Very interesting mod idea on the nexus forums

This excellent poster put up an idea for a mod. I love the detail and the idea. What do you guys think?

(Original Link: http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/294576-vault-25/page__gopid__2750769#entry2750769)

Just to start, I realize the chances of someone actually working on a mod as detailed and complicated as this are basically non-existent. My primary purpose for posting the concept outline is in the hopes the ideas might get scavenged and used elsewhere. At the moment I'll just post what I have now and will probably add more later on. If anyone wants to steal any part of it for their own project or, by some dim chance, actually attempt to make it, they've got my blessing. Just let me know, since I'd be interesting in following what you do.

A History of Vault 25
MoleCo was a small independent contractor specializing in the construction of personal fallout shelters and bunkers. In 2073, funded by the Cold Creek Civil Defense Initiative (a civilian organization founded by Cold Creek resident and cereal-mogul Horus Mills intended to address local fears - specifically his own - regarding a potential nuclear war), MoleCo created the Cold Creek Communal Bunker Project. The Cold Creek Project was to be the test bed for MoleCo’s own line of vault-style scale shelters. Intended to allow the company to compete with Vault-Tec, the Communal Bunker was designed to cater to smaller middle-class communities who found many of their numbers left off Vault-Tec’s exclusive acceptance lists. Completed in 2074, the project was a success, finished both on time and under budget, and MoleCo seemed primed to compete openly with their larger rival as orders began pouring in from communities across the United States.

MoleCo broke ground on their second communal bunker, this one in Rhode Island, but before any significant work could be completed found themselves subject to a hostile takeover by Vault-Tec. Backed by government dollars, Vault-Tec successfully seized control of MoleCo and immediately canceled the communal bunker project. Though no further small-scale bunkers wold be constructed, as a PR maneuver Vault-Tec chose to honor MoleCo’s promise of maintenance and support for Cold Creek by ‘adopting’ the bunker into the Vault-Tec family of Vaults.

Officially designated Vault 25, the Cold Creek Bunker was expanded marginally to accommodate additional monitoring equipment and refitted to fit a more standardized Vault appearance, but no major structural work was done. Unlike the Vaults commissioned by the United States Government, the Cold Creek Bunker was always intended to be a relatively small underground facility, offering long-term shelter and protection for only the roughly twenty families living in Cold Creek at the time and is barely one fifth the size of a standard Vault. At least five more families, tourists in or passing through Cold Creek, were allowed access when it’s doors sealed at the outbreak of the Great War, making it one of the only Vaults to willingly allow unregistered outsiders entry.

Vault 25 also included the unusual edition of animal pens intended for the rescue of prize horses and cattle from the ranches in the community. The animals fared very poorly in the underground environment and those that did not die from natural causes during the first year were later put down as a mercy. Nearly 27 years later, these pens would prove vital in the domestication of mole rats who had burrowed into the Vault after their own underground layers were sealed on the surface by Mojave residents trying to eliminate the pests. Vault 25 residence have relied on mole rat ranching to supplement their food stores every since. Thanks to Horus Mills, the Bunker also represented the greatest stockpile of radiation free Sugar Bombs in the world which not a single Vault residence since Horus Mills has eaten, but which became an important fodder for the mole rats.

Vault 25 had gone largely undiscovered by the world at large for nearly the entirety of it's existence. Now, more than two hundred years later, Vault 25 at last opens it’s door to the world and sends out it’s first explorers to examine the potential of settling the surface. They find the ruins of Cold Creek around them, they find the distant lights of New Vegas shining, but most of all they find you.

The Mod Concept
A story-driven community building game where the Courier becomes a sort of guide to and diplomat from the Wasteland, if not defacto leader, to a group of Vault-dwellers who have literally just opened their doors for the first time when the Courier happens to stumble across them. Vault 25 is occupied by largely well adjusted and good intentioned, but hopelessly naive individuals. It is, in a sense, much like Vault 3 only where as Vault 3 had the gross misfortune to encounter the Fiends upon opening their doors, Vault 25 encounters the Courier (also possibly to their gross misfortune). There would be numerous quests the Courier could partake to help the Vault residents adjust to the outside world. Everything from to bringing them potential spouses to expand their narrowing bloodlines to teaching them to scavenge and build from recycled materials to building diplomatic relations with other factions in the Wasteland. They would slowly build a community around their Vault entrance from the ruins of Cold Creek, shaped greatly by the Courier’s influence.

Immoral Couriers could, of course, merely kill them all or sell them to the Legion, but additional options could include corrupting them into one large brothel, transforming the Vault into a drug lab, or even manipulate the residents of Vault 25 into his/her own private raider force.

The MoleCo back story is there more or less to explain why, unlike most Vaults, you should be able to actually explore every part of Vault 25. It's merely that there is less of it to explore since it was only intended to hold about 100 people instead of 1000.

Also, for the record, like most locations already in Fallout New Vegas, Cold Creek is a real location not far from Las Vegas.

Vault Experiment
Through investigation of the computer systems, the Courier would learn that the purpose of the Vault 25 social experiment was to test the capability of the standard upper-middle class American family to endure with it’s democratic loyalties intact in the presence of subtle socialist propaganda. Every book, magazine, holofilm, and musical recording sent to Vault 25 was from the United States Unamerican Activities Force “blacklist” of entertainment deemed too sympathetic to Communist ideals. The Overseer’s guidelines were rewritten to take on a more socialist approach to governing the Vault and even called for a dissolution of the position following the death of the first Overseer and the formation of a Vault Community Counsel in his place, assigning the Overseer's duties to a new resident each week. Unlike most Vaults, the Overseer of Vault 25 knew nothing of the social experiment taking place in his Vault.

Additionally, three of the five families who “happened” to be vacationing in Cold Creek at the time the Vault sealed were known Communist Fifth Columnists secretly forced into the town by UAF agents. Part of the initial test was to see if the Vault’s assigned residents would even allow strangers of unknown political ideology into their homes. Rather than having the negative effect estimated by Vault-Tec researchers, Vault 25 actually remained a stable community longer than many others. The planted Columnists engaged in no major acts of sabotage after realizing their own chances for survival were far better within the Vault and the open forum offered by the Vault Community Counsel allowed for a sense of communal purpose and open discussion not seen in most other Vaults. The system was not, however, without it's flaws. With a shared sense of responsibility largely went the urge for personal drive and betterment. Vault 25 could maintain itself adequately, yet saw almost nothing in the way of dynamic visionaries after the passing of it's first generation residents. Those who followed seemed to grow progressively less creative and more docile, willing to continue the mostly plodding doldrums of Vault life while they waited for the years to count down until the Vault doors would open. There are at least a handful of "radicals" among the remaining population, the nearness of the day the Vault was scheduled to be open seeming to awake a sleeping vibrancy in some of the younger generation and already many begin to draw up their own plans for how to deal with life on the surface world.

New Equipment
The mod would feature a two more or less lore-friendly outfits; the Vault-Tec Sealed Exploration Suit and the Vault-Tec Sealed Security Suit. I call them more-or-less lore friendly as this sort of thing always struck me as something that would be included in most Vaults and yet strangely never was. The player will learn from computer records that due to errors in production and shipping manifests, every known copy of the Sealed Exploration Suit and the Sealed Security Suit were accidentally printed with the 25 designated and shipped to Vault 25, instead of every Vault receiving shipments as intended. The result has been that the remaining residents of Vault 25 have continued to wear Sealed Exploration Suits long after running out of standard Vault Suits and still possessive a massive stockpile them. Sealed Security Suits, being somewhat more rare, are held in reserve.

Vault-Tec Sealed Exploration Suit: Radiation Suit in Vault-Tech colors. Intended for post atomic-holocaust exploration. Somewhat less effective at protecting it’s wearer from radiation than a standard suit, but also slightly more durable. Virtually every Vault 25 resident will be wearing one of these when first encountered, as it is the last form of Vault-Tec issued clothing they have in great supply. Unlike a standard Radiation Suit, the helmet is a separate piece.

Vault-Tec Sealed Security Suit: Combination of Vault Security Armor and Radiation Suit, in appearance just a Sealed Exploration Suit with a ballistic vest and padded joints. Intended for post atomic-holocaust exploration. The Sealed Security Suit offers protection from both radiation and physical assault. While Vault 25 still possesses a large number of these suits, only a few residents actually wear them as the suits are still rare compared to the Sealed Exploration Suit.

NPCs
Horus Mills (Deceased): Cereal mogul Horus Mills is perhaps best remembered in the Wasteland for his most famous and prolific creation, Sugar Bombs. Yet, this was only one of several dozen food-like breakfast products that sprang from the mind of this under looked genius. As founder and CEO of Cereal Mills, one of the largest American processed food stuff producers, Horus Mills was most personally involved in the Advanced Cereals and Pastry Department of his company. It was thanks to his hard work that Sugar Bombs were declared by multiple health and news publications as “Atomically, and Additively, Delicious” (the term ‘health risk’ was thrown around a few times as well).

Unfortunately Mr. Mills’ personal involvement in the Advanced Cereals and Pastry Department resulted in much of his company untended and many areas suffered from a sever lack of quality control and rampant corporate espionage. Claims of wide spread food poisoning from people who had consumed Captain Horus’ Fresh Fish Fillet Frozen Dinners, and the subsequent lawsuits from the survivors, forced Horus to partition off and sell nearly all of his companies assets. He managed to retain control of only the breakfast food production.

Though generally patriotic, Horus’ obsession with the potential of a Communistic attack on American soil followed after he uncovered hints that the frozen dinner incident may have been a case of deliberate sabotage, possibly by Communist infiltrators, and that the former Frozen Dinner Department of Cereal Mills, now under new management and renamed Moma Dolce’s Processed Food, even at that moment many have been merely a front for a Communist invasion of the United States. When American intelligence agencies dismissed his claims and he was rejected for placement in one of Vault-Tech’s vaults (breakfast food invention being dubbed a “Non-Vital” skill in the post-atomic apocalypse world), Horus returned to his boyhood home in Cold Creek Nevada and founded the Cold Creek Civil Defense Initiative along side long-time friend Byron Wilson. Despite the insistence by friends, relatives, neighbors, and the numerous psychiatrists they hired, Horus liquidated nearly all of his remaining assets into a combination of cash and Sugar Bombs and hired MoleCo to build the Cold Creek Communal Bunker.

When MoleCo was later taken over by Vault-Tech and the Bunker folded into the Vault project, Horus was granted the position of Vault Overseer. His first act of preparation for the potential nuclear holocaust was to ensure his Vault would have an adequate supply of Sugar Bombs to last them the projected 200 years.

Byron Wilson (Deceased): Former RobCo engineer Byron Wilson was the designer of Giddiyup Buttercup, the atomic-powered robotic horse. A loving father who designed Giddiyup Buttercup under his daughters "strict supervision," Byron Wilson was an earnest believer in the need to keep children happy and distracted from the escalating violence of the world. He brought the design to his superiors at RobCo in the hopes of bringing the robotic manufacturer into the ever shrinking toy market, but Giddiyup Buttercup was personally dismissed by Edwin Robert House as “patently ridiculous” and “the biggest waste of time I’ve ever seen.” Undaunted by this, Byron Wilson left RobCo to found his own company, Wilson Atomatoys, to produce his creation. The first Giddiyup Buttercup rolled off the assembly line in 2042. Wilson Atomatoys launched a highly aggressive advertising campaign which included stunts such as a rodeo on which beautiful cowgirls rode Giddiyup Buttercups and launching a long ranged probe that contained nothing but a Giddiyup Buttercup because “even little girls on other worlds want one.”

Despite it’s astronomic price tag, the toy proved an unparalleled success and Wilson Atomatoys shot to the head of the toy manufacturing market in little more than four months. This success was redoubled the following year when Byron Wilson, who by then had taken an interest in miniaturization, produced the much more affordable Giddiyup Buttercup dolls. This success drew the attention of elements within his former employer RobCo, who managed to pressure a reluctant Robert Edwin House into purchasing Wilson Atomatoys and folding it into RobCo the very day it went public. Back under RobCo employ again, Wilson turned his abilities towards popular RobCo patented robots and produced an entire series of RobCo Combat Ready Action Toys for Boys. The most popular among this line was Sam Sentry, a fully functional RobCo Sentry Bot complete with operational gatling laser, produced at 1/10th scale.

Though the RobCo toy line proved moderately successful, none of them equaled the success of Giddiyup Buttercup and, following the rather lukewarm reception of Patty Protectron (Pink Painted Guardian of Little Girls Secrets), Robert Edwin House closed down the RobCo Toys subdivision. Though out of work, Byron Wilson was by this time already independently wealthy and rather than pursue work elsewhere, retired to his ranch in Cold Creek where he would continue to work on numerous toy projects in private as a hobby and spent time with his wife and daughter.

When longtime friend and fellow Cold Creeker Horus Mills returned home and began trying to convince locals of the immediate threat posed by Communist China, Byron reluctantly helped him found the Cold Creek Civil Defense Initiative. Though not as earnest about it, Byron considered creating a safe place for the children of the Cold Creek community to take refuge in case of a disaster to be worth investing in. After Vault-Tech took over the Communal Bunker, Byron Wilson was assigned as Vault 25's head engineer though he also doubled as the Vault’s instructor until his death.

Giddiyup Battlecup (Companion, Pet): One of the last creations of Byron Wilson before his death, Giddiyup Battlecup was originally intended to combat the naked molerat invasion in Vault 25s lower floors. Giddiyup Battlecup is a heavily modified Giddiyup Buttercup (his daughters, specifically) which features armor plating, electrified shock-hooves, and twin lasers installed into it’s eyes. It also features an extensive AI upgrade to take advantage of these features and an eagerness for battle, though it retains it’s original directive to adore children. Giddiyup Battlecup proved overwhelmingly successful at containing the naked molerat infestation until Vault residents were able to begin capturing and domesticating their offspring for the Vault. With no external threats to the Vault since then, Giddiyup Battlecup has been harnessed for a variety of tasks, but mostly to give rides to children.

The Courier could convince Vault residents to allow him to take Giddiyup Battlecup with a high Speech check OR after making a Science check to discover that inside Giddiyup Battlecup, Byron Wilson had hidden the location of at least a dozen Giddiyup Buttercups buried in the Nevada desert after RobCo Toys closed it’s door. The Courier can then offer to to locate and convert them all to defensive robots in return for borrowing Giddiyup Battlecup. As a companion, Giddiyup Battlecup can carry considerable weight compared to other pet companions and grants the Pest Control perk, granting bonus damage against mutated bugs and animals. It's weapons, however, are somewhat ineffective against well armored targets. Giddiyup Battlecup’s personal quest is “My Kingdom for a Horse” and centers the mysterious fate the buried Giddiyup Buttercups.

Weekend's progress

A better written update will follow tomorrow when I am not eyeing my bed so dearly. Did a lot of grunt work over the weekend. I went through and modified every consumable in the game (that made sense) to modify hygiene and waste levels. 

This process was done while watching The Office on one monitor and going through each item in another. This also required me to implement my previously described work around for the lack of foresight on Bethesda's part wherein they failed to create a way for me to determine the magnitude of a scripted spell effect. I created more than 40 base effects and an equivalent amount of associated scripts so that I could apply numbered increments and decrements to my new attributes Hygiene and Waste Level. The Comfort attribute will need a similar treatment sometime soon.

I think I am going to have to implement a settings inventory item much the same way Arwen, and other mods, have set theirs up. There are too many things I want the player to have a choice with. An example of this is whether or not the player is going to want a menu on all water items and activators to manage things like [Drink, Clean Up, Bottle Water, Replace All Bottled Water With This Water, etc...]. Alternatives to showing a menu are things like the common crouch + activate or possibly binding an alternate key.

Yep, that's right, bottling water is going to have to be a part of this mod as well since this mod will likely conflict with other mods that do the same thing given how I modify existing ingestibles in the game. That's ok, there are some changes to how it works elsewhere that I want to implement.

A good friend of mine pointed out to me this weekend that documentation on the mod, including in game, is going to be needed if people are going to understand how hygiene and waste levels interact with the gameplay. I'll work on that this week too.

Good night all, and as usual, please feel free to leave comments on the blog.

Oh the frustrations...

The GECK defines the ability to modify existing actions as a base effect for something larger like rad sickness. I've been forced, due to a lack of support from both the GECK as well as NVSE, to have to create point specific base actions in order to modify my new attributes such as Hygiene, Waste Level and Comfort. This is because normal base actions are given a magnitude but scripted base actions, while given a magnitude, have no way to determine what that value is.

I am currently trying to determine the correct values and time lengths to remove accumulated hygiene points (higher is dirtier) when using water sources such as sinks, faucets and, when I figure out how, oceans, lakes and puddles.

Short of actually applying individual values to different sources, such as sinks being more or less effective at clean than say a water valve or lake, I am limited to saying how clean you can become based on the quality of the water being used.

I do plan to script bottles of water such that they can be used to clean oneself. I have a couple of ideas on how to do this. What do you think?

  1. I could do what many people do, which is when crouching and activating a bottle that has been dropped, the water is used for cleaning up (i.e. reducing hygiene) instead of drinking.
  2. I could have the water be used for cleaning instead of drinking when hygiene reaches a certain level
  3. I could have the water automatically be used to clean and provide simultaneous normal function
  4. I could provide a menu that appears when consuming water (possibly only when hygiene is 200 or above) that allows the player a choice

Ideally, I'd like it to only serve one purpose at a time. Other things I have accomplished are the auto-increment of hygiene and waste level over elapsed time. These values also need to be tweaked in order to determine a good value such that it can add a challenge but at the same time not impede enjoyment.

Finally I am tracking down a bug wherein the toilets with pure water that I was originally testing my scripts with were working fine but the first rusted toilet I've found now fails to prevent the player from standing when in use.

Hygiene Monitoring...

In my last post I described adding base effects and actor effects. I'll quickly describe how I'm using some of them. I've created a quest and an associated script to keep these values applied and removed as needed. 

In this case I move on over to the Quests section of the Object Window and right-click and select New. This brings up the quest dialog. I chose the names, "Hygiene Monitor" and "FurtherNeedsHygieneMonitor" for Quest Name and ID, respectively. I've chosen Start Game Enabled, Allow repeated conversation topics and Allow repeated stages. This is mostly because I don't know exactly what they do but, at least for now, I really want everything to work and nothing to block. I've also thought of using quest stages as a way to detect which stage of poor hygiene the character is suffering from if I cannot find a way to detect if an actor effect is currently applied to the player.

Once the quest is created, I clicked on OK in the bottom right corner. I then clicked on the pencil in the tool bar to create a new script. Be sure to select Quest as the Script Type. The script grabs the current hygiene script variable from the FurtherNeeds main quest and then does a buch of comparisons, removing and adding the spells (actor effects) as needed.

(download)

Continued Progress

Tonight saw the addition of base effects for reducing barter and speech. Surprisingly enough there are no effects in the current game to do this. Well with Further Needs there will be. :) I learned that Base Effects are Fallout terminology for Magic Effects in Oblivion. Actor Effects are equivalent to Spells. At least as far as I've seen so far.

Adding base effects to reduce the barter and speech were not as difficult to as the effect to reduce the newly introduced hygiene stat. Since this deals with reducing a stat or attribute that doesn't normally exist in the game, I'd like to go over how I did it.

You'll need to find Base Effects in the tree on the left side of the Object Window in the GECK. Right click and select New. This gives you a dialog. In this dialog, you'll need to select Script for the Effect Archetype. Since my effect is detrimental you'll also need to tick off the "Detrimental" flag. Recover is selected for other similar effects so I chose it as well as Self for the same reasons.

Finally you'll need to create a new script. This can be done by clicking on the pencil icon in the toolbar of the main GECK window. From the widow that pops up you'll need to select Script->New. Be sure to also set the Script Type to Effect in the drop down menu at the top of the window.

Sadly, and much to my dismay, the GECK still shows the scripts in a proportional font. This drives me insane since almost all coding is universally done with a fixed width font. Ho-hum. Such is the way of things I suppose. Once this is done you can fill in the script with appropriate values. For now, I only have descriptive text because I am still searching on a way to determine the magnitude applied when the effect is in place.

These base effects are added as effects that occur when Actor Effects, or Spells, like my PoorHygiene800, are applied to a character. As you can see, someone with a hygiene score of 800 really really really needs to bathe. :) Being as this is one step from the highest, most revolting status, one can attain the penalties are fairly high.

(download)
 

G.E.C.K. Scripting Functions (One List)

Block Types

Functions   

A  [Top]

C  [Top]

D  [Top]

E  [Top]

F  [Top]

G  [Top]

H  [Top]

I  [Top]

K  [Top]

L  [Top]

M  [Top]

O  [Top]

P  [Top]

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Fallout Highlighting for Intype

Intype is a nice editor for Windows that is based, at a glace, on the editor TextMate for the Mac. The editor has seen very little improvement of late but with any luck it's sole developer is making strides between what makes up his day to day life. That, however, is not the point of this post.

The point is that I've created a syntax highlighting scheme for working Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas scripts. This is based on the Notepad ++ syntax highlighter that can be found on the Fallout 3 Nexus

Yay! A new team member!

I met a nice fellow who goes by the name AllanOcelot on thenexusforums.com today. He has graciously offered to help me out with my mod. He seems to be skilled with doing 3D meshes and together we might be able to add new animations to the game as well. I am very excited to have met him.

I feel more and more confident that this mod will make a solid release. I will work on building some tutorials over the weekend so people, including my new team mate, will be able to learn from my endeavors.

Next Steps

I promise to do a full tutorial on what I've done as well as to put up an early version as soon as I get a few more things squared away. Current topics I'll cover in the tutorial, listed here as a reminder for me as well something for others to hold me to, are:

  • How to remove and reapply clothing using NVSE
  • How to disable for a period of time the ability for the player to do something
  • How to replace all the existing objects in a game with one you've designed (aka the toilets in this case)
  • How to attach a script to a piece of furniture and have it affect the main quest values
  • How to display text on the screen like in the HUD project using NVSE

The things I need to look into next are

  • How can I add modifiers to all the food and drink in the game and do I have to modify each one or is there a base object I can apply my scripts and logic to?
  • Create the new background/history menu. The chosen backgrounds will directly affect how the comfort meter is calculated.
  • Determine the best rates of waste level, hygiene and comfort increase and decrease to create balance
  • Allow faucets and tubs and other water sources such as large bodies of water to reduce the hygiene meter and essentially clean up the player
  • Determine how to get the players to react differently to the player based on hygiene. I know I can add effects such as modified barter and/or speech skill but I'd like to be able to add conversation points without directly modifying the conversations of each and every NPC in the game. Hoping there's a way.
  • Finish making it such that the when the player sleeps the hygiene, comfort and waste level meters increase correctly.
  • Figure out how to do the same with waiting. It seems that this handled in a different way and I cannot find it (yet).

Further Needs Mod

Wanted to give folks an update on my Further Needs mod for Fallout New Vegas. This mod will require the player to keep track of waste needs, hygiene and overall comfort. I plan to implement several role-playing aspects into the game such historical traits that help round out the character and his or her interaction with NPCs in the game. These backgrounds and traits will also help to define how comfortable the player is in a given situation. This could be expanded to include phobias, strengths and other meta aspects that make us all human.

The toilets in this game are all designed as water sources (yuck!) but are not functional at all. I've take the chair, furniture object and skinned it as a toilet to allow players to sit on them. One problem is that the artists failed to take scale into account properly so most players find their legs dangling a bit when they sit. Also, none of the toilets have toilet seats. Oh well. :D

One aspect of this is that failure to relieve oneself will cause discomfort, in the form of penalties to things like combat, running speed and even speech and barter. When waste levels reach 1000 (or redline) the player will immediately stop wherever they are and relieve themselves. This will skyrocket the hygiene levels (higher is bad) to very high or the highest levels possible. When this happens, NPCs and others will likely not be very happy in the PCs presence. Furthermore the length of time it takes to relieve oneself is proportionate to the amount of waste built up and while doing so the player cannot do anything but look around. This is best managed because if it happens while walking through a camp of Death Claws it may be very unfortunate for the player. 

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