No, I'm not. I'm suggesting a much smaller project than New Vegas, fewer new models, no voice acting, and no 'open world', and using as many existing assets as possible. That makes it a much easier project than New Vegas was. Yes, it wouldn't be easy, and it would definitely take a good bit of time, but it's at least possible, as opposed to the 'bigger than New Vegas' idea that Tannanbaum had.

There's a problem with your logic in that.


You see, New Vegas had to be produced on a set of standards for which people would PAY to play it.

What I want to do is nothing so grandiose. I plan to use every damn resource at the disposal of the modding community, either already within the game... or already made for some other purpose somewhere else (through getting as many permissions and the like as is possible from modders), and put together a connected number of World-spaces which adequately encompass the world map of Fallout 1 & 2. Why both? Because who knows... it might actually get done one day... and then someone could 'borrow' the map, remove some borders and such, and use it to make their own conversion (which would never get completed) of the second game.

My focus will be on the first game. It will rely on finding support, it will rely on a few friends of mine hopefully supplying me with some much-needed models and textures, and it will maybe rely on a few decent voice actors to supply dialogue.

Anything that exists that works, I'll use.

Anything that doesn't, I'll have to beg and plead for someone to try to make.

Fallout 1 wasn't a complicated game by any stretch of the imagination. The map itself would be huge... but hell... plenty of it is just wide open desert anyways. I suppose that might present some gameplay issues of their own. Scaling down may be required... but certainly not so much so as Fallout 3 or New Vegas. A world can be expansive and still be fun to traverse.

It just takes the right balance. It only took a few seconds to get from Vault 13 to Shady Sands. My computer runs too fast for me to go back and check... but I think it was about a day in game time. Maybe twelve hours. I'm not certain anymore.

So you take that measurement... and you apply it to the whole of the map... and you have your scale.

Suddenly it's not so terribly vast.

Of course, those VAST expanses where there was NOTHING in Fallout 1 would have to be filled. Fortunately, the map marked all sorts of city ruins and the like which were un-explorable in Fallout 1. Such places, accompanied by random encounters and plenty of mooks out there to fight should make the traveling aspect somewhat enjoyable. Particularly since these places would be prime for looting and pillaging and any other bits of exploration fun you might have.


There's nothing wrong with taking forever to finish, either.

Who knows, maybe you focus on getting the 'core' gameplay areas done, with the quests and all that jazz... and then you just keep working on all that wasteland to explore. There's no rule saying you can't go back and change it if you like.

After all, this is a MOD... not a professionally developed game. We have different standards. It doesn't have to be sellable. It has to -work-... and it has to be fun.

If you're not a modeller, texturer, scripter, world builder, npc builder, dialogue builder... then learn.

Nobody magically learns what they know about modding by osmosis. They try and learn.

There's no shortage of "project managers".

Yes, there is something wrong with taking forever to finish, because that means it'll never be done. It'll probably never be even close to done. You're talking about making well over a hundred worldspaces the size of New Vegas (it could take game-months to walk across the Fallout 1 map). Unless you want to wind up with real-world hours of barren wasteland between locations, you need to use some sort of fast travel system or screw with the scaling so much that the entire west coast of the US can fit into a game world the size of New Vegas and that's just silly.


Anyways, if you want to make a mod that'll never be even close to playable, you go ahead and make your epic 100 gigabyte game world. I think I'll stick to the realm of the possible, thank you very much.

(Also: If you make a project where you set goals that you *know* are unreasonable, that project will collapse and die very quickly - if you set goals that can actually be completed in a reasonable amount of time, it might actually last long enough to produce something)

Might as well just put this out there, the reason i brought up rebuilding it is because most of the newer generation has not and probably will not play 1 or 2 for a multitude of reason, So getting them acquainted with the story line of 1 and 2 could possible close the rift Bethesda set when it made 3 between the community. Non of my friends have ever played or considered playing fallout 1 or 2 yet they are quite content playing New vegas.

...in no position to be launching a large-scale project whilst lacking any appreciable skills beyond the ability to post with near-religious fervour about old ideas that failed the last time they were tried?

There is actually one that has been around for a while now: http://www.moddb.com/mods/fallout-2161

To be fair, besides the completely-useless 'project manager' skill he also says he's a level designer, which is a skill that's actually required for a mod like this, no matter what form it takes. It's not a skill I have (I'm primarily a scripter) - I've made some cells in Morrowind all the way through New Vegas and they're all pretty ugly.

You're doing what a great many persons in your position have done before... making up facts and numbers without putting any solid backing behind them.

You try to make it sound like it would be impossible to do. You try to make it sound like it took New Vegas, with it's professional development team, a year or more to produce the game that they did... with a multi-million dollar budget... so therefore they must be superior to any amount of us, with nothing more than dreams and too much free time on our hand. That it would therefore take us what... 100-times more effort and work to compete?

And yet... they had so much more than a world map in that game. They had so much more than just any feature in New Vegas in the kind of time you're talking about. And that was with a deadline to meet! There are entire characters who got deleted at the end of development. There are entire stories they never told. They had a LOT more than what you seem to think was possible... and they did it in a remarkable amount of time.

...and people STILL think they produced what amounts to a very un-professional product. It certainly has a plethora of bugs and a certain lack of polish, anyways.

Most of the mods I see on the Nexus are more centralized in scope and of higher quality than the entirety of the game. There's a reason, too. They're mods... not games. And although the development of a mod such as this would mimic a professional development in terms of its needs and design... in the end, it only requires a fraction of the work of developing the entire game.

Some goals have to stretch the boundaries between reasonable and unreasonable. Sometimes, in order to make progress, you need to dare to take a couple steps outside the box. It's a risk. It's not the insanity you make it out to be, and it's certainly not the guarantee you seem to think I believe it to be... it's a calculated risk when you make a daring goal.

And that's the difference between the quality of a game like Fallout 1... and a game like Fallout 3.

That said, I'm going to explain a bit more about my methods. And I'm going to keep talking until someone who thinks this would be a fun project decides to say they'll help out. Nobody's forcing anyone, after all. And once I have that other person, I'll explain to them my ideas... and I'll listen to theirs... and like any responsible game developers... a plan will be formed. And hopefully, as the plan is drawn out, things which seem like larger problems now will be broken up into smaller problems... and those smaller problems broken up into bite-sized, manageable bits.


My method of taking on large projects is to break the objective into small, centralized pieces. Each piece gets the attention it needs, takes the time it needs to get done right, and then another piece gets attention. If you take it in chunks, solve your problems as you come to them, and ensure that everything you have added plays well... it works. It's good. It has quality.

As I stated before, the first objective would be to find an appropriate scale in which to 'import' the classic Fallout map into a Fallout 3-ized worldspace. That is to say, how far in real-time should point x be from point y... and so on. This would be determined by approaching real-world maps... making measurements of the actual game location... finding what seems like a reasonable size scaling-down... and testing it to see how it works.

The real trick will come in actually making the map. I've been looking up tutorials for months... but as of yet, I'm still having a bit of difficulty pulling it off. I'm hoping that, now, with TWO games being actively modded for, a few new tutorials documenting this sort of a thing might come up. Otherwise, it's largely learn-by-experimentation.


Like Pintocat said... if you don't know how to do something... you learn.

While I'm fairly certain it was directed at me, I'm not really in need of that lesson. It is, however, a good thing to keep in mind... and the motto by which I manage all things. I don't ask anything of anyone else, that I am unwilling to attempt to do myself. And if I can't do it... I'm always trying to learn. I expect the same of most folks, even though it isn't always possible.

I also expect that there will be a great deal of resistance and naysayers... but then again... there always are whenever something big is proposed.


If you wanted to do something like this... do something like you proposed, Langy... I would invite you to lend your ideas and your expertise to the endeavor. Don't think for a moment that because your 'system' of doing this is much smaller-scale and simpler than mine, I reject it. In fact, what you describe sounds like precisely the bridge between and old new that I would like to see in a Fallout game.

You see... at the least(from my point of view) ... your system would be the basis upon which the entire mode of travel is founded for the project.

At best (again, from my perspective), it would utterly replace the asinine system of 'fast travel' which Bethesda so callously began pawning off as a 'vital' part of their game design. In its most basic form, it would make the mod playable. And if my theories proved true about creating the entire massive expanse of wasteland panned out like I think the could... then at a much later date, the system could be updated and improved in order to make both of them work seamlessly.


But you can't start ruling out the big and the bold simply because it sounds 'unreasonable', or nothing amazing would ever happen.

You have to test and probe and prod and find out what is merely impractical... and then you sit down and you find a way to make the problem smaller... and then you divide it up into 'goals'... and you make those goals happen.


Your idea is good, and practical.

My idea would be massive, but impractical. It would require a great amount of time and dedication. Those are two things I have no foreseeable shortage of. Unless I die, I pretty much spend 90% of my time eating, drinking, pissing, and dreaming Fallout.

My idea would require a lot of work. Probably a great deal, if not the entirety of it, my own. But I stated further up in this post how it could be done with minimal stress and injury. I pointed out the methods by which one would 'scale down' the environment to make your highly-overestimated 100-New-Vegas-Sized-Worldspaces into a far more 'reasonable number'. And most importantly, I laid out the precise way in which this mod would have to be approached if it was ever going to be done.

Taking your time, focusing on a small part of the big picture, and working your way from one end of the canvas to the other. It's the same way a classical masterpiece is painted... and it's the same way a remarkable mod is made.

Just to reply quickly to this one... I think you misunderstand. I really don't want to be the one launching it. I'm certainly not the guy I would pick for the job. And I'm also in no real hurry to get started on it, either. In fact, I'm sure this thread will be long dead and buried before there's ever anywhere near enough support for the idea. Hell, even then there probably wouldn't be.

I think my first post, there, pretty much made it evident that I'd be willing to bet this will die before the thread ever hits its post limit.

I'm certainly not holding my breath.

I just wanted to point out that you cut out there, at the end of your quote of me, that I'm a pretty decent level designer (As in I've been making dungeons and towers and towns and such for games since Doom. But mostly spent my time with Morrowind, since it's one of my all-time favorite games)... and good with character design and dialogue writing. They changed things up with Oblivion and Fallout 3 when it comes to dialogue... so now I have to figure out the damn system all over again... but I've pretty much determined that I'm going to have to learn it if I want to ever get anything accomplished with NPCs anyhow... as this appears to be a common deficit amongst modders.

But yeah, you're right. It really shouldn't be me making the posts about doing it.

That said... I will... if anyone out there believes they would enjoy to try it as well.`

And that's right where I'm at.

The distance between LA and Vault 13 is roughly 175 miles. Even if Fallout 1 was a square 175x175 miles square (it'd probably be closer to 200x200, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt), that's still greater than a 100x increase in area over the Capital Wasteland (roughly 14x14 miles square when superimposed on a real-world map - the actual game's roughly 3.5 square miles). I'm not sure on the size of New Vegas, but the playable area seems to be on the same order as Fallout 3.



I'll agree with that, but you also should have reasonable goals and expectations.

I agree! Goals should be reasonable. I'm just not willing to write off the idea that it could be done, without just the two of us here going back and forth like we are.

Even if the original game's world map is roughly 100x larger than The Capital Wasteland... then you can still handle it both your way and mine... without making it impossible to complete. The process of 'scaling down' the game world is not just a matter of 'compressing locations together'... it also means adjusting the time scale in such a way so that the game makes it -feel- like you're traveling further than you really are.

With some decent terrain-scaling, you could take a region 100x larger than The Capital Wasteland... and represent it in as little as 125% of the same space. Don't get me wrong, it would feel compact... but it could be done. It isn't the way I'd like to do it, mind. I'd -really- like to make it so that you can actually find some rather massive expanses of nothing but desert, where the survivalism aspects of New Vegas would really shine. I have no doubt that a wasteland could be made in which it took 12 minutes to get from Vault 13 to Junktown... and that 12 minutes could represent the roughly day-and-a-half time of your journey.

But that doesn't mean the only options for making the world are by making it 100-times the size of Fallout 3's... or making it 25 percent larger. It just means that those are options which can be considered.

Considering these options realistically isn't unreasonable.

It's when there has been a discussion... and an agreement is made that there is no suitable scale which would justify putting the effort into it... that me continuing to rail on and on about it being impossible would slip from me being ambitious... to me being outrightly unreasonable.


Of course, I doubt such a discussion will ever occur, between anyone. There's never going to be a strong enough presence for such a mod anyways, according to the majority of folks who have come through here so far.

Just when you thought this thread couldn't get any more irrelevant Langy pulls it out of the bag. Primm Valley is about 50 miles from Vegas. Chevy Chase is about 15 miles from the Washington Monument, in the game it's about 200 meters. Did you think these games were to scale? Were you wondering around thinking "Man, why does everyone go on about Las Vegas, it's like 3 buildings?"

Seriously, you should both stop wasting your time, you might as well be debating what kind of rocket fuel would be best for your plan to land on the moon. No offence but you both have about as much experience and chance of succeeding as you do with this endeavour.

Why should anyone want to remake them? Even compared to 2010 standards, F1 & 2 are two of the best games out there. Who cares how they look, gameplay counts

No, I didn't think they were at a 1:1 scale. I didn't realize that New Vegas compressed things quite so much compared to F3, though. I just don't think it's a good idea to make it so you can walk from Oregon to LA in ten real-world minutes is a good idea since that scale is ridiculous and the only way to avoid something like that is to either use an alternative travel system from 'actually walk everywhere' or make the Wasteland too big to be reasonable.

Colonel: No, considering the options realistically isn't unreasonable. That's perfectly reasonable. You just haven't been doing so at all if you think making a TC with a wasteland the size of New Vegas or larger is realistic for a mod team.

Maybe people want to play them in real-time, Mr.Moe7.

That wouldn't be any significantly different to how New Vegas is. If you start at Mojave Outpost (Mountain Pass in real life) then follow the i95 to Hoover Dam then go through Vegas back down the i15 to Mojave Outpost that would be a 200 mile round trip.

Funny, you know, theres a TB combat mod for Fallout 3

So Fallout 1 would be about 16x the size of New Vegas or thereabouts if using the New Vegas scale (roughly 200 miles to a side rather than New Vegas's roughly 50 miles to a side, so F1 is 4x the linear dimensions of New Vegas, 4x the linear dimensions being 4^2 or 16x the areal dimensions). That's still excessive, but yes, it's less than 100x the size of New Vegas at the scale of New Vegas.

Let me put this bluntly then, a lot of people will most likely forgo playing one and two because of its mechanics. Players today tend to like fast paced better than anything else which is a shame because then they miss out on the whole story. Doing this would mean that the people who cant understand the game because of the mechanics could get a better grip on the story.

Looking at it, this is what the math kinda looks like, I think.

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060410215160/fallout/images/0/0b/F1world_map.jpg -socal area from Lower bay area down to San Diego

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20051109211109/fallout/images/7/7f/WORLDMAP6.jpeg -northern Calif, from the bay area up to the Oregon border.

Together they represent the state of California.




That is a monumental amount of real estate to model.....



Looking at the FO2 map, I'm thinking that each of the little red sub sections in a grid square is about the size of a DC wasteland.. :unsure:

How much should the map be scaled down to then? Also I have been looking at the map and there are a lot of cities along the coast that would need building if this is made into an open world..

Well honestly, all you would have to do is create the world, quests, and npc's! all of the items that were in the original are in fallout new vegas or in fallout 3 mods/new vegas mods, and I'm sure most mod authors have no problem letting you borrow, let's say a pipe rifle mesh, animation, and sound from their mod.

Not as easy as you think, if this maps needs 16* the normal size of new vegas then that means it would have to be (32768,32768) thats pretty... big

The thing to remember, here, is that the map isn't really the most important part of it.


For the purposes of something like this, Langy's idea for a traveling mechanism would work perfectly -fine-. Most of the map, in the meanwhile, could almost be generated randomly, and then edited later to better resemble the one in the original games. Although it is an infinitely more spread-out map... the actual design of it would include some very large tracts of desert sand and scorching heat. This means you can have some decently massive, flat-ish areas to traverse, where the only thing you're likely to find is an approaching caravan... or some wild creature intent on you being its next meal.

But for any kind of a release, simply having the classic Fallout locations, some random 'zones' to fight in during encounters, and a means of traveling between these places would be enough. After putting something like that out there for folks to play, there's no saying you can't go back and repopulate the wasteland between here and there, and then tweak the system to accommodate travel over land.

Discussion on how to do that could come -after- all the core elements of the thing were complete.

It's not something that should -overshadow- the importance of creating the classic games, like it has. It's something that should compliment it nicely.