Sun setting in Valhalla Expedition base camp

Well, I think it’s time for me to pull the plug on this project. At least on my own behalf. I think I should take a moment to look back and write something down about this project. Game developers usually write up post mortems for their games so I think I’ll take a shot on that even though our project was a mod (but large enough to be a expansion itself).

Starting out

I started modding out of sheer boredom. I had some plans on various mods for various games (like making a mod for The Witcher based on the Finnish horror movie Sauna). Fallout 3 won as a platform mainly because of the nostalgia it gave me and because it was still quite fresh (I started planning the mod even before the game came out).

The aim of the mod was to add Europeans, mainly northerners, to the Fallout lore. I created the basic structure of the plot, wrote it down and posted it on some forums with some basic ToDo lists in hopes to form a team. That didn’t work out too well since most of the topics just turned into flame wars about how I was contaminating the fallout lore with filthy European influences

Also, generally people are not too interested in helping out someone with just an idea. They want to know that you could pull off the project by yourself if necessary. People want to be sure that there is something in it for them before they’ll sacrifice their time to help you.  That taught me very well that ideas aren’t worth anything unless you can implement them. That’s the main thing I want to say to all starting out modders and game makers. No one will finish your project for you, so don’t go looking for a team unless you are ready to do all the heavy lifting yourself.

Another attempt

After failing early on to gather a team, I tried a different strategy. The aim of this strategy was still to find a team to help me with the project but my method was quite different. I decided that the best way to attract attention to the project would be to prove others (and myself also) that I could pull it off. Fallout modding that time was still quite premature (the GECK wasn’t even released yet) and the community was craving for new weapons to the game. So, armed with a copy of Blender and Fallout Mod Manager (basically a hex editor at the time) I started making my own weapon mod, the Valhalla Rifle.

Render of the Valhalla Rifle

Rifle in game

The rifle is inspired by the Finnish SAKO TRG sniper rifle, but not a direct clone. This mod was one of the first unique weapon mods in FO3 and it became quite popular (you can spot it in many Fallout 3 related youtube videos for example and almost all fan-made weapon packs for the game). One of the videos I made about this rifle was actually featured on YouTube’s .

Through the rifle’s popularity I started recruiting people for my larger mod project. I managed to get quite a crowd together but in the end only a few were really interested in doing some actual work on the mod. There were however a few people who were genuinely interested in the project from the start. This group later became the coreteam of the mod:

• Istvan, pretty much wrote all of the dialogues in the mod and helped me to fill in the spots with the background story
• Illyism, crazy scriptkiddie
• KrazyKommy, GECK editing and QA .
• Erki, our star voice actor

We also had numerous of other contributors and if you’re interested you can check the full list here.

In the next part I will write about the planning process and early phases of development. To be continued…

Motorcycle goes VROOM!

OK, here is the deal. The deadline for Project Valhalla alpha is getting more near every day. I am fairly confident PV will ready for alpha testing then, since we only have 2 quests that need to be scripted left before it.

After alpha of PV, I will take some time to look at the Motorcycle mod I made earlier. Since I will have limited time to work on it, I would like to hear your opinnion  about what you consider to be the most important features to implement. Here is the poll:

You can choose upto 2 features that you would like to see in the upcoming version. If I missed a feature that you would like to add to the poll, please drop me a comment here at my blog, so I can add it (I’ll only add the features from the comments on the blog, since it is much easier for me to keep track of them there).

The mod can be downloaded from Fallout3Nexus.

And if computer games are not you’re cup of tea, you can buy the real deal from here!

Pretty sweet huh?

I really need to get a better movie editing tool than Windows Movie Maker : P

Well,  I am not really building cars since I just used the model found at Tranquility Lane. But I spent a full day’s work on making the skeleton for the car, rigging the pieces to that skeleton and then another day trying to get it to work in game. It was a nice learning experience. I must write some ideas down before I forget em, hence I am writing this post. Please read on if you’re interested.

Horses:

Fallout 3 lack support for mounts, so I have been studying how the horses for Oblivion were made. If I could figure out more about the horses in Oblivion, then perhaps I could find a way to mimic their behavior in Fallout. Illyism, a fellow modder for Project Valhalla, has also been trying to “crack the code” how they made them in Oblivion. Fruits of his labor can be seen here.

It seems that horses are just creatures. When player click on them, some hard coded script plays the getup animation and then makes the player control the horse. Basically we can mimic the controls with simple FOSE scripts, as seen in the Ridable Creatures and Car Mod, but what we can’t mimic is the behavior of the player on top of a horse.

Motorcycle:

I made a creature of the Motorcycle armor I had rigged earlier (copied rad roach files to a separate folder, added Motorcycle.nif file there and checked it from the Model list in the GECK). I combined riding script and this creature. The results were a ridable motorcycle creature.

After that I checked the “Tilt forward/backward” and “Tilt right/left” boxes in the GECK model list. Strangely enough, it worked in game aswell. At this point I had a motorcycle that I could ride and it tilted along the surface of ground it was driving on. Pretty sweet ain’t it? But even while the motorcycle did tilt along the ground, my character didn’t.

It is quite frustrating. Frustrating enough to make me post on the Bethesda forums about it. Unfortunately, no one there seems to know a work around or if they do they just spent their time scloding newbies on the forum.

In Oblivion, when you ride a horse your character’s legs always stay in place even if they the horse is going over tilted terrain. I just need to figure out how that is done technically and then implement this to Fallout 3.  But I don’t know how. Yet.. Frustrating indeed…

Cars:

I can’t rotated the actor but I could hide it inside a car. So, why not make a rideable car creature? Nah, my ego wouldn’t allow me to release such a basic mod, since there is already other mods that do it better. So I decided I would make a rideable car creature with wheels that rotate, turn and bounce along the terrain. Sounds a bit better and, more importantly, it’s a better challenge for me.

So I nicked the car model from Tranquility Lane, created skeleton for it, rigged it and somehow got it to work ingame. Quite buggy still. The wheels are still static for it since I haven’t had a chance to redo the animations for it yet. Also, I know that it is possible to make the wheels follow terrain by adding foot IK systems to them, but I just don’t know how yet. I have to do little more research on the subject.

to be continued…

I frequently idle on the channel #Fallout3Modding @ Quakenet. Couple months ago the discussion there was pretty vibrant. Everyone was asking “How I do this with the hex editor” or saying “Wow, I just got my first weapon to work ingame”. Everyone pretty much knew what the other people there were working on and helped each other out when they could. Nowadays I can pretty much fit the 24 hours worth of discussion on a single window. And most of the time that discussion is about something completely different than the channel name suggests.

Perhaps the discussion has just moved on to forums and wikis. But then again, I tend to read those daily aswell and there rarely is much that I’d really consider new or ground breaking. Some flamewars, some bumps on project topics and someone complaining about or looking for another nude mod. Forums also tend to turn more and more hostile as the time passes.

Are we already past the peak of Fallout 3 modding? I think its kinda sad if we are. Luckily there is not too many intereting games coming out on Q1, so I think that Fallout 3 modding might still have a chance with the upcoming DLC and all.

But enough rambling for now. Need to continue work on Project Valhalla. Perhaps it will spark a new life to the scene once complete.

As you can see from the video, its quite buggy at the moment. But its atleast a start to introduce vehicles to Fallout 3. Hopefully someone else will pick up from and start improving it. I don’t have time to work on it further, since I am pretty tied up in making Project Valhalla.

Nevertheless, I had some ideas and theories on how to improve this further. I have been posting those theories around forums, but sadly people seem to skip those posts. Oh well.. it’s their loss ; )

One thing that bugs me with modding Fallout are the group of people who expects too much out of us poor modders. If we release something spectacular or ground breaking, it is not enough for them. They expect us modders to provide them with top-grade technical support and immediately start implementing their ideas for the upcoming versions. And the weird thing is that even if I state in the description that I am NOT going to be able to provide technical support or that I will NOT be able to work any further on this, they still send me PMs  asking those things.

So basically, people who are too lazy to read through the description but still expects to be served like a king? That does not compute.

Available as a mod at Fallout3 Nexus.

Render

Closeup

Fanmade texture. Huge improvement!

Rifle in game