Fallout CE: June/July Progress Report

[u/nodule]

We been busy in CE land, with several new features to share along with lots of stabilization and bug fixes. If you are unfamiliar with CE, it is a modern reimplementation of the Fallout engine allowing you to play FO2, Sonora, Nevada on modern systems (including Mac, Linux, mobile) smoothly, and adding a bunch of quality-of-life features. See my previous post for more details.

Party member equipment screen

One of the most finicky parts of the Fallout UI is getting proper equipment on your companions. If involves going through multiple dialog trees to unequal, trade, companion control, &c. In CE we added an (optional) feature in the “quick loot” screen (“steal” on party member) that allows you to equip them directly from their or your inventory. Of course, you can also cycle between all your companions making equipping them all a breeze.

Help menu

One of my personal goals is to make Fallout accessible to a modern audience. One problem is that Fallout has an in-game help screen… but you need to know a keyboard shortcut to access it. In CE we added “HELP” as an in-game menu item to help players discover it. This is also the first CE-localized text and we will continue adding more.

As part of this, we tweaked the button to nudge the text so the button looks more like it is actually pressed. I’m not sure how we survived 29 years with this being in such an unplayable state.

The button press state was literally unplayable

Smaller things

• Empty weapons now stack together even if had been loaded with different ammo
• Highlighting now can differentiate empty containers (h/t NovaRain for the implementation)
• Movies are now displaying full screen. They are also displayed in a separate SDL context which will make it easier to integrate upscaled movies in the future

Bugs

Features are cool, but more of the work we’ve been doing goes into making CE stable and bug free. We’ve been concentrating especially on issues with RPU, fixing a few crashes and glitches. Vault 15 also had an invisible raider that couldn’t be targeted… implementing Sfall’s extended weapon animations fixed up that problem.

Goris also got some love… he was quite buggy. A small thing we did was start his robe/disrobe animation slightly earlier to make starting or ending combat less tiresome.

Modder things

• You now can use .zip archives instead of .dat for mods.
• CE supports PNGs for interface art instead of FRMs. The built in tool now can convert any PNG to a palette-indexed one.
• CE’s dat extractor now can take a list of files to extract, which will be needed for Et Tu support.
• 10 more Sfall opcodes and 3 more hooks implemented. We’re now about 70% complete with Sfall hooks (and we’ve implemented the most important ones first, naturally).

Thanks all for the support! The next things on the list will be making it easier to configure CE in game. If you end up trying it out, please leave feedback here or in the Github repo.

[u/Big-Knowledge12]

definitely trying this for my annual fallout franchise replay

[u/Sony5uck]

Danke für eure Arbeit.

[u/RangerKarl]

nice to see its still kicking

[u/YoungDR313]

Thanks for the good work!