holy shit is the #Fallout3 GECK the most dogshit piece of software I’ve ever tried to use omg. I don’t know how Bethesda has managed to continue using this engine for however many decades it’s been now but they really need to just switch to Unreal already

I do not understand how they made a whole entire game in this engine, let alone like twelve or however many it’s been now

well, now I know why nobody mods Fallout 3 lol. it seems like Fallout 4 is so popular to mod because they made the engine and tooling Moderately Less Ass

I don’t know if y’all have ever used Valve’s Hammer Editor circa 2006 but imagine one step backwards in technology from that, except the map you’re editing is The Entirety of Fallout 3 At Once Including All Logic and Items and Scripts and no there is no way to filter down to just the stuff you care about unless you know exactly what it’s called. also I’m pretty sure there’s no way to edit a script once you’ve written it because it gets automatically compiled and packed into the ESP (which means it gets chucked into the massive list of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of entities, which is completely unsorted in any way) and the source code is just gone

also if you Touch Anything your mod will be subtly broken in a way that’s impossible to detect without third-party tools. that’s called a “wild edit” which the GECK will helpfully do for you without asking or telling you

also it will automatically crash if you try to use it in any way whatsoever unless you go into an INI file and enable bDoNotCrashIWantToUseTheSoftwarePleaseThankYou

(specifically, if you try to import more than one master at a time (which every single mod ever is going to require) the GECK assumes you’re doing something wrong and just, crashes. on purpose.)

Bethesda games are way too fucking unmoddable to have such an enthusiastic modding scene

@kasdeya as full-on level editors, Bethesda's modding tools leave a lot to be desired, but there are still a couple of crucial factors that make them so popular: they allow players (even/especially those with no prior coding experience) to modify their games in a myriad of ways, and they're actually available to players at no additional cost (which is rare, i think, for the action RPG genre)

@smolcasm @kasdeya The ability to change the global variables in o.g. Oblivion & Morrowind let me do astonishing things. I agree though, making new levels sucks in the creation kit.

@kasdeya Just having an official modding toolkit at all, even if it sucks, is enough to develop an enthusiastic modding scene. There are so few games that actually do that.

The fact that you can go in and start changing stuff with little to no programming experience whatsoever, and make your own mod that way, is HUGE. And it's part of the reason why those better third-party tools exist at all.

@kasdeya That said, you're right about the GECK being a pain in the ass to use. I remember modders back in the Gamebryo days joking about how their love for the construction set was matched only by their hatred for the same. Creation Engine alleviated some of those issues (enough for the Skyrim and Fallout 4 modding scenes to absolutely explode), but even now they're still kind of a pain.

The little bit of Bethesda modding I've done has almost always been things I could make in third-party tools. No placement of objects in the worldspace, so I could get away with using xEdit for everything and it was a godsend. So easy to override records and make changes. I used it when I delved too deep into Skyrim mods and ended up with a bunch of incompatible plugins, creating compatibility patches to get them to play nice with each other.