The bright side of a Moon
Scheduled my next live-stream of Fallout 3: 4 PM Pacific on Wednesday 1 May 2024. Click the link and the bell to get a notification!
And I’m sharing this thumbnail because I’m ridiculously excited how well my in-game toon looks!
Currently trying to find royalty-free music so I can listen to Three Dog on-stream without getting my video hit by the Gods of Copyright. Should be able to pull something together. Found a mod that lets me replace the music which helps a lot!
Had a successful Fallout 3 stream today! Was super nervous all day, but my morning was taken up by getting dad to the airport for his vacation. I love my dad, and I’m happy I’ve been able to help him out while his living space is rebuilt/repaired, and it’s been great having him around… I do look forward to having some time and space to myself after a month. Maskin’ ain’t easy, and yes, I mask even around close family like dad.
After I dropped him off, though, I headed back to the house and tried to arrange everything for the stream. OBS kept locking up and crashing on me, which was frustrating, but I didn’t have a lot of mental energy to troubleshoot it. It seemed to happen when I was changing scenes, though, so I just decided I would avoid doing that as much as I could. I got my countdown set up, I got some music playing for the countdown – I wanted to play the classic Fallout Galaxy News Network songs, those old-timey showtunes and such, but after a quick google realized that those are still covered by copyright laws and could lead to my stream being demonetized.
Bethesda, however, has very generous terms for fans using the soundtrack music or other visual assets, so I just streamed the Fallout 3 game soundtrack, by composer Inon Zur, on shuffle, for the 15 minutes before go time. That worked!
I also set up an in-game overlay of a headshot of myself as a teenager, one that I had punched up using AI image enhancement, to show folks watching what I was aiming for in creating my character. The conceit is that I would be playing as myself as much as possible, something I did years ago when I streamed and played Fallout 4. For the record, here’s a screenshot of my character from the stream:
And for my S.P.E.C.I.A.L:
Some of those numbers are aspirational. Also, I know, I know, Charisma should be a dump stat, but I just didn’t have it in me to make it 1 for optimal gameplay. I’m not going for optimal, I want to be me, as if I had been raised in the vault.
I played through character creation, my 10th birthday party (I ate the sweetroll immediately and told Butch to back off), taking the G.O.A.T. (and beating the snot out of Butch for threatening Amata), taking the tagged skills Science, Lockpicking, and Repair. I can improve other skills but I wanted the best chance of getting through the vault escape without bloodshed. Which, um, I wasn’t able to do. Had to kill a couple of cops, I mean security, but it was in self-defense; they were going to beat me to death like they did Jonas. I did spare the Overseer, although I do not trust his promise to leave Amata alone. And instead of shooting it out with security at the Vault door, I just ran.
Several friends showed up in chat and I even had to ask their advice at some points. It was fun!
A note about guns: personally, I have made a vow to never touch a gun again in my life. I did that after the Sandy Hook shooting. Even if the revolution comes, I will support it with my other skills: troubleshooting, documentation, computer support, mechanical support. But when I did that, I also allowed myself an exception: in the event of an apocalypse, be it nuclear, zombie, or alien invasion, I will allow myself to use a gun. The Capital Wasteland is not just one of those, it’s all three, in one way or another. Also, it’s a game. But I do intend to try to solve things with words first, before violence, on this playthrough.
Will be continuing the stream on either Wednesdays (Wasteland Wednesday) or Friday (Fallout Friday.) Want to keep a regular schedule. Watch here for updates!
Quick post to document a problem I had and the solution that worked for me.
When streaming/recording Fallout 3 using OBS Studio, if I used Game Capture, OBS would show the game briefly but then freeze up, or worse, just show a black screen. Tried every setting in OBS that I could change for Game Capture, tried running OBS as administrator, even uninstalled and reinstalled OBS. Just could not get it to work. Didn’t want to use Fullscreen Capture for aesthetic reasons (it would capture my desktop, or notifications unrelated to the game, that kind of thing.)
So I broke down and read the documentation. Wouldn’t you know it, they had a solution to this.
I had to disable/close RivaTuner Statistics Server. That did the trick. Turns out having that overlay breaks Game Capture in OBS. I seriously would have never thought of that if I hadn’t gone in and found the OBS support docs.
Good documentation saves lives! Or at least prevents stress wrinkles.
I spent most of the afternoon getting things ready to stream Fallout 3, as mentioned previously here. I think I’m ready to go. I’m nervous that it will be a disaster but, hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
As my bestie Tracy said, and I quote, “OK, you might have to not be a perfectionist at the very beginning. Just sayin’. People do tend to improve over time.” Wise words and I hope I can follow her advice. But it’s hard, y’know?
I’ve got OBS set up, I think, to stream the game properly. I’ve scheduled it, and announced it to the world on YouTube and Instagram, as well as let my friends know if they feel like dropping by. I made some slides for transitions, went into StreamElements and set up some chat bot commands and got a nifty overlay for the countdown and to notify if anyone subscribes or tips me.
Let’s do this. If you’re reading this before 4 PM Pacific on 28 April 2024, go to the link below and click the bell to get a notification. And come over to my YouTube channel if you can. If you’re not familiar with Fallout 3, the game literally starts with your character being born. It’s bonkers, not gonna lie.
Way back in 2015, I was hyped for Fallout 4 being released in November. I was poking around Bethesda’s YouTube channel and discovered, indirectly, that they were hiring. Hiring quest writers.
Hey, I’m a writer! That sounds like a fun job. I should do that. One of the requirements was a 2-5 page (500-1250 word, approximately) story set in one of their game worlds, focusing on dialogue.
I immediately thought of setting a story in Portland, my home town, only in the Fallout universe, 200 years after the bombs fell. The Fallout universe is grungy, adult, and has an off-kilter sense of humor, and since part of the Portland I love are the underclass, the working class, the service staff and strippers and musicians, I thought a post-apocalyptic Portland would be a perfect setting.
Over the next couple of weeks, I thought about the characters more; since the story was to be mostly dialogue, I needed to have well-designed characters that had distinct voices. Soon enough, I had three interesting people – a woman who was a Vault dweller, descended from a group that survived the nuclear annihilation, a Ghoul who chose to help others but paid the price of loneliness and immortality, and… one other, a mysterious person whose past influenced both of the previous two’s lives. And in the present of the story, they all interacted… somehow.
I had the opening scene down. The woman, Calista Brasesco, was exploring the Willamette Wasteland in search of something to help her Vault and her people, and comes across an old burnt-out bunker, that used to be a strip club in Portland before the war. In the ruins, she finds the Ghoul, Louie “Lovie” Duckworth, who somehow recognizes her from before the war. They trade stories and discover what they have in common… which was the third character. And that’s where I was stuck.
I didn’t know how to make that revelation interesting. I didn’t know how to make the character decisions interesting. I wasn’t even sure Calista had any decisions to make, honestly.
I knew who all three people were, mostly, as I kicked the story around in my head and made notes when the ideas came to me. But it didn’t gel. It didn’t feel like a story yet. So I let the idea sit in my head and kept taking notes, and playing Fallout 4, and reading the wikis for lore in that universe. And I mentally berated myself for not just writing.
I was mad at myself because, while I thought I had a great story brewing, I wasn’t actually churning it out. It was taking too long. In my mind, I told myself, “Bethesda isn’t going to be interested in you if you can’t just toss out good stories. You need higher output. Just write, dammit!” And, as people do, I slowly shifted my rationalization from “I’m writing this to get hired” to “I’m writing this because it’s a good story and I want to tell it.”
And still, I didn’t actually write it.
I had another breakthrough when I picked up another piece of Fallout lore that made the mysterious third person much more menacing, but it still didn’t click for me. Felt too obvious. And maybe it was obvious because I’d been thinking about this story for 6 weeks; maybe it wouldn’t be so obvious to someone reading it for the first time.
Dammit. I needed to just write the story.
If I’ve learned anything at all as a writer, I’ve learned that ideas often don’t click until I begin to put them down into real words, sentences, paragraphs. So, a few days ago, I used a trick that’s helped me break out of my writer’s block for my stalled novel: write daily, with a goal of 50 words per day. It’s worked beautifully for my novel, because once I start writing, I rarely stop at only 50 words. I just keep going.
I put down the opening paragraphs of Calista scouting out the ruin, setting the scene, and felt that was enough. 158 words. That was the first day.
The second day, I wrote out her getting closer and seeing what was inside the building: defenses, and another person, sleeping. Another 158 words.
Today, I had her actually find a way past the defenses and get into the building. Only 114 words, and I could tell I was stalling. Clearing my throat. 430 words, almost two pages, and no dialogue. This wouldn’t do.
So I got in the shower and somewhere along the way, the story started running in my head, starting with Lovie making a cryptic remark to Calista and jumping from there… that’s what I should be writing, I thought.
Suddenly, it made sense. Why Calista was there, and what Lovie wanted, and how the identity of the mysterious stranger was both menace and resolution for both of them, with an added twist of painful irony…
And the story is currently writing itself. Finally. That’s how my brain works.
“Can’t wait to share it” is a much better feeling than “can’t wait to tell it.”
As a funny follow-up to my post a couple of days ago, Saturday morning I woke up and decided to install, patch, and mod Fallout 3 to make it somewhat stable, look better, and be a bit more modernized, in anticipation of streaming a playthrough of the game at some point in the near future.
And so did apparently everyone else.
The primary site for downloading mods for games like all of the Fallout games, as well as many others, is Nexus Mods. And on Saturday morning, Pacific time, by the time I got going, it was struggling. I kept seeing Cloudflare checks to prove I was human; a tactic to slow down high levels of use for websites. And sometimes, even then, the pages I was trying to reach did not load, and required refreshing. It was frustrating but also a little hilarious.
I am glad that there is interest in the Fallout games. I’ve said this before; I love the universe and the lore and the games, so having more people playing and learning about the world is amazing. You will never catch me gatekeeping people being excited about something cool.
I didn’t do a lot of mods; I think my list stands at 22 or so. Heck, for the record, here are the mods I installed:
I have a hankering to write up a current How To for this. The list above is sorted alphabetically and doesn’t reflect the install order or the load order. Let me know if you think that would be useful; I was going by my own experience and a lot of google searching for best mods and order. And most of the how-tos I found were for Mod Organizer or NexusModManager, not the newer Vortex, which is what I used.
There are more than enough gotchas in there to trip someone up. I can confirm that; I was that someone and I got tripped up several times. Had to wipe, uninstall, and start over at least twice.
Some tips for anyone trying this themselves:
Get a nice clean install of the base game first. Open the launcher, let it auto-detect your graphics settings, launch the game and let the opening title cards play, maybe start a New game, then exit. That creates the base files.
Install Vortex from Nexus Mods. You’ll install most (haha, no, not all) of the mods through here.
If you’re installing from Steam, it has an update that removes Games for Windows Live, which is broken since it was intended for WinXP, and Fallout Script Extender doesn’t work with that version (1.7.0.4). You’ll want to downgrade the game to 1.7.0.3. Luckily, the community has provided a patcher that will downgrade Fallout 3, as well as patch it to use more than 2 GB of RAM, and other helpful things. Download and manually run the Fallout Anniversary Patcher first before anything else.
Next thing you want to install is Fallout Script Extender. Don’t use the button in Vortex; manually download it and manually install it.
At this point, you can start installing other mods. You can use my list above as a starting point. My philosophy was – I wanted lore-friendly stuff, no major changes or new questlines, bug fixes and modernization, and just a hint of upgrades for modern graphics and displays. I did succumb to the temptation of making the 2008 Bethesda faces look a little better, but I did not install any body mods or new weapon or armor textures. I might, still, but for now I’m fine with it looking the way it did back in the day. And I am experimenting with re-done NPC animations.
I may still tweak or remove the persistent green tint in favor of third-party lighting and colors through the use of an ENB, or I might not. Again, part of the reason I want to play this is nostalgia. The look and feel of original Fallout 3 is a majority of the charm, to me.
It’s worth it, though, to have a clean, pretty game to play. And my computer, while it hasn’t been top-of-the-line for a good while, is still plenty powerful enough to run this game at 1080p and 60 frames per second. I’m looking forward to revisiting the Capital Wasteland.
Comment or contact me if you’d be interested in a full How-To write up. And stay tuned if you want to see me stream my playthroughs. That is definitely coming soon.
With the release of Fallout on Prime, the new TV show set in the Fallout universe, interest in the post-post-apocalypse wasteland has never been higher. I mean me, my interest, mostly. I want to reinstall and play all the games, now. And I have at least reinstalled several of them (Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 76) but haven’t yet found the time to start a new journey in that wild far future.
It’s been fun going through the process of getting a nice clean install, patching the older games to run on modern hardware and software, and picking out a few good mods to make it more stable, improve the graphics and gameplay, and fix the more egregious bugs. OK, again, that’s probably just my own quirky tech-focused kind of fun; your mileage may vary. For Fallout 3, it took maybe an hour’s worth of googling, downloading, and a scosche of trial-and-error. But I got it all running.
Stay tuned to this channel for the possiblity of me streaming a playthrough of Fallout 3, playing as myself… I’m working up the nerve to try it.
That being said, my nephew also wants to play some Fallout, excited by the new show and especially for it being set in the game’s continuity, being a true follow-on to the game chronology. Max and I have been texting each other questions, theories, and memes about Fallout since the show dropped. This is actually fun for lots of people, not just computer geeks like me! Surely anyone reading this has one or several friends they share memes with, right? Not just me? It’s a universal thing these days?
The other day, though, he sent me a link to a Steam Community guide about how to install and run Fallout: New Vegas and asked me if it was a good how-to. I took a look and it seemed pretty comprehensive, and offered to help him out if he ran into any troubless. I felt a bit of a duty; I had helped him build his current computer a couple of years ago. Mostly though I’m excited to see him play and happy to help him get the most out of his rig. He’s been mainly a console player; mods aren’t a normal part of his gaming experience; whereas I’ve been modding games since Skyrim. I may not be an expert but I would consider myself a competent modder.
He started to get it going the other day but I didn’t hear anything more. When I pinged him to ask how it went, he said he got distracted, totally understandable. Today, though, he had the energy to get it going, and I was able to screenshare with him and walk him through the trickier parts, like making sure to back up the default files and folders before messing with them, which saved us in at least one instance. The instructions for the mod that enables scripting support, NVSE, said to copy the entire contents of its mod to the main game folder, it wanted to overwrite the Data folder already there. I backed him out of that, had him rename the old folder, and then copy everything.
Once we got the mods installed, though, the game crashed to desktop on launch, throwing the error “missing masters.” When I had Max launch the game normally, it didn’t appear any of the DLC was available; turns out they all lived in the old, renamed Data folder. Copying them to the new modded Data folder fixed the issue.
Then I spent over an hour watching him start a new playthrough, MST3K-ing and joking and googling things for him (like what is a hot plate used for, anyway? And did the Brotherhood try to take over Hoover Dam (they got distracted by Father Elijah’s fixation on HELIOS-1)). Fun times!
I’ve spent so much time in these worlds, playing, learning the characters, maps, and lore. Even making up my own wasteland lore (which has yet to be contradicted by the official material, yay!) Fun times, indeed. And I’m so glad that non-gamers are learning how rich and weird the Fallout universe is. I welcome new fans with open arms.
Feel free to ask me any questions. Love to help.
Been playing a lot of The Long Dark lately. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a computer game that’s a survival challenge that I’ve written about before. Your character is lost in the eerily abandoned Canadian winter on an island in the vague northwest. You have to struggle to stay warm, find food and water, and manage your strength. Meanwhile you have to watch out for predators that are far more agressive than found in nature, like wolves and bears. Infrastructure like running water and electricity is down, although sometimes there is an aurora that causes electrical devices to be temporarily usable; unfortunately this also increases the agression of predators making it very dangerous to be out and about under the glowing lights in the sky.
There’s a story mode, too, where you can play as Will MacKenzie or Dr. Astrid Greenwood (voiced by the incredibly talented Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale, respectively), estranged spouses who are trying to find each other and get to a town on the island with a mysterious briefcase. Four of the five chapters have been released for story mode and at least one more is coming. It’s interesting and goes into the weird Quiet Apocalypse that’s befallen Great Bear Island.
That’s not the mode I’m playing right now.
For as long as I’ve had the game I’ve enjoyed the lower levels of difficulty; in those modes the game is much less tense, you start with basic gear like decent clothing and matches (important for getting and staying warm, as well as boiling water and cooking food), and you have better loot scattered around to help you survive, like knives, hatchets, pistols and guns.
But I always admired the streamers and let’s players who played on the highest difficulty level: Interloper. Streamers like Tomasina, Zaknafein, Archimedes, among others. On Interloper, there are no guns, and you start with no matches at all. In that mode, knowing where you are and where to find matches and other good loot is paramount. The maps themselves don’t change, but the possible locations of gear is somewhat randomized. And you have to craft your own knife, hatchet, and bow — there are no guns in this mode. And without a knife or hatchet, you can’t harvest animals well, you can’t craft the best clothing in the game, and you can’t make a bow and arrows. You can’t even defend yourself from hungry wolves when they attack.
To give you a little idea of how the developers see this mode, there is a Steam achievement for surviving a single day in Interloper. It took me several tries, after doing my best to learn the maps on lower levels, before I achieved even this. When I wrote my earlier post I hadn’t even attempted Interloper. It felt too brutal.
I forgot to mention: this is permadeath. Dying in the game means your current save is deleted. Go back to Day 1, you have to start over. Make a single mistake and it can cost your whole run. And nearly every death in this game can be traced back to a mistake the player made. Get overconfident, go out into the cold without proper precautions, or just misjudge how much food and water you’ll need, and it’s over. You’ve faded into the long dark.
But I have finally strung together enough luck and skill that I am past Day 200 on a single run. Other players I’ve talked to have said the game gets boring at this point but not for me. I’m enjoying having a better chance (not a guarantee by any means) of surviving after the brutal first 20-30 days getting set up.
It’s far more than a walking simulator. It’s beautiful, meditative, and challenging. I love it.
I was listening to a member special from the Accidental Tech Podcast folks, and they were sharing their Computer Origin Stories; remembering their first time using a computer, and their journey from there to their later computer programming jobby-jobs (as Casey always calls their regular jobs) before they all eventually quit to do the podcast full-time, some faster than others.
It’s fun to reminisce! It was all so very long ago, because I am old.
I should probably make this a much longer post, with links and images, but I wanted to kind of sketch out the outline of my own personal Computer Origin Story first. Try to get it down in words. It’s hard and I may be leaving out things and it might not all be in the right order, but here’s my first notes on the topic.
I am unsure if arcade games count for the purposes of “computers” but they were absolutely computers, so I’ll begin the chain of events by my encounter with a Lunar Lander arcade game in what must have been early summer 1979. It was the end of my 8th grade year in Junior High and our class got to celebrate by taking a day trip to the Kah-nee-ta Resort in central Oregon. While the rest of my schoolmates were riding on horseback, or relaxing in the hot springs, or sunbathing, I was in the dark resort lobby feeding quarters into this game trying to land a vector-graphics spaceship on a 2D planet surface, guiding it in by using a knob to control the rotation and a button to feather the rocket to speed up or slow down.
The first personal computer I remember using was a Tandy TRS-80, at a computer store in a suburban shopping mall. I must have been a teenager in my middle years. There was a grocery store in that mall, and when mom would go get groceries, I’d wait for her at the bookstore in that mall, and then, eventually, I’d wait for her in the computer store. This must have been in the early 1980s. I was in high school but I don’t remember what grade. I suppose I can try to find the name of that store, but for the life of me I can’t.
At some point the store ran a contest where the prize was a TRS-80, which would have been prohibitively expensive for my family to buy. To win the contest I had to play a Star Trek game and have the highest score. I got one chance to do it, and I don’t think I lasted longer than a minute or two. My parents, particularly my mom, thought I was going to beat it. I did not, but I had a lot of fun.
That store sold other computers. I would regularly buy issues of Byte Magazine and read up about computers. That’s where my interest began. But it didn’t stop there. More to come soon; there are a few more stops along the way.
Credit: Courtesy of Prime Video
This isn’t a spoiler but a funny story I wanted to share. My dad has been staying with me since his apartment got flooded and they found asbestos. His normal TV viewing is procedurals like NCIS or The Rookie, or westerns.
When Fallout on Amazon Prime came out earlier this week, I showed him the trailer to see if it’s something he’d like to watch and his response was “I’m not a big fan of cartoons.” He is entirely unfamiliar with the games.
So I started watching it anyway and now, three episodes in, he’s just as hooked as I am. I think he likes the dark humor and ultraviolence.
That being said, I, too, like the tone of the show as well as the fact that they’ve spared no expense in making the digital world of recent Fallout games into real actual props. Seeing T-60 power armor in action is amazing. There’s a scene near the end of the first episode where someone is being interrogated and they just have the power armor pacing back and forth menacingly. You don’t even see the whole thing, just what passes behind the person being questioned, and the sound effects. Just amazing. Yeah, I imagine that would be intimidating as fuck.
I’ll write a fuller review when I’ve finished it but so far it’s great. I hear the people who whine about things whining about this and The Lore but fuck ’em. I’m not a slave to the lore and neither is Bethesda. Just tell a fun story, that’s all I ask.