This is the first in a series of interviews in which we will be exploring the world of Fallout modding and some of it's most noted members. Timeslip revolutionised Fallout 2 modding with SFall, and is well known for many other projects.<blockquote>Q: Who are you?
In my modding guise, just Timeslip. The old-school fallout fans probably know me for SFall, and the Bethesda crowd that only joined in at the third game for Fallout Mod Manager.
Q: How did you get into Fallout modding?
Given how habitually I try and mod stuff, that's pretty much the same question as asking why I started playing Fallout in the first place. On the first playthrough of a game, I'll mod whatever's required to get it working properly. On older games that tends to be graphics patches and on newer ones things like stripping out crap, like GFWL. If a game is good enough to warrant a second playthrough, I always try to mod other things as I go and Fallout 2 turned out to be good enough to warrant considerably more than 2 playthroughs.
Bethesda's announcement that they were working on Fallout 3 brought back memories of the other two, which I still had hidden away at the back of a cupboard, but which hadn't been played for years. I decided to pull them out and see what the fuss was about. After playing for a bit, it was obvious there were a couple of things I needed to change: A fullscreen application doing resolution switching tends to cause problems for my duel monitor setup, and after playing more recent games, I really wanted to be able to use the mouse wheel on certain screens. That was the start of SFall; just a small patch to fix a couple of my own niggles. I posted it on Bethesda's new Fallout forums on the off chance that someone else would find it useful, and the existing modders on holiday from NMA picked it up pretty quickly. On my second playthrough (using the Megamod, IIRC), I started adding random gunk to it like the script extender, and taking up some of the feature requests. From there it grew pretty quickly, and even started picking up extra contributors.
So I guess you have Bethesda to thank for SFall's initial existence, but it was the thanks and support of people from NMA that caused it to grow the way it did rather than dying as little more than a mouse wheel patch.
Q: You have done a lot of work on other games. What work are you most proud of?
Back while I was still working on it, Morrowind Graphics Extender would have won that, hands down. It started off similiarly to SFall; it had a few tweaks (antialiasing and the like), but no killer features. Then I announced I was working on adding oblivion style distant land, was greeted by a chorus of "that's not possible", and then went and did it anyway. There was a very valuable lesson in that; never claim that something is completely impossible, because there's always the chance of embarrassing yourself later. Unfortunately it was a lesson I didn't learn too well; early on in SFall's life I said that a resolution patch that increased the viewable map area wouldn't be possible, and then Mash went and did it in my despite. Although in my defence, I was careful to limit myself to making excuses about needing to redo the maps, rather than flat out saying it was technically impossible, which was what I have to admit to thinking.
Since I left though, MGE has been taken over by more people who, while perhaps not knowing how to get started with such a project, certainly know a heck of a lot more about how efficient graphics engines are supposed to work (and having more than 3 weeks of C++ experience, which was what I had when I started it, probably helped them too...). It's changed beyond recognition, and I don't really understand how half of it works any more, which makes me uncomfortable still claiming it as my mod.
In terms of sheer number of downloads I guess the Oblivion/Fallout Mod Manager would win (well over a million, although OBMM is long since dead, and FOMM is now supported by Karburke rather than myself, so it's probably time I stopped counting), but there wasn't much there that I can point at and say that it's really something special. It doesn't do much more than grunt work.
Q: SFall is an amazing project. Do you have any future plans for it, or will you be focusing on your multi-platform FO project (an equally amazing project)?
I have no current plans for SFall, but I rarely have plans for anything; I just do whatever seems like a good idea at the time. There's certainly some improvements I'd like to make to the script editor when I find time. I'd also like to try writing my own script compiler for curiosities sake. It wouldn't really be useful at all, but another recent project forced me to learn antlr, and now I'm stuck in a bit of a "I have a hammer and everything looks like a nail" frame of mind with it.
The multi-platform Fallout project was really just an experiment to see if it was possible. It'll never replace the original+SFall on Windows or Wine on Linux, and since without a miracle from Bethesda it'll never be available from the app store equivalents of any mobile platform, even there it would serve little purpose.
Wait, after what I said earlier, I just said 'never' again there didn't I... Maybe I should make add "almost certainly", just in case.
Q: How do you find your creativity to do this?
How much creativity is really involved? If I start playing a game, it does Windows 7's silly colour thing, and I think 'the colours are all wonky. I should fix that.' does it count as being creative? It doesn't always have to be that clear cut, but that's my general method: I'll be playing a game, see something which I don't like, or which I feel like changing just for the fun of it, and then set about thinking up how to change it. There's probably more creativity in that second stage than the first, but that's creativity of a different sort; more problem solving than thinking up something completely new.
Q: Any advice for newcomers to the modding scene?
The main thing you want to do is to avoid burning yourself out. Pick a game to mod that you enjoy playing, and that has an active community. Work on something that interests you and not what other people tell you they want, even if it reduces your target audience. Don't jump straight in at the deep end; start with something small and build your way up.
The worst thing you can possibly do is pop up in some forum you've never visited before, announce some grandiose project to a bunch of people who don't know you, and have nothing concrete to show but promise that you're going to release next week anyway. 99% of the time, you'll have bitten off more than you can chew, will fail miserably, be left with a bunch of people who no longer trust you, and possibly will have destroyed your own enjoyment of the game (although if you are in the other 1%, you have my envy).
Q: Where do Fallout 1,2,3,NV rank in your all-time favorite titles?
Putting the fallout titles in order amongst themselves, 2 was most certainly my favourite, and the one I've spent by far the most time on. The first game was still good, but I've never really had the urge to replay it, probably because of the lack of mods. Bethesda's attempt at a third game I really didn't enjoy, which unfortunately means that I can't comment on FNV: due to my experiences with FO3, I decided against buying it.
Against other games, Fallout 2 holds up well. In fact it's up there with Morrowind, the Settlers and Fragile Allegiance (anyone remember that old one?
) as my all time favourites.
Q: Whats your take on modern RPGs?
Heh, you shouldn't have asked that. You're going to cause me to rant now.
An unfortunate fact is that the big developers are all in it for the profit. It's understandable; building a modern game has a huge cost in both time and money, and they have shareholders to please. That means that they all make games that they know will sell a large amount of copies. No-one takes any risks, and everyone targets the same (biggest) demographic, the result of which strongly discourages any originality, and which is a bit of a bugger if you happen not to be in that demographic. There's a focus on making games "accessible" (i.e. completable by a crippled chimpanzee in his sleep) or on fancy graphics, rather than new complex gameplay mechanics. The worst thing of all is the treating of customers as nothing more than statistics (and, in the case of the PC, aspiring pirates,) rather than as people. The worst symptoms of this are DRM and DLC, the first apparently designed by people who hate it as much as the paying customers do (and considerably more than the real pirates do, who don't have to worry about it at all) to please people in suits who don't know how the real world works and have never managed to figure out how to google the pirate bay, and the second designed by marketing people who know very well how the real world works and know how to extract the maximum amount of money out of people with as little effort as possible. (I differentiate DLC from expansion packs there by terms of size. It's the difference between paying $20 for another 10-20 hours of game content, or 10 sets of 1-2 hour DLC at $5 each. You end up paying more than twice as much for exactly the same thing, and that's without even starting on the horse armour/black dye jokes).
I do try to practice what I preach too. Of my last, umm, 12 non-indie games purchases, 10 have been from GoG. Of the remaining two, one was new but which I only bought because I had two thirds off (and which, tbh, I wish I hadn't...) and one was a boxed copy of an old game that GoG didn't sell. Admittedly one of the GoG purchases was the Witcher 2, which isn't old, but is still good, and handled by a developer/publisher still small enough to have some respect remaining (which also means, unfortunately, small enough to have little experience with handling such a big game launch, and now that they have valuable IP, they'll probably be bought up by someone bigger and have all the life sucked out of them fairly soon).
Q: What do you do outside of modding?
Umm, lessee, what stereotypical geek stuff is there? Anime/manga, eating pizza, (but not drinking beer. I hate the stuff.) Attempting to play D&D, but failing due to not being able to convince anyone else that it's a constructive way to spend their time (which to be fair, it probably isn't but that's missing the point). Also sewing, which probably isn't so stereotypical, but is a pretty darn useful thing to be able to do. Oh, and uni and sleep, which I should probably include on account of the silly amount of time they take up (seriously, why do we have to sleep? It's such a waste of good time ).
Q: Who is your most influential modder?
We've never met, or even spoken, but nevertheless my answer will have to be Alexander Stasenko, best known as the author of Morrowind FPS Optimizer. It was only a little thing; he released a command line tool called fpu2sse which did exactly what it said on the tin, but which the average born-after-the-days-of-DOS Morrowind player was having trouble using, so I wrote and released a little gui for it. It was all of half an hours work, but it was nevertheless very well received on the morrowind forums. It was the response to that that made me think 'hey, I can write stuff that people want. I should do this more often!' It's not that I would have never started modding without that; I already had done, but they were all really small things that I'd only written for myself, and I only ever published them on my website without ever joining in any public discussion on any forums. That was the point where I switched from only ever working on smaller things to taking up bigger projects. Certainly without that small insignificant-looking incident, Morrowind Graphics Extender would never have existed.
Q: Who is your favorite Fallout character and why?
Difficult one. Normally I'd look for a character that matches my own personality, or at least that I could relate to, but there's no individual in fallout that stands out above all the others. There's always the option of the player character, because there I have the option of projecting my own personality onto him/her, but that's probably cheating.</blockquote>
In my modding guise, just Timeslip. The old-school fallout fans probably know me for SFall, and the Bethesda crowd that only joined in at the third game for Fallout Mod Manager.
Q: How did you get into Fallout modding?
Given how habitually I try and mod stuff, that's pretty much the same question as asking why I started playing Fallout in the first place. On the first playthrough of a game, I'll mod whatever's required to get it working properly. On older games that tends to be graphics patches and on newer ones things like stripping out crap, like GFWL. If a game is good enough to warrant a second playthrough, I always try to mod other things as I go and Fallout 2 turned out to be good enough to warrant considerably more than 2 playthroughs.
Bethesda's announcement that they were working on Fallout 3 brought back memories of the other two, which I still had hidden away at the back of a cupboard, but which hadn't been played for years. I decided to pull them out and see what the fuss was about. After playing for a bit, it was obvious there were a couple of things I needed to change: A fullscreen application doing resolution switching tends to cause problems for my duel monitor setup, and after playing more recent games, I really wanted to be able to use the mouse wheel on certain screens. That was the start of SFall; just a small patch to fix a couple of my own niggles. I posted it on Bethesda's new Fallout forums on the off chance that someone else would find it useful, and the existing modders on holiday from NMA picked it up pretty quickly. On my second playthrough (using the Megamod, IIRC), I started adding random gunk to it like the script extender, and taking up some of the feature requests. From there it grew pretty quickly, and even started picking up extra contributors.
So I guess you have Bethesda to thank for SFall's initial existence, but it was the thanks and support of people from NMA that caused it to grow the way it did rather than dying as little more than a mouse wheel patch.
Q: You have done a lot of work on other games. What work are you most proud of?
Back while I was still working on it, Morrowind Graphics Extender would have won that, hands down. It started off similiarly to SFall; it had a few tweaks (antialiasing and the like), but no killer features. Then I announced I was working on adding oblivion style distant land, was greeted by a chorus of "that's not possible", and then went and did it anyway. There was a very valuable lesson in that; never claim that something is completely impossible, because there's always the chance of embarrassing yourself later. Unfortunately it was a lesson I didn't learn too well; early on in SFall's life I said that a resolution patch that increased the viewable map area wouldn't be possible, and then Mash went and did it in my despite. Although in my defence, I was careful to limit myself to making excuses about needing to redo the maps, rather than flat out saying it was technically impossible, which was what I have to admit to thinking.
Since I left though, MGE has been taken over by more people who, while perhaps not knowing how to get started with such a project, certainly know a heck of a lot more about how efficient graphics engines are supposed to work (and having more than 3 weeks of C++ experience, which was what I had when I started it, probably helped them too...). It's changed beyond recognition, and I don't really understand how half of it works any more, which makes me uncomfortable still claiming it as my mod.
In terms of sheer number of downloads I guess the Oblivion/Fallout Mod Manager would win (well over a million, although OBMM is long since dead, and FOMM is now supported by Karburke rather than myself, so it's probably time I stopped counting), but there wasn't much there that I can point at and say that it's really something special. It doesn't do much more than grunt work.
Q: SFall is an amazing project. Do you have any future plans for it, or will you be focusing on your multi-platform FO project (an equally amazing project)?
I have no current plans for SFall, but I rarely have plans for anything; I just do whatever seems like a good idea at the time. There's certainly some improvements I'd like to make to the script editor when I find time. I'd also like to try writing my own script compiler for curiosities sake. It wouldn't really be useful at all, but another recent project forced me to learn antlr, and now I'm stuck in a bit of a "I have a hammer and everything looks like a nail" frame of mind with it.
The multi-platform Fallout project was really just an experiment to see if it was possible. It'll never replace the original+SFall on Windows or Wine on Linux, and since without a miracle from Bethesda it'll never be available from the app store equivalents of any mobile platform, even there it would serve little purpose.
Wait, after what I said earlier, I just said 'never' again there didn't I... Maybe I should make add "almost certainly", just in case.
Q: How do you find your creativity to do this?
How much creativity is really involved? If I start playing a game, it does Windows 7's silly colour thing, and I think 'the colours are all wonky. I should fix that.' does it count as being creative? It doesn't always have to be that clear cut, but that's my general method: I'll be playing a game, see something which I don't like, or which I feel like changing just for the fun of it, and then set about thinking up how to change it. There's probably more creativity in that second stage than the first, but that's creativity of a different sort; more problem solving than thinking up something completely new.
Q: Any advice for newcomers to the modding scene?
The main thing you want to do is to avoid burning yourself out. Pick a game to mod that you enjoy playing, and that has an active community. Work on something that interests you and not what other people tell you they want, even if it reduces your target audience. Don't jump straight in at the deep end; start with something small and build your way up.
The worst thing you can possibly do is pop up in some forum you've never visited before, announce some grandiose project to a bunch of people who don't know you, and have nothing concrete to show but promise that you're going to release next week anyway. 99% of the time, you'll have bitten off more than you can chew, will fail miserably, be left with a bunch of people who no longer trust you, and possibly will have destroyed your own enjoyment of the game (although if you are in the other 1%, you have my envy
).Q: Where do Fallout 1,2,3,NV rank in your all-time favorite titles?
Putting the fallout titles in order amongst themselves, 2 was most certainly my favourite, and the one I've spent by far the most time on. The first game was still good, but I've never really had the urge to replay it, probably because of the lack of mods. Bethesda's attempt at a third game I really didn't enjoy, which unfortunately means that I can't comment on FNV: due to my experiences with FO3, I decided against buying it.
Against other games, Fallout 2 holds up well. In fact it's up there with Morrowind, the Settlers and Fragile Allegiance (anyone remember that old one?
) as my all time favourites.Q: Whats your take on modern RPGs?
Heh, you shouldn't have asked that. You're going to cause me to rant now.
An unfortunate fact is that the big developers are all in it for the profit. It's understandable; building a modern game has a huge cost in both time and money, and they have shareholders to please. That means that they all make games that they know will sell a large amount of copies. No-one takes any risks, and everyone targets the same (biggest) demographic, the result of which strongly discourages any originality, and which is a bit of a bugger if you happen not to be in that demographic. There's a focus on making games "accessible" (i.e. completable by a crippled chimpanzee in his sleep) or on fancy graphics, rather than new complex gameplay mechanics. The worst thing of all is the treating of customers as nothing more than statistics (and, in the case of the PC, aspiring pirates,) rather than as people. The worst symptoms of this are DRM and DLC, the first apparently designed by people who hate it as much as the paying customers do (and considerably more than the real pirates do, who don't have to worry about it at all) to please people in suits who don't know how the real world works and have never managed to figure out how to google the pirate bay, and the second designed by marketing people who know very well how the real world works and know how to extract the maximum amount of money out of people with as little effort as possible. (I differentiate DLC from expansion packs there by terms of size. It's the difference between paying $20 for another 10-20 hours of game content, or 10 sets of 1-2 hour DLC at $5 each. You end up paying more than twice as much for exactly the same thing, and that's without even starting on the horse armour/black dye jokes).
I do try to practice what I preach too. Of my last, umm, 12 non-indie games purchases, 10 have been from GoG. Of the remaining two, one was new but which I only bought because I had two thirds off (and which, tbh, I wish I hadn't...) and one was a boxed copy of an old game that GoG didn't sell. Admittedly one of the GoG purchases was the Witcher 2, which isn't old, but is still good, and handled by a developer/publisher still small enough to have some respect remaining (which also means, unfortunately, small enough to have little experience with handling such a big game launch, and now that they have valuable IP, they'll probably be bought up by someone bigger and have all the life sucked out of them fairly soon).
Q: What do you do outside of modding?
Umm, lessee, what stereotypical geek stuff is there? Anime/manga, eating pizza, (but not drinking beer. I hate the stuff.) Attempting to play D&D, but failing due to not being able to convince anyone else that it's a constructive way to spend their time (which to be fair, it probably isn't but that's missing the point
). Also sewing, which probably isn't so stereotypical, but is a pretty darn useful thing to be able to do. Oh, and uni and sleep, which I should probably include on account of the silly amount of time they take up (seriously, why do we have to sleep? It's such a waste of good time ).Q: Who is your most influential modder?
We've never met, or even spoken, but nevertheless my answer will have to be Alexander Stasenko, best known as the author of Morrowind FPS Optimizer. It was only a little thing; he released a command line tool called fpu2sse which did exactly what it said on the tin, but which the average born-after-the-days-of-DOS Morrowind player was having trouble using, so I wrote and released a little gui for it. It was all of half an hours work, but it was nevertheless very well received on the morrowind forums. It was the response to that that made me think 'hey, I can write stuff that people want. I should do this more often!' It's not that I would have never started modding without that; I already had done, but they were all really small things that I'd only written for myself, and I only ever published them on my website without ever joining in any public discussion on any forums. That was the point where I switched from only ever working on smaller things to taking up bigger projects. Certainly without that small insignificant-looking incident, Morrowind Graphics Extender would never have existed.
Q: Who is your favorite Fallout character and why?
Difficult one. Normally I'd look for a character that matches my own personality, or at least that I could relate to, but there's no individual in fallout that stands out above all the others. There's always the option of the player character, because there I have the option of projecting my own personality onto him/her, but that's probably cheating.</blockquote>
