Fallout New California BETA 213 Update news

213 Changelog:

Here is the spreadsheet of issue tickets and content additions.

We fixed the "crash entering the atrium" by installing the 4GB Patch for you, so you don't have to! (If you crash there now it's because you don't have the minimum 8GB of RAM!)

We fixed the bug that causes Eastern European users to fail to launch.

We fixed user error installing the mod with a simple one stop shop EXE that does everything for you.

We fixed the "Black Screen on Startup" bug that causes the mod to hang forever (it was user error too.)

210 rolls up 200->206 all in a nice package, totally revamps the meshes and textures with new compression and fixes lots of errors therein, which both reduces crashing and improves FPS in all but the most intensive scenes. A full re-download and new game is required.

Nerds, so long as you were smart enough to pass the Tier 4 Quest for Maria and activate the Enclave Hologram, Bragg and Chevy will now offer you the chance to join The Enclave in the revolt. You can do this either by getting arrested by Chevy with high intelligence, or, by sneaking past Chevy and talking directly to Bragg.

Crashing at Union City *should* have ceased. Reduced effects, reduced spawns, cull bodies sooner. More needs to be done to improve frame-rate there but it's better.

Navmesh errors that were persistent in the mod and causing rare crashes have now been fixed.

We marginally reduced spawning and improved weapon & armor balance all across the mod. You will still need to wait for 220 for an overhaul, but this is better than it was.

Many of the empty houses that were previously copy/pasted placeholders have been fleshed out with decoration, lore, and loot.

There are now more lore notes in the wasteland and worldspace than there were.

Every currently outstanding ticket for a quest break has currently been addressed. I'm sure you'll dig up some more for us, so let us know and send us your save file!

Reduced effects in places where users with EVE, EXE, and NMCs all at max resolution were consistently tipping way beyond the 4GB limit and crashing. Specifically this fixes the crash at the Vault Upstairs Elevator, but also at I-15, Union City, and the Ending battle.

Characters that repeat catch phrases will now only say them once per game.

Bugs in the character revision menu have been fixed. No more extra perks or lost levels. The annoying crash there is still random, but once we know what causes it we'll fix it. For now, restarting from the save at the bed fixes it.

Reduced certain obscure skill checks to something more reasonable for lower levels.

Added a classic Wattz 1000 Laser Rifle to Kira and various vendors. Also, Dr. Rossman's rifle will be that type in 220.

The infinite spawns at I-15 are now neutered. They still spawn a lot of guys and the battle is still frenetic, but but as you get to the end, they send one last giant wave and if you're not gone, they artillery strike you to death. Jameson, Ben, Vargas and the obvious army of 10,000 raiders weren't joking, get going!!

Objective markers across the mod have been made more clear. Could still probably be better, but it's a WIP.

Radiation around Rice Airfield is now adequately hellish.

Dr. Lang is now more useful and his adjusted prices in NCR dollars.

Snippy the Psycho Medik now has more drugs to sell.

Many NCR Troopers now contain letters home (part of a future side quest.)

Vendor count across the wasteland has doubled. There are more unique vendors at Athens, Union City, Angel Breakers, Big Bear, Xiabula, and across the Pass randomly. They will also be voiced in 220.

More caravans travel the Pass.

Lore breaking portraits of the NCR President in 2280 are now portraits of the NCR President in 2260.

If you kill the Overseer before he speaks, the quest fails and everything goes to hell. But you can escape now.

If you kill the Overseer before Bragg is done talking, you fail and Bragg shoots you for disobeying orders. TRIGGER DISCIPLINE, SOLDIER!! JESUS CHRIGHST!

If Evanson is dead, the quest advances normally.

The Missile Launcher can now be activated a second time. Previously backing out of it caused it to be unusable forever. Oops.

Vault Dwellers mentioning the broken Coffee Maker aren't kidding. You can fix that now! For a reward! It even magically teaches you how to make wasteland coffee.

Added more clarity in poorly worded quest objectives to make sure you know what to do and when to do it. No more players sleeping in Kira's bed to turn on their robot dog. Sleep in your own bed with your siblings instead!

O'oga now carries his own head at all times. So if you kill him you can always have his head. Mmm. Heady.

Slave collars now automatically release when Elsdragon frees you or you leave the Highway during Escape! You can then put them on your friends! Or a Christmas tree!

You will no longer find random power armor. If you're one of those people that say, "this mod sucks you don't even get power armor until the end," then you may now complain about that louder. Fallout 4 is right over there if you want early power armor.

If you try to murder your way through Athens-Tec after killing Jackson, killing Wilson, but before going to the NCR, then you will now be shot to death or captured and sent to Elsdragon.

If you shoot the Father before you talk to him, the quest now advances.

Annai no longer dies randomly while fighting Chevy. In fact, if she does die, and Bragg and Chevy are dead, she resurrects and comes to help you / have a conversation with you. Project Brazil never quits!

**SPOILERS**
Added another terminal that makes sure that you definitely know after you talk to the Father that he is a NIGHTKIN, ever after Project Brazil made him all meaty. Nightkin are not known for making sense! So that whole "clone of the master's killer," thing? Yeah, uh, no -- "you're just a xerox of some dead guy he scrapped off the kitchen floor."

The Father is delusional! And so are you if you believed him! The guy is nuts! In the future I plan to add more dialogue so you know for a fact he is indeed nuts, and not just hint at it, but make that very very obvious so people stop wigging out about it, as if the Wild Wasteland joke wasn't enough to give it away.

You can no longer use Solid Project to climb over obstacles that are meant to be one way, regardless of whether or not you use Solid Project.

Med Check on Eliza is now 10 instead of 40. Because, yeah, no duh, she's high as a kite dude.

Jameson no longer stays stuck during Journey to the Deep if you scout ahead.

Jameson and Hrafnkel now both always run from the Main Gate to the Main Door.

Jameson and Hrafnkel, if you save them, now ignore combat and flee with you.

If you snipe Vayger from across the bridge waaaaaaaay over there, then he gets very mad at you, and brings his friends to come ruin your day. Also bypass later dialogue checks with Silverman as if you talked to him. Annai also runs off when this happens (for now. In 220 I'll give her more dialogue and a quest branch starting there.)

There are two Gatling Turrets outside Daggerpoint, so if you hacked the two inside, the outside now activate and help you run away as well. As long as they last, anyway.

Kieva no longer falls through the floor at the Power Relay.

At the last battle, The NCR and Raiders are more helpful. They will actually fight the Mutants more consistently. (You can still skip the battle totally if you navigate the maze avoiding conflict and run right past the mutants. It's hard, yes, but it's totally doable. Don't even have to fire a shot. Seriously!

Jamie, doomed to be replaced by the much more interesting Dakota, no longer breaks down when sold into slavery.

Terra Mayson, when you cause her to doubt her mission and have a mental breakdown, no longer comes back to kill you as if nothing happened.

The player's magic teleporting army of invulnerable Protectrons all die an ignoble death in the Vehicle Tunnel.

And many more...

Looking Back on 5 Major Patches Worth of Feedback

BETA 200

Launch day was a little rough last month.

Top of the stack, number 1 issue, was with installation and mod managers.

The problems stemmed from the install process for the mod being more complex than a game's typical exe installer and having to patch your New Vegas to 4GB Large Address Aware, and there being 4 different mod managers for New Vegas, (plus Vanilla,) and just tons of people didn't understand how to get the mod installed, loaded, and working.

We had just enough tech support hands on deck to fight on 5 unique mod managers across 3 websites.
To fight an army of inexperienced users and unknown hardware.
All while in BETA.

Plus, with some users on a brand new New Vegas bought off steam having never modded before, and others with mods from 2010 used to doing things the old way and having never formatted their hard drives.

We prepared for that in private but nothing prepares you for the reality of day one of a mass beta.

Overnight, we had over 100,000 downloads, October 23rd to October 24th. In English and Russian.

Nexus's servers had to be rebooted for 30 minutes. ModDB reported their highest bandwidth usage ever at one time. Falcon-Lair.ru saw a 15x increase in registered users. Our torrent for 201 had 2300 seeders by 6:00am that morning and who knows how many downloads. Some said it was well past 80,000 on day one, but it's impossible to tell.

BETA 201

Topping it off, users could not get BETA 200 patched using the 201 Patch. 201 was our Day 1 patch including bug fixes and issues that we didn't get into 200before our cutoff for merging files. We should have combined the two files into one and released. We did that day 2 with 202.

BETA 202

202 only managed to fix issues with the patch, combining it together, and several issues with start up and map markers being visible too early, letting players break their game. This was on Day 2.

BETA 203

202 was online for about a week before 203 arrived, on Oct 31.

That first week is where we got most of our feedback that ultimately informed 210 and 220's new direction, and 203 started that shift. I didn't sleep for a week during this more than a couple hours a night.

We fixed some spawning issues, tons of game breaking bugs, and other major flaws.

203 was 1.3GB. Huge patch. It re-did all of our texture mipmaps to improve performance and standardized them, so they were better compressed for slow hard drives and lame GPUs.

That helped stop a lot of the crashing. So did mildly reducing spawn rates of NPCs and lowering polycounts in some levels, like the Atrium. The Atrium I had to rebuild and cut a lot of content, like the cinema, some side passages, apartments, and decorative areas meant for future quest modders to make their own quests. Sad but necessary.

BETA 204

204 came out not long after 203, and again, just fixed quest bugs. Locked some doors and fixed several major quest stopping bugs.

Looking at the Future of the Mod for 1.0 -- SPOILERS

We got a LOT of feedback the last month.

Most of it is fair and reasonable.

Some of it is unfair and ridiculous.

I'm only going to focus on the fair part.

#1 -- The Companions fall off a cliff after the Vault.

Yep. This was due to the reality that the mod, although it was over 300,000 words, is in fact, not a AAA game, as much as I'd love it if it was. 2 people, Rick and Thain (myself,) wrote, coded, and voiced all of that. There were supposed to be more people, but they all quit on us, so we did the entire mod by ourselves.

Each companion recorded for between 6 and 10 hours. Sometimes in one session, sometimes in two, in 2015. It wasn't a small operation. Adding one now will be another 8-12 hours of recording in 2018 and will take weeks of work.

But, this is something I'm willing to do.

Ben Kurtz will get his own cut content implemented, and you can read it here. He'll also get a content expansion all around so he continually has something new to say. He will get a large pesronal quest arc and be better integrated as a tribal guide to the story and worldspace. Voice update by the same actor, Steven Cates.

Jenn Hail will get her cut content restored and be redesigned to be more roguish and mature. She'll also get a content expansion all around so he continually as something new to say. She'll have her lockpicking, stealth, and personal quest updated. Totally revoiced by KenKoi.

Kira Mann will get some extra content added and some minor revisions. She'll also get a content expansion all around so he continually as something new to say. Voice update by the same actor, Caitlyn Singer.

Eric and Jamie are being replaced from the ground up with Eric Campbell and Dakota Feron.

Dakota Feron will be one of Bragg's Patriots and be met in the gym after exiting the coach's office. Talking to her will reveal more backstory on the patriots and establish her relationship. After the revolt, the player may encounter her as a Patriot ally as a helpful friend, or, as a captured Vault Security ally in the Upper Apartments. The Vsec player can convince her to betray Bragg and join the player. The Enclave companion will spend the rest of the game with the player as they go though that story. Voice actor not confirmed.

Eric Campbell will be retooled as a more serious and funny Wasteland Scout with a generally upbeat attitude. More of a committed leader, he'll never complain, always be ready with something useful to say, and keep the player on track. He will help them watch Dakota while she's still a prisoner, and contribute to the player's survival skills as a Wasteland Scout. Voice actor not confirmed.

#2 -- There are no Side Quests. This makes the wasteland feel empty.

Remember all those years I told you that over and over and over?

Guys. We're not getting paid. We were 2 dudes. I know, I hated it too.

Thankfully, we did get some new people involved. They are making a Voiceless town, a ghoul town, another NCR Hub town, and peppering in tiny side attractions here and there in the form of notes for a Courier quest and other little things to do in the desert.

I'm adding a Romanov Warlord duo to build your own power armor, and some side content related to the companions.

And that's it, that's all I'm willing to do. If you want more you just have to make it yourself or convince an existing New Vegas modder to do it. I'm done. I'd be glad for this to be over now so I could move on with my life, but, I'll update it one more time with a month of my life, and that's it, it's finished.

Everything I'm doing after this December ends will just be at a significant financial and personal opportunity loss long term, and it won't contribute to my future success or career. So I'm keeping it minimal, one last round of personal sacrifice for you guys, and then it's your turn to help me out.

What comes after New California?

We have a new game on the horizon!

It'll be a top down 3D isometric Survival RPG set on the ruins of an alien megastructure. You start out freshly abducted from Earth with no directions and little explanation. You'll have to gather a tribe of fellow survivors and brave the harsh wilderness and face off with medieval empires and alien organisms. A little bit Fallout 1 and 2, a little bit Rimworld, all on Unreal Engine.

I could use a couple 2D artists on the new team right now, and you can donate to our Pay-Pal to help me afford the start up expenses. We have a bunch of veterans we've worked with before that want in on this, so I need to begin crowd funding after FNC is all wrapped up so we can afford to focus just on this project.

And that's it for the 210 update.

Check us out on our: Discord.gg. You can also keep track of us on ModDB, Fallout Nexus, or Facebook. We've got an online community centered around each one.

Thain