My research into modding could be considered to have started about seven years ago on youtube. I’ve been watching this channel AlChestBreach for many years and his main content is Fallout mods. His channel is still going strong and every time I’ve watched a video I both laugh and learn a lot about modding. Recently, while watching his Fallout 4 mod playthroughs, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to just how the mod author has put together the world they created. Some of these mods are literally game-changing and are very technically impressive, such as The Train. This series’ relationship with modding has certainly come a long way since the first mods in Fallout 3, which I’ve also modded and played. There’s actually a funny story about Fallout and the Gamebryo engine it runs on. In Fallout 3’s DLC Broken Steel, there’s a part where you enter and ride on the Presidential subway. When you activate the controls, the game locks the player in place and the train proceeds forward following the tracks. The funny thing is, due to the limitations of the engine, the team had to work around an issue of the train moving and came up with an interesting solution. The train car was actually a hidden NPC wearing the train as a hat, and then the NPC would be the thing that’s scripted to run along the tracks carrying both the train and the Player on its head. Weird stuff, but it shows the kind of ingenuity it takes to get an old game like Fallout 3 to work as you want it sometime. Hopefully, I won’t face an issue with such an odd solution as this.
With Fallout 4, I’ve only ever owned it on the Xbox One. In most cases, consoles never see large scale modding the same way PC does. The platform just isn’t friendly towards the sharing and downloading of mods. However, with Fallout 4, Bethesda created a software platform that allowed for mods created on the PC to be shared and downloaded on the Xbox One edition of Fallout 4. This is the first time that mods of this kind were allowed officially onto a console and it brought a larger audience to the magic of modding. I’ve played that game and the mods that were available for many many hours. But now I’ve just purchased the game on my PC in order to create my own mod for this thesis. While playing the game, I’ve been taking note of objects and terrain that will be useful to use in an underground setting. I’ve explored a few of the caves in the game to get a sense of how the developer treated these subterranean areas. I understand now that most of the areas that I will have to create are considered Interior Cells, in contrast to the exterior cells of the main game world. We’ll see how that fact translates to the larger interior areas that I have in mind. I’ve also managed to download a bunch of awesome mods in order to do some first-hand research into them. I will soon be delving into the Creation Kit to learn how to do some of the things that I see in the mods that I’ll be playing.