Falloutsylvania

[Retlaw83]

I'm making a new campaign that will be a combat-oriented RPG that takes place in Pennsylvania between Fallout Tactics and Fallout 2. It will use weapons found in my classic weapons pack, plus others from the original RPGs; I have a lot of room to play around when not encumbered by the default campaign.

Don't know why I'm announcing this, except maybe to apologize if the first map looks a little weird, as I am currently drunk and about to fire up the level editor.

[Stevie D]

I looked at the thread title and thought it was going to be based in Transylvania.

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

I looked at the thread title and thought it was going to be based in Transylvania.

Same here, I thought ah this will be a mod were you play as a ghoul vampire, and then thought how he's going to do the blood sucking?

[Retlaw83]

You two are thinking of <i>Fallout: The Masquerade</i>.

[Snake]

Now that would rock!

[Stevie D]

No it wouldn't.

[Retlaw83]

Finished tiling on the first map, which is the Borderton trading post. I now need to get the speech file working. Something that will be refreshing is that, since the mod isn't mission-based, I don't need briefs or debriefs and the accompanying triggers.

At any rate, here's a picture of it with entities turned on:
[img=http://img62.exs.cx/img62/1606/borderton0qg.th.jpg]

The lady between the church and the main office is Star, a potential love interest for the player, and on the other side of the main office and wearing red armor is a gun-toting bad-ass named Requiem. Both of them are recruitable.

I also plan on having towns that are found only as special encounters. This adds to replayability - you never know where exactly a town you've visited will be - and it helps with sidequests. Of course, no story critical things will happen in random towns.

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

and on the other side of the main office and wearing red armor is a gun-toting bad-ass named Requiem. Both of them are recruitable.

Good name for a character, though a red Requiem, doesn't really go. Requiem has more a black or dark green kind of feel to it IMHO.

[Retlaw83]

I was considering dark green, but I don't like the look of it in a Fallout setting. Don't know why.

[Stevie D]

Duder, a good tileset a for large generic terrain like that can be made by going to Generic ==> Floors ==> Plain and shift-selecting all the tiles without any features four times, and then adding to that selection all the other tiles in the folder, the ones with features, such as those you have outside of the settlement walls, just once. That gives you a four-to-one ratio of featureless to feature-containing tiles and an ideal recipe for mass drag-box tiling. It's over 100 selections, but well worth it. I think it would work well both inside and out of the compound.

Req, you've been made famous, eh?

[Jimmyjay86]

At any rate, here's a picture of it with entities turned on:
[img=http://img62.exs.cx/img62/1606/borderton0qg.th.jpg]

Yeah, what Stevie D said. See Mistake #3. I typically cut and paste large patches of ground from a previously made map. Maybe even consider breaking it up with grass, bushes, or varied junk.

[Retlaw83]

Yeah, I didn't vary the tiles enough. More grist for the mill.

The terrain outside the compound - at least to the sides of the walls - is not very visible because that's where the bounding box is, so it can stay as it is. The inside needs fixed, though.

Thanks for the tips!

[OnTheBounce]

Personally, what I do to keep my terrain varied is simply to use the first 12 tiles from the Plain set and place those in large sheets, letting the editor do the selecting. After that I just leave it until I start detailing the map. At this stage it looks very boring, but once I'm finished it is quite satisfying.

When I start detailing the map I start looking for areas that are uninteresting to look at, and place patches of grass there. I also place foot-paths using the DirtSand tiles. Once that's done I put Dirt tiles in that have recognizable features, but only in areas where I want to further break up uninteresting ground.

Some other things you might consider that break up uninteresting ground are things like adding some cracked mud by your well (along with some containers for water found in the Raider tile set), and also not making the entire road you have consist of those PostWar Town road tiles. Rather, you should use them to make tracks/ruts in the road. That, IMHO, looks better than simply having the entire road made of them.

The reason I usually save detailing for last is that none of what I've described above will affect gameplay, e.g. it offers no cover. Anything that can't be seen is a waste of time, and hence I don't bother with it.

BTW, did you put caps between the two levels of wall in that two-story church? Even if you don't intend to have any floor for the second story you should put caps in. A double ring of them in that case so you don't have a groove on the inside of your wall. Not doing so can adversely affect the occlusion data for the map.

Keep up the good work,

OTB

[Retlaw83]

Cool. I retiled the ground, although the job is amatuerish and looks like dog food in the editor. Looks great in the game, though.

The church seems to "occlude" just fine, but I'll play around.

[Retlaw83]

I'm currently playing around with the speech file for the first mission. When this thing is done, I plan on distributing three .bos files; one with the core campaign data, one with .mp3s of voice "actors" (maybe even an amatuerish cutscene!), and one with new load and title screens.

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

Req, you've been made famous, eh?

Famous or Infamous? Infamy, Infamy he's got it in for me.

Retlaw if you are going to edit the tiling you might want to add some windows to the church, if you remove one of the wall tiles for each window, replace it with two thinner wall tiles leaving a gap in the middle, then fill the gap with a ruined city railway platform wall. This will give you an arrow slot effect and they blend fairly well. You might also want to add some stacks of various containers between and around the market stalls, since there's so few of them they kind of look a little lonely.

If you were to do the shift and select with some small plants and grasses then set the grid res to 99 (click in the grid res box and then type it in) and drag a selection box over the desired area, that'll add some randomly spaced grasses and shrubs etc, and is a quick way of breaking up lots of open ground. Do the same outside the walls with some larger plants and trees which will make the area outside look less barren, even though it'll fade to black you still can see if there's anything there or not.

If you haven't gotten fed up with the suggestions, a couple of pieces of random junk like processed wood or unprocessed logs from the industrial sawmill set and some remains of vehicles etc can make a map seem less empty. Also you might want to change the main wall, some generic fence tiles (wood and wire) mixed in with the junkwall tiles and a couple of car stacks can give an effective barricade that (to me) instantly screams PA. But if you want to go with the rich high tech trading post look then have you considered using the robot walls with electrified fence?

As to the love interest, you could use a gender based trigger, and have two Star entities one male one female, deactivating one of them depending on the gender of the PC.

[Retlaw83]

You know, it never occured to my dumb ass that someone might pick a female character to play this campaign.

I haven't done much mapping, as evidenced by what I have in my Chrome Warriors mod. But I'm getting better with these suggestions. I have a feeling that by the end of this, though, I will have made several trips to the Graveyard of Broken Dreams and DaC's map templates section.

I may end up eventually taking the church off the map. It serves no other purpose than me wanting to put a church there. I could use it a subplot, but so far ideas for those are few and far between.

I like the poured concrete I used for the walls, because it goes with the image of the place. Borderton isn't a place scraped together from salvage; it was built by hard-working and proactive individuals who want to get the world back on track. And new, clean concrete is a good indicator of that.

[OnTheBounce]

...it never occured to my dumb ass that someone might pick a female character to play this campaign.

:hehe: I'm glad that was brought up, since I'm one of those guys that likes to play female characters. (Make of that what you wish. )

...[N]ew, clean concrete is a good indicator of that.

Okay, then I won't suggest using the Trench walls to build your wall. They look good, and make for a break if all of your locations look too much like Junktown.

Speaking of the Graveyard of Broken Dreams...Retlaw, you're taking care of MV's Map Hub in his absense, right? If so, can I send you some ZIP files of TO versions of maps I've made? PM me an email addy and any limitations of file size and I'll get to work getting them out to you.

JJ86, the same goes for you, if you're interested.

Cheers,

OTB

[Retlaw83]

I wasn't informed of any limitations on filesize; as far as I know, Teatime it's letting me do what needs to be done.

I'll be updating the Map Hub next week, before Christmas. The school firewall prevents me from accessing port 21, so I can't do it from college.

[requiem_for_a_starfury]

You know, it never occured to my dumb ass that someone might pick a female character to play this campaign.

If you haven't already see the sex and race relations topic.

I like the poured concrete I used for the walls, because it goes with the image of the place. Borderton isn't a place scraped together from salvage; it was built by hard-working and proactive individuals who want to get the world back on track. And new, clean concrete is a good indicator of that.

I understand where you're coming from, in that case you might want to increase the thickness of the wall, add an inner wall and cap the gap between them with concrete roof tiles, and then barbed wire. You might even want to have a staircase leading up to the battlements so that the citizens can get up there to add to the defence or at least maintain the turrets. For some butresses you can break the wall up with the occasional tile from the PWT Concrete set, either mixed as how they did the church in Kansas City or just up against your wall with a corner tile from the same set on either side.

Speaking of turrets you might want to add some in each corner, or at least have some rear facing one's. Even if it's only a neutral trading map it looks odd that they only have the entrance covered. Perhaps you can make it part of the plot to suggest to the head honcho to improve their defences (for bonus experience) maybe they have some other turrets in storage, but don't have the parts to repair them and you have to go to a preoria type map and find the parts and bring them back?

One other suggestion, clip some tents, either from missions 1 & 2 or some from Bunker 5 and paste them either in or outside the town, so that visitors have somewhere to rest in.