Fallout 4

[Art Blade]

ah yes, same here, too

[mandru]

Reporting in on a few more observations/oddities. 

In Nuka World why have I never encountered a cave cricket in a cave?  Or for that matter (other than a burrow through a large pile of trash for the access to the Hubbologist space craft) found a single accessible cave to start to account for all of those damn CAVE crickets. 

And killing bigger tougher enemies should result in better loot drops but someone forgot to mention that to the cheap a$$ Death Claws. 


On completion of the Cappy in a Haystack competition you gain the code to enter into the office of John-Caleb Bradberton who was the inventor of Nuka Cola.  There is an assortment of items he found enough value in that they were entombed with him in a sort of time capsule.

** In a quick aside - Bradberton's story is a prime example of "Be careful of what you wish for." **

One of those preserved items is a pristine Chryslus Cherry Bomb the only car purported to have broken the sound barrier.  With its single passenger bubble top cockpit, ultra sleek lines, and joystick steering it's admittedly a hot little number.

To look more closely into the cockpit I jumped up onto the car and was surprised.  I don't know why I was startled that there was a reflection but beyond that it was a reflection of something I really didn't expect.  Instead of reflecting the dull metallic ceiling of the chamber the plastic bubble faintly showed a blue sky with the hint of a couple clouds.

In afterthought I've realized that I've not gone back into Bradberton's digs in other weather conditions or night -vs- day to see if that reflection is an accurate representation of the current sky outside above Nuka World.  I guess that's something I need to put on my to-do list if I ever get back over that way at night or on a day during a Rad Storm. 

I also managed to drag a new line of dialog out of one of the Atom Cats when I showed up in a X0-1 PA equipped in the Red paint that gives extra speed in sprinting.  I think it was Duke who's at the first entrance.  He said something like "Man, that's a sssmokin set of Power Armor."

[Dweller_Benthos]

Cave crickets used to live in caves, but after the war, moved out into the world and mutated, grew bigger and no longer lived in caves. Sounds good anyway.

The reflection on the glass in the car is most likely a standard reflection image. When creating objects for use in a game, you can specify what the surface looks like, dull, stone, metal, glass, etc and also specify what the reflection will be. Real time reflections of actual objects in the game is almost impossible to do, so when the object is created it's given a generic image to "reflect" and is usually a sky of some kind. When the object is inside you get a reflection of the sky when there's no sky in sight.

[Art Blade]

the loot drop is dependent on your game's difficulty setting. Don't play it on survival (a completely different game setting) but try the hardest one below survival. Not that difficult to master, really, especially if you erm, help, your weapon builds.

[mandru]

Thanks for the feed back on those issues guys. 


A quick note to mention that I've found a w0#k around for an ongoing frustration. 

Once I've installed a railing I've wanted to raise above floor level a piece of settlement's automated defense weaponry high enough to shoot over the rail but I hadn't succeeded in finding something I could build from the workshop with a supporting top side that would allow me to place a weapon like a laser turret on it.

The Hay Bales from Nuka World's Dry Gulch miscellaneous menu will stack for height adjustment and allow the placement of items on top of them. 

[Art Blade]

nice find

[fragger]

You can also see reflections in the backs of some weapons, like the Combat Shotgun and Combat Rifle. There's a kind of rounded section at the back end of both weapons where you can see a reflection that moves around when you do, but on close inspection the reflection is always the same - a skyline with nearby peaked house roofs showing.

You also see reflections in the glass on the fronts of the large stores (Emporiums), but once again it's always the same scene reflected no matter where you are. In fact I think it's the same scene that you see reflected in the guns, just not distorted by curvature.

Theoretically they could have reflective surfaces that do reflect what's actually around you, but the processing cost to your CPU and graphics hardware would probably impact the game too much and slow the frame rate to a crawl. Working in 3D, I've seen how true reflective surfaces on objects can seriously increase processing time. And when you have surfaces that are both transparent and reflective, the processing time really gets pushed up. That's why it's far more economical to use an image map (like a small jpg) as a reflection image. The effect is still pleasing, unless you look closely enough to see that the reflected image is not a reflection of where you actually are In the case of the weapons, the devs no doubt went with a city skyline as the reflection image because that's the most likely thing you'd see reflected most of the time in the game.

Nice discovery about the hay bales, mandru I also made a small recent discovery - that the new lights and lamps which are introduced via Picket Fences magazine #2 can be turned on and off (PF issue #2 is "Modern Hearth", found in an upstairs office in Hardware Town).

[fragger]

Here's a little demo what I made To demonstrate the impact reflection and transparency have on processing speed, below are four images, with the time taken to render each image shown. You can see how the addition of shadows, reflection and transparency result in about a five-fold increase in render time as compared to the base image with no effects:

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Now add in animation and all the other processing that's going on in the game and you can see why they went with reflected images rather than real-time, true reflection processing

[Art Blade]

a tree?

alright, no tits, then.

well, still nice

Something else that crossed my mind when reading those lines about reflections. Back in the late 1980s, someone once said, "life sucks. But the graphics are great."

[mandru]

Thanks for that info fragger. 

[fragger]

No worries mandru It was something fun to do while I waited for the stupid rain to stop - which it didn't

[mandru]

I'm trying something new.  The first couple synths that popped up among my settlers (early in this time through the game) were quietly removed from the populations but I've been dwelling on and mulling over fragger's stance on the synths just being people too.

Well yeah, but... 

I'll seriously allow the concept that some of the synths (possibly) may be Railroad or DiMA's Haven type seeking refugees from the Institute fleeing for a new life but the majority of synths that I've seen documented in YouTube videos have eventually become trouble makers bringing down outsider Institute synth attacks on settlements.  After spending some skull sweat seeking a balance I may have struck on a solution that's somewhere between the extremes of Exterminate -vs- Ignore approaches of dealing with them.

I have a couple settlements I've not developed and populated with a recruitment beacon those being Hangman's Alley & Red Rocket near Sanctuary Hills.

Before coming to this decision I had built up Hangman's Alley to be minimally set up to receive settlers by first clearing out the non-useful clutter, installing substantial defense coverage, food/water for 12, equipping 300 units of power, and using existing structures I'd squeezed in at least temporarily beds for 8.

But then I got pulled off track by chasing down the game's other rabbit trails Far Harbor, Mechanist and Nuka World. 

With those distractions satisfied my attention returned to settlement building and the thought to compromise in dealing with synths by incorporating fragger's stance on synth management by using Hangman's Alley as a synth refuge.  My thought being identify and relocate all synths to Hangman's Alley then any outside attacks on their refuge I'll defend but internal conflicts I'll let them hash out among themselves. 

My established auto-defenses should determine hostiles from committed settlers both outside and inside the open floor plan of the settlement. 


Of course there's always the invariable hitch of anything I plan out in detail being balked whether it's in real life or in the gaming world. 

I've added maybe 40 settlers within the last couple hundred hours of game play and I've also screened through all the workshops for any synths that may have replaced and inserted themselves among my various settlements since committing to this course of action.  Not a single synth has tried to join a settlement since I decided on how to deal with them. 

Build it and they will come my foot. 

[Art Blade]

 

[fragger]

I actually abandoned that stance a while ago mandru, I just haven't commented on it since

Quite some time ago I posted about how I knew I had a synth at Sanctuary, but didn't know who it was. It didn't appear to be causing any harm, so I never bothered trying to uncover the synth. Then one day, Sanctuary got attacked by Institute synths, but they never got past the wall I'd built around the place. Instead, I went out to meet them, and all the fighting took place outside the walls. After it was over, the Workshop told me I was a settler down. It turned out to be the synth. She had been reduced to a pile of smoking ashes behind the counter where she worked - and they were red ashes, not Institute blue. She had evidently been gunned down by the other settlers while I was outside, because I knew none of the synths got past the walls and all my settlers were equipped with regular, non-Institute, red-beamed laser rifles.

What I'm not clear on is which attracts the other, i.e. do synths come to a settlement as legit settlers (either not knowing they're synths or knowing but covering), or as deliberate plants, to bide their time until their comrades come a-knocking, at which point they drop the pretense? The killing of the synth at Sanctuary suggests two possibilities: 1) She either attracted Institute synths who were in fact looking to kill her for escaping - the other settlers somehow realized that so they took her out preemptively, or; 2) when Sanctuary was attacked, the presence of Institute synths triggered her to switch sides. I tend to go with the latter possibility, regardless of whether the synths are intentional plants.

Because I was outside the walls at the time, I didn't see who opened fire first, the synth or the settlers. And since then, I've had the same kind of thing happen elsewhere, but as before, I never saw what happened.

But whatever the story is, it does appear that if a settlement contains at least one synth, sooner or later that settlement can expect an Institute attack.

It would be very interesting to see what would happen if a settlement contained nothing but synths. If you go ahead with that experiment mandru  (if the game will let you) I for one would be very interested to learn what happens

[Art Blade]

interesting thoughts and report, fragger. I actually had a settlement for synths only but.. I used a mod preventing any settlement attacks so I never had any weird killings. Before I installed the mod, the attacks were started by either Raiders or robots, judging from bodies scattered around the battlefield.

Regarding your suggested two possible reasons, a "preemptive" killing of the settler-synth doesn't seem likely and doesn't seem logical. The other possibility seems far more likely and in a way logical. Like that one line from the film Dune, "the sleeper awakens" seems to be the reason, albeit that synth must have been pretty stupid to turn hostile while surrounded by armed settlers because, well, there was that one glowing testimony of a red dead redemption

I would have expected that sleeper-synth to function like a traitor, to be the one who opens the gates at night so the combat-synths may sneak in and then wreak havoc once inside the settlement.