So in a comment I made on Reddit on Thursday, I've decided to tackle the arduous job of porting Alton, IL to Tale of Two Wastelands 3.2! There has already been a version done for 2.9, however, no one has taken on the 3.2 port job that I'm aware of.
So where to even start?
Well, for starters, click the image below if you're one of the three people that hadn't heard of Alton, IL, the DLC-sized mod originally released in 2011.
The first order of business before doing anything else; merge that update ESP into the main ESM.
The original release of Alton (and all subsequent releases) contained a file called 'AltonAddon.esp', which was used to make updates to Alton without having to make changes to the main ESM, which at the time, was a bit more of a difficult task than it is now thanks to tools like xEdit which allow the kind of flexibility needed to merge the two plugins. That will not carry over to this new version if possible. I ran a similar update process with Malevolence prior to version 2.0, however, making major changes was a giant pain, especially if navmesh changes had to be made, which made the size of the ESP swell massively, which necessitated the 86ing of the ESP addon.
Fortunately, Alton doesn't make use of any external plugins or mods, so I shouldn't have great difficulty porting over assets, code, whatever else. The only thing I see causing a real issue is the LOD data, which was a problem with Malevolence as I was unable to re-use the Fallout 3 data and had to re-generate using a mix of the New Vegas GECK and FNVLODGen with limited success. Support for re-generating LOD was lacking, and as a result, I ended up with a LOD set that I'm not quite happy with to this day.
Probably the next step from there is to redo my TTW setup to go back to the same kind of bare bones setup that was used to craft the TTW version of Malevolence, then start a countless chains of test runs to find and quash bugs where they may be found.
I may make some changes to the code base once the conversion script has been done. Bug fixes, dialogue changes, what have you. Give it a bit of a clean-up job since if my memory serves correct, a lot of the original scripts were a mess.
But what sparked this sudden interest, you might ask? Well, you probably didn't, but I'll share with you the reason I'm even tackling this job in the first place.
Alton, IL was the source of inspiration that was used to make Washington's Malevolence. Alton is the whole reason that mod came into existence. Part of it was ego, part of it was a creative spark that managed to last for years, something that had been sparse in that part of my life. While I had 'made' some really crappy vault mods that were never released, this mod was what really started my own personal interest in modding. I wanted to do it bigger and better. Whether I ever actually achieved that is up to public opinion, of course.
So that's basically it for right now. The project is in its infant stages and I can't really give a true date for release.
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
-Janitor Dave