Fallout hacks



  • Is this real?

    I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.



  • @cartman82 said:

    Is this real?

    That's what I want to know. Please paste?



  • @Magus said:

    That's what I want to know. Please paste?

    Your discourse is fucked up. See the source and copy link into a new tab. Or fix your browser. Or fix discourse.



  • It isn't discourse or my browser. It's the fact that I'm at work, like many people here, and you directly linked imgur. If you paste the image rather than the link, it uploads it here, which is convenient for those of us who have to deal with really serious IT people.



  • @Magus said:

    It isn't discourse or my browser. It's the fact that I'm at work, like many people here, and you directly linked imgur.

    Shouldn't discourse create a local cached copy? I'm sure it was doing that at some point.



  • It was turned off.



  • Oh fuck, so what, now I have to download and reupload every image I want to post?
    That takes all the fun out of copypasta.



  • Are you using IE or a mobile device?

    Otherwise, you can copy an image and just paste it directly in the editor and it will upload like that.



  • Ok, you should have explained the problem instead of posting 17 passive-aggressive hints.

    Fixed.



  • @ChaosTheEternal said:

    Otherwise, you can copy an image and just paste it directly in the editor and it will upload like that.

    Nice to know that variant works. You never know. For example, copy-pasting image file from desktop doesn't work, but drag-dropping it does.



  • :hanzo:
    https://what.thedailywtf.com/t/quick-links-thread/48962/314?u=jarry

    @cartman82 said:

    I don't know whether to be impressed or horrified.

    this





  • @cartman82 said:

    Is this real?

    Yeah, this is actually a pretty mild hack by Gamebryo/Creation Engine standards.

    To make my Paranoia mod, the first version before I fixed it, I found out that there's no function in Papyrus (Creation Engine's scripting language) to find the "ground" (meaning: navmesh ground) Z coordinate at a given X, Y coordinate. I mean, it's not as simple a problem as it sounds because some areas like Markarth have like 15 navmesh "ground" levels all stacked on top of each other, but.

    So what was the workaround?

    The version 1 workaround was to have an invisible NPC (I think I picked a fox) follow the PC around. The fox would always be located on the ground, so I could use its Z coordinate to find where to place the statue. The problem was the invisible fox would somehow get into combat rarely (to this day I have no idea how, I had all his AI set so nothing should attack him and he should attack nothing, but it still happened sometimes.)

    Version 2, IIRC, just drops an object in the desired location, then immediately pulls out its Z coordinate then destroys the object. This works because Creation Kit has code to "settle" new objects when you drop them, and I can (almost!) guarantee the object drop won't take place in the viewport of the player. (It would only be visible for a frame or two, and I probably set its "skin" to gibberish so it'd be invisible.)



  • I think the image data itself has to be in the clipboard, rather than the file. I almost always link screenshots by making the snip and immediately pasting. I thought this was fairly well known, or I would have been more forthcoming.



  • @Jarry said:

    (ninja'd)

    Ugh, curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough!

    @Magus said:

    I think the image data itself has to be in the clipboard, rather than the file. I almost always link screenshots by making the snip and immediately pasting. I thought this was fairly well known, or I would have been more forthcoming.

    I knew about copy/pasting images, just didn't know that local caching is off for outside links.

    I guess my "no-IT" privilege is showing.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The version 1 workaround was to have an invisible NPC (I think I picked a fox) follow the PC around. The fox would always be located on the ground, so I could use its Z coordinate to find where to place the statue.

    Version 2, IIRC, just drops an object in the desired location, then immediately pulls out its Z coordinate then destroys the object. This works because Creation Kit has code to "settle" new objects when you drop them, and I can (almost!) guarantee the object drop won't take place in the viewport of the player. (It would only be visible for a frame or two, and I probably set its "skin" to gibberish so it'd be invisible.)

    WTF.

    @blakeyrat said:

    The problem was the invisible fox would somehow get into combat rarely (to this day I have no idea how, I had all his AI set so nothing should attack him and he should attack nothing, but it still happened sometimes.)

    You know, that's actually hilarious.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @cartman82 said:

    Oh fuck, so what, now I have to download and reupload every image I want to post?

    Moanings about copyright issues.

                 subject             |         updated_at         | username | previous_value | new_value 
    ---------------------------------+----------------------------+----------+----------------+-----------
     download_remote_images_to_local | 2014-08-20 18:57:36.170057 | PJH      | f              | true
     download_remote_images_to_local | 2014-08-20 18:57:43.637162 | PJH      | t              | false
     download_remote_images_to_local | 2014-08-20 18:57:44.736479 | PJH      | f              | true
     download_remote_images_to_local | 2014-08-20 18:57:47.122358 | PJH      | t              | false
     download_remote_images_to_local | 2014-08-20 18:57:48.863994 | PJH      | f              | true
    

    DiscoBool before anyone mentions the actual value. (And actually the reason that word got created)



  • It was more annoying than funny, because the fox was allied to the player and so it'd put you in "combat mode" (which meant you couldn't fast travel) and the fox was invulnerable so it would never be hurt or die, and the fox followed the player so you couldn't even "outrun" the combat to reset everything. (Like you can when the cops are chasing you.)

    IIRC going to an indoor zone and resting for a week or so would reset everything, but it was a pretty nasty bug.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    The problem was the invisible fox would somehow get into combat rarely (to this day I have no idea how, I had all his AI set so nothing should attack him and he should attack nothing, but it still happened sometimes.)

    That's foxes for you. Untrustworthy, they are!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    the fox followed the player so you couldn't even "outrun" the combat to reset everything.

    No way to have the fox stop following you if it got into combat?



  • I'm sure I could have piled hack atop hack atop hack. But I didn't choose to do that.

    Don't ask dumb questions.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Right, the hacks should only be just so deeply piled.



  • I hate discourse. "Yes, abandon" apparently means "I want this exact text to appear in the post box immediately every time I navigate to this thread from now on, even though I just deleted all the text and said I want it abandoned."



  • @PJH said:

    ```
    previous_value | new_value
    ---------------+-----------
    f | true

    
    So, a boolean that does the opposite of what it's named, stored twice, in two different formats.
    
    Bravo :clap: :clap::clap:


  • Hahaha! This is so funny!



  • I love that it changed 5 times in 12 seconds.



  • Unfortunately, this is par for the course for game development, especially with Gamebryo (although, I do not hate that engine like some people do).

    It's all neat tricks and little hacks that make the game run smoothly (but burns your soul at night). Needless to say, impressive way of using existing in game systems to create a new "subsystem" (moving set pieces).



  • I should share this tweeter I got:

    The image link:

    TIL how Bethesda made most of the tables of Skyrim



  • Really? They couldn't spare 5 minutes to open 3D Studio and cut the fucking thing in half? Really?



  • I bet it has more to do with object clipping and physics more than anything else.

    Guess: They couldn't get table to lay flat on surfaces correctly without some physics/graphical glitches, so they cheated and made them physics disabled and clip the object through the world.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    I was actually going to suggest doing something like that for your paranoia mod but you got all blakeyhurt about "hacks piled on hacks".



  • I would not be surprised if this method was chosen to work around a nasty bug in Gamebryo's animation system or a bad interaction between havok and the animation system. Based on my experience with oblivion and fallout 3/NV, there are way too many ways for animations to crash the game. Of course it could have been that Bethesda was lazy like shown above as well.



  • Why build a table model if you already have a shelf model and it looks just as good? No need to increase the size of a game that needs to run on consoles for no reason.



  • @delta534 said:

    Of course it could have been that Bethesda was lazy like shown above as well.

    It's not lazy. It's actually quite common, and generally the quickest way to get some functionality into a game. Nothing is ever fully done "the right way" in game development, it would take too much development time away from the core systems.



  • Why build a 12 foot ladder when you can embed a 15 foot ladder in the ground?



  • @cartman82 said:

    Really? They couldn't spare 5 minutes to open 3D Studio and cut the fucking thing in half? Really?

    Well they'd have to do all the physics work also.

    The reason is probably more administrative than technical-- I'm guessing it takes more paperwork to have a new "table" item creative than it does to just sink an existing bookshelf down into the ground. Nobody likes paperwork.



  • Especially when that 15ft. ladder is already built, and can easily be faked to be a 12ft. ladder. As you said, no wasted resources recreating assets.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said:

    Well they'd have to do all the physics work also.

    and that model will take up RAM, RAM that consoles tend to be rather tight on so every model you don't need to create frees up RAM to make the physics better with, or improve the graphics, or even get the thing up to be barely playable 30FPS (because gone are the days when AAA games run at 60FPS on commodity hardware đŸ’¢)



  • @FrostCat said:

    I was actually going to suggest doing something like that for your paranoia mod but you got all blakeyhurt about "hacks piled on hacks".

    ... ?

    The Paranoia mod already does that when placing the statue, so it appears to be "sunk" into the ground, as if it'd been there a hundred years instead of just being placed there a second ago. That's part of the joke.

    The problem I had is figuring out where "the ground" even was.

    (Oh, and trying to figure out how to get the statue's physics to move along with the statue itself-- turns out for optimization reasons, objects that aren't expected to move are "statics" and those that are are "moveable statics", but converting from one to the other isn't even close to trivial, and requires some deep plumbing in the .nif file format as well as tweaking in Creation Kit.)

    In any case, it's a dumb mod I made as a joke like 3 years ago. I'm not going to go back and "fix" it so whatever brilliant idea you have, you can just make your own mod.



  • At least it clearly shows where the president’s daughter is hiding.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    The problem I had is figuring out where "the ground" even was.

    Yeah. Make the thing go down an extra 20 feet, pick a point that you decide on it is nominally ground level, make that point be at the same z-coord as the player's feet.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Yeah. Make the thing go down an extra 20 feet,

    Ok, so now it's 100% under the landscape...

    @FrostCat said:

    pick a point that you decide on it is nominally ground level,

    How?

    @FrostCat said:

    make that point be at the same z-coord as the player's feet.

    So it hovers in the air if the player is standing next to a hill?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    So it hovers in the air if the player is standing next to a hill?

    No, you're missing the point. You make it really tall, expecting most of it to be buried. So it's (say) 30 feet tall, and nominally 5 feet should show. You place that point, 5 feet below the top, at the same level as the player's feet. If the ground there happens to be lower than the point you chose, the extra bottom area is exposed, is all that happens.

    IOW you do exactly what they did with the bookcase above.

    Assuming this is possible, I never did any Skyrim modding.



  • @FrostCat said:

    No, you're missing the point. You make it really tall, expecting most of it to be buried.

    So now I only have to spend months learning Blender, getting it to export to .nif format, figuring out how to add the physics params, etc.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    How did you make that thing in the first place?

    Alternative: use rentacoder.co.in or something and pay an Indian guy to make it for you.



  • @FrostCat said:

    How did you make that thing in the first place?

    The statue model was pre-existing, I just modified it to turn it into a Moveable Static instead of a Static.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    The statue model was pre-existing

    I had a feeling you were going to say that.

    If you were going to update the mod, and I get that you don't want to, the most cost-effective thing would probably actually be to pay someone offshore to make an updated model.



  • @FrostCat said:

    the most cost-effective thing

    Uh huh...

    @FrostCat said:

    be to pay someone

    ... uh huh.

    Any non-crazy people want to participate in the thread now?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Any non-crazy people want to participate in the thread now?

    Oh, you think that would be less cost-effective than spending "months" learning how to do it yourself?

    yes, please, non-crazy people show up, because the mod author isn't one of them.



  • The most cost-effective thing is to open blender, and type this:

    sz42[enter]
    

    and then export your elongated untextured box to Skyrim.


Log in to reply