"The End"

H

Hellsbane

First time out of the vault
I've been playing the FO series for years & have never been aware there was any time limit in playing FO 2 to get to the Enclave. Well of course it would be reasonable that there is. I was taking my time in my most recent replay of FO 2 & trying to get all the "encounters" (specifically I was PO'd that I was not able to come across the Holy Grenade encounter with that wonderful little rat - having encountered the Knights some time previously) when suddenly the screen went blank & the picture of a tremendous explosion was shown together with the final words "The End." Then the main menu was shown. Whoa! I've never seen this talked about in any of the walkthroughs, including Per Jorner's (of course, that dosn't mean it hasn't been - I just don't remember it). Well, I've been to the Enclave so many times it's no big deal anymore. I just play the game now & then to experiment with it. But though the time limit is not that much of a factor in FO 2 as it is in FO 1, it's obvious that the exploration I was doing should be left to after visitng the Enclave - when there is no time limit period.
 
The guide said:
The game will end after 13 years of game time (which would correspond to 25 Jul 2254). This event will be marked by a slightly animated screen saying "the end". Even if you play a "go everywhere, do everything" kind of game, you should only use up 3-4 years at the most, and even if you want to walk around the wasteland levelling up endlessly from mindless random encounters, you should be fed up before 13 years have elapsed.
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It's not related to the Enclave, but marks the point where the time variable would flip over to a negative number. This would make things go wonky, so they just had the game end instead. The same limit is in Fo1.
 
If that's true, it makes me wonder why in God's name they used a signed datatype for the date and time.
 
It may flip over to zero, I'm not entirely sure. But it does all the flipping.
 
Thank you Per, I do now remember years ago reading about that so I had forgotten. Thank you for the very excellent material you have written BTW.
 
Per said:
The guide said:
The game will end after 13 years of game time (which would correspond to 25 Jul 2254). This event will be marked by a slightly animated screen saying "the end". Even if you play a "go everywhere, do everything" kind of game, you should only use up 3-4 years at the most, and even if you want to walk around the wasteland levelling up endlessly from mindless random encounters, you should be fed up before 13 years have elapsed.
Click to expand...

It's not related to the Enclave, but marks the point where the time variable would flip over to a negative number. This would make things go wonky, so they just had the game end instead. The same limit is in Fo1.
Click to expand...
Actually the time goes into a negative value already in 17 May 2248. That's when the merchants stop restocking (should be fixed in killap's next release).
08 March 2255 the time variable is about to return to a positive value (restarting the time cycle) which causes the whole game to lock up. That is the real end.
I don't know why they chose to cut it off in 25 Jul 2254, but the reasons you mentioned don't seem to be it.
Maybe they just thought an even 13 years is better than 13 and a half?
 
As far as I know, SFall is capable of adjusting or removing the limit. It's included with some mods (Unofficial patch, RP, High Res).
 
Per said:
The guide said:
The game will end after 13 years of game time (which would correspond to 25 Jul 2254). This event will be marked by a slightly animated screen saying "the end". Even if you play a "go everywhere, do everything" kind of game, you should only use up 3-4 years at the most, and even if you want to walk around the wasteland levelling up endlessly from mindless random encounters, you should be fed up before 13 years have elapsed.
Click to expand...

It's not related to the Enclave, but marks the point where the time variable would flip over to a negative number. This would make things go wonky, so they just had the game end instead. The same limit is in Fo1.
Click to expand...
Speaking of which, what would it take to get around the limit in FO1? As far as I know, the sfall tweak for that is FO2-only...
 
Per said:
By adding a bunch of bytes to the counter?
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I don't know how it's done and I never tried it but it's mentioned in the changelog. Maybe Timeslip could explain. My guess is it changes the datatype.
 
Outside of giving ourself 99 AP with an editor to get out of the V13 cave at the end in FO1 is there another forced end to the game?
 
Per said:
By adding a bunch of bytes to the counter?
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By adding one byte to the counter to store the number of 13 year time spans that have passed, so you get somewhere over 3000 years in total. That extra byte is invisible to scripts that aren't specifically coded with it in mind though, so goodness knows how much stuff breaks when you use it.

Rather than relying on that, I recommend people use sfalls feature to slow down or prevent time passing while moving around on the world map if they're going to be doing lots of power levelling or whatever, because that tends to be what eats up most of the time.
 
Timeslip said:
Per said:
By adding a bunch of bytes to the counter?
Click to expand...
By adding one byte to the counter to store the number of 13 year time spans that have passed, so you get somewhere over 3000 years in total. That extra byte is invisible to scripts that aren't specifically coded with it in mind though, so goodness knows how much stuff breaks when you use it.

Rather than relying on that, I recommend people use sfalls feature to slow down or prevent time passing while moving around on the world map if they're going to be doing lots of power levelling or whatever, because that tends to be what eats up most of the time.
Click to expand...
It's always funny to me the things that designers don't anticipate. I played an indie series called Winged Warrior quite a bit, and in one of the games they didn't anticipate anyone power-leveling (cough excessive unnecessary leveling in my case cough) and when you got past player level... I think it was 40, all the stats went screwy and either became huge or tiny numbers and nothing made sense any more. It was good times. It's unfortunate though... you'd think after the industry being around this long, things like games playing way too long or leveling way too much would be taken for granted! But they aren't. And I mean how hard is it to use int16 instead of int8 (or whatever the case may be). I just don't get it.
 
There's also the negative skill point bug in Wasteland. The skill cost is capped at 255; however, this is interpreted as -1, so you can get skill points by raising the skill. Then once you get to 127 skill points, that is interpreted as a negative, preventing you from abusing the bug (until you just spend some of the points).
 
Per said:
There's also the negative skill point bug in Wasteland. The skill cost is capped at 255; however, this is interpreted as -1, so you can get skill points by raising the skill. Then once you get to 127 skill points, that is interpreted as a negative, preventing you from abusing the bug (until you just spend some of the points).
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Oh good one, I had forgotten about that. Been a few years since I played Wasteland.

I feel like this kind is a bit more forgivable, considering how old the game is (i.e. such tighter constraints on memory footprint) but yeah, either way it's funny/frustrating/baffling just the same.
 
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