Hey there F4NV fans and supporters, and welcome to 2022! And along with that, welcome to this latest devblog! This blog is going to be touching on a few of the more interesting or exciting things that we've had on the go, as well as a talk about our latest major recruitment drive for the project.
A brief disclaimer - this update is not going to contain any new screenshots of upcoming content. This is strictly a blog entry - stay tuned for future updates, which will be far more visually stimulating.
--2021--
2021 was an interesting year for F4NV. Beyond the rough start to the year, and the ongoing wear on all of us that the continuing COVID-19 crisis has been causing, progress has been a touch slower in places than we might've liked. All those aside, however, progress has still been steady. A number of new, fantastic content creators have joined our team, several of which came straight from our community, and numerous new features and pieces of content of been created for the project.
As projects like ours continue, there comes a time where further growth becomes necessary. Our output over the course of the last year or so has been enough to justify the creation of a brand new department (our Form Standards and Gameplay Team,) and we've reached a point in time where we're also ready to begin recruiting more staff to our quest department (more on these later.) From a technical standpoint, 2021 was a year of incredible developments for the project. From visible holstered weapons (long thought to be technically infeasible,) to weapon ammunition type switching. Other smaller bits of work have also been ongoing with our various systems, but we'd like to give those their own more detailed overview in the future when other related systems have been fully finished. Needless to say, however, that our weapons art team has already been plugging away at work to integrate assets to support these systems, so this overview should hopefully come sooner rather than later.
All in all, the last year has brought us to a point where we have some very clear direction for where our team and project need to go.
Aside from the high-level summary of development, there's a number of other items worth calling attention to:
Creature Animation - One of the great challenges of modding Fallout 4 over the last 6 years has been creatures. Due to how animation date for creatures is created, it has been nearly impossible for new creature animations to be created. At least, it was until very recently. Based upon the extensive programming work and writings of IceStormNG, with backing from VelvetGoat, and with assistance and direction from The Reclamationists, we're very pleased to provide a little bit of a signal boost for this fully fledged creature creation tutorial for Fallout 4 - this workflow will be invaluable for many projects, our own included, and while this isn't a conventional announcement from us by any means, it'd mean a lot if you could check out and maybe even endorse this incredible modder's resource!
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/56676/
Gambling - Something we've often been asked about is whether or not we've put any thought into the gambling minigames found in New Vegas. As we'd previously announced, F4NV will be using some functionality from TheWhiteColarPlayers' Barstool Games (
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/30222 ). Beyond this, however, we've also had work underway on gameplay support for slot machines, and also have had some very tasty work underway on some beautiful assets for gaming tables and card decks for the various establishments found in the Mojave. Look forward to a future showcase for some of this content - it's pretty rad.
Freeside - *Freeside.* Stay tuned.
Finally, we'd like to open up the floor to our community for questions. It's quite often the case that our community has some less frequently asked questions, or those that aren't easily answered in the space of a few sentences. To help to address this, we'll be doing a follow-on post in the near future, and we'd love to answer some questions in longer-form for our community. Feel free to toss out your questions, and we'll select a number of them to provide a deeper dive into in the future.
--RECRUITMENT--
It's not too often we make a concerted recruitment post, but with much of the progress we've seen, we're now in a position where certain parts of our team are looking to expand. Here are our current high priority departments looking for staff:
QUEST DEPARTMENT - With the leaps and bounds our staff have made in the worldspace, we've ended up in the happy situation of needing to bring on new members to help with quest creation. Quest creation staff work with F4NV's internal questing system to build quests, and work in conjunction with our VA department to ensure that all content is properly recreated in F4NV. Applicants should have at least some experience with Fallout 4's quest system - unfortunately, due to differences in how quests in F4NV work versus base Fallout 4, we do require previous experience, as we're not really able to both train people to work with Fallout 4's quest system, and then retrain them to work with the internal systems we use for quest creation.
AS3 PROGRAMMERS - Alongside our worldspace work, our scripting team has also found themselves in need of some extra assistance. Due to the way Fallout 4's UI systems utilize Flash as a basis, it's far more easily modified than UI elements in other titles. However, this requires specialized knowledge. We're looking for applicants with experience working with AS3.
CK GENERALISTS - Like any mod or game development project, technical debt and the updating of various forms to the correct standards are always something that has to be kept in mind. Beyond this, work on integrating assets, creating items/loot tables, and other such tasks are always something that needs to be kept on top of, and integrating a pipeline for future balancing and QA tasks has become a major priority as of late. As such, we're looking for people who are willing to help us with some of the dirty and less than glamorous work needed to help keep the ship sailing cleanly. We're looking for applicants with some generalized experience in the CK who don't mind getting their hands dirty with some of the less exciting, but still very important parts of our gameplay and design teams.
If any of these roles seem like they might interest you, please don't hesitate to apply at:
https://docs.google.com/…/1FAIpQLSfKGgRHHC-Brg2Go7…/viewform
Beyond these, we also have a small number of openings in the following departments:
3D ART
LEVEL DESIGN
And of course, our VA department is also more than happy to accept new applicants as well.
--WRAPPING IT UP--
2022 is the start of something new. With the new positions we're looking to add, and the way we're aiming to grow our team, there's no question that this year is shining with potential. We're all looking forward to having some new and exciting showcases for all y'all, and hope you'll stick around with us through this journey. Until then, as always - stay classy!
