Now available - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZkSC8TxqSU

Other videos are

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNOd9vllKvs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td3WMRPV6EM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozH-DTqFADU

--------------------------------------

Now updated to 0.4.2, new features are;

Flamer and Missile Launcher can now be mounted.
The Missile launcher has a laser sight, this will cut off when moving at more than a slow drift.
Minigun and Flamer now have clips with on-screen clip & ammo counters.
A reload button has been implemented fro Minigun and Flamer.
Installing batteries has been simplified.
A User Manual and Quickstart Guide can be found in the HoverChair's storage.

I've included in this version a Hoverchair 0.4.2 - MK2.esp which uses Falcon8204's brand new HoverChair model. This model includes a roll-cage which makes the chair much easier to use in 1st person view. It isn't fully textured yet, and may be altered in future, but opinions and feedback on it are most welcome.

This version isn't savegame compatible with earlier versions; please uninstall any other version and clean your savegame before installing 0.4 (see http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?s=&showtopic=960580&view=findpost&p=13877387 - thanks Martigen!)

============================

My ridable Hover-Chair modification has another release, and version 0.4.2 is available to download from http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4501.

I'll be starting on adding a side-car for a companion, though that might take a while. In the meantime, though, please do let me know what you think of it so far.

Any opinions or suggestions are very welcome.

From the readme...

Description
===========

A working, drivable HoverChair! Be the envy of other Vault Exiles™! Please note that Vault-Tech Industries are not responsible for any chaos or confusion caused by the use of this prototype vehicle.


Location
========

Super Duper Mart near Megaton.


Details
=======

This is a further improved release of a work-in-progress drivable vehicle mod. The HoverChair can be found outside the Super Duper Mart near Megaton.

The HoverChair runs on fission batteries, which can be found scattered sparsely throughout the Washington DC wastelands, and can be retrieved from the wrecks of some robots by experienced travellers. This abandoned test vehicle has one battery in its on-board storage, along with a useful remote control. If you're finding it hard to locate enough fission batteries, Echonite's Echo_BatteryCharger (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1696) can produce new fission batteries from various weapon energy cells, and Highsight's Solar Charger (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2021) can produce new weapon energy cells from sunlight.

Activate the HoverChair while crouched to access the maintenance options. These give you access to the chair's storage (limited to a weight of 50), to the battery compartment, to the mount/remove weapon option, and to the inertial dampers and steering options (see below).

Activate the HoverChair while standing to mount. The default controls are;

Forward key to accelerate
Strafe keys to steer
Activate key to dismount
Jump key for 'Leap' facility
Ready-weapon/Reload key to reload

When you first approach the HoverChair a message will appear prompting you to re-map the HoverChair's controls. This is strongly recommended as it will enable the on-screen compass and health bar, and make sure enemies react to you properly as you're riding.

The vehicle steers like a hovercraft (a 'sliding on ice' effect), so driving in 3rd person view is strongly recommended. Plus the jet engine flare and Falcon8204's chair model look really good! Enabling inertial dampers will make the vehicle easier to handle but will shorten battery life. Turning can be set to accurate (better for aiming the weapon) or responsive (better for quick turns at high speed).

The Hoverchair can run over water as easily as over land. Take it for a cruise along the Potomac, and enjoy the view!

Vault-Tech Industries are proud to announce that the HoverChair chassis is strongly re-inforced, and can deliver crushing blows to the less polite inhabitants of Washington DC. Just Point and Plough, and the HoverChair will do the rest! This is more effective against large, slow moving enemies. Small, agile enemies are more likely to dodge.

Is crushing not enough? If you have a Minigun, Flamer, Missile Launcher or Fat-Man in your inventory you can install it on the Hoverchair. Load the ammo into the chair's storage, and blast away!

The Explosive Salmon feature will allow your HoverChair to leap skywards! Please note this can only be used once every ten seconds or longer.

A quest called 'HoverChair Location' will be added to your quest list. This simply provides a marker to where you last parked the chair. In addition, the chair will appear on your PipBoy map (Vault icon) and can be fast-travelled to.

When you take the remote control from the chair's storage it will be added to your 'aid' inventory; select the remote (left click) and close your inventory to activate it. You can use it to re-map your HoverChair controls to other keys if you prefer, or to call the vehicle to you. This is a short-range call, and is for when you drive into a pit you can't drive out of.

If you park the HoverChair on a steep slope or the edge of a cliff, it may end up upside-down. Don't worry! Vault-Tech Industries Intelligent Recovery Systems, incorporating RobCo AI technology will come to your aid, and self-right the vehicle on activation!


Install
=======

1. Extract the files to a temporary location.
2. Examine the folder structure and make corrections where necessary.
3. Copy files to (install folder)\Fallout 3\Data\
4. Start Fallout Launcher, click 'Data Files', place a checkmark beside the HoverChair 0.4.esp file.

Please note that HoverChair 0.4.2 isn't savegame compatible with earlier versions, and should only be used with a clean savegame. To clean your savegame, carry out the steps below *before* installing HoverChair 0.4.2

1. Uninstall the old HoverChair as described in that version's readme.
2. Restart Fallout 3 and load your savegame. Click past all errors.
3. Go to a (preferably unmodified) interior.
4. Wait for 4 in-game days.
5. Save again - this is now a clean savegame.
6. Exit Fallout 3 and install HoverChair 0.4.2


Uninstall
=========

1. Start Fallout Launcher, click Data Files, uncheck the HoverChair 0.4.2.esp file.
2. Delete the files/folders associated with the mod.

Fallout 3\Data\HoverChair 0.4.2.esp
Fallout 3\Data\HoverChair readme 0.4.2.txt
Fallout 3\Data\Meshes\HoverC\
Fallout 3\Data\Sound\Fx\HoverC\


Known Issues or Bugs
====================

The chair can sometimes drop down through boulders, roadways or other scenery, especially if your framerate drops significantly below 30FPS. If the chir becomes trapped, use the Leap facility to escape.

The flamer doesn't always set enemies on fire.

Sometimes the flamer will leave large chunks of flame floating unconnected in the air (especially the first two or three times it's used).

Ramming enemies up against building walls can cause you to clip into the building, and possibly get trapped there. Dismount, fast-travel to a nearby location, return on foot and use the Remote Call option on the Hoverchair remote.

Occasionally texts for 'Probe' activators will flash up while driving.

The sound of the main engine will sometimes fail, but comes back after a while. Doubling your iAudioCacheSize and iMaxSizeForCachedSound settings (see Fallout Tweak Guide at www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_1.html, page 10) will help avoid this.

If you have G.E.C.K running at the same time as Fallout 3, you may experience a full lockup.


History
=======

0.4.2

Added Flamer and Missile Launcher as mountable weapons.
Added on-screen clip/ammo counter, and reload key.
Fixed player getting jammed in the middle of the chair if it was in another cell when activated.
Fixed player getting jammed in the middle of the chair if knocked down by an explosion or a Deathclaw Matriarch (from Mart's Mutant Mod - http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3211); player will now be knocked off the chair.
Fixed player sitting on air during death sequence if killed while riding the chair; chair now explodes and player ragdolls.

0.4

Weapon Mount feature added (Mount metalwork by Falcon8204)
Added ability to travel over water
Added map-marker (fast-travel enabled) for the Hoverchair
Added option of accurate/responsive turning
Fixed errors when Remote Call option was used while crouched
Fixed crash when Remote Call was used while in a distant cell to the Hoverchair
Fixed resetting controls to default while riding the chair
Control mapping correctly reset when reloading a saved game

0.3

New HoverChair model by Falcon8204
Added ability to ram enemies
Added ability to make modest leaps into the air
Added limited storage
HoverChair now needs fission batteries to run
Added inertial dampers to improve handling at the cost of shorter battery life
Reduced volume of lift and thrust jets
Improved control re-mapping menus
Somewhat improved collision detection


0.2.1

Fixed bug which occasionally caused the Hover Chair to rise relentlessly skyward.
Added quest marker to parked Hover Chair.
Allowed use of compass and health bar while driving (only if controls are re-mapped).

0.2

Lockups fixed.
Building collision detection improved.
Re-mounting errors fixed.

0.1

First release.


Contact
=======

You can find me on the official Bethasda Game Studios forums (http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?act=idx) as 'AndyW'
You can find me on Fallout 3 Nexus (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/index.php) as 'AndyW1384'


Credits
=======

Thanks to:

Bethesda, for creating Fallout 3.
Falcon8204 for modelling and testing.
Old_andy for testing.
Fallout 3 Nexus.com, for the a one-stop-shop resource for authors and players.
The NIFSkope/NIFTools team.
The Fallout Script Extender team.
The developers and maintainers of Blender.
The developers and maintainers of GIMP.
My brother, for understanding trigonometry - I'm a coder, dammit, not a mathematician!
LHammonds, for the Readme Generator this file was based on.


Tools Used
==========
7-Zip - http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15579
NIFSkope - http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifSkope
TES Construction Set - http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11367
Blender - http://www.blender.org
GIMP - http://www.gimp.org
Readme Generator - http://lhammonds.game-host.org/obmm/tools_readme_generator1.asp


Licensing/Legal
===============
Many models supplied with this mod are the property of Bethesda Game Studios. They are modified and adapted versions of Fallout 3 models, and cannot be used in any context other than a G.E.C.K. based modification of Fallout 3 without written permission of Bethesda.

Apart from that, you can do whatever you want with the scripts and methods used in this mod. However, please ensure you understand the principles and coding before you incorporate them in your own mod - I can't offer support for any mod except this one.

If you decide to use the Hoverchair model/s in your own works, please kindly inform and credit Falcon8204.

I'd love to have a gun on that svcker. Even if it's just a single gatling laser on the side, or something as epic as a weapon mount that allows you to place a weapon of your choice on it and shoot it by pressing a certain button, and it auto adjusts to target a foe you pick in vats. It'd still be a good addon for the thing.

I'd also suggest toning down the flamethrower sound for the engine, kinda hard on the ears after a while.


I love the look of the chair, it's a really makeshift vehicle. Seems to work just fine too.

Hm. Weapon mount should be do-able... I think. It might be tricky getting the placement right for different sized weapons. I'll do a bit of experimenting .

Seems reasonable. What do other people think? I didn't notice it being too loud, but I must admit I was more concentrating on debugging it. How about the volume of the lift jets?

Thanks !

Oh man. That looks awesome!
Cookie? :cookie: (You deserve it)



The sound does seem a little loud, a little toning down would be good.
I also support the "put a weapon on it" idea.


Nice work

Thanks .

Another question (which I suppose falls into the 'is it fun' bracket) is 'Is the handling right?'

Personally, I like the way it handles. It is difficult to drive, especially at first and especially if you're going hell-for-leather. I like that, because I think it makes the chair more interesting and entertaining to drive, but what do other people think? Should it have less drift? Less speed? Should it slow down faster when the thrust isn't on?

Comments and suggestions welcome .

Nice work, looks pretty good. You definitely need to add in the ability to run over NPCs. No vehicle is complete without the ability to pancake hopeless pedestrians.

Looks great and seems like a lot of fun to play but it seems it needs FOSE. I'll be checking your progress though as I think it's really a wonderful mod idea. Keep up the good work!

ZOMG. this is awesome :bowdown:

i haven't downloaded it yet but i looked at the youtube vid. the handling seems alright to me. although i think you should make it a bit slower; it is a chair after all also in the vid it looks like you hit that tree and bounced back like 100 feet. if you could modify the physics calcs to make this more realistic it would be awesome. perhaps send you flying over the top if you hit it hard enough.

some sort of fuel i think would work well to balance the complete awesomeness of this. fusion batteries and/or microfusion cells obviously fit the bill here.

a fixed weapon on this i think is a requirement but maybe you could later have different models - one with a weapon but slower and another without a weapon. but faster. perhaps a third which handles like a WWI tank but fits your whole arsenal on it :gun: maybe disabling vats while on it would serve to balance it further; or maybe a large accuracy drop instead of complete disabling.

i can see this later on becoming one of those star wars speeder bikes. pew pew pew lazers FTW


can't wait to try this out. i'mma have to start a new game for this one. this (with mounted weapons) + MMM = teh sekx.

another thought: i wonder how this would handle with the sprint mod installed...

cheers
falcon

Stephen Hawking would be proud!

Well, we'll see. That's my favourite, but adding weapons seems to have a strong vote . I'll probably try the weapons first, see how tricky it is, if it defeats me then flattening enemies will be the next experiment. I'm a bit wary of having both, 'realistic' though it may be, because then the chair would, frankly, be a total God-Item.

Yep. No way of getting away from good 'ol FOSE. In this case, even if I had some inventory items tied to hotkeys for control, I still have to use FOSE to avoid a nasty graphics problem, so it'll always need FOSE. I take it you use one of the versions of Fallout not supported by FOSE?

Thanks .
Glad the handling looks ok in the video. Of course, how it looks and how it plays are two different things . I think the speed and handling are more gameplay things than logic things - but I agree it has to be at least a bit plausible.
Hmmm. I fear that may be impractical. I don't think it's possible to get the player to tilt using a script. The only way that sort of thing could happen is if the player got hurled from the chair - and I just don't think that would be fun. Not after the first two or three times, anyway.
Fusion batteries, definitely. Figuring out how fast to use them up would be the tricky part.
That's an interesting idea. VATS is irrelevant, as any shooting would be done by the chair, not the player. But tweaking speed, manoeuvrability and accuracy to balance out the weapon sound like the right way to go.
Shouldn't make any difference at all . The chair's speed has nothing to do with the player.

Proud? Envious! Ha, eat my radioactive dust, Professor Hawking!

can you do a version thats more like a anti-grav kinda hovering?

Do you mean one that lets you go higher and lower at will? That would be simple enough (though I think a jetpack model would be more the thing for that idea), but it raises the old problem of Fallout 3's worldspaces. You anti-gravity up over Megaton's walls, or over a pile of rubble in the DC ruins, and you're not going to like the empty space and half built models that you see. Fallout 3 really isn't kind to high flyers, I'm afraid.

Or have I misunderstood you?

throw up a poll maybe?


well ideally there would be a threshold velocity where that would happen. maybe you could use the "knockdown" animation (like when you get hit with grenades/missiles) instead? i realize this would take a lot more coding, so if not its no biggie.

i dunno about you, but i think flying off the thing traveling at 100mph sounds like fun! if only for S*s and giggles



good call on the chair/player differentiation. i'm still a new player when it comes to that sort of thing :shrug:
EDIT: New player?? ok auto censor... w/e you say...



that is only if your chair can open and maintain a wormhole to the next galaxy.

Nice work!
I can see it call twin minigun's :nuke:

Maybe. People can't give reasons in a poll, or express their level of enthusiasm. I think this is a pretty good way of gauging what will excite and what will disappoint .


Probably the last thing I'll add, but definitely thoughts of how to do it are now floating around in my head...

no i means a kind of hovering (with sound) where there is no flame or jet pack but a kind of anti grav field. similar to the hover tank in the game planetside or the hover bike in tribes 2.

Correct. So far I've managed without FOSE but looking at your work I'm starting to think I'm going to need to find a way to get FOSE to work on my game.

I second the twin miniguns idea. Then all you'll need is a radio mod to play the Ride of the Valkyries while you storm the Wasteland. :nuke:

Ah, I see.

Is it possible? Yes, absolutely. Can I do it? Erk. The thing is, I'm useless at modelling, haven't the first idea about texturing, animation or special effects, and shader/particle effects are a book still waiting to be opened.

I'm very pleased with what I've managed to achieve with the hoverchair with so little skill, but the fact is all the effects and models in this mod are cut-and-paste from elsewhere in Fallout 3. And it took me a long time and a lot of effort to figure it out. Honestly, don't hold your breath for any alterations like that, unless someone else takes the mod and does the changes themselves (which I'm perfectly happy for them to do).

Sorry to disappoint .

I'm flattered . Good luck with that.


Oh yes, I like that . I wonder if the Project Valhalla team know of a source of out-of-copyright recordings of that sort of music? When and if I get round to it, I must remember to ask them.

Bug found (the chair sometimes rises relentlessly skywards). I'll upload a fix sometime tomorrow (28/03/09 GMT).

I quickly tested adding a Gatling Laser, and to my surprise I found that it's... well, it's really, really dull. You just sit in the chair, blazing away, until your enemies fall over. It feels very remote, and quite clumsy. Very strange, I'd have thought it would at least be entertaining.

I'll upload a weaponised version before long to get feedback, but right now I'm inclined to go for the NPC/Creature knockdown instead of weapons.

This is a great mod andy, and in my opinion a great improvement over the Motorbike. I have some suggestions though.

-Could you re-enable the HUD so I could see my compass? It makes it allot harder to travel without it and I find myself checking my map alot which is boring.

-Could the remote be used to summon it to you anywhere, instead of just when close by? I keep forgetting where I put it and have to search for ages.

-If you implement fuel (e.g Fission Batteries) I recommend you make a way of building your own on a workbench out of energy and microfusion cells because of the fact that Fission Batteries are really quite rare. Maybe they were out every 24-48 game hours?

And I personally like the idea about running down people rather than shooting them, sounds funner.

I've only run out of fission batteries when I didn't have my charger on hand, and when I had used my ammo for shooting.

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1696 allows you to turn energy ammo into other energy ammo(SC to MFC to FB to APC), which not only allows you to turn your pistol ammo into rifle ammo, and the other way around, it also allows you to craft fission batteries when you need them. Oh, and it never hurts to be able to make Alien Power Cells as well.
I'm sure you're also worried that you'll run out of cells to form batteries, and I've got the cure: just equip your http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2021, and get some sun for a little while, and you'll be getting pure power in no time. Sure, you have to be outside in the daylight to get any power, and those two mods allow you to turn 1000 SCU(Solar Charge Units) into 1000 small cells, then into any* of the other ammo you can make with the charger with your battery charger.
*That isn't for heavy weapons

I'd though this was impossible... but I've just thought of a way it can be done. FOSE to the rescue !
That... might be a bit overpowered. On the other hand if this is, basically, a more fun version of fast-travel then it's no fun to lose it. Hm. What would you think of an active quest which, if you select it, gives you a pointer towards where the chair is? Another alternative might be a 'magic fly halfway across the world to me' option, but one which needs re-charging or re-purchasing.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
That's how it's looking at the moment.

Excellent idea! Thanks so much for the links . I'll set the power requirements reasonably low (those batteries can power a robot for hundreds of years, after all ), but it'll still be something of a challenge to keep the chair powered. Those who find that frustrating can download one or both those mods.

The quest marker sounds like a excellent alternative to my idea. I'm glad that you can put in the HUD aswell, yey!

Thanks Andy!

Now updated to 0.2.1; this version fixes a bug that caused the chair to occasionally rise skyward, adds a quest marker to help find your parked chair, and allows you to use compass and health bar while driving.

This version isn't savegame compatible with 0.2; please uninstall version 0.2 and clean your savegame before installing 0.2.1 (see http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?s=&showtopic=960580&view=findpost&p=13877387 - thanks Martigen!)