I hate the small population of Fo3. And this isn't a problem exclusive to just Fallout 3, but every Fallout and Elderscrolls title.
It seems like every time I get hyped up about a town, city, organization, et cetera, I get there only to find a dozen people. Seriously the FO3 town of Megaton was supposedly built from airport scrap and is surrounded by massive metal walls, but there's only a handful of buildings and a dozen or so people living there. You mean to tell me a dozen people scrapped an entire airport and built a "City"? Nah I don't think so. Same with rivet "city". Massive aircraft carrier with only a few people on it. Meanwhile everyone talks like it's a big city. The brotherhood constantly talks about the ruins as if they are swarming all over them putting up the "good fight" and after scouring all over those ruins you only encounter living Brotherhood soldiers 3 times and come across a few dead bodies. Oh yeah, a real warzone you got there. NV is no different, Novac, Goodsprings, Camp Forlorn Hope, Mojave Outpost, all of them. They are all poor excuses for what they claim to be: Towns, bases, outposts, et cetera. The actual city of New Vegas is probably the best populated place in any Fallout or Elderscrolls title and even it is lacking, with a small population, only a few dozen buildings and not even half of them can be entered. And skyrim, oh don't even get me started on Skyrim. Bethesda and Obsidian seriously need to work on their scale when it comes to the size and scope of what they call cities, towns, wars, because even though theres alot of reference to these things in dialogue the actual game play doesn't hardly reflect any of it. Luckily there are wonderful modders out there who have stepped up and compensated for this incompetence (strong word) and created population, war, and expansion mods for Fo3, FNV, Oblivion, and Skyrim. War mods like "Endless Warfare" and "Warzones" for New Vegas and Skyrim do a GREAT job at really bringing the warfare aspect of NV and Skyrim to life with respawning small and large scale battles between warring factions. Unfortunately -as far as I know- no such mod exists for Fallout 3. The DC ruins present a great opportunity for an awesome close quarters combat Warzones-esque mod, I still hope someone will eventually get around to making it.

Okay, my rants over.

P.S I actually meant to post this on a different discussion but accidentally clicked the "New Post" button.  Oh well.

Actually this is a good topic to have going because I know a lot of modders and players alike hate the problem you mentioned. Maybe we can get someone together and make a mod that addresses the problem more, similar to the Skyrim Expanded Cities mods.

It isn't a matter of incompetence - its a matter of hardware limitations and also the way their games calculate AI and NPC behavior.  Gamebryo is an older engine that strains under the weight of some of Bethesda's ideas/systems.

Yeah, games like Assassin's Creed have dozens upon dozens of NPCs on screen sometimes, but those NPCs don't have sleep schedules, jobs that they do, quests that they offer, patrols that they maintain, combat AI routines, etc etc.

Sure, Bethesda could drop 100+ NPCs into Megaton or something, but the PCs/consoles designed to run the game at that time wouldn't have been able to handle that.  The game would have performed unacceptably.

I've done a number of large-scale fights in my Mass Effect mod (battles between Geth and Collectors, for example) and despite my PC being extremely powerful, these battles cause slowdown and lag for me.  I had a 50v50 (meaning 50 of each faction) fight set up and it was just too much. And honestly 50v50 is, itself, a pretty small number for a war/huge fight.

Its easy to look at something about a game and think 'this is lame' but there are often technical reasons for the shortcomings people are so quick to complain about.

I know where you're coming from and I can understand that Bethesda probably did the best they could with Gambryo, but still -as I'm sure you can understand- these issues were still very disappointing. And even after they ditched Gambryo with Skyrim population issues like the ones listed persisted. Do you think that can be dismissed as hardware limitations as well, or no?

asc_kel wrote:

Actually this is a good topic to have going because I know a lot of modders and players alike hate the problem you mentioned. Maybe we can get someone together and make a mod that addresses the problem more, similar to the Skyrim Expanded Cities mods.

sounds like a great idea

They didn't ditch gamebryo, they updated it and gave it a new name. I thought that everyone knew that by now.

asc_kel wrote:

They didn't ditch gamebryo, they updated it and gave it a new name. I thought that everyone knew that by now.

Nope haha. I was under the impression that they were using an entirely different engine. The Creation Engine, it's called, right?

It's going to be a while until we get a large amount of NPCs in one area doing all sorts of jobs and having schedules. Keep your fingers crossed though, it might happen in our lifetime.

Archangel-DA wrote:

I know where you're coming from and I can understand that Bethesda probably did the best they could with Gambryo, but still -as I'm sure you can understand- these issues were still very disappointing. And even after they ditched Gambryo with Skyrim population issues like the ones listed persisted. Do you think that can be dismissed as hardware limitations as well, or no?

Skyrim is the same engine.  They updated it to do some new/more advanced things, but it is very much the same engine. That's actually one of my many complaints with Skyrim, the fact Bethesda hyped it up as a new engine when its just a fancier version of Fallout 3's.

And I'm not dismissing your complaints, I'm explaining that there are technical reasons things are the way they are. It isn't incompetence or laziness, there's only so much they can do. I'd love a hugely populated Megaton/Rivet City as much as anyone, but when I realize what it would do to the game's FPS, I don't dwell on it.

Tesvixen wrote:

It isn't a matter of incompetence - its a matter of hardware limitations and also the way their games calculate AI and NPC behavior.  Gamebryo is an older engine that strains under the weight of some of Bethesda's ideas/systems.

Yeah, games like Assassin's Creed have dozens upon dozens of NPCs on screen sometimes, but those NPCs don't have sleep schedules, jobs that they do, quests that they offer, patrols that they maintain, combat AI routines, etc etc.

Sure, Bethesda could drop 100+ NPCs into Megaton or something, but the PCs/consoles designed to run the game at that time wouldn't have been able to handle that.  The game would have performed unacceptably.

I've done a number of large-scale fights in my Mass Effect mod (battles between Geth and Collectors, for example) and despite my PC being extremely powerful, these battles cause slowdown and lag for me.  I had a 50v50 (meaning 50 of each faction) fight set up and it was just too much.  And honestly 50v50 is, itself, a pretty small number for a war/huge fight.

Its easy to look at something about a game and think 'this is lame' but there are often technical reasons for the shortcomings people are so quick to complain about.

Actually it kind of is game companies in the industry no longer want to innovate just release the next game, for examples many games lack x64bit support, real multi processor support, that's why you can get away gaming on just a little I5 cpu and pretty much have the same gaming experience in most games as a four or six core I7. Even those that lack huge ram capacity. They game industry for the most part has become complacent and get away with murder in their really bad code.  

Bethesda has has been gutting the gamebryo for some time now, their latest edition v4.2 a stripped down ver of gambryo v4.1 ripping out x64bit support, DX11 support, larger access to hardware that has lots of ram available. The reason you are getting those slow downs is the lack of multi core/thread support. All of it mostly running if not all on a single core or two cores clocked at an average of 2-4ghz depending on what you have.  Because they cheap out and develop for the consoles that are on hardware from the early 00's to mid 00's.

If you have C++ and other programming knowledge, a copy of Gamebryo v4.1 to Gamebryo Lightspeed you could very well impliment those things into fallout by upgrading the engine itself, it has been done before, but does not get released. Many games that are on huge huge maps, have to pump a lot of pollys, textures, are normally on the gamebryo engine many games single player and mmorpgs are on it believe it or not, what happens is a game company gets the base sdk ver of it, with instructions on how to make it for the programmers/scripts to work with, and another set of instructions for the artist to work with it. http://www.gamebryo.com/ to find out more about it there. Or its on the cryengine that is not an open sourced SDK to game studios, and support is very well lacking... thus you see so many games not using it...

You can talk to Maxunit he does have an un Bethesda raped ver of 4.0 or 4.1 of the gamebryo engine or he knows where to get it. I am waiting on my license to go though for it now-.- big plans on the way.

SuperFraggle wrote:

It's going to be a while until we get a large amount of NPCs in one area doing all sorts of jobs and having schedules. Keep your fingers crossed though, it might happen in our lifetime.

We can only hope!

Archangel-DA wrote:

SuperFraggle wrote:

It's going to be a while until we get a large amount of NPCs in one area doing all sorts of jobs and having schedules. Keep your fingers crossed though, it might happen in our lifetime.

We can only hope!

I think what the NPC react in Watch Dog was quite impressive already, the normal npc are not exceptionally memorable but they really has the feeling that they are the real person who have their own lives.

We can only pray for the next gen gaming, when the consuls finally evolved lol

SuperFraggle wrote:

It's going to be a while until we get a large amount of NPCs in one area doing all sorts of jobs and having schedules. Keep your fingers crossed though, it might happen in our lifetime.

Knowing Bethesda, sadly we're going to exchange one thing for another. If they increase the population, they'll decrease the gear collection or quests. I can't remember them doing anything fully.

There is populated wasteland for fallout 3 and nv mods but you make a valid point as to why Bethesda did not make the population scale larger. Because it would make for a more Immersive world.

Archangel-DA wrote:

I hate the small population of Fo3. And this isn't a problem exclusive to just Fallout 3, but every Fallout and Elderscrolls title.
It seems like every time I get hyped up about a town, city, organization, et cetera, I get there only to find a dozen people. Seriously the FO3 town of Megaton was supposedly built from airport scrap and is surrounded by massive metal walls, but there's only a handful of buildings and a dozen or so people living there. You mean to tell me a dozen people scrapped an entire airport and built a "City"? Nah I don't think so. Same with rivet "city". Massive aircraft carrier with only a few people on it. Meanwhile everyone talks like it's a big city. The brotherhood constantly talks about the ruins as if they are swarming all over them putting up the "good fight" and after scouring all over those ruins you only encounter living Brotherhood soldiers 3 times and come across a few dead bodies. Oh yeah, a real warzone you got there. NV is no different, Novac, Goodsprings, Camp Forlorn Hope, Mojave Outpost, all of them. They are all poor excuses for what they claim to be: Towns, bases, outposts, et cetera. The actual city of New Vegas is probably the best populated place in any Fallout or Elderscrolls title and even it is lacking, with a small population, only a few dozen buildings and not even half of them can be entered. And skyrim, oh don't even get me started on Skyrim. Bethesda and Obsidian seriously need to work on their scale when it comes to the size and scope of what they call cities, towns, wars, because even though theres alot of reference to these things in dialogue the actual game play doesn't hardly reflect any of it. Luckily there are wonderful modders out there who have stepped up and compensated for this incompetence (strong word) and created population, war, and expansion mods for Fo3, FNV, Oblivion, and Skyrim. War mods like "Endless Warfare" and "Warzones" for New Vegas and Skyrim do a GREAT job at really bringing the warfare aspect of NV and Skyrim to life with respawning small and large scale battles between warring factions. Unfortunately -as far as I know- no such mod exists for Fallout 3. The DC ruins present a great opportunity for an awesome close quarters combat Warzones-esque mod, I still hope someone will eventually get around to making it.

Okay, my rants over.

P.S I actually meant to post this on a different discussion but accidentally clicked the "New Post" button.  Oh well.

Yea but in Fallout not alot of people would survive if there was a nuclear holocaust

I think a minimalist population in Fallout can be easily explained. Apart from obvious (Nuclear war) there is the hardware issue. This game eats memory like a fat kid eats potato chips. Even still about 85% of the remaining population only really serve as either are completely useless or want you dead.

But it sometimes fills the lonely nights exploring the wastes, taking the long road to vegas to find it alive with people (and Fiends) looking to meet you.

deathsand12 wrote:

But it sometimes fills the lonely nights exploring the wastes, taking the long road to vegas to find it alive with people (and Fiends) looking to meet you.

Ah.. fiends.. good times, good times..

So true, the useless NPCs decimates my performance massively. However, I feel uneasy when I'm exploring somewhere that contains no NPCs. It makes me feel like I'm in a horror movie and something will pop up on me.

Raiders/fiends are like radroaches. Kill one more come out.