Being the new guy is always tough. It wasn't long after before I was replaced as the resident newbie. At this time in the mods life span there were 3 main active modellers, Shinrasoldier3 - Lead Developer, Tempus - Modeller, Composer and General Energiser Bunny of work and myself. There had been some notable models done by Killerx20. The guys does insanely good models. He provided us with the main bulk of models for the city. The rest of the work concentrated on making a subways section demo as a Tech/Proof of concept Demo.
Although we weren't a big team or making fast progress things were coming along. I was enjoying the learning curve in very much a learn for yourself environment. In hind sight the lack of direction was what would ultimately lead to problems further down the line but we'll get to that again. At this point I could get models into the world which in my book is a milestone in terms of modding for Fallout. Using the vanillia content is one thing but when you see your own creation in there, there is something more intensely fulfilling.
So the new kid on the modelling block was Poor Rufio. Although there were a few people who had good intentions to learn to model he was the one who had shown the most promise and drive. It was around this time that I was starting to experiment with getting collisions working so I decided to help him out with getting things working as far as I had gotten. He had only been learning Blender for a short time but was able to get the basics modelled, UV-wrapped, textured and so it was time to export and get it in-game.
It is about this time that I came up with testcube. The premise was to do a simple model to test some feature and simply name the testing object testcube, which could then be scaled into the real model at a later date. Anywho me and Rufio were doing some testing and the four images from the initial Blender test model. This was the basic textured model he was trying to replicate as I had done. He was having some trouble with UV unwrapping so I showed him how to use the testgrid. I showed him how to export the model as a .NIF and we got a static version in-game. Now I went back and worked on my own to get collision working. After a good bit of research I found out how to add the necessary Havok metadata to the pre-exported file that would be used in the collision detection. The end result was an object which I could pick up, shoot at and generally interact with other objects in the world, albeit with some initial undesired consequences. Making sure that you have given the object sufficient mass reduces the likelihood that shooting it will make it fly off miles into the distance. Lesson learned.
