Hey guys, well I own and have completed Fallout 3 on the PC with bare minimal mods almost a year ago now. I want to play Fallout 3 again but this time heavily modified for a different experience. I've looked at game play overhauls and many of them offer some great alterations. But there is not one I am completely happy with, it's not the quality of the mods as they are high but rather the direction they choose.

I've been testing FWE for a couple of hours and I like most of it but certain aspects I don't, some examples:
Multiple permanent icons on PIP / Boy, for example Triage, is it possible they can be configured outside of Fallout 3 and then limit the interface inside the game?
Bullet Time - I don't want the icon for it either
Immortal Dogmeat - Why can't my dog die?
The icons for the new weapons not matching existing
Some of the perk modifications
Standing 1mm away from water is fine but dip your little toe in and 50 rads a sec and in 20 seconds you are dead


I like mods that are seamless or at least no more pop ups after a new game. Is there a simple overhaul mod that is easy enough for me to mod from? Now in your opinion if I want an overhaul my way would you recommend that I take an existing Overhaul mod and create a patch or compile a collection of existing of mods out there? Please note I have no experience in modifying Fallout 3 and I don't want to spend weeks on it but I'll be happy to do tweaks and also merging mods.

Examples of seamless mods I love:
- Visual:
* Terrain Texture mods - Megaton, Terrain and Rivet City
* Project Beauty HD
* HiRes Weapons
* FX improvements - Subtle sun glare, Vision FX
* NPC height Randomizer
* Darnified UIF3
* Xepha's Darker nights
* Fellout
* Street lights
- Audio:
* GNR More where that came from
- Gameplay
* Weapon Mod Kits
* Outcast Rewards Decreased
- Bug fixes
* Unofficial Fallout Patch
* Crane fix

Other mods I use that I want altered:
* FWE
* CALIBR
* CRAFT

Well, according to what the FWE guys have been saying lately in their thread, version 5 will have a combined menu that lets you configure many more aspects of it, probably including a rad multiplier. I don't know if the bullet time menu will be lumped in, too, but it probably will. I hear that The3rdType made new icons for 5.0, too.

I think the Triage "item" and other menus opened from the Pipboy is a result of a limitation of the GECK, in that scripted items are pretty much the only way to put a (config) menu into the game. In other words, you're kinda stuck with that. It's not really that annoying.

Personally, I've made a couple patches in FO3Edit and added my own tweaks/fixes to FWE and other mods, that way. Basically, I've been copying a property as a new override into a new, separate patch, and tweaking some values. You should be able to revert the perks, and remove the "essential" flag from Dogmeat, that way. I don't have any experience with the GECK, either, but it's fairly simple in FO3Edit.

I think compiling a collection of lesser mods has a possibility of creating a larger mess, since there are compatibility issues to work on. FWE is essentially a collection of lesser mods, tweaked for balance and compatibility.

Thank you Zero, maybe I'll put off playing Fallout 3 until version 5 of FWE.

I suspect the only true way to get the mod I want is to make it myself, since I am not skilled enough and I don't have enough time then modifying an existing overhaul mod is the way to go. Now that I think about it, overhauls cannot be modular as each component is altered so it balances with the hole game.

I've just seen so many great mods that are so close to being what I want, but are just a few steps out. Some are likely due to the limitation of GECK as you say but most of the ones are because I disagree with the direction of the author. In those parts I will have to patch them.

Another example is in FWE where it increases the radiation problem, but I'd like to see radioactive objects vastly reduced as well as the maximum threshold of the body. For example the max rads your character can take is 200 but food and water contain no or only 1 rad, Radaway would also be a lot more of a rare find. How I'd start on something like this, I do not know.

Haven't tried FWE yet, so I can't speak to it, but this is exactly why I avoid big overhauls in general,. They seem great in principle, then all of a sudden, it's like: Wait a minute--why is my Pipboy light pink? How does that improve "realism?"

That, and they keep expanding and expanding and are never finished. It would be one thing if this meant squashing bugs, but often it means introducing new features, which introduces new bugs, and so on and so on.

For Fallout 3 I'm trying to go with smaller, individual mods, which can mean conflicts, but everything is a trade off, I guess.

Yeah I avoided them last time round, the only reason I am using it now is as a test. It's strange that FWE improves about 85% of the game to me but it's the other 15% that I am focusing on while I play it. It keeps reminding me that I am playing a game that has been modified.

When I play Fallout with no overhauls and just a few mods I just enjoy the experience, but when I play with overhauls I keep thinking about whether that change are better or worse. I seem to be constantly evaluating the game, which is ruining the experience.

Plus the pink pipboy would be quite distracting in the grey-brown wasteland.

Have you guys tried http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1064654?

My Tweaks have always been designed to work with other mods (specifically, the ones on http://amito.freehostia.com/Fallout/FO.htm).

Ok, so it is true that my mod is never finished, as I'm always working on making it better . . . but it is a very solid, pretty much bug free, set of 8 independent game play altering modules. You just pick only the ones you want to use, and add other compatible mods that you pick.

Oh, and I didn't make the Pipboy pink.

I kind of think that FWE already takes care of this, but not in the way that you want. Instead of reducing the rad cap, the values for radiation intake is scaled up, which essentially gives the same result: you die more easily from radiation. Whether it's 200 or 1000, it's really just a number. The number may be unrealistic, but you get the same experience.

Edit: I should probably mention that FWE's readme contains a list of the individual mods that were compiled into it. And, aside from Arwen's mod list, There's http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1056342, and probably a few others around.

In the GAME world of Fallout 3 with FWE, Radiation isn't always a bad thing...take the current game I'm playing:

Im level 12 (almost 13), have explored about 60% of the wasteland, and I'm wearing what appears to be the best power armor in the game (winterized T51B from Operation Anchorage).

I have both the perk from Moira, and RAD CHILD perk from FWE. Even though I'm in Power Armor, and have another perk that prevent's critical hits (from the Ultimate Perk Pack, aka UPP), I still get limbs and my head disabled constantly.

I don't have the time, nor the patience to look for a place to drop that damned finicky bedroll after every fight, nor to sit there and 'triage' myself again and again and again...

So, what I do is carry a number of high radiation consumables, like dog meat which if I recall off the cuff adds like 23 to your rad count. Furthermore, I try to keep my rad count hovering in the background at around 380 'rads'.

When I start getting crippled, I eat and drink, or jump in the nearest puddle until my rad count hits around 650 for an average fight, 800 for a long fight. This causes my 'mutations' (the perks) to kick in and start regenning my health and limb condition slowly, enabling me to hide behind something for 10 or 15 seconds when needed, then emerge once again ready to kick butt.

This is just one example of the tactical superiorities inherent in FWE. Certainly, 1000 'rads' will still kill me, and certainly I've had to adjust to that fact by doing things like improving my explosives skill so I could blow open the front door of the broken section of Rivet City (still took a mininuke though), but from a sheer combat perspective, the high radiation has become my friend.

I am, however, looking forward to being able to LOWER the radiation in FWE version 5.0, simply because from a realism standpoint, the water in the wastes would be nowhere NEAR that deadly, except perhaps right by the megaton bomb.


As to things like 'pink pipboy lights', stuff like that generally will NEVER be in FWE, and the things you DON'T like, you can generally shut off, although you will probably still have the inventory item(s) related to them. Just ignore them.

Hi Arwen,

I've downloaded your mod yesterday but I haven't tested it yet. I just gave the readme a quick once over and it looks good. I will have to study that a bit closer, thanks for highlighting it.



Yeah, I know. I should just accept it as a gameplay mechanic, something designed to make the game challenging and fun to play. However I keep seeing the 'Wasteland' that supports such little plant life with highly irradiated water but there are huge amounts of animal life. I can't figure out how any large mammal can survive there let alone human colonies, raiders in the wild and the huge variety of beasts. If the game had the rad level reduced to 200, had food and water gave none to very little radiation but left all the other rads exposures at the same level (such as recently exploded cars) then I could be better immersed into the game. After all people would still need Rad-x, Rad-away and environment suits to survive on a long term basis. If Rad-Away was reduced to 1/5 of original game levels then after travelling to a irradiated area or consuming enough irradiated materials you'd use doctors. If exposed food and water gave only 1 rad each, then after 20 meals you'd have 40 rads you'd have minor radiation sickness you'd then have to pay the doc to be cleaned up because using a precious Rad-away (now only 20% of original amount) would be not worth using.

Does this make sense?

I can see these types of things in multiple area's of gameplay such as injuries, combat and resources. Now first play through I just ignored it, but now I am looking at overhauls I can't stop but focus on it.

Plus I am out of work so my brain is in weird mode. If I had just came back from a busy day at work and saw this post I'd think this person has too much time on their hands.



I think that FWE definitely improves gameplay over the original game and I agree with 85%+ of the mod choices. It's just for me I am focusing on the 15% that I don't agree with. That's why I was wondering if I should compile my own, or modify an existing overhaul mod. I'll give Arwen's overhaul a go to see if those changes are more in keeping with my preferences.

What you're saying makes sense, but what we're dealing with is a game design (radiated areas, such as water, are often used as barriers, or difficult areas to get through.)

My mod also greatly increases the RADs . . . because the barriers were generally way too easy to get through, and increasing RADs is the easiest way to keep my mod compatible (with mods like RI/PN and BLTC).

But I also increased the effectiveness of Radiation suits (and PA) . . . the combination makes these item now necessary, instead of just having a Radiated area as a minor inconvenience.

Remember too that Fallout is an alternate reality . . . where things like radiation behaves a bit differently than in the Real World.

I realise your points and I should just accept it as a game play mechanic, I know.

But I am the type of guy who points at the TV screen shouting "That's not possible!" when I watch another TV show character say "I'll just enhance this photo and voil?!" and suddenly the previous 32x32 computer image suddenly displays the killers face in total clarity.

So when I play Fallout 3 I have plethora of game play choices to point and scream at, so I am looking at mods that reduce those. I mean I can accept super mutants, ghouls and two headed brahim existing in the Fallout universe but say that my character can't go for a leisurely swim without his skin falling off and I will start the pointing and screaming.

One thing you can do about the rads/water issue is to download a mod called Pure Water and load it at the end of your load order. That way it will override any rad/water changes made by FWE or any other overhaul you load. There are four choices of ESPs with the mod for more or less or none radiation in water and for bluer water or not.

gothemasticator

Thank you my good man

If you go the route of using the pure water, you might want to also grab one of the 'greener' mods that adds some life back to the wasteland. It has been over 200 years, after all, and the grass and trees, while sparse, would have started coming back and 'taking over'.

Also, if you plan on doing that, I recommend you replace the 'barriers' that used to be radioactive water with another type of 'barrier' to make your wasteland experience memorable....Marts Mutant Mod.

If the sheer number of various creatures that start showing up is too much for you to enjoy, you can, if using FWE, get a patch (search for KAI on the nexus) that allows MMM to spawn different TYPES of creatures drawn from both vanilla and MMM, but will stop it from spawning EXTRA creatures.

Additionally, you may, for 'realism' want to look into a backpack mod.

Also, I recommend grabbing one of the 'tent' mods from the Nexus as the bedroll from FWE, while very nice and very cool...is also almost impossible to place in the wasteland in this version (hoping they do something about that in version 5).

The 1000 rad limit is actually the most realistic number. From wikipedia:

(The rem is a derived unit built around a centerpoint of 1 rem = 1 rad, modified by the radiation wavelength and properties of the irradiated material. Both the rad and rem are considered obsolete units in favor of the gray.)

I'm not sure exactly what the OP is meaning by "seamless", whether its a lack of in-game configuration menus or being the work of a single author. Either of those criteria would be satisfied by It's Bubbly!

I don't think it is that difficult to remove the pip boy tokens and reroute their functionality to a key press (take a look at the http://fose.silverlock.org/fose_command_doc.html for more information). From what I hear, most of FWEs functionality will be controlled by a number of global variables in the upcoming version 5.0, so you can simply make a FWE dependent plugin that changes those values to whatever you want. That will require going over the menu scripts to figure out what the variables do, but it should be very doable. Then you simply need to stop the menu from being displayed, and then you have your seamless overhaul

It will take some work, but it should be very doable.

Thank you for this, I'm looking forward to v5. This is what I was after hearing.

Rhoark thanks for the reference, at the wiki source there is no link between rems and rads at all but if we assume that rem=rad then a 1000 is a pretty good number to use in the game. It also highlights that radiation sickness in the game should be more severe. But in highlighting that to me now makes believe balancing the game is more difficult, as having water at 50 rads/sec means death in 20 seconds but having water a 1 rad/sec is easily ignore as a minor inconvenience. Also anything emitting 50 rads/sec would need to kept very have a very wide birth. The bomb in Megaton would contaminate the entire area and even if the area was 1/10th of the water people would only live for around 3 minutes.

Overall, the residents of Megaton probably have more to worry about from cellular mutation and cancer than from immediate death by exposure.

I learned a fair amount (but not enough) about radiation in the military, and even more afterward while working with nuclear density gauges for a soil, concrete and asphalt testing company, and generally so called 'radiant' exposure from a bomb like Megaton's would either be so high as to prevent anyone from living within a mile or so (winds and water table dependant) or so low as to be more of a long term mutation and cancer concern than an immediate threat.

The no-life scenario would only happen if a stress point, such as a rivet, or (unlikely) the casing itself, were to have ruptured on impact. If that was the case, there would be no Megaton as death by exposure would have been a matter of minutes, hours or days, depending on the location and severity of the hull breach.

Still and all, even if the bomb had been carefully laid to rest there, rather than dropped from 50,000 feet by a bomber...I sure as hell wouldn't live in a town as small as Megaton with that thing in the middle.

Heck, I've been to apartment complexes bigger than Megaton

I agree with your post and this is what I believed to be the case in the original Fallout's Megaton, but after FWE the water surrounding the bomb emits 50 rads / sec, which to me suggests there is a failure in the casing of the bomb. At 50 rads / sec a human would die in 20 seconds of exposure (in Fallout 3) and any level of radiation that could kill someone in 20 seconds surely would contaminate the entire area making Megaton completely uninhabitable by humans (I'm sure Ghouls and Super Mutants wouldn't mind). That is one of the things I would want changed in FWE and the reason for my thread. But just to restate again, I understand it's a game mechanic, I just want it changed.

It's completely still water collected at the bottom of a crater. Bomb or not, there's still runoff to consider.

Seriously, it feels like you're derailing the thread, a little. That isn't really heavily related to gameplay, and more to general realism and Fallout lore. Remember that the Fallout universe is based on perceptions and culture from the 1950's.

I'm derailing the thread I created?

It relates to my early post that there are several things I want changed in overhauls and that's why I created the thread, it's not because I think FWE is bad, far from it I really want to use it but tweaked.

Also the radiation is just one aspect of the changes in gameplay I want, specifically I would want radiation levels to be lowered in food and water but also to vastly decrease the medication and gear that help resist or heal radiation poisoning.

Um, I don't really see how the feasibility or possibility of the existence of Megaton and the intact bomb is related to the game mechanics of radiation intake. I already suggested changing the radiation multiplier. Heck, I just opened up FO3Edit and found the variable for you: It's fRadiationAccumulationRate. It's a multiplier; vanilla Fallout is set to 1.0, while FWE has 5.0. All the food and water is under "Ingestibles", and you can do a deep copy override, or modify the values one by one. Your call. FWE has an optional mod for less medicines. Probably an adaptation of another mod.

Okay well thanks for the variable in your post, but I think you are writing with the intention to rile and be picky.

I appreciate those that have tried to help, but I don't want to have this thread turn into nit-picking. I will ask for it to be closed.

I will check out Arwen's overhaul mod and I'll give FWE version 5 a go after it's release. I will try to have a go at modifying them but I'll probably need some people's help and I'll create a new thread asking then.

I think what we should be taking away from this discussion is the fact that radiation should vary from place to place and source to source.

On top of that, radiation shouldn't be the only concern. Bacteria, mutant viruses, venemous bugs, all of these have their place.

There are many places in the game that getting a disease from toilet/sink drinking would make sense, as well as places where poison would make sense (industrial runoff), but all of them just have this blanket generic level of radiation.

Take the game I'm playing right now...totally blew my immersion to realize that the FUNGUS POOLS in Little Lamplight are as radioactive as the Tidal Basin...