Tag: computers

The Power of the Atom – Installing and Modding Fallout 3 in 2024

Gaming, Tech

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.

All of the above

Daily Story Project, meta, Tech

This blog has been up and in existence in some form or another for over 20 years. Over that time it’s run on several different platforms: first on Blogger, then on a bespoke CMS written by a friend, hosted on that friend’s server, and finally, when that friend moved away, hosted on a Mac mini I plugged in whereever I could, then, eventually, imported into WordPress and migrated from whatever hosting service sucks less and costs the least amount (currently Bluehost.)

When I started this whole thing, it was just a place for me to dump my random thoughts on whatever I wanted to talk about. I never designed this place for consistency and I never had an eye to making money from it, be it by getting sponsors or affiliates, putting ads up, or soliciting for digital downloads and media (although there was a desperate period in my life when I did try putting ads here, which failed because of the low low traffic.)

While I love everyone who comes here to read anything I say, there aren’t enough of you to make it worth it to Google for monetization. Don’t get me wrong on this. At the highest traffic levels for this space, I was getting about 200 hits per day, and I was posting nearly daily. To me, having 200 people care about my work is amazing and humbling! If I were standing in front of a crowd of 200 people who cared about the words I write, I would be beyond happy. But those numbers are peanuts to the internet, even for the time (this was a decade ago), and especially now.

But I do kinda care about reaching a larger audience, and one of the technical problems that I would need to fix, according to Google, is broken links. And with all the years of posting, holy shit are there a shit-ton of broken links, some of which I have no way to fix beyond deleting them or noting them as broken in the present day. I have spent hours going back through old posts checking links and fixing the ones I can, but let me tell you, manually doing that for (including this post) 2590 published posts over 21 years is a lot of work.

There’s another category of broken links, though. For a while, my post permalinks used the scheme of bamoon.com/year/month/day/post-title.php. I think there are perhaps 50-100 of those, from a previous WordPress configuration. Eventually I switched to bamoon.com/post-title/ Because these follow a regular pattern, I know that I could probably use a script to go through the posts and the database and update them all. But I am not a strong coder. I also know that one can use a feature of Apache and add lines to the .htaccess file to re-write the requests one-by-one as users request them. But, again, that means regex and scripting, not my strong suit.

Here comes ChatGPT, though. It’s not good at so many things, like making sure people have only four fingers and one thumb on each of two hands, but people (like Molly White) say it’s brilliant at scripts and coding. So I asked it for help. It gave me solutions for both cases. Great! I have a staging site I can test these on, so it won’t break the main site. But… one last question, ChatGPT: which solution is better?

And I feel like it punted. It said both are good, and I should implement both. The database fix is more permanent; the .htaccess rewrite is immediate and invisible to the reader.

Looks like ChatGPT is an Option D (all of the above) kind of bot.

Big Iron on our hips

Daily Story Project, Gaming, Tech, TV

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.

Screenshot from the game Fallout 3, opening credits: an old TV test pattern in black and green saying "Please Stand By" in retro-futuristic text and graphics.
Coming soon: me making a fool of myself in the Capital Wasteland

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.

Computer Origin Story, Part 1

Daily Story Project, Gaming, Tech

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.