Fan Made Fallout

[DarkUnderlord]

Fan Made Fallout is dead.

What I want this post to be about are the reasons why I think we failed. They're not necessarily in any particular order other than that which sees them come to mind. Some of it may be a little fuzzy as I recall events 7 years ago but bear with me. These are my own thoughts, from my own perspective. Other team members are more than welcome to post their own.


1. Mapping

Mapping is the core of any game. It's the environment. It's what the user inter-acts with. When I started this project back in 2002, I'd come fresh out of writing the Arcanum Modding Tutorial. Arcanum was a nice game made by the same blokes who did Fallout... but I had always enjoyed Fallout that much more than Arcanum. Then, with news that the Fallout Map Editors were potentially going to be released, I was as giddy as schoolgirl who gets giddy over whatever it is schoolgirls get giddy over these days. Finally, Fallout would be mappable! Before the official editors came out we had to use TeamX's editors and for the most part, you'd start making a map in those one day, only to find the map didn't load the next day and you couldn't do pretty much anything with them other than place walls - and even that was sketchy.

Now Arcanum's editing tools are really nice and simple to use. You can make a fully-blown city-sized map in about a day. Literally. Tarant sized city (biggest city in the game) = one day (okay, maybe two). In fact making an Arcanum map involves little effort other than clicking, dragging out an area, releasing and wallah! You have an instant house with floor, walls and a roof. By comparison, mapping in Fallout is a bitch. There's a reason my forum profile here has "Building walls in my Vault... One piece at a time.".. because that's what you do. You literally place each individual piece of wall in individually. First off you search through a long list (with no index) of walls, hoping to find the right piece for what you're looking for. Then you plonk it down. What you've plonked down amounts to a small sliver of wall (EG: a start piece). You now need to place the next appropriate sliver next to it (EG: a middle piece). So you hunt through the Fallout Mapper to find it (logic would dictate it'd be near it's companions and in some type of order and while they often were, it wasn't uncommon to have that one little bit you needed somewhere else which necessitated lots of scrolling through a list. Of course, made worse by the fact that you didn't notice the piece you were after easily).

This pain-staking process continues and after about a day, you might have two or three rooms built. That is, if you've got the hang of it and could find the pieces you were after and hadn't been driven insane yet. It actually wasn't uncommon for me to cycle through the entire list of wall art pieces three or four times and still never find what I wanted - even when I knew it existed because I'd seen it in another Fallout map. Even when I'd used that same piece of wall before. Adding items is much the same process. Long list of items to scroll through, no index or sense of order, just keep scrolling through until you find that toilet you're looking for that's facing the right direction (though to be fair, most of the pieces facing different ways are next to each other).

... and when you realise you've built an area incorrectly because it doesn't suit your needs or it isn't large enough, you then need to remodel it. Repeat the above process. To save time, you don't delete walls though and will drag them around the map until they find a home. I think my first whole Fallout map took the better part of a few weekends to put together. And I'd still missed something out and had to re-do most of it (I built it too small). Mapping Fallout is not easy. I don't know how the developers managed to complete the maps they did but I have a lot of respect for them. I also have no respect for them because I'm certain they would've saved about half their development time by simply building a better mapping tool.

Mapping is a painstaking process and you need to be committed, with a lot of available time, to get results. When you're working on a project in your free-time, this has a significant impact on your ability to deliver. Particularly when you're designing maps for a purpose and not just willy-nilly.


2. Scripting

Arcanum's SockMonkey Script Editor is a steaming piece of shit. That's why DjUnique is awesome. He made a wonderful tool that allowed you to simply throw scripts together easily, if you knew what you were doing. For the most part, I did and it was no trouble to put together a fairly complicated dialogue with little effort. DjUnique's dialogue editor made that even easier too. So even when the official tools let you down in Arcanum, fan-made tools saved the day.

Fallout scripting isn't so hard either by comparison. That is, if it worked. Which for the most part it didn't. At least for us, which I put down to us being inexperienced and not certain on how things worked. Scripts in Arcanum would work for the most part. Scripts in Fallout wouldn't unless it was written by the one guy who happened to know C++. This was generally for a combination of factors. See, scripts in Arcanum are stand-alone and often plug-in and out as necessary. Scripts in Fallout often rely on other files (header files and such) and if those files aren't correct, all hell breaks loose. This is a problem when you're talking about editing NPCs which involves editing proto's which means everyone on the team needs the same proto list otherwise the mapper will simply stop loading maps and then you wonder why nothing is working. Because if the mapper can't load the map, you can't test your script and if you can't test your script...

In short, scripts worked when one person was working on their version of the maps and files. Scripts rarely worked after they'd changed PCs. Couple this with the fact that some functions didn't work as advertised and you have some major problems. Why does that need to be a macro and not a variable? Do we have to define that there as well? Do you have your copy of that header file?

Our initial approach to scripting was to wipe most of the files clean and add our own functions and variables in as we went. BIG MISTAKE. Why isn't this working now? What's going on here? Why does that even need that? Our smart approach of working with clean files back-fired badly and lead to more problems.

Scripting ultimately meant the key people who knew how to script, had to be scripters. It wasn't something you could train or get the less knowledgable guys to do. You had to be good and have some idea what you were doing. That was a problem when one of the scripters was your lead dialogue guy, the other was supposed to be doing the general project management stuff and your main technical asset was too busy in real life to spare a lot of time on the project.


3. Hard-Coded

I hate stuff that's hard-coded. Did you know that Fallout insists on playing a bunch of movie files when it starts? I mean really, why couldn't they be more considerate of modders when they built the game? Did you know that artemple.map ABSOLUTELY MUST, UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES be the first map the player starts on? If you want a different map, you have to make it and re-name it artemple.map. Did you know exit-grids don't work as advertised? Did you know that on a certain time and date, that "Encounter with Frank Horrigan" script will run, no matter what you do? Or how about when you first view the World Map, the location of Arroyo insists on being highlighted? What about the bitch of an issue it is just to get the player from the starting "tribal" model to wearing the Vault Suit? Turns out that one's triggered by playing a certain movie.

All of these simple things either had to be ignored or meant work-arounds were required. The version of Fallout 2 I had included a bunch of fun stuff like "You trip over a rock in the desert". Hah! Take that Frank Horrigan Encounter. Movie files were replaced with those wonderful blank movies you could download from NMA, which meant you'd see a blank screen for a short transition. Sure, the first map was artemple.map but all it did was play the "wear Vault Suit" movie and then move you to the first map we wanted you to actually be on.

Some of the issues though, involved hacking into memory during run-time. Temaperacl used the wonderful FVF loader for that. Of course, do you think that worked flawlessly on every version of Fallout 2? I'll give you a hint, the answer contains an 'n' and an 'o'. In the end, a lot of these issues can only be resolved flawlessly by simply removing some of the things we wanted and not caring about others.

Once again, the time involved in dealing with these issues, needing someone on the team who understands the more intricate complexities of scripting or computer programming and that person having enough time available to start and complete the task their working on, means it all begins to have a significant impact on what you're doing. Or at least, what you're planning on doing.


4. Version Control

By now you would've noticed version control was a serious issue. What version of what file someone had and more importantly, having the versions that all worked with each other, was deadly important. In fact it was serious. Ninja Serious. A user couldn't just modify a file willy-nilly without checking that the modifications then didn't mess up any other file. You couldn't just fuck with the proto list (a file where all the NPCs resided that the mapper used) without then checking that we had removed PCs from all the maps (boy that was a fun one). Remove proto list and then try to edit that map that already had NPCs on it for filler content? HO-HO-HO. Congratulations, you're screwed. Anyone got an old copy of that map or the proto list that works?

Multiple people (some of whom didn't know what they were doing) editing files wreaked havoc. Again, when one person was doing it all, everything was fine. The minute someone else touched the file, it meant liaising with them. Did you do this? Have you got this file? Are you sure? It doesn't work for me... Even with SVN, we still had issues.

In an environment where we're all professionals sitting across from each other on the same PCs, this is still an issue but much less of one. In an environment where most of us are amateurs logging in to the forums maybe three or four times a week for an hour at a time, it meant problems. A lot of the issues we just ran blindly into simply because we didn't build Fallout 2 in the first place so we we're trying to reverse engineer it and understand how it worked. "Whoops, we broke something" lead to a series of "What did we change?", "Why isn't that working?" questions to find out what the actual problem was, why it was caused and how we could avoid doing it again.

Once more, time and knowledge become significant issues. If you need the guy who wrote a script to answer a question for you and he doesn't log in for another week, that delays what you're doing significantly. If you need a mapper to tweak a map before you can even touch another file, it delays things. Now you're sitting around and waiting for something to happen and there's not much incentive to check the forum or do something else.


5. Internet Forum

As you might also have guessed, a lot of our problems simply stemmed from the fact that we were working on an internet forum. Often in different time zones. Scheduling IRC sessions was always an issue. We tried staggering them to allow different people to attend. We tried holding them regularly. There were a few key people you wanted at every chat. For the most part it wasn't too bad but there was always someone who was there at 2 am in the morning.

Getting stuff done on the forum was always a problem though. Someone would make a map in their spare time. You needed your spare time in order to look at it and comment. Your spare time and their spare time often didn't match up. You'd get caught up with something else you also had to do, meaning you didn't have time to get to that other thing. You'd hope for some more spare time. You'd review it. It'd be a week later. Changes needed to be made but they wouldn't have spare time for another week to do them. Then that stuff needed to be looked at.

Things dragged out.

Part of this was simply the way we chose to manage the project which in hindsight, was too much. We should've just let it ride, accepted the maps that were okay, not worried about the little stuff and just moved on. Instead, we mostly wanted to comment. That was too big. That was too small. That wasn't right. That was right but could you change this? The project really needed a strong, decisive type there all the time to kick ass and make decisions. Of course that was me initially... until I got swamped.

If we were all in an office, coming in day after day, it would've been easier. I would've been the Project Manager I had to be. We would've been getting paid for a start but there would've been other people to do the stuff that needed to be done. I'd be there every day to view the work, everyone would be there every day doing work. The minute you add in a delay from "How's this?" to the feedback, you create a problem.

Throw in the issues of someone writing a dialogue, then someone else having to take that dialogue and turn it into a script, finding out only then that parts are missing and that it needs more work. By then a month has gone by.

Things became even more difficult when the guy providing feedback was also writing a dialogue or mapping or scripting or trying to get a prototype done. If you're on your own, that stuff's a lot easier because you don't have people expecting to hear your feedback. When you've got a team under you, your priority becomes keeping them moving at the expense of focussing on your own tasks, which you then have to find someone else to handle. Which is a problem if you're one of the only people who can do that particular task.


6. Staffing

Finding people who were good at what they did was incredibly hard. We were lucky in some of the people we got on the team but most people who joined followed the same never-ending pattern:

1. Hi, I want to join!
   
2. Show us what you can do.
   
3. New member writes example dialogue - when he really should be writing a dialogue we'd actually use in-game.
   
4. Time consuming review process - when we really should be working on stuff that'll end up in-game.
   
5. Application accepted.
   
6. New member gets bombarded with a hundred things to read to learn the plot and find out what's going on.
   
7. Manager spends time looking for and assigning new member a task.
   
8. New member promises to get right on it.
   
9. Three months later, having never heard from the member again despite follow up PMs and e-mails, new member is removed from staff.
   
10. At best we have a useless and partially completed dialogue. At worst we have nothing.
    
11. Process is repeated.

I've lost track (not true, I just can't be stuffed counting right now) of the number of members who joined the project with lofty ideals, never did anything and were then removed. Some of them even came back and asked to be let on again, only to do nothing and leave again.

I like to think of myself as a capable guy. Some of the people on the FMF project are also pretty capable guys. My time and their time is wasted when we spend it baby-sitting other people who accomplish nothing.

We've spent time writing tutorials to train people to become scripters. Waste of time. We'd have been better off just scripting.

We spent time reviewing dialogue in the hopes it would make better writers. Waste of time. We'd have been better off writing the dialogue ourselves.

The artists I can't complain about. They were generally pretty good at what that did though a few did have some pretty high self-imposed standards - and to be honest, new artwork was never meant to be a priority. I'd hoped FMF could be completed without a single piece of new art but then we found someone who did some great work and we got carried away. Suddenly we were adding in cool new items that we felt we needed to make a quest better (Ref: Daisy).

In some cases we did get lucky and a few good people came through who, with a bit of help, really excelled but for the most part, looking for new people was a bad idea. We should've kept the project closed, accepted only a handful of competent people and then gotten on with the job. We might've been finished three years ago if we'd done that. By the same token, we wouldn't have any of the brilliant members the project has had. Though given the project failed to accomplish anything, I'm not certain if having those people really was any better (no offense guys, just speculating ).


7. Motivation

You can see a lot of time was spent dealing with management stuff. Providing feedback, is that okay, is this okay, does this do what we need it to do? In the end, management is why I left. Yep, I pretty much walked away from FMF about two years ago. I actually enjoy mapping. I enjoy scripting. I even enjoy writing a dialogue or two. That's why I started this project because I enjoyed those things. Sadly I never really got the chance to do any of them. It was clear my role was needed to tell others what they needed to do and when you only have a certain amount of spare time (and when mapping and scripting and writing really do require a full concentration of effort over a sustained period - see 1. Mapping), you focus on where you're needed.

You feel guilty when you're working on a map knowing three people want you to review their own maps, there are two half-completed dialogues that need feedback, new members need work found for them and you've got an artist asking if there's anything he can do. That's not even taking into account the process we went through in reviewing quests, writing things up thoroughly (that too was a bad idea and waste of time) so we had something others could read and work off and answering PMs about what's going on for people. Then drawing an area out on paper so a mapper had something to work with and so on...

There are only so many motivational tl;dr speeches you can write before you realise you're wasting your time. There are only so many times you can ask someone if they've finished that dialogue yet before you have to give up and concede that it's not happening.

We really did over-manage the project quite hideously. We should've let people sink or swim on their own terms, rather then spending time dealing with them. While we planned a lot out and I'm quite happy with what we did plan, actually turning that plan into reality was always the hardest part. In the end, you lose motivation to work on a project. After all, why are any of us doing this? For money? It's a free mod. For glory? Who really cares about that. You do it for yourself because it's fun and the minute the project stops being fun, you give up.

Which is ultimately what I and others did. People came and went. Some of the really good ones too. They just stopped coming to the forums. We'd have periods where everyone was on the ball and motivated and we'd get a lot done, only to follow them up with long bouts where someone was busy on something in real-life, someone was doing something else, someone left because they wanted to move on and nobody was around to do anything. That's what I'd chalk most of those 7 years up to. A few months of serious activity stretched out over long periods with nobody doing nothing.


8. Conclusion

So why are we dead and what could've been done about it? FMF was ambitious to begin with. It's easy to look at something and go "Yeah, that'll be easy" because it works on paper. It's another to sit down and try to do it and then run into all the problems that there's just no way you could've forseen before-hand. Our plan was always to complete the planning, then mapping and dialogue, then script it all. It sounded easy but it never happened.

The technical issues and time involved to deal with them meant we never had the scripters necessary to resolve most of the issues. And if you want to make a Fallout mod, scripting is everything. Of the skillsets we needed the most, it was scripters. They were the hardest to find and those we did find often simply didn't know enough about scripting to be able to do anything. When we did find good ones, we wasted their talents by putting them into management of other scripters or in writing tutorials.

It wasn't until recently when one or two people took on most of the scripting themselves and worked through it that we got anything tangible (beyond the various iterations of prototypes we've had over the years). That was to release a rather pathetic "demo" which contained all of bupkiss. That would've been great 7 years ago but if 7 years later that's all you've managed to accomplish, good God are you doing it wrong. There are only so many times you can post "Demo tomorrow!" before it starts to look stupid.

FMF never had the scripters that were able to resolve even some of the what would seem to be fairly simple technical issues. We have Temaperacl (who probably knows everything about Fallout 2) but he didn't have the time. We ran into too many problems that needed someone like Temaperacl to solve them and when you're relying on one person with awesome abilities who doesn't have time, you're in trouble.

So what mistakes did we make? In order:

1. Lack of technical expertise; lack of knowledgable members who had the necessary time available to resolve technical issues. This covers the whole gamut from the simple things like making a dialogue script work through to the more complex stuff.
   
2. Over ambitious project; drastically under-estimated the time it would take to complete certain tasks. You never really know how long something is going to take until you sit down and do it.
   
3. Attempted to run a large team-based project (we had over 50 members on the books at one stage) when a smaller team would've sufficed and performed better. Waste a lot of time on management.
   
4. No strong driving motivation beyond "it's fun". When it comes to work, you work for money and when the project becomes more like work and less like fun - and it's not making you any money - you stop working on it.

I think the short answer for why we failed is we tried to do something in a team environment that really should've been done by no more than five or six guys. The problem is we never got those five or six guys available and motivated at the same time and for a long enough period in order to accomplish what we planned. The truth is, Fallout 2 was created in ten months by a team of people working full-time on it. FMF was always going to have less quests and a tighter story than Fallout 2, but we drastically under-estimated the time involved to make it happen.

7 years of constant work may have gotten the job done. If it was the same people through-out that period working in their spare-time. When you're gaining and losing members every 6 months though, when those new members need to get up to speed, when those old members take knowledge with them, when you forget why we were doing something a certain way because the guy who did that has left and it's now buried in a forum in a thread somewhere that you can't find...

Don't do something you can't do yourself. I simply lacked the time between this and everything else I was doing to contribute more than a few hours a week on the project and for what we planned, that wasn't enough. It wasn't anywhere near enough.


Epilogue

Fan Made Fallout is dead. It won't be happening. The people who've been working on it mostly don't give two shits about it anymore... or they do but it always comes back to time. So then what did we do? What did we accomplish in all this time? Sadly, very little. We planned a lot. We've got a wiki full of "Great Ideas™" including a plot that involves the option to blow up your own vault (or not care and leave it to blow up). We had factions the player could side with, determining the outcome of the game. A trial where you could defend yourself and call witnesses. Drugs, including a trippy experience. Lots of great ideas. All of them.

... but we barely scrounged a completed dialogue together and made the script for it. We struggled to actually make a quest. We did finish most of the maps.

So here it all is. We're laying FMF bare for the world to see. To point and laugh and perhaps to wonder at what could have been. All of our secret hidden forums have been made public for you to read. Feel free to go through and see how many motivational posts you can find. See if you can count the unanswered "Can someone read this please?" requests. Our DevWiki has been opened for you to peruse. See how some ideas seem to eerily match things that are present in Fallout 3...

And maybe... maybe...

[Dude101]

Hi. Can you hide the MR forum please.

[Sabel]

:'( sad day.

Thanks to everyone that have contributed to art over the years. i.e. Joe and Krudd. Lots of great stuff from you guys!

[DarkUnderlord]

[Sabel]

hehe

[AltraWave7]

We tried...oh god did we try...

Great speech Dark...thanks for the proper send off FMF deserves.

Hope someone finds this stuff useful...like my maps.

Altra

[USFR]

Godamnit guys. I had really been hopin on this. Checking back every 3 months to see if there's some progress.

What the hell?!

For crying out loud, you guys had a big ass team and 7 years.
People have finnished mods alone, or nearly alone!
If you guys had so little time, why not give/share your work with an other modding team a lil sooner?

I mean there was so much potential here...what the fuck!?

At least nice of ya'll to give the resources. That's great, so someone can use them and improve their stuff. But damnit...you guys...what the fuck.

Well thanks for trying, the shit that you were making could've actually toppled the real Fallout games...maybe.

EDIT: After having the read through the long, long FAIL post it really seems evident to me that you should've opened up your project far sooner and let other scripters from other mods give you a hand.
I bet some people from Mutants Rising or from the Russian team could've helped...But you guys were pretty stuck up and wanted it your way, honestly. So there might've been some conflict there. Obviously everyone would have someone in the team informed of the plot and work towards the plot. These central people would then have more frequent discussions and stuff.

Edit 2: Do you suspect Bethesda "borrowed" some of your ideas? Which ones...that would suck if they gave you no credit.

Edit 3: Upon even further review I belive your project was driven much as the Soviet Union. From the central Soviet down. Instead of from the local soviets up. For example putting people into teams, working on one town at the time and giving them nearly full artistic and otherwise freedom would've been great. This way you'd eliminate the need for huge IRC sessions and top-down control of everything. Not to mention you could have different parts of the world done in groups within different time zones.

And so...why didn't I suggest this earlier? Why am I babbling about this now?

Well I didn't suggest this earlier because you guys were extremely reluctant to share anything, any problems you had, with the rest of the fallout community.
I don't know why I am babbling about this now. I guess I just always wanted to make a post here again and now at the end I guess its appropriate.


PS: Also fuck you faggots for being the 4Chan of the Fallout Community. I still love you tho! Not in that faggoty way...just not in that way.

[Chris Parks]

WTF?

[Stevie D]

[USFR]

I thought my criticism was pretty balanced but
you're as defiant as always to any form of outside criticism. That's why you failed on such an epic proportion never before seen. Yet you kept going, just pushing failure one step further.

[Sabel]

[HVAttack8]

[DarkUnderlord]

[AltraWave7]

[Gingerbread]

You know what? I signed up just to say I love you Fallout nuts for even trying. 7 freaking years. That's amazing!

Peace out.