This week, we have officially taken the tape off of our logo -> That means we have fully ported to new Vegas, with no broken or missing textures/meshes in Vault 18 or Black Bear Mountain! That was a BIG step in the right direction!
We posted Project Brazil on the Fallout: NewVegas Nexus website, and within 24 hours were were a top file on the site. At the end of January, we were the #2 File of the Month, after giving the win to Team Mission Mojave for their support in helping us develop Brazil!
After just a month, we've earned 50,000 views and 1,200 downloads. The file is just a temporary Work in Progress, but because of it we've earned lots of positive attention, encouragement and even a few donations of time and resources. Not bad for just a WIP! This shows there is really a strong audience for our work, and keeps us motivated in what we are doing.
We now have 10 Dialogue Contributors and 5 Team Writers! You can check out that progress in our Development Bible, posted on our main page here at ModDB. We have a large list of Team Members in Programming and Modelling, but only two world space artists (myself and NexusAngel.) We could absolutely use more help from young professionals willing to donate time to a project that promises to be a nice place to start helping build a career resume.
If you would like to download our current Work in Progress and give us a hand, check it out here:
Then send an Email to Fallout3ProjectBrazil@gmail.com to show us your interest and find our what you can do. For writers, send in a sample text and a quick analysis of our Project Bible. For Voice Actors, toss us a high quality sample of your work in previous games. For programmers and level designers, just show us a file you've completed in the GECK.
This week, we're reached a pretty important development milestone. Our Worldspace, Black Bear Canyon is now about 2/3rds complete and ready to populate with details, navmeshes and scripts.
You can see from this tiny little heightmap the size and scale of our world, and this is only about 2/3rd of the worldspace. There will be additional mountain ranges to the north, south, and north west, with playable canyons and hills in between the peaks and ridges. The rest of that big blue void will be populated with the highway leading out towards San Bernardino Valley, which was annihilated in the war and left a desert wasteland populated only by sand dunes and glass craters.
Everything you see in blue is a playable area where the player can explore. The reddish coloured mountains are impassable barriers. Union city and the highway haven't been outlined yet.
The way GECK handles its cells, you can only see a tiny square of your work at a time, and only edit a smaller square inside that visible box at a time. Putting an entire area together requires you to memorize landmaarks you've created, and "just know" where you are working relative to what else you've built.
We haven't run our LOD generation, which requires a professional scale computer anyway. When we're done with the terrain and object placement, you will be able to see from Horizon to Horizon everything from the mountains up north where Vault 18 is located to Union City in the far south west.
A quick look at the development of Black Bear National Forest and the surrounding locations.
You can see from this concept art, compared to the heightmap, that Black Bear Mountain we've built in-game is about a 1/3 scale representation of a real place set in the Fallout universe. Even scaled down, it is a HUGE plot of land. In real life, is is nearly 40 miles wide, where as ours is about 16. Walking the whole distance between each quest on the way to Union City or the Athen-Tec feels like a lonely adventure across a real place. After the important sites have been visited along the way in the first quest, fast travel points will be essential. It is quite a long walk from end to end.
The most important factors behind the scale and layout are story and atmosphere:
- How could these factions exist out here and not destroy each other?
- How could they have been there for 200 years and still not be under one massive civilization?
- What keeps these people here, and why stay in the middle of nowhere?
The answers to those histories can be found in the terrain itself. The large distances, broken ecosystem, and natural barriers, help present a universe where we CAN have towns and tribes locked in a primitive standoff without them being lost to skirmishes long ago. It's just far enough removed from the main body of the NCR as to be on the outer edges of its territory, yet not far enough to be under threat from Caesar's Legion.
I was a perfect location to tell a story in the Fallout Universe that feels like you stepped from a huge and bustling, healthy city in Vault 18, then were thrown into a harsh reality in the middle of nowhere. From the very beginning you see signs of civilization dwindle from the Vault cave towards the emptiness of the forest and grasslands towards the south. It has more of the Fallout 1 & 2 feeling, where the global travel system represented a vast sea of unpopulated wastes you had to cross.
It's not like the Capital Wasteland where buildings and whole city blocks were left standing, with civilization always in sight. It isnt like the Mojave either, with the Vegas lights or some town along the way. Black Bear feels like you're lost in the wild, with no direction but to follow the highway until you come across the clashing armies of the Union & Survivalists.
Creating the sensation of walking down a mountain, as opposed to flat terrain, has been a big factor in our design of the North East of the map. Just about everything is somehow slopped, or surrounded by tall peaks and ridges in snaking canyon highways. The valley feels like an adventure across the rivers that came together from the streams you saw at a higher elevation, looking back at the tall ridges you came from.
The highways helps lead the player towards their main destinations, and wandering off into the wilderness tends to be a disorienting adventure in of itself. Our layout is just complex and natural enough to keep the casual player turned around for a short time - with something dangerous to keep them occupied - before finding a new way towards their goal, but allowing the realistic role player a unique sense of immersion without the distractions of ACTION ACTION ACTION LOOT LOOT LOOT that Fallout 3/NV turned into. There are hidden story items and unique characters in places that make sense, rather than scattered across a flat playing field at what feels like random placement.
It is exceptionally complex, and will take several months to fully complete - even with time saving measures to hide the unused edges - but the first time you see it from horizon to horizon, it will be worth it. The first time you get lost and end up a slave or attacked by a hungry yao gui, you won't be paying attention to the pretty landscape as much as the story. ;)
Cheers!
Brandan Lee Pittman
Project Leader
great! keep up the good work. your work is impressive.
Looks really rather cool, will be following from now on :D.