[Fallout: New California] BETA 231 is Online! news

Since FNC was released in October 2018, thousands of bugs have been fixed, the world has been improved, and adjustments to game-play balance have made the experience much more smooth and enjoyable. This update's change-log is 7 Pages Long.

We re-compressed the meshes and textures, so this is a full re-download. Not a small patch. These new NIFs should avoid random crashes, caused by the way the meshes were originally exported from 3dsMax to Nifscope, a 3rd Party mod tool not issued by Bethesda or Gambryo, which were prone to corruption. Same with the DDS textures, also with no official tools, and had introduced incorrect MipMapping (the way the computer scales textures that are further or closer on your screen) that caused performance issues. This has been an ongoing situation and why we had to rebuild and re-release the full game 3 times (the 3 in BETA 231.)

231 also contains a great deal of world map adjustments and new exploration content, and overall improvements to the look of things outside the Vault. New notes and discoverable locations now pepper the world, and your bridge to New Vegas after the end of FNC should be smooth as butter, no matter how many mods for vanilla you have adding junk to Doc Mitchell's house.

Subtitles have been corrected universally and a lot of small issues and bugs have been fixed regarding conversations that lacked cohesion and needed to match voice files.

Grenades have universally been removed from mutant load orders and "infinite spawns" of background actors during large events were reduced.

Post-Apocalyptic Linguistics!

FNC is now localized into:
Russian

Mandarin Chinese

Japanese

Spanish

And Brazilian Portuguese is underway in our Discord.

The Game Was Rigged From the Start...

No new quest content or character expansion has happened since 2019's BETA 221.

I (Thaiauxn, Brandan Lee) wrote a 1.0 Design Document as a postmortem, (You should read them!) and left it up to the community to implement the rest. So far no interest from the modding community has materialized to implement that new dialogue, which would expand the companions and replace the ending encounter with the Father.The work would be difficult technically, and very expensive hiring 7 new actors and implementing their voices, but would seriously improve the mod's story-line and tone.

The work isn't impossible, but the intimate tying into existing scripting requires you study FNC's codes and level design, with many very delicate scripts and trigger boxes that if implemented poorly would cause a cascade of broken events and bugs, which need to be fixed as you go. Replacing the dialogue is easy, but it's adding wholly new characters in place of the ones that already exist while splicing them into the main quest that checks to see if they are present or not in multiple branching paths.

Again, it's not impossible, a dedicated modder could follow my design documents, implement the dialogue, and script the variables. Most of that work is already done for you. But it's a matter of willpower community volunteers putting in the efforts together.

I wrote the companion & ending update to address the criticism FNC received on launch from New Vegas players, especially on Reddit, but I knew all those issues were there looooong before release. There just wasn't much we could do about it. This mod was a massive sacrifice for us, and adding even more content to it was a crippling prospect. It had to be a community volunteer effort, and with so many big mods fiercely competing for talented modders, so far no one has taken on the challenge.

Remember, 99% of large mods fail, as was reiterated by Josh Sawyer in that FNC live stream. Making it to a BETA release is big deal. That just doesn't happen often.

Not working on FNC has allowed me to publish a physical card game with some friends, write the main quest for a Tycoon game, develop a RimWorld mod that may well be a game in its own right, and start a new Indie Game that I've always dreamed of creating.

If that 1.0 content ever gets its patron? That'll cap it off for good for me, and I'd come back to work on it a little more around Project Morningstar.

Otherwise, I'm still on this page daily updating for 232 and beyond, and doing tech help on our Discord. Our discord has helped thousands of players get their game running. If you need help feel free to drop by and ask in one of the channels set up to do just that.

The Lonesome Road...

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.

Also watch us on our new Patreon! It's unrelated to our mod's development, but instead focus on the development of our card game STAVE and our indie game Project Morningstar.

Thain