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Dev Diary 134: 2253
🕑 Added 2024-01-28 19:06:28 +0000 UTCHeya mutants,
The year is 2253, and the brave Dutton family caravan is traveling through the radioactive wasteland... Oh, wait, scratch that; wrong franchise! ;-)
As I mentioned in the last dev diary, I was looking into getting caravan runs working. To say the least, the way they were technically implemented in Fallout 1 and 2 is atrocious. No wonder the dev working on them thanked someone "for keeping me sane throughout this project" in Vault City Designer Notes and then never worked on another game ever again -_-
To refresh your memory, basically what's happening is that you jump from encounter to encounter on the same desert map until you reach the final destination. So, you're not actually traveling the world map, and every world map encounter is "faked." Yes, you read that right; every caravan encounter was re-implemented there using a SEPARATE script. The world map code plays no role.
This means the devs had to maintain two world map code bases instead of one. It also robs the player of opportunities to experience much more exciting caravan trips where any encounter, even special ones, can be triggered, where the player is the one planning the travel route, and also where their Outdoorsman skill plays a role. So as you know, if you have a higher Outdoorsman skill, the game will do the usual "random encounter prompt". Here it is even more important because that means there's an equally higher chance of your caravan successfully reaching its destination because you're good at Outdoorsman.
So, I decided to revisit the whole thing, unsure if my plan is even technically possible. And, I can say that it was, so I'm much happier with caravans now!
In Fallout Yesterday, when you start a caravan run, the world map will pop up, and then you can set off to your destination along the route of your choice. The caravan will follow you as long as you don't stray from your path (visiting another city or returning to the starting town), steal from them, attack them, if it takes too long, and so on. And as you can see from the screenshot, our Hoover Dam-Jericho caravan ran into some rat hunters hunting big rats in the mountains. Mountains as an encounter location were not possible in Fallout 2.
With this great news, we will wrap up this week.
I'll see you soon,
-PJ
Comments
PJ
Thank you, Willem! Glad to hear you will enjoy the caravan runs once again. They were always so much fun in previous games, and now with these changes, even more so!
Willem Brits
What an update! The caravan runs in Fallout (Crimson) and Fallout 2 (Brahmin Drive) was one of my absolute favourite parts of the games and just felt so cool. Really cool vibe and captures such a big part of that wasteland atmosphere not knowing what to expect, but also not aimlessly wandering and actually having a goal whilst wandering. Very interesting regarding the very inefficient implementation of caravans in Fallout, it is definitely not a great implementation. Your implementation is much better and I am so impressed PJ! Well done! This is really amazing to actually properly have the caravan runs operate on the world map with all that goes along with it (exploration, random encounters, time passing, etc.). I could see myself literally just running caravans all the time! :) That screenshot reminds me so much of my caravan runs in Fallout 1 and 2. Extremely impressive work again and kudos on also getting mountain terrain encounters to work! You and the team are on a roll PJ! Thank you again for all your hard work on this, I cannot wait for further updates on this. It just gets better and better, this especially is really really impressive work!
PJ
Thank you, JR! It will be fun 😃
JR
That's very fascinating! Thank you for that piece of information. I'm looking forward to trying your implementation.
