Make Your Own Radio Station Fallout 4
Tommye Hope
How do these Radio Stations work exactly? I built one and assigned a Dweller with 10 Charisma to it. There was a timer of 2 hours or so and I expected after this time a new Dweller to appear in front of my Vault. But nothing. So I assigned another Dweller but the timer did not decrease. I upgraded the Radio Station - it said it would increase the chances. After the timer ended: Nothing.
So is it really that with 2 Dwellers locked away for 2 hours in a full upgraded Radio Station there only has a chance of attracting a new Dweller? This seems like a big waste, since I can produce as many new Dwellers as I have female Dwellers and it only takes a few minutes until a women gets pregnant. Is there any advantage in using the Radio Station instead?
The Radio Station gives you a full grown Dweller ready to work with only a few hours waiting between Dwellers, if the RNG is in your favor. With pregnancy, you have to wait for the female Dweller to get pregnant, deliver the baby and then the baby has to grow. This takes 6 hours (3 for pregnancy, 3 to grow in adults) compared the Radio Station (only 2 hours) but the former is 100% reliable while the latter may or may not work.
So there are a number of minor advantages which are easily dismissed if you manage your pregnancies correctly. On the other hand, there's a large drawback: you can't turn it off. If you decide you have enough people and don't have a radio station, you can simply avoid putting anyone in the barracks. But, if you do have a radio station and don't want anymore people, you have limited options, and they all kind of suck:
I've had the radio station for two and a half days and I've received 3 dwellers with it so far. I only have 1 radio station that's been upgraded and it has 2 dwellers in it. I must be really lucky to have been so successful with it so far but I think it's great. I still make some of my woman pregnant but I think it's really important to try and get new dwellers via wasteland cause it's never bad to have a new blood line in your vault. Especially since a daughter can't mate with her father and a son can't mate with his mother so I almost ran out of available men and woman before the radio station.
I've recently started releasing a series of radio station mods for New Vegas, and few people have PMed me asking how they can make their own. There are a few such tutorials for F3, but to my knowledge there are no up-to-date tutorials explaining how to create a new radio station in New Vegas. I've got a bit of time to kill, so I figured I'd whip up a short tutorial on how to make your very own custom radio station from scratch! his is pretty basic stuff and is still very much a WIP, but hopefully some of you will find this interesting and informative!
Fire up the GECK and click on File/Data. Make sure Fallout.esm and only Fallout.esm is selected, then hit OK. Once everything is loaded, go to File\Save and save your mod under whatever name you'd like. SAVE OFTEN! The GECK is fairly unstable, and nothing sucks harder than losing thirty minutes of work to a crash.
The first thing you should probably do is set up a Talking Activator. This is the object which actually broadcasts your station; without it, you'll never detect the station on your Pip Boy. Look on the Object Window and go to Actors/ Talking Activator to bring up the list. You can make one from scratch, or you can simply duplicate one: double click on a talking activator of your choice and change both the ID and name. Make sure both the Radio Station and Cont. Broadcast checkboxes are checked, click OK, then say Yes when you're prompted to create a new form. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT! If you don't create a new form, you'll overwrite and possibly bugger up a vanilla TA.
Open up a cell of your choice; it can be any cell you'd like. Click and drag your newly created Talking Activator into the Render Window and place the copy of the TA somewhere off in the void where players won't see it. Next, double click the placed TA to bring up the Reference Window; navigate to the Radio Data tab and change the Broadcast range to Everywhere. Click OK.
Now you need to link your TA to a Radio Quest, which is where you'll define playlists, dialogue, and all that other good stuff. On the Object Window, go to Actor Data/ Quest. Right click on the list of quests and select "New". Give teh quest an ID and a quest name, check the boxes next to Start Game Enabled and Allow Repeated Conversation Topics, and finally, hit OK.
Now you've got to go back in to the Quest window and set the Conditions. In the Quest Conditions box under the main Quest Data tab, right click, select New, and chooce GetIsID (parameter) == 1, with your Talking Activator's ID set as the parameter.
Your radio station SHOULD be fully activated at this point! Now's a good time to save all your work, fire up New Vegas, and test your mod ingame to make sure you're doing everything right. If things are going smoothly, your Pip Boy should detect your new radio station... of course, it's nothing but dead air at the moment.
The main problem here is encoding. Radio New Vegas uses stereo mp3s; however, I have yet to have any success using mp3s myself. For whatever reason, Fallout is prone to glitching songs depending on what format they're in, so your best bet to encode each of your songs as mono channel .wavs. Goldwave is a shareware program that will allow you to do this for free, but any audio encoding program will do. name these songs whatever you like, but it's best to keep them descriptive, especially if you plan on adding lots of new music to your game. Once that's done, it's time to place them in a safe spot. Navigate to your Data/Sound/songs directory (you'll know you're in the right place when you see a folder named radionv) and create a new folder. Name this something descriptive and put the newly encoded wavs in here!
Since my radio station is a Christmas radio station, I'll name my folder "xmasradio". I'll name the songs in accordance with the conventions I used for Radio Free Wasteland, "zMUS_xmas_SantaClausIsComing" and "zMUS_xmas_LassoSanta".
Go back to the GECK, and look at the Object Window under Audio/Sound. Right click, new. You can ignore most of the settings for now (these can be tweaked later, or the raw sound files can be modified as necceasry). Give your new song an ID (preferably something related to the track you're adding) and click the Add Sound button. Navigate to the folder you created earlier and double click your newly encoded wav. If you'd like, you can preview the song with the Play button, just to make sure it's working right.
Now you've got your songs ready to play, head back to the Radio Quest you made earlier. Double click the quest, and navigate to the Radio tab. If you know how conversations work, you can probably take things from here. For the rest of you, this part can be long and boring. First, right click on the Editor ID box, and select the topic "RadioHello". It's very important you use this topic as your header; for whatever reason, radio station don't seem to like playing unless RadioHello is the first topic in their list.
After that, set up some more topics to serve as playlists. There's thousands of ways to approach this process, and once you get the hang of radio creation, feel free to experiment. Radio New Vegas uses a bunch of topics, mostly for different banter topics, as well as one master music playlist controlled by some clever scripting. For now, let's keep it simple, and use multiple linked topics to serve as your playlists. For my radio stations, I've been using five seperate playlist topics with up to four randomly selected songs in each. Mouse over the Editor ID box, right click, new, and add an ID name for any Playlist topics you might need.
Now, go back to RadioHello, and in the Info Box, click New, add anything you like under Response Text, and hit OK. Highlight the newly created response text in the Info box, and in the Link To box to the right, right click, add topic, and select your first playlist topic from the menu. Change the Speaker to whatever NPC you'd like, and leave everything else blank, like so:
Now, go back to the Topic list and select your first playlist. Add a new response, like you did with RadioHello. The response text can be anything you want, I'd recommend making it your song's title for future reference. DO NOT put your Response Text in quotes!!! Radio New Vegas does this, but I've found it prevents my songs from playing. Now, click on the TESSound button, and select the Sound object you set up earlier. You might want to turn off your computer's speakers at this point! The GECK likes to play the sound you picked, automatically, in full, with no option to stop it. If you get into a groove, it's not uncommon to hear your GECK blare five or six songs at once.
Of course, your radio station is kind of dull right now. It's the same small batch of songs, over and over, one after another. Randomizing your radio station playlists will go a long way towards keeping your radio station fresh and interesting. It's fairly simple to do. Go back to your first playlist topic and create a new response in the Info box just like you did before. Now, check the Random box for every response under your current topic. You can tell which responses have been Randomized by looking at the Info box; responses which have been checked off properly will show an R under the Flag column. This way, the computer will randomly select a song to play each time the playlist comes by.
And that's it! Do this over and over until you've added all the music you want to hear on your radio station. Like I said before, I personally like to use five playlists with two to four songs per playlist, but feel free to tweak things to suit your taste.
You, my friend, deserve a cookie. Or at least some Kudos. I've done some modding, but mostly involving graphical things. This finally let me quit listening to "Big Iron" four thousand times a day. Now instead of Old West, I can rock NV with some Metallica or somesuch other nonsense!
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