jackson zone

Pictured: Scott Rodenhizer working on a clay model of Set's head from the original Fallout being worked on.

Also notice the concept art for Killian Darkwater, Gizmo and Set in the background as well

I have a hunch that most experienced game developers think about engines less in terms of “best” and more in terms of “least bad” or “best for this type of game”.

IMO, Unity is the best engine for small scale games and small teams.  You might be thinking, “Like Pillars of Eternity?”  No, in retrospect I actually think both Pillars and Deadfire are too big for Unity.  But if you have a team of 1-10 people, it’s fantastic.  It’s easy to rapidly prototype in Unity and the editor is easy to work in.

Unreal is pretty good for larger scale games.  I don’t think it’s as great for small teams because there’s more overhead just to getting things up and running (again, IMO).  I have to also qualify my opinions on Unreal because I’ve never directed a game using it, I’ve only worked on it as a staff level developer.

Obsidian’s Onyx engine started out being pretty nightmarish (Aliens-era) and seemed to get a lot better on subsequent projects (Dungeon Siege III, South Park: TSoT).  The area pipeline was incredibly fragile/hard to work with and scripting was practically nonexistent, a reactionary consequence of programming leads having bad experiences with our over-scripted games like NWN2 (see below).

If you wanted to do more or less exactly what it did, the Infinity Engine was pretty easy to work with.  That said, there was a boatload of broken and bad stuff in it / the editor when we were working with it.  But in terms of making content, the pipelines were pretty straightforward.  All of the scripting was LUA and even though I didn’t do much of it, was also pretty straightforward.

I came onto NWN2 fairly late, but the NWN1 engine and editor were actually pretty easy to work with.  By replacing the editor and renderer (things that were arguably technically necessary) we made it a lot harder to work with, even if it was more flexible.  Neverwinter Script is very powerful, powerful enough for junior designers to write scripts that turn into nooses for them.

Bethesda’s engine was the easiest to create content for, by far.  Source control was easy, iterations were fast, the scripting language was pretty powerful -- just easy to work in.  Not necessarily easy to change, but if you wanted to do what we did on F:NV, which was make a bunch of new content and new features for the F3 engine, it was great.

The RenderWare engine was not awful to work with (at Midway), but RenderWare Studio was very slow and painful.  I did not have a good experience working in that editor.

When Black Isle was using LithTech (1.0) for Torn, I would argue that the engine was not even ready to be used as middleware.  One of many problems that plagued the Torn team.

The Jefferson/Van Buren engine was kind of a pain to work with on Jefferson but became much easier to work with on Van Buren.  Still, the area pipeline was slow and fragile because of how lightmaps were baked/exported.

Fallout: Miami is an upcoming DLC-sized mod with an original setting, complete with its own engrossing main quest, interesting side quests and characters, including new companions. The central theme of our story is the struggle between order and freedom. The setting for this new adventure is the post-post-apocalyptic Vacation Wasteland of Miami Beach. Once a popular tourist destination, attracting rich and glamorous visitors both foreign and domestic, it now plays host to an eclectic assortment of factions and societies, each with its own culture and approach to the challenges of this new post-nuclear world. The once-great slaver kingdom of Sunshine Cove has recently come under threat by a horde of automobile-worshipping nomads calling themselves the Nuclear Patriots. While Miami’s various factions vie for control over the Vacation Wasteland, a long-forgotten remnant of the old world slumbers beneath the waves, waiting for an opportunity to reclaim America once again.

Now at the end of the game when you’re going across Hoover Dam, there’s a part where the vertibird comes in with all the Enclave folks, and one after another they all jump out in their power armor, assuming they have their power armor. But because all those characters are set to ‘persistant’ they won’t just go away as you keep playing the game…so there was a time when I was playing through and I was on Hoover Dam, and I saw the vertibird show up, and Doc Henry jumped out, and Judah Kreger, and Cannibal Johnson, and then the naked corpse of an old man flopped onto Hoover Dam. And…it was Orion Moreno, who had been killed and not properly removed from the quest. So I like to imagine that they did it out of spite, they were like ‘no you fucker, you’re gonna go on one last mission with us,’ and they just pushed his dead body out of the vertibird. And we watched that over and over again and it never stopped being funny.”

companion: 

“ Clinging to the thread of the notion that your fight is a righteous one ”

[Text: I also wish people would stop thinking it’s disgusting for people to want to be with super mutants when like it’s Canon in the game that they still do have sex and enjoy it and have it with each other and humans and I wish that was more expanded upon. They are attracted to humans and have libido. I can understand the hesitation and the point is much more nuanced than what I can fit here but, let super mutants fuck. Also kind of tired that androgyny for super mutants is all cis male features.]

Because it plays a key role in the way nutrients are recycled. Various types of fungus and mushrooms are key in the decomposing process of turning dead things into nutrients, which various kinds of herbivores turn around and eat as high-mineral bonuses in the undergrowth. But that’s not the only thing fungus recycles. Like all living things, fungus will find a niche and get all the energy they can out of it– and I’m not just talking edible mushrooms. I’m talking slime molds, toxic mushrooms that pick up impurities in the soil and cycle it out or evolve to use that toxic thing as part of their defense mechanism or energy source. Evolution is an arms race, both in flora and fauna, to use everything in the environment as efficiently as possible, avoid dying before reproduction can occur, and to reproduce as broadly as possible. 

Now let’s talk about radiotrophic fungus. Literally, mushrooms that eat radiation.

Sounds like fiction? Guess what, it’s fact, and it’s living near the elephant's foot of the Chernobyl disaster.  

So while yes ‘lol glowing mushrooms’ in radioactive caves is a thing in the Fallout universe [though here in the real world, the thing that appears to be letting this fungus convert radiation to chemical energy is melanin, so it’s pitch black rather than glowing green. Ah well.] I’m fascinated to think about what a proliferation of this kind of fungus would do to the food web. 

It has a niche; obtaining chemical energy from radiation sites in the same way plants normally get energy from the sun– but that energy isn’t just used up. Plants are nutritious to the things that eat them because of the chemical energy they soak up from the sun. They are solar collectors, and that energy is passed on to the things that eat them. Food webs are energy maps, from the smallest initial processors to the biggest consumers of refined nutrients. 

So let us consider a fungus that, after the Great War, hits this mutation and proliferates because holy crap there is radiation everywhere, and while that radiation is killing most solar-loving plants, it is feeding the crap out of this fungus and making it intensely energy rich. It’s a type of energy that’s toxic to most animals. Because most things can’t eat it without dying [assuming they can even get CLOSE without succumbing to radiation poisoning] and there is an overwhelming abundance of chemical energy to be had with almost zero competition, this fungus spreads like gangbusters in the area and diversifies. And diversifies. And diversifies. Eventually it becomes it’s own competition for space to grow in the high-radiation area, and becomes multiple different spices with various different strategies to take advantage of this abundant chemical energy.

And then the first fucking rad-stag comes by that DGAF about radiation and starts munching on mushrooms that haven’t evolved a single fucking defense for being nommed on besides being in a hostile environment… which the radioactive animals no longer care about because they’ve evolved to process it.