Dev Diary: Working on Tuckered Out 1.3

Oh, Tuckered Out. I just can't quit you.

I'm working over the next handful of months to get all my Fallout 4 mods to a relatively final state before Starfield hits, or at least states that allow at least for the possibility of porting. And right now I'm working on Tuckered Out.

Tuckered Out was my first significant mod project for Fallout: New Vegas. It began with my own annoyance at being a pack mule, constantly carrying thousands of caps and every weapon in the game and still being able to run and jump like nothing was amiss. I began thinking about how weariness would actually accrue while running across the desert with hundreds of pounds on my back.

Answer: quite quickly and painfully.

So I started with a quick script that monitored the player's current inventory weight and would adjust the player movement speed as the weight changed. If the "weary" factor got too high, then there would be some sort of penalty for that. The player would pass out, they'd slow to a crawl, something.

Of course, the devil's in the details, and a lot of New Vegas involved walking uphill, and I somehow had to take that into account. And once you're tracking altitude changes, you also have to start distinguishing incline/decline angles, because a sharp climb is going to be more taxing than an easy one.

And once you've done that, you have to figure out how to treat falls differently than downhill runs, which means you have to decide what a fall is, and that leads to trigonometry and more angles and exceptions and figuring out damage and more exceptions and finally it breaks your immortal soul on the rocks of Lake Mead, as you spend evening after evening attempting to find a glitch in the math that reliably identifies movement underwater because if you don't the player can't finish the game.

Oh: and it turns out that mathematically modeling falls reveals tiny artifacts that, once fully identified, turn out to be stumbles that just emerge from the complexity on their own. And you have to do something about that as well. (I think this was my first real experience with emergent behaviors, which would later become a really big deal when I began working with AI.)

This is how game mod projects get out of control, folks. One exception at a time.

The crazy thing was that years later, long after I'd left FNV and PANPC became my core project, I was surprised to learn that some people actually remembered this little boondoggle and enjoyed it, and that they were quite surprised to learn that the PANPC guy was that guy.

That led to porting Tuckered Out over to Fallout 4 - mostly on a challenge - which meant having to nearly completely rewrite it. But I did, and while it'll never be as real time as the original (due to script lag and other factors unique to Papyrus), the core math all still manages weariness and detects falls in FO4 reasonably well.

Anyway. So what I'm trying to do now is to split the weariness and fall systems into separate scripts - they were always an integrated system - to try and take advantage of multithreading to bring them both closer to that real time ideal. Weariness isn't too bad, but the fall detection can take a second or two after the actual landing and I'm not crazy about that. Hopefully optimization and the script split will make a difference and I'm not just creating work for myself.

And if I am just creating work.. well.. that's Tuckered Out. This thing has always refused to be complete, always ready to replace each problem with a tougher one.

Tuckered Out taunts, and I consistently rise to its mockery, which realistically probably means that ten years from now I'll be writing another blog post like this one how I still haven't reached a point where I'm ready to take my trouble child out back and shoot it.

Ah well. That's game modding, right?

- G.