I know this is probablys not a new revelation but i was flicking through some fallout 4 screenshots and on one of them that shows placing a turret theres a "size" meter with a bar half filled and not an awful lot around
Kinda annoyed by this, having a limitation to what you can put down; it genuinely may hinder over-the-top defences, grand structures or an illustrious setup of lights.
Then again, it may not. Given bethesdas track record it seems likely that settlement construction wont ever quite live up to the hype but what do you guys think?

Well they need to be sure the game engine doesn't blow up, plus it makes sense, there is already a limit on where you can build a settlement, so for similar reasons it make sense to have a limit on how big you can make them.

Seems like something that makes sense, honestly. The game has to keep track of all the "parts" you place (and have power left over to run the NPCs / do raider attacks / etc). I wonder if a settlement at full "size" will slow down a console or lower-end computer....

Yeah, the game doesn't just comprise settlement building. A line does need to be drawn somewhere.

Of course there has to be a limit. Mods will enhance the feature, so if you play on PC it shouldn't be a concern.

As for whether it will live up to the hype...I doubt it will, Bethesda oversells many game features before release. Again, not much of a problem if you're on PC.

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I wouldn't expect it too, I'm sure it was stress-tested enough to where it won't slow down on consoles, hence the limit...but, this is Bethesda, so who knows?

Let's look closer at the building/settlement system we saw in Todd Howard's E3 presentation. Here's a pic to look at for reference:

http://i.imgur.com/lweXrZG.png

The settlement system in Fallout 4 seems to work very similarly to Bethesda's newly-released Fallout Shelter. Along the top of the screen, we see that the game keeps track of power, water, and food running through our settlement—just like in Fallout Shelter.

We can also see that it keeps track of how many people are currently living in the settlement, how many beds are present, how happy the settlement is on average, how safe the settlement is from outside threats, and finally the size of the settlement, which apparently, and understandably, has a maximum.

This suggests that we have to set up power (generators) and water sources (pumps), but also to establish ways of getting food for everyone in the settlement. We know that Brahmin caravans and farms are one possibility, but what could some other strategies be? Can we set up hunting parties? What do you think? Is there any evidence for anything else?

Towards the bottom of the screen, we have a list of structures that can be built, including a section of a building, a chair, a painting, and so on.

How do you guys think new structures are added to the list? Do we have to interact with a structure in order to be able to build it? Have you found any other information which might make it clearer how this works?

I guess Fallout 4 has zoning laws i guess lol. "no sir you can not place 100 turrets down to defend your settlement as this raises safety concerns for children" or "no you can not have all buildings over 3 stories tall" lmao honestly, the game could only do so much. its not like you could continue to dump objects into the game world and not expect them to place a limitation on it as to prevent hiccups and crashing of the game engine or your systems hardware. IMO personally i feel that the settlement creation will still be fulfilling and fun even with a placement limitation.

Even with mods, there's still a limit because the map doesn't go forever.

Wonder if I can make the third New Vegas somewhere in the Commonwealth? Would be interesting.

I would like a statement of comparison on size. Like will our settlements be restricted to Big Town (like 6 buildings close together) or maybe Megaton (multi-storied houses on elaborate ramps/stilts) sizes? Small town size, village size? I mean really any kind of context would be helpful Bethesda!

You know, I'm vaguely reminded of the size/complexity gauge in SSX 3, for doing your characters' outfits - every piece of clothing or other gear would fill up the gauge some (mostly due to polygons, but glow/flame effects likely counted against it, too). Use too many fancy items on some parts of your snowboarder and you couldn't make any more changes elsewhere. Weaker system back in that era, of course, but basically the same concept - the game can only manage so much "stuff" in one place without starting to have issues, so here's a limit.

I hope we can have one air force base size settlement

I know what you mean, but you can't really get a good view of what's around so you cant say it's small per say yet

i'd imagine some perks like local leader increase the size you can make a settlement/house, or different areas allow for larger ones or something like that

and sorry but you just arent gonna get an unlimited build option or super mega structures with armadas of turrets and lightshows and blah blah on your plot.... thats a bit silly

they have the rest of the game's stability in the area, npcs, scripted raids, etc to consider, plus the building/settlement feature is just a side thing that simply can't take too much umph from everything else

put enough crap in a little area and you get stuttering and crashes (but im sure there will be a mod that removes it/adds larger plots for the pcs that can deal with it)

but its a necessary evil, a teeny tiny necessary evil that shouldn't bug you unless you are WAY too picky

it's not a city sim, so the city building just can't be what you seem to want

i don't go play sim city and get whiny that i can't go first person to the 14th floor of a building and pick up a clipboard off a desk

all i can say is play a city sim between fo4 plays if you want that experience, otherwise shrug it off and deal so you can enjoy the game without having a sour note in the back of your mind over a pretty understandable game limit

orrrrrrrrr mods

Note that the current settlement is empty while size is half full. The size might be the existing houses and stuff.

Now the size the engine can manage would be very large, town and other stuff will be far larger than our settlements unless we goes way over the top.

Last the limit would be simple to mod out, if its an limit at all.

If you have gambling and booze I'll show up

maybe your settlements size is dictated by your leadership perk level, the higher the level the more people that will want to join you.

Since it's a settlement can we make multiple buildings or is it just a single-building compound type thing? So far I've only seen images of compounds with big single buildings.

They've always got to have some kind of limitation, just for the engine's sake, although I hope I can still build my towers tall. This really is the exact thing the Creation Engine excels in, though; the Gamebryo engine it was build off of was used for games like Civ IV or some of the Tycoon games. Dynamically altered game worlds constructed of modular pieces is exactly why Bethesda uses this engine instead of another.

Tangent time: There was a PSP remake of the first Mega Man game, Powered Up it was called, that included a really robust level editor. Despite having a cost setting for each screen to help tame performance, it was actually really easy to slow that game to a crawl with custom levels; I learned a lot about level design the hard way from that little game. My little community also discovered a lot of neat bugs with the editor that enabled us to do some really cool things, too. That is a game I will blindly defend for nostalgia; but I can make a good case that it was really the best Mega Man game, too.

There's a bunch of other buildings in that screenshot.. Surely those are making up some of that "size" since they are able to be deconstructed to gain materials. Don't overthink it, you might hurt yourself. I'm sure it'll generally be big enough to satisfy the majority of people's wants. But there will always be some...

I hope they have some unique NPCs that eventually spawn in at certain settlement locations. It's kinda hard to form an attachment to a place when it's just filled with mouthpieces.

I suppose it has to exist to make sure it doesn't put weaker computers (and potentially consoles?) in a choke-hold. For people playing in God-Machines though, I'm sure that will be changed eventually.

I'm more worried about where the spawn points will be. If they just spawn them at the settlements, then walls won't keep them out effectively, and turrets won't be able to fire them off at a distance.

That's just to stop some smart asses trying to build 100 turrets in the same place...

My guess is multi buildings, you can only build houses on foundations but they tend to be grouped together.

One obvious idea is to put defensive walls between them to create an fort with the buildings as towers.

In fallout 3 I used an mod who let me repair and turn robots making them followers.

I did not use them as followers outside a few fights like going to the water purification center with liberty prime.

I used them as mobile turrets mostly to defend open towns but also good fast travel points who tend to spawn mobs.

Kept spares outside megacity, now it was pretty fun then you exited and 20 securitrons opened fire on an raider, an very load and very short firefight

Probably to prevent performance issues.

Could the size of your settlement be somewhat determined by skills, and the amount of people living there?

I also hope that the size of the settlement grid depends on the location of each particular grid.

It would be strange to me if all of them were, say 5 acres.

As for what they have shown. as first place we can build, I see as something to cut our teeth on. Get the basic flow of building, but not to the point where you can just build and build and forget the the game. Maybe there aren't many settlers far west on the map, since it is away from Boston, so a huge town wouldn't make sense. As you go further east, you find more people who are hoping to get into a town, but for various reasons, find themselves unable, or those who have been uprooted. A larger settlement here would work well, there would be enough people to necessitate a large settlement, but (if FO Shelter is any indication) to run it as well.

I'm also hoping for a treehouse mod, but that's neither here, nor there.