One application comes to mind for this: watch for new screenshots (assuming they automatically get put into a directory for Fallout 4 screenshots) and add the in-world coordinates to the EXIF data.
- a fitbit (pipbit?) for Fallout, track how many km/miles ran/walked, how many km while carrying how much kg of equipment, theoretical calories lost
- since it seems to synchronize stats and inventory, you can map where the player killed most enemies/took most stimpaks so you can get a heatmap of enemy-rich zones and rank them by difficulty - divide killed enemies by health lost (or used stimpaks)
- there are sites like fallout4map.com which track the location of unique and hardcoded items, you can automate this now
It's a Unity app, so `apktool` works well to get out all the assets. Nothing is obfuscated. There's also sample pipboy data file there too (for the demo mode).
Normally I keep notes on decompiling game files, but this time I didn't unfortunately :/
But I didn't get too far anyway - the DemoMode.bin file contains the demo data. There's a list of locations in a custom binary format, but the titles are readable.
I tried modifying the values to make them all visible, but the app threw a parsing exception when trying to load my modified file.
Have you got some kind of API? I'd be happy to look into connecting your map to the game. I think it would be nice to to need an app for this, but if this runs on a responsive website, that can connect to the game independently.
Combined with the inventory access, you could check the player's inventory against the known unique items, and place a custom map marker on the exact location for the next one they don't currently have - a treasure hunter app.
It would be incredibly cool to have a script that automatically manages your inventory while playing the game, e.g. the player picks up all items and has the script auto-drop them if they don't meet certain requirements (value/weight ratio, duplicates, etc.). I'm excited to see where this goes!
I find the way the game displays inventory (particularly guns) quite irritating to say the least. I want to see one ammo type at a time (since you need minimum one gun per ammo type) and then to see a comparison (damage, rate of fire, accuracy, and specials).
Yes, that's also one of the very few complaints I have about FO4. The whole inventory system is designed as if limited to what you can do with a controller. Why can't you deposit all junk from your companion automatically? Why can't you get all inventory not currently used by them? Why can't you craft/replace with power armor pieces that are in storage?
I hope some patches/mods for the inventory system come out soon.
I find this to be a pervasive problem with Bethesda games starting a few years after The Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind was released. They pack an insane amount of complexity into their games then provide utterly feeble tools to manage it or refuse to invest time into them as that complexity grows from game to game (especially their inventory system which hasn't changed much since Oblivion). Nothing demonstrates this better than Fallout 4's base building mechanic which is leagues better (and more complicated) than in any other game I've played. You can literally build a downtown Sanctuary with a dozen 10 story tall skyscrapers with farmland and electrical infrastructure but doing so using the Workshop as it is now (months before the release of the official game editor) is absolutely maddening and down right impractical. No 2d map or overhead camera, no alignment with complex terrain like building foundations, no templating, zero interface to manage the settlers (the current community concensus is to give each settler a different hat or outfit for each available job!), and it's just down right Unintuitive in every way. The mechanic overall feels like it was part of the game design from day 1 but the interface they give you to use it was made in a weekend.
Bethesda knows their games are bought for replayability and community mods so it seems that they make a lot of sacrifices no other gaming company would, knowing that the more annoying it is the faster some modder will totally replace it with far superior execution. To be fair though, no other company cranks out fantastic open world games that are as good as Bethesda's on such a regular basis. All of this pays off when a five year old game has graphics as good as a newly released one except with half a decade of damn near professional effort by thousands of modders.
The only actual improvement they've made to the inventory system is that in FO4 you can now take items from containers without opening a separate dialog, which is a _very_ welcome improvement IMO.
the last bit ain't true - from my experience last month. had a off-gaming period for last 5 years and didn't play Skyrim when it was launched. sat to it 2 months ago, with all datadiscs, patches, put all interesting (not only) graphic mods, which had years to gain maturity and compatibility. So I thought I will have the best possible version of the game, better than creators ever aimed for.
The game looked meh on all maxed, but that isn't a dealbreaker for me (after all, I still sometimes run old Deux Ex 1, probably the best game ever in its genre). it was boring like hell, and the whole game screamed quantity-over quality. FYI - I played all previous TES games vigorously, starting properly with Daggerfall (didn't have good enough rig for Arena back in those days, but I played it too a bit). This was just nothing-special experience, and I uninstalled it after few hours of gaming.
2 weeks ago installed Witcher 3, and those games are uncomparable. 21st century meets 80's arcade gaming (heck, not even). Visual side is one aspect, but this game is simply better in every possible way.
Had an off-gaming period of 5 years as well, and trying to get back into it. Just built a nice rig, to max out these new games. Is there a texture pack I can get for the original Deus Ex (1) or something? I played Deus Ex HR two years ago and I was blown away by it. Had a talk with a friend of mine who is also a Deus Ex fan and he told me that Deus Ex 1 is better than HR in every conceivable aspect. Of course I can't wait for Mankind Divided to come out, but I'd very much like to play Deus Ex 1 (for historical reasons) without my eyes smarting. If not I just might get Deus Ex HR Director's Cut off of Steam.
I completely agree and want these features, but I think Bethesda is faced with the issue of overcomplicating the UI for a more mainstream audience which they're obviously hoping to attract. The UI is probably already completely overwhelming for a lot of mainstream users. At some point, I'm sure adding more options, buttons, commands, and screens might make a lot of people really uncomfortable.
Obviously though there's a balancing act at play. The flip side to not having these features is that some of the inventory management stuff is a bit inconvenient and boring and cumbersome. But people tolerate that to an extent if the rest of the experience is worthwhile.
I can't help but think Bethesda takes a "World of Warcraft" approach to UI - since no level of customization will make everyone happy, they just implement a baseline and leave the rest up to modders. (And since this only applies to desktop, the baseline works out heavily tailored to consoles.)
Of course this would work more smoothly in practice if the modding tools were ready, and if UI extensions were easy to make and manage.
I really like this idea, but one of the big "improvements" for me in the scavanging system (given that I didn't play New Vegas, which I believe implemented some of this) is that it's no longer just about weight to value ratio, and it's also about rare components (screws, gears, etc.) for weapon mods. For this to be useful to me, it would need a customizable "hit list" of crafting components as well.
Am I the only person who collects lots of stuff early in a quest, runs out of room when I find better stuff, then drops a bunch of it in a locker/cigarette machine/corpse near the front door in the hopes that I'll stumble across it later (current return rate = 0)?
You can mark ingredients for search in the crafting menu (press 'T' on the pc version I think) and any item that has those ingredients will have a spyglass next to the item name when you look at the item. I have gears, springs, adhesive, and aluminum all marked.
I think they tried to force you to learn how to use this system when you need a circuit board to build a sentry for your settlement and the closest one is in the red rocket in a phone. I just got mad and used the internet. It wasn't until about 20 hours into the game when I wanted to start building mods for the guns that I noticed it.
In addition to the spyglass icon, if you are facing a chest/item that contains materials you've marked, they have a blue "glow" overlay that makes them stand out. Pretty sure that's part of the base game since the only mods I've installed are one to add more songs to Diamond City Radio and one to tweak lighting and improve ambient occlusion (just basic post-processing tweaks). Don't think the blue glow on tagged materials is part of either mod.
That sounds like level 2 of the scavenging perk in the INT tree. Level 1 was finding screws and uncommon materials when scrapping guns, level 2 is finding rare materials when scrapping guns as well as highlighting tagged components in the game.
Fallout 4, being a Bethesda game, has first class modding support on desktop PC. AFAIK, Xbox One should be getting similar capabilities within the next year, and PS4 is rumoured to follow suit.
Mods give you complete access to accomplish anything with the game world or interface, even morph it into a completely different game.
games like Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup actually have client scripts that do that. One could take them as a foundation to work out the details of such a tool. I think this would be really really helpful.
It's possible that the client is capable of more than just being a server. Running
help "Bethesda.NET" 0
in the console reveals some interesting commands, such as login, checking if the player is logged in, getting some profile stats and whatnot.
So of interest is whether the scripting engine (Papyrus) is capable of accessing the network or changing anything about the network commands (especially destination/content). If so, that's possibly bad because a lot of players have a propensity to just run as admin[0] due to script extenders in the various games, which are required for a lot of the most popular plugins (e.g. SkyUI).
Used innocently, this could be really cool for modders. Check for updates or even download patches while the game is running for example. Or, hell, multiplayer.
There's also a couple of other commands I found interesting in the game console, such as PyConsole and LuaConsole, which are described as Python and Lua consoles, but running these didn't do anything for me. Those would be fun to play with in game.
Would be interesting to play around with. Imagine having a "Twitch plays Fallout 4", but with someone playing the game properly but Twitch gets to control the inventory, armour, weapons, map etc... all via the pipboy api.
Why? Bethesda has a history of making games with best in class modability and the tools they release for moders are fleshed out versions of what they use for designing the game (which usually takes a few months, FO4 tool expected early 2016).
Hell, with scripting extenders and graphics mods, some of their games like Morrowind can become nearly indistinguishable from modern AAA games nearly 13 years later. Bethesda knows this and I can't imagine them locking down anything that could be used to make their games better by their community for decades to come.
Agreed. Despite the debacle with the paid skyrim mods (which I still think would be a good thing...), Bethesda definitely understands how important the modding community are to their games.
More likely that somebody writes FalloutSheep that invades privacy by dumping the inventory of anybody playing on the same network and then users demand Bethesda encrypt the data.
So there is no authentication on the API endpoint? I have my PS4 connected directly to the Internet to avoid NAT issues, and I wonder whether the API would be available openly as well.
This is very cool. I have to wonder though what you could do with it, like I don't mean to devalue the OP but I see a lot of people here discussing the possibilities (inventory management etc.), but what is there to stop you from doing that with traditional modding? I guess with consoles this might be useful (although I heard consoles can play PC mods this time around), but as far as the PC goes its probably far easier just to use make an actual mod for the game that does what you want instead of bouncing it around wirelessly with a relay.
If people downvoting me could explain why, that would be nice. I'm not trying to downplay the OP's creation and I think it's really cool. I was trying to reply to the people in this thread because I feel like they are praising it for the wrong reasons. It's not like we can finally access your inventory programmatically and script it for the first time ever, you could already do all of that stuff with regular modding, and it'd probably be a lot easier too. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but if so I'd like to know how.
As an analogy, to me it'd be like praising WIFI for finally allowing us to communicate between computers on a network.
Didn't downvote, am the author of the write up. Since I don't run Windows in the house any more, there's little opportunity for mods (I'm playing on the PS4). Tinkering with the network was fun in its own right.
Only level 12 by November 20th? The desire to play must not have been that strong. He already got side tracked with something that isn't getting him any more loot.
Between settlement building and figuring this out, what else is there? ;)
In all seriousness, I made a new character for investigating the relay and fuzzing the server when I wanted so I wouldn't be screwing with my first character.
If someone wants to chip in for a copy of XBox One Fallout 4, I'd be happy to look at adding support for it this weekend - it's 100AUD which is a little crazy.
Incidentally, flexlm/port 27000 used to be how a variety of apps were licensed. Much pain was had when the license manager would occasionally go out to lunch.
