Dev Diary 134: 2253 (Patreon)

Heya mutants,

The year is 2253, and the brave Dutton family caravan is traveling through the radioactive wasteland... Oh, wait, scratch that; wrong franchise! ;-)

As I mentioned in the last dev diary, I was looking into getting caravan runs working. To say the least, the way they were technically implemented in Fallout 1 and 2 is atrocious. No wonder the dev working on them thanked someone "for keeping me sane throughout this project" in Vault City Designer Notes and then never worked on another game ever again -_- 

To refresh your memory, basically what's happening is that you jump from encounter to encounter on the same desert map until you reach the final destination. So, you're not actually traveling the world map, and every world map encounter is "faked." Yes, you read that right; every caravan encounter was re-implemented there using a SEPARATE script. The world map code plays no role.

This means the devs had to maintain two world map code bases instead of one. It also robs the player of opportunities to experience much more exciting caravan trips where any encounter, even special ones, can be triggered, where the player is the one planning the travel route, and also where their Outdoorsman skill plays a role. So as you know, if you have a higher Outdoorsman skill, the game will do the usual "random encounter prompt". Here it is even more important because that means there's an equally higher chance of your caravan successfully reaching its destination because you're good at Outdoorsman.

So, I decided to revisit the whole thing, unsure if my plan is even technically possible. And, I can say that it was, so I'm much happier with caravans now!

In Fallout Yesterday, when you start a caravan run, the world map will pop up, and then you can set off to your destination along the route of your choice. The caravan will follow you as long as you don't stray from your path (visiting another city or returning to the starting town), steal from them, attack them, if it takes too long, and so on. And as you can see from the screenshot, our Hoover Dam-Jericho caravan ran into some rat hunters hunting big rats in the mountains. Mountains as an encounter location were not possible in Fallout 2.

With this great news, we will wrap up this week.

I'll see you soon,

-PJ