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| A nuclear winter with zombies and all I have is a switchblade? |
I'm Back!
It has been a long time since I played Fallout 4. I sort of randomly checked my Zombie Walkers mod on nexus mods and saw several posts where people were having trouble. I glanced through many pages of them and saw things mostly related to stability/crashes and bloated save game files.
I take a sense of ownership in what I do and felt bad about this, even though I'd been away for so long. The comments didn't inspire me to take up modding again (yet) but did inspire me to play Fallout 4 again after the long absence.
Winter and Zombies
It is the winter season here in Buffalo, NY and I've always liked snow. I thought it'd be fun to mod my freshly re-installed Fallout 4 with a winter theme to play my mod in. The screenshot above is from that setup and I wanted to call out a few of the mods I used in case anyone else wants to check them out.
Maybe i'll post a full current mod list later as it includes other game changes outside of visuals also.
My Experience
I used replacements for everything 100% except humans. Added extra spawns at 25%. Enabled NPC resurrection and set it at 60 in-game minutes and allowed zombies to infect with basic infection. Settlement attacks and Sleep Interruption were also enabled.
Overall I didn't have many issues after playing a save close to 10 hours so far. The biggest thing seems to be performance related in downtown Boston where I experience a single hard crash and some delays with spawn replacements where I could hear Super Mutants talking and firing weapons before disappearing. Also, sometimes there was delay between a head-shot and the zombie dying in that area.
Some features I didn't feel compelled to turn on (alternate death) and others I never saw executed in game and didn't really miss them (zombies eating corpses). Extra spawns seem to work well, though I had a thought that it'd be nice if this were to increase on it's own over time during play. I experienced both a settlement attack on Red Rocket and sleep interruption a few times while travelling (scary with darker nights too).
What I Learned
I remember why I enjoyed playing Fallout 4 after being away from it for so long. It really takes you away into your own sandbox world. There are some cool new mods out there that help with this immersion also.
Another thing, is that my wheels are spinning and I'm actually considering ways to improve this mod. Not promising this is going to happen, but I think this mod could benefit greatly to some modularity. Many of the nexus mods I downloaded had installers popup when using Vortex that let you pick and choose what you wanted to install. I think this would help greatly for people who only like certain aspects (eg. running with the feral ghoul overhaul only).
Some parts of my mod have been implemented since I worked on this. Several versions of death alternative mods are out there now, both standalone and as part of popular overhauls (eg. Horizon). Many point out that several spawning mods exist out there also. All of this makes me think that I can strip out some of the feature bloat and those that want those extras will still be able to include them elsewhere.
What Now?
For now I'm in the exploratory and planning phase. I'm scoping out the potential work involved with revisiting this mod and trying to decide if I want to take the plunge. Free time is not easy to come by as a father of two, but I did enjoy working on this and feel a certain responsibility to maintain it.
that is realy nice to hear i hope your doing great. I already have posted about the hard crash issue in your nexus mod page. As the more time you spend hard crashes become more common i have also noticed that after a certain time (its been ages since that happend so i dont know when it did realy happen) every ghoul that was spawned in with the scripts from your mod was a potential hard crasher i also noticed that the probability increased with more ghoul (makes sense) but at some point even 3 ghouls could cause my game to instantly crash aka comming too close to them. So because i had tons of free time i dicided to go around the entire fallout 4 map and kill every ghoul there was. After many crashes and sniper kills (couldnt get too close) i had succsesfullly killed every ghoul that had loaded in zombie walker scripts. I wasnt suprised that after i killed all of these ghouls i could saftly spawn in as many vanilla game ghouls in without crashes even more than 3 !! wowsers. Maybe the hoard behaivour causes these crashes i dont know but i neither have tons of free time anymore as my school is starting thomorrow again..... i wish i could do extensive testing and maybe your mod doesnt even cause these crashes (wich i find hard to belive but id love for it to be true) maybe one of my mods (wich i am sure does not effect any ghoul behaivour or anything to do with ai) had compability issues with zombie walkers (i remember that i had once done extensive testing with all behaivours enabled and came to the same conclusion but its been over a year since then, maybe i could do bether now, dunno) in conclusion time is needed wich neither of us has quiete a bummer also please keep all the feautures in your mod even if some other mods do the same (there isnt realy anything wrong with having more options and just diabling sections of zombie walkers like alternaitve death) not evryone uses horizon after all etc...
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback. Glad to hear you've enjoyed it. I'll keep your thoughts in mind as I trudge forward on a re-write. Going to prioritize core features first of course, but so far my interest is holding.
ReplyDeleteI have enjoyed this mod more than 150 hours, is really amazing, i was have some crashes and freezes when saving/load the game. Im really happy to hear that you are working on it, is amazing to play this mod, im very happy.
ReplyDeleteI would like to tell you how amazing your mod is and how greatful I am to have played it. Unfortunately, ever since I got it my game has continuously crashed and frozen. So sadly I will have to delete the mod so that I can continue my playthrough. Thank you for this amazing mod. It was so awesome to play it for the couple days I had it. I hope all is well and that you're doing good.
ReplyDeleteI'm loving this mod on the Xbox, gives a really good zombie apocalypse feel. However, I've got a problem in that the zombies keep fighting each other. When they attack a settlement they just kill each other until there's one left standing. The headless zombies appeared about the same time. Have you come across this before? Thanks
ReplyDeleteStay tuned as I'm working on a 3.0 version (currently in beta) that I'm hoping will perform better.
ReplyDeleteSorry Late to conversation, I love the Zombie Walker mod the only downside the save times. Thanks for the cool mod. Cheers
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