side, you can supply caps and have it acquire items of that business type. All shops require hiring an NPC that cuts into your profit, and all of this requires subquests to acquire the building (in a way that does not tick off the town so they will buy from you) and employ workers. Also I could probably use some better methods for distinguishing between items.

- Most of my defense scripts for towns/traps seem to work well enough, but they have some issues. Rather than making them perfectly free from exploitation, I'll probably just draw a line in the sand for quality and call it good (I can't beat the power gamers).

- Story and dialogue design has been a focus. Every character you meet that doesn't have a generic name like 'raider' has their own little plot, even if its only a snippet paragraph in my giant collection of scripts. Not all of them are necessarilly significant, but they should provide a little color to the towns.

- World map will be huge but sparse, as advertised. If you are expecting a thrilling battle on every turn of the road, or a new location every five feet, well sorry. I believe in highly detailed but very spread out content for the majority of the map. In the 'spaces' I have everything from open desert to ghost towns (like Springvale), with some secret loot but sparse enough that you can go bonkers going through five empty farmhouses to find the one with an old shotgun tucked away.


I've done enough experiments, and even though I wanted to release some demo material as an add-on to FO3, I might just get down to business in my nice clean world. If I release a demo of content it will probably jump to a small worldspace and be a small mini-western that I wrote up. As a final test of my map creation process.

It'll probably be end of year before I feel up to a big release, depending on when I'm ready to start integrating gameplay mods.
 
I should state that I am considering having multiple worldspaces, one for each major map. When you reach the edge of a map you will be allowed to 'travel' to the adjoining map.

The mechanic of travel is much the same, except when you get near the edges of one of my giant regions it will ask 'travel to X?' whenver you walk to that entire border.

Most of this is for efficiency and design concerns. In some cases you will be able to look into the next map just as if you had taken a few steps, using matching scenery on both sides. In other times it will take a week of game time and you end up in an entirely new region.

Another part of this is that the scale will be blown up dramatically, although it will still be minaturized to a degree, the walk across New York City will be a truly epic one.

For the longer stretches (i.e. non-adjacent maps with a travel time > instant) there will be a midpoint map for each combination that is allowed. For instance, on the path from Boston to New York. With some probability you will be dumped into this midpoint map instead of your destination, and experience a special encounter. These vary from meeting other happy travellers to all out gang fights, and so on.

These maps are much smaller in size, and walking to any edge will continue the trip to destination.

The game plot is set over a couple years, and I use the fast travel mechanisms to remove some of the tedium for people who want to just play the storyline instead of slog through sidequests and lots of walking to explore the nooks and crannies.

So the world map is still huge, but I will cheat here and there to help establish scale. The maps are not per location, like FO/FO2, a single map can be near the size of the FO3 map (excluding DC) and be all one city (assuming the engine can handle my script for New York), or it can be an open wasteland with a major city, a few towns, and a splattering of action locations. My goal is to have somewhat realistic walking/motorcycling times without making the player slog through it all.

I have to admit, already at times I can see large expanses of space that will be just empty cause I don't feel like investing the time in it. But we'll just consider that nice open spots for mods from other users!
 
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