Fallout: New Vegas news round-up

[WorstUsernameEver]

The closer we get to release, the more we have to post, so here's another quick round-up of Fallout: New Vegas news.
Planet Fallout has published an interview with Project Director Josh Sawyer. It's very informative and frank, so it's more than worth a read. Here's a snippet:<blockquote>Is the interface identical for all versions or has it been customized to reflect the system it's played on and the controllers it's played with? E.g. the pc version had a variety of mods customizing the UI, Darnified UI being one of the more popular ones, which changed font sizes, colors, placement of infographics to make use of the better resolution most PCs offer etc.
We investigated offering an "High Def" user interface but unfortunately found that while it is relatively easy to modify existing fonts (as Darnified's UI does), expanding the overall font library to allow for an SD/HD toggle between the two was more complicated.

[..]

How "canon" is New Vegas?
Everything in Fallout: New Vegas can be considered canon until retconned. </blockquote>Ausir has been also pretty active lately and has another news tidbits round-up ready for the Fallout community, including Pete Hines boasting that the New Vegas official guide is longer than War & Peace on twitter, Sony giving the European PS Plus subscribers free Fallout 3 DLC and VGChartz counting Fallout: New Vegas pre-orders as 775,000 (take into account that it's not the most reliable source though).

To conclude, Talking about Games is asking for questions to ask Pete Hines on their podcast this Friday, and Best Buy will host a live-stream event this Thursday with Project Director Josh Sawyer and is encouraging everyone who has questions to post them on this thread on the official boards.

 

[Alphadrop]

Fallout: New Vegas' version of the GECK will be available for PC users at launch. It has all of the functionality of Fallout 3's GECK with the addition of new scripting commands, new ammo subtype functionality, integrated weapon mod functionality, and a new dialogue editor that offers a "tree" view of conversations.

Heck yea! Dialogue was such a bitch to do without having a way to view it all.

 

[Briosafreak]

Fallout: New Vegas' version of the GECK will be available for PC users at launch. It has all of the functionality of Fallout 3's GECK with the addition of new scripting commands, new ammo subtype functionality, integrated weapon mod functionality, and a new dialogue editor that offers a "tree" view of conversations.

Heck yea! Dialogue was such a bitch to do without having a way to view it all.

So true, this should really help now

 

[DemonNick]

It's too bad about the HD Interface. I can understand why they abandoned it, but it'd been mentioned before and I was kinda looking forward to non-huge fonts.

 

[Starwars]

Would've been really nice to have that built into the game, agreed. Had really hoped they'd include it for New Vegas, but meh.

At least it'll probably be one of the first things modded in.

 

[Makagulfazel]

Darnified UI being one of the more popular ones, which changed font sizes, colors, placement of infographics to make use of the better resolution most PCs offer etc.

Great mod. Works with FWE to display Sleep/Hunger/Thirst percentages and shuffles around the pipboy menus to make them more intuitive. Oh well, I'll just wait for him to port that sucker over.

 

[Lexx]

Hope it will happen fast, because I don't like the default blind-people HUD from Fallout 3.

 

[Surf Solar]

Am I the only one who has no problems with the default UI? I don't really care about the font size to be honest...

 

[Makagulfazel]

I don't really care about the font size to be honest...

"That's some nappy headed fonts there. I'm going to tell you now, man. That's some - Woo!"

 

[your evil twin]

It's not the bigness of the font that is the issue, it's the the fact that large font means less lines of text on screen. When you are talking with someone and there are six dialogue options, you can only see three of them and you have to scroll down to see the others, see you don't like them, then scroll back up again... while if you use a mod that reduces font size, you can see them all simultaniously.

Also, when in the pipboy, shrinking the font size and the spaces between lines lets you fit twice as much info onto one page, so changing weapons or checking which limb is crippled or looking at quests isn't a massive scrollfest.

Would've been really nice to have that built into
At least it'll probably be one of the first things modded in.

Before Darnified UI I used a simple mod on Nexus that just changed the font size and the spacing but left the fonts and layout the same. That alone was a massive improvement, and that mod was out when I started playing just a few days after release.

 

[Beelzebud]

It's really lame that they can't be bothered to make a better UI for the PC version.

 

[frosty_theaussie]

Seems like Obsidian should have hired DarN instead of Oscuro, then.

 

[100LBSofDogmeat]

So I'm gonna guess they aren't releasing hi-res textures so it'll look "normal" on my rig. Hopefully the community will release the hi-res packs soon after launch. Nice changes to the GECK though.

As for Mr. Hines, I have no interest in anything that asshole or Todd Howard has to say about anything. Ever.

Last rant, about canon, I've never accepted anything from "fallout" 3 to be so I guess I may have to pick and choose what is in New Vegas.

 

[your evil twin]

What they found difficult about the UI was that while it would be easy enough to have the fonts be smaller etc, the problem is having a toggle in the menu so that the player can change between large text and small text on the fly.

The various unofficial mods like Darnified UI etc simply overwrite all the font stuff and you have to completely uninstall the mod to undo the changes (not just deactivate the mod, you have to remove the files) and you also have to undo some changes to a config file or revert to a backup.

To impliment all that as a simple menu option would require a significant amount of new programming, changing the ways that the config files work and the menu system works.

I've seen the "new" orange HUD and pipboy in Fallout New Vegas mentioned many times, in magazines, websites, and on forums, and that's a large number of journalists and fans that didn't even realise that the orange HUD colour is actually an existing menu option in Fallout 3. (I've been playing with orange HUD right from the start!)

So if that can slip under people's radar, so would an option to change text size. And unlike changing the HUD colour, that might take a week of serious programming, which is hard to justify for a menu option that many people will not even realise exists, and many people won't care about.

And those that do care about it can just download a user-made mod, because it is primarily PC gamers that care about this. You'd need a really large HD tv and have to be sitting uncomfortably close to reckon that the font was unessarily large.

(I think I heard some players of Mass Effect 2 complained about unreadable text - they didn't have HD tvs and all the text was made on the assumption that you were playing in an HD resolution.)