Fallout Tactics mod The Sum (1.8b)

This project might be one of the most ambitious I've ever encountered in the modding world, wow.

I think I've found a bug: I'm attempting to do the quest where I find the serial killers that wiped out Cleveland. I get a random encounter outside of Cleveland where there are three hostiles: two are named "survivors", the other one is a "hunter." I can kill the survivors just fine, but nothing I've tried will hit the hunter. The percentage to hit is always at 0% no matter how close I am or what weapon I'm using. Is this intentional, or has something gone wrong?

Thank you, and I can't wait to explore this more and give longer thoughts.
 
Hi there! Thanks for the comments yess :D

Yep, that's intentional unfortunately. Random encounters are heavily bugged because of the engine. For example, a fraction of the objects they hold loose their tagname and it creates problems inside my mod. I had to remove most of them. Also, I soon realised that friendly random encounters can be attacked and killed without them attacking you back, ever. I found that a bit stupid and decided to make the friendly random encounter immortal instead. For those two reasons, random encounters are now a bit underused in my mod. I even thought for a moment about removing them completely, but they still add some kind of flavor to the game, so I kept them.
 
Hi all,

For my mod project, I am about to test removing random encounters from the game entirely, and I would appreciate your thoughts on this if you want. Here is my reflection so far :

1. This is by far the single most annoying thing in the game.
2. It is heavily distorded by modern computers :
- Most of my encounters have only 1% chance, but they sometimes appear 5 times in a single square regardless.
3. There is a confusion between special and random encounters. Both show a lightning icon, both can open a map without notice.
4. It does not pose any real treat to the player, so it is little more than a waste of time.
5. Killing random encounters will never affect any other part of the game.
6. When you enter a map by yourself, you never find any living being, anywhere you go on the map.
7. As they are not a real "player" in the map, there is no way to control them, including their Agression, Communication and Mobility values.
8. When they are friendly, their only goal is to move out of the map and you have to run to them to trade, which is ridiculous. And as their goal is to "cross the map", sometimes you don't see them at all before they disappear.
9. It is HEAVILY bugged :
- Friendly encounters never retaliate if attacked, so they are free kills giving free XP and items. If you make them immortal like I did, it just create confusion.
- Items hold by random encouters with tagnames are duplicated (some with a tagname, some without)

I am thinking about replacing them with entities and factions already present in the random maps.

Pros :
- You now have to "search" for them instead of them falling on you.
- It gets fun to travel the map, as you are not ALWAYS interrupted.
- You can revisit encounters that you like (merchants) with respawn inventory and the ones that gave you a combat challenge.
- You can add merchants a house, some furnitures, and they stop moving away from you.
- They can pose a treat if you are cought by susprise, random maps become a small risk.
- You now have a reason to enter a random map manually.
- All bugs magically solved.

Cons :
- A lot of work and you need a lot of different random maps.
- There is an unused skill that you have to deal with. I had some success in safely changing it to the training in travelling efficiently (each point gives you 1 more pound of max carry weight) using FTSE.
- It can get damn repetitive. The same maps brings the same encounters. This might be solved using a randomly generated variable (using FTSE) that can most of the time disable the entities, making sure they don't ALWAYS show.
 
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I removed all random encounters from my upcoming mod, FT: Crusade, long ago. They were never present, to be precise, and it's for the better. At first, I wanted to throw several outdoorsman books at the player in the first location, but then I realized there's no reason to have the encounters at all. What I did is when you enter a wasteland location (= outside the town marker), it opens a tiny map with a camp.
 
I definitely find Tactics encounters annoying, and a few of my campaigns in The Sum have been slowed by their presence or required a reload of an older save due to bugs. While I wouldn't miss them, I do like many of the ideas they presented (the flood encounter comes to mind) and I'd like to see some of their features reimplemented elsewhere in the game.
 
Golbolco said:
I definitely find Tactics encounters annoying, and a few of my campaigns in The Sum have been slowed by their presence or required a reload of an older save due to bugs. While I wouldn't miss them, I do like many of the ideas they presented (the flood encounter comes to mind) and I'd like to see some of their features reimplemented elsewhere in the game.
Click to expand...

Oh that's handy because Flood, minefield and other special situations are special maps that will stay. I was happy with random encounters like dumps and the US or CAN army (all glitchy and broken robots), but I'm sure I can make them reappear in some places.
 
Reinar said:
I removed all random encounters from my upcoming mod, FT: Crusade, long ago. They were never present, to be precise, and it's for the better. At first, I wanted to throw several outdoorsman books at the player in the first location, but then I realized there's no reason to have the encounters at all. What I did is when you enter a wasteland location (= outside the town marker), it opens a tiny map with a camp.
Click to expand...

Wow it's good to know I am not the only one that thought about this, means there are definitely some truth to it. Thanks a lot for the feedback.

I'll let here the lua replacement code I made for using the outdoorsman skill as a bonus to carry weight, if someone find it usefull to replace that skill. I did not test it a long time yet, but it is stable :

Code: 
function OnLongTick(e)

  s = world:GetSquad() --Only apply to squad members, applying it to all was making the game crash
  for i=1,#s do
    if s[i]:GetAttribute("outdoorsman", ACTOR_TABLE_CURRENT) > 0 then
      temp = s[i]:GetAttribute("explorer",ACTOR_TABLE_TEMPORARY) - use another perk temporary attribute as a variable
      curr = s[i]:GetAttribute("outdoorsman", ACTOR_TABLE_CURRENT)
      --s[i]:DisplayMessage(curr)
      calcbonus = curr-temp
      if calcbonus > 0 then
        bonus = { maxCarryWeight=calcbonus }
        s[i]:ApplyBonus(bonus,true)
        s[i]:SetAttribute("explorer",ACTOR_TABLE_TEMPORARY,curr)
      end
    end  
  end
 
I think I was able to find the best middle ground between Tactics bugs and missing features. Because any actor placed directly in random maps are hostile no matter what alignment you give them (!"/!%?&), I decided to remove only animals from the random encounters (all of them) to place them in the maps. This way, I'm able to remove at least 3/4 or more of my encounters and it's also faster to make than transfering everyone into the maps. And this fun thing I didn't know existed : I can now tell animals to only and always flee when attacked...
 
_Pyran_ said:
Hi. The Sum\core\movie.7z (325mb) - unnecessary file (copy of movie folder)
Click to expand...
This mod contains every file from Fallout Tactics, it is standalone. It is a design choice I came with after a email exchange with Bethesda. They accepted that I could distribute the mod as a standalone game. It helps me as most persons I know never played Fallout Tactics and don't own a copy of it. I publish patches of the game without unnecessary files, but only to be able to play the game from its previous version.
 
nadeauhugo said:
This mod contains every file from Fallout Tactics, it is standalone. It is a design choice I came with after a email exchange with Bethesda. They accepted that I could distribute the mod as a standalone game. It helps me as most persons I know never played Fallout Tactics and don't own a copy of it. I publish patches of the game without unnecessary files, but only to be able to play the game from its previous version.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the reply. I know that the mod is standalone.
I want to clarify: in the files there is a folder "movie" (24 files *.bik) and next to it there is an archive with "Movie.7z", it contains the same files. When comparing - the files are the same.
Question: does the game use an archive or is it superfluous?
Screenshot-232.jpg
 
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