r/FalloutMods • u/NomadsAnomaly • 21h ago
Fallout 4 [Fo4] Fallout 4 in Godot Engine
Hello all, been seeing all these new vegas projects popping up and I'm loving it. I wanted to share our version of that in Godot.
Disclaimer: No original Bethesda assets or code is included. This is all our own code we wrote. Everything is done on the user's machine and you must own Fallout 4.
Below is our snippet/TLDR of this project and attached pictures. These show an early view but not the final version. Our team consisits of graphic artist, game devs, and two software engineers.
The images attached are just early prototypes and do not represent the final version.
Hope to bring it to you all soon, if you have any questions ask away!
GardenEngine: Fallout 4, rebuilt on a modern engine
GardenEngine is a brand-new engine that runs Fallout 4's world with completely remade graphics. It uses the game you already own. Nothing from Fallout 4 is included or shipped. The engine reads your installed game and builds everything from it.
What it brings
- A seamless world: the Commonwealth streams in around you as you move, with far fewer loading screens.
- Your mods come with you: the engine reads your Fallout 4 mods the same way it reads the base game.
- Open and moddable: change anything in the engine to suit how you play, and share it with others.
- A built-in editor, designed to take over from the Creation Kit.
- A brand-new weather and sky system.
- Papyrus script support for quests and mods.
Next-gen graphics
- Physically based materials: metal, rust, concrete and glass react to light the way the real thing does.
- Real bounced light, soft ambient shadows and accurate reflections.
- A realistic sky and atmosphere that changes with the time of day, plus volumetric fog and light shafts.
- Soft, natural sun shadows.
- Film-style colour, with eye adaptation when you step from a dark vault into daylight.
- Vulkan and DirectX 12, FSR 2 upscaling, and quality settings for low-end to high-end PCs.
PC only. In active development. GardenEngine is an independent fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Bethesda. A legal copy of Fallout 4 is required.
Leaving the old engine’s problems behind:
GardenEngine isn’t a patch on top of the original engine. It’s a full replacement, so the vanilla engine’s long-standing problems don’t carry over.
The biggest one is precombines. In vanilla Fallout 4, much of the world is baked into precombined meshes and visibility data. When a mod edits an area, those bakes break, and you get flickering objects, missing buildings and big frame-rate drops in places like Boston. Mod authors then have to rebuild them by hand, and two mods touching the same area often can’t both work.
In GardenEngine, none of that exists. The engine groups and draws the world itself, live, from whatever your load order says. Change an area, add a settlement, stack mods in the same place: the world is simply built the way your mods describe it.
Demo coming soon
We expect to release a playable demo within the next one to two months.
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u/bigtittygamerboy 21h ago
Does the engine emulate the same features as base Fallout with Creation Engine? Like interacting with different objects and having their positions and everything else remembered? Is it still based on a call loading approach?
Sorry for all the questions I’m just really curious past the graphical lift
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u/No_Adhesiveness_5727 19h ago
u/bigtittygamerboy spent a ton of time in the Creation Engine SDK. Interesting to see it in another engine.
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u/NomadsAnomaly 20h ago
no worries, good questions! it's not creation engine. it's fallout 4 ported onto a custom build of godot, using your own copy of the game's data, converted locally. World loading is still cell-based like vanilla: exteriors stream in a grid of cells around you, with modern LOD for the distance. We use world streaming for this. Interiors are separate cells. doors between interiors and exteriors aren't wired up yet. Plans are in place to eliminate a large majority of the loading areas on final release.
Interaction (activating, grabbing/throwing, looting containers) works, and papyrus scripts are being rebuilt. Persistent world state like creation engine has (everything you move staying put in your save) is partly there and still in progress
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u/Alternative-Cup-8102 20h ago
TS gotta be written with ai.
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u/NomadsAnomaly 20h ago
Because you don't understand it? Lol.
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u/bigtittygamerboy 20h ago
Thank you for the info! Really curious to see more documentation on the handling of streamlining loading areas and persistent world state. Good luck bro :)
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u/WiikdFiire 18h ago
Well, no, because it's October 2026 and every fan gaming project is using AI. And the fact that you just can't simply answer regardless of the reaction around you is just kind of sad
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u/WarlordOverdriv 16h ago
Whether it was made by AI or not, having a lot of issues like Preconbines (my biggest thorn in my side every time I want to mod) be a thing of the past is already enough to pique my interest. Now how all of my F4SE mods are handled (I used to run a lot that relied on F4SE) is something I am interested in seeing. Saw where you mentioned in another comment that a lot of those engine level things are implemented, so I'm hoping this takes off enough for existing F4SE mods to be updated with a version that supports this as well.
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u/NomadsAnomaly 15h ago edited 12h ago
Pretty much all of those will become obsolete with this engine. F4SE mods rely on reverse engineering the original engine to add new functionality. Since our engine is fully open source, that same functionality can be built directly into it, often in a matter of hours or days.
As for the UI, we're also shipping a built-in editor that allows users to customize and design their interface however they want, without needing to write code.
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u/bunnycat26 15h ago
Coded by humans?
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u/OfficalLockeWilson 14h ago
Probably not. I may hate AI, but I’d be lying if these advances in game modding in the past month or two weren’t exciting for the scene at the very least.
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u/Phozphoric_acid 13h ago
People gotta realize nobody is getting paid to do this. I wouldn't want someone wasting their time coding a project like this when they could be starting their own business or working a real job involving coding.
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u/Appropriate-Lion9490 4h ago
Yea, that’s what people don’t realize, if anyone wants this sort of shit happening you gotta pay them 2000 grand at the least
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u/NomadsAnomaly 59m ago
AI is in our workflow. We use AI to help assist with some of the code. Does that mean it's vibe coded? No. Everyone on the team knows how to code and understands it. We all hold tech jobs IRL.
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u/Aerorufu 16h ago
How would weather and lighting mods work with your system?
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u/NomadsAnomaly 16h ago
To put it in its most simplest form, they will become outdated based on old tech and not something to use in this. Our weather system is based off similarities to red dead redemption 2 weather, and based off the weather type will cause different environment actions. With that said though the engine is fully open source so anyone can change anything. We also will be shipping a full weather tool to configure however you want. Our github is linked in the post if you want to follow more closely.
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u/Phozphoric_acid 13h ago
So someone could throw their mods in with the source code and have an LLM recode any mod of their choice to work on your new engine?
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u/NomadsAnomaly 12h ago
If it's a F4SE mod and you understand the code a LLM could assist with it, that's correct. Feel free to join the discord posted on the github and would be happy to explain more.
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u/Umlunguboy420 21h ago
Amazing
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u/mdizzy123 20h ago
Awful
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u/Umlunguboy420 20h ago
Well, good thing you don't have to use it 😉
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u/mdizzy123 20h ago
Yepp and good thing this is an open forum for discussion 😉
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u/Umlunguboy420 20h ago
So what are we discussing?
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u/mdizzy123 20h ago
You tell me. You're the OP in this situation
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u/Umlunguboy420 20h ago
Well I said Amazing you replied awful, is that what you call a discussion?
🤭
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u/mdizzy123 20h ago
Literally the textbook definition of a discussion. Aka an exchanging of words 😏
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u/Umlunguboy420 20h ago
Alright very meaningful discussion.
You sure changed my mind lmao
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u/mdizzy123 20h ago
Not every discussion has to change minds. Not sure why you think it does
→ More replies (0)
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u/Aerorufu 16h ago
Also how well do you think it'll run on an older pc?
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u/NomadsAnomaly 15h ago
A lot better than anything on the current vanilla system. I tested this on a 3060 and a ryzen 3600. On max settings FPS was between 80-100
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u/DeeAitch132B 21h ago
AI?
Yeah I’m good man.
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u/RollingSparks 19h ago
Love the trend of just labelling shit AI then fucking off as if you just turned down a job at auschwitz. Half the time it isnt AI at all and the other half its a team of dedicated professionals using AI for bulk work that they then use their expertise to build shit from.
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u/DeeAitch132B 19h ago
Didn’t ask bro
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u/Navy_Groundhog 19h ago
Complaining about AI being used for basic, every day tasks, and unnecessary slop videos of people's dogs: Valid
Complaining about usages to cut down human leg work that people were ALREADY doing for free: Man calling the printing press the work of the devil
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u/Tocowave98 20h ago
This is basically impossible to do without it but sure, cry about it
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u/Alternative-Cup-8102 20h ago
didn’t oblivion do this with its remaster? And it’s not like making fallout look next gen is impossible. It just takes time and effort.
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u/DeeAitch132B 20h ago
Okay? Am I supposed to suddenly care since it takes effort to do with people?
The human product is worth infinitely more and something I’d support, not someone saying he’s “developing,” a mod which means just repeatedly running it through AI.
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u/NomadsAnomaly 19h ago edited 19h ago
Hi, I don't want to get into an argument but I will let you know we aren't just throwing things with AI and make it for us. The entire team we are all professionals that have worked in the tech industry. Myself i have been a software engineer for almost 10 years now. We go through our code; we test our code, and we ensure it works. Please give us some slack here.
Also not once in the post did I say anything about AI and you calling this a mod just tells me you don't understand what this project is.
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u/Mabarax 19h ago
I've heard that it's possible by human hands but would take 100s if not 1000s of hours rerigging skeletons, animations, nav meshes to swap engines whereas an AI can do it within hours. Any credence to that? I have no problems with it, and I wonder if the ones who do would dismiss cancer screens results if they used AI. At the end of the day it's just a tool
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u/NomadsAnomaly 19h ago
Hi, we've built a conversion in the code that on the local machine all that data is converted automatically into a godot format. If you look at the screenshot above you can see the vanilla animations in the engine itself. In the animator editor. It's kinda sad to see everyone saying AI slop when we never mentioned AI and the entire team have been coding before AI was even a thing but oh well. We continue on.
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u/Newbie4Hire 6h ago
I mean that's the point, your entire post didn't mention AI a single time. it's obviously AI. So it's like you are trying to hide that it was made with AI to people who don't know better, people don't like that. I don't give a rats ass it was made with AI, but be honest about it.
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u/Mabarax 19h ago
I'm a huge offender of looking at the pictures and title only, so I am sorry for assuming after just reading a comment. After reading all your post and your link it's actually quite sad seeing the comments you got now. It's clear you've all put a lot of work and effort into this. If it's consolation I think it looks amazing and can't wait to give it a try
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u/NomadsAnomaly 19h ago
I notice a trend people label things AI slop because they don't have the skills to understand how it works or how to create it in the first place so by their logic if they can't do it then that must mean immediately it's just generated AI, lol.
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u/Tocowave98 17h ago
Just ignore the uninformed people crying slop at everything. As the other guy said they'd literally cry about it if AI were used to cure cancer because it took away a potential hypothetical job from humans who haven't even accomplished a solution for it yet.
It literally took OpenMW almost 20 years to reach its stable release and many features are still in beta. It's basically a meme at this point that every time Skywind/blivion get close to release they get kicked back another 6-12 months. Bruma released 9 years ago and no other BS project is even close to release yet.
If people want to continue waiting forever for these things just out of virtue of them not using AI, they're free to do that. In the meantime I'll be enjoying the near endless amount of content, game ports and new experiences coming out thanks to these new tools.
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u/Tocowave98 20h ago
There's a difference between requiring effort and being downright near impossible. The only way this could maybe be done without AI would be if people who wrote the engine got on board with a project like this, but that would quite literally never happen because even if they wanted to do it (and for free, too), they are probably forbidden from it by their contracts/NDAs.
But sure, keep mourning the loss of an imaginary potential job this mod's creation supposedly stole from a human, as if any hobbyist would have the time or edpertise to undertake such a project for free, or have six figures of disposable income to pay a team of senior developers for years to make it for them while also paying a legal team to stave off the inevitable C&D from Bethesda.
I'm against the reckless use of AI when it comes to taking actual employment opportunities away from people or forcing it down our throats with unwanted AI "assistants" on every app and website, but hobbyist use of it to make things that people can't do and aren't doing is totally different. No one is asking you to be "impressed" with it either, nor is anyone forcing you to download and use it. You're free to continue using human-made mods only, no one ever said otherwise.
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u/DeeAitch132B 20h ago
I never once claimed it stole a job dude I’m
Just not supporting AI garbage mods.Whole fucking nexus is infested with this shit I’m good.
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u/Tocowave98 20h ago
Good thing Nexus provides you with an option to filter out AI "garbage" then, right? I'm sure the people enjoying the new mods instead of watching as promised projects get delayed by a year every year are really going to struggle without your support.
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u/DeeAitch132B 20h ago
I’ve hit the filter and it still shows up including the nasty ass AI gen images people plaster literally everywhere.
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u/Reasonable_Youth7193 21h ago
You could have simply skipped responding but I guess you had to make it clear you are anti ai. Just an FYI pretty much any software you use day to day has been touched by AI and if it hasn’t yet it eventually will. So you might as well just not use a computer/phone at this point. Have a good one.
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u/DeeAitch132B 20h ago
Buddies mad lmao
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u/Reasonable_Youth7193 20h ago
Lol. I don’t even know these people. The anti Ai movement is just kinda stupid imo.
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u/DeeAitch132B 20h ago
Not really. It’s needed in some places but I will announce my displeasure and lack of interest where ever I please.
I do not need AI mods, I’m good.
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u/Honolulu-Blues 20h ago
Nobody claimed you knew them.
And being against AI slop is not stupid. Nobody cares that someone used AI to make something they don't understand and won't be able to maintain.
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u/Reasonable_Youth7193 20h ago
He just said Buddy’s mad implying I’m the OPs buddy. Can you not read?
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u/DeeAitch132B 20h ago
Buddies mad just means I’m calling you Buddy/Dude/guy.
If I intended to loop you in with OP I would’ve specified,
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u/OnionsTasteBad1 20h ago
I'm not insanely against ai as of late but this type of comment is such cope, you're just upset someone had a differing opinion to you
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u/Reasonable_Youth7193 20h ago
Explain how it’s a cope? I’m not sure you understand what coping means.
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u/OnionsTasteBad1 20h ago
You can't handle a different opinion so you cope with this asinine "You could have just not responded" thing
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u/MasterCoat3923 19h ago
When you say "seamless world" do you mean it makes the indoors connect to the outdoors? like for example you could go into the musem of freedom and seamlessly walk in without a loading screen? if so can this allow for combat with a raider outside? could i use one of the windows of the museum to shoot from?
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u/RollingSparks 19h ago
How would it even work considering most interiors are like 3x+ bigger than the exterior asset it represents?
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u/Navy_Groundhog 19h ago
Seamless doesn't necessarily mean that you the player aren't going anywhere. Seamless means there's no loading screens, it can still teleport you.
We've seen "seamless" teleportation since portal 1... Actually there was maps for the original DOOM games that utilized teleportation heavily.
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u/BobbybearAlpha007 16h ago
Dev on the project here. It’s fast world streaming so if you go really fast you won’t get a loading screen. Unlike the base game where if you go faster than it can handle it forces you into a loading screen.
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u/NomadsAnomaly 19h ago
Hi by seamless it means world streaming for the majority of the exterior world but yes we are moving forward removing most of loading screens.
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u/Sharp_Ad5783 1h ago
I'm a bit confused, is this Godot or basically you upgrading Godot yourself? Also is there a discord server?
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u/NomadsAnomaly 1h ago
Godot as a game engine being open source can be modified for our needs. The discord is on the github linked in the main post. Can't link it here.
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u/Sharp_Ad5783 1h ago
Oh I understand, thank you
Also do you think this is actually achievable, I really dont know much about these things but this sounds like a pretty huge thing to do
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u/NomadsAnomaly 57m ago
No problem.
We have been working on this for some months now. We expect to have a demo out to test in a couple months. Feel free to join the discord.
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u/Ged- 1h ago
That's interesting. I'm making a TES like game myself in Unity, and I'm a CE enthusiast as well.
The results are insane frankly. Though what's with light baking for cells? I saw a cell baker script in your project. Don't BGS rely entirely on live-calculated lighting?
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u/NomadsAnomaly 54m ago
Yeah, BGS does most of its lighting in realtime, which is one reason FO4 interiors are so heavy. Places like Switchboard have hundreds of lights, many overlapping, and the engine has to calculate them every frame.
Our cell baker uses Godot's LightmapGI to bake static interior lighting ahead of time. This cuts down the performance cost significantly and gives us proper bounce lighting.
Lights that flicker, turn on with switches, or change during quests stay realtime. If a cell hasn't been baked yet, everything still works in realtime.
Exteriors also stay realtime because of weather and time of day. So basically, anything that doesn't need to change gets baked, and everything else stays dynamic.
Feel free to join our discord and the dev that works on this part can give you more details.
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u/Ged- 48m ago
Lol what do you mean the game is heavy because of hundreds of lights?
- They use a deferred renderer since FO4 so you don't have the O(nm) performance hit for lighting.
- Lighting is done in the pixel shader, and pixels are only overdrawn when you have transparency. And again, deferred renderer.
- It's heavier to constantly read a lightmap and light data instead of just light data
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u/NomadsAnomaly 30m ago
Sorry, I worded that badly.
As for lightmaps being heavier, that really depends on the scene. You're basically trading realtime lighting calculations for texture lookups and memory usage. Godot's LightmapGI is built for this and is actually one of their recommended options for static environments.
We can get proper bounce lighting and softer shadows without having to calculate all of that in realtime, which can also improve performance by reducing the work the GPU has to do every frame.
https://bethesda.net/en-EU/news/the-graphics-technology-of-fallout-4
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/3d/global_illumination/using_lightmap_gi.html
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u/United-Engine7128 33m ago
I assume that this will be single player only and that no extra effort will be put into facilitating the functionality of multiplayer mods?
I fully understand if it is out of scope. The basic game is a big enough task as it is. It's just that I know that the multiplayer mods are far from perfect, partly due to how the basic game is not built with multiplayer in mind.
And thank you for picking Godot to build on. It's a great game engine!
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u/NomadsAnomaly 29m ago
Multiplayer will be included once the single player side of things are completed. Yes, I love godot and just being able to do literally anything in it!
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u/IRenewed 21h ago
Aiiii
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u/Reasonable_Youth7193 21h ago
Not to worry. If you are bothered by having AI help you could make it yourself. Can we expect a release sometime this decade? Thought not. Fuck off.
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u/Alternative-Cup-8102 20h ago
Jokes on you my fallout 4 can pretty much already do most of what they are aiming to achieve. All it took was some time and a good amount of effort.
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u/Tocowave98 20h ago
Not a single person who downvoted you could get even 10% of this project working without using AI, and none of the people who could do it would ever bother (and are probably contractually forbidden even if they can do it).
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u/HoratioRadick 19h ago
These posts are entertaining. Using AI to make something nice looking, show to a bunch of folks, then fuck all happens afterwards. Anything for the updoots or pick ridi g or whatever the OPs are after.
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u/NomadsAnomaly 19h ago
Hi I'm not sure what you mean by this. We've been working on this for almost 6 months and you can tell by my profile I don't care about reddit stuff.
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u/NotASockPuppet88 21h ago
Skyrim needs this. Its needed it since release
The best we got was Skyrim SE, but that still isnt good enough. The engine is poo (made even worse by Papyrus and its insanely limited resources)
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u/Reasonable_Youth7193 21h ago
Only facts in this comment. It would be cool to see support for Skyrim.
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u/Weazyl 20h ago edited 18h ago
Find it really fascinating the amount of neo-Luddites that the rise of AI-assisted code is bringing into the light
Really neat stuff, might have to give this a try when it drops
EDIT: downvote me all you want, whether we like it or not, it's not going away. I don't care for it much either, but it's here, and the vast majority of shit that you use uses it.
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u/zebus_0 11h ago
You mean a machine wrote. Ugh AI slop just set modding back by 10 years.
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u/Reasonable_Youth7193 11h ago
Can you explain how it set back modding? Im sure you have a well developed argument.
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u/Minedude33Reddit 13h ago
"Our code" is code for "we ran this through ChatGPT and it spit out slop"
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u/NomadsAnomaly 12h ago edited 11h ago
Feel free to join the discord and I will tell you what each line of code does. I'll even get in a voice call with you. You understand there were software devs before AI right? You read the part were I put that our team consists of real devs?
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u/Minedude33Reddit 12h ago
Sorry, I just assumed it was made by AI considering all the reverse-engineered coding being pioneered by AI right now. I've gotten at least 20 different posts on my home page of people talking about "developing" their own code only to admit in the comments later after that they actually didn't develop any of it and it was all AI-generated code. My bad. Good luck with the mod.
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u/Skrrrrt_Cobain95 13h ago
Slop? Im not the biggest fan of AI but the word slop is being cringed to death already.
It's clearly proving useful.
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u/ranger910 12h ago
Yeah most of the people calling everything slop are just anti-ai, not anti-slop.
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u/coyote1942 18h ago
Going to get a letter soon. Not sure why you guys don't keep quiet until release.
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u/NomadsAnomaly 15h ago
Everything done here does not violate copyright. All the code is our own we wrote and own. This is on the same level to things such as openmw or TTW
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u/aVarangian 20h ago
ooh, promising
does F4SE "work"?
has it "solved" cell-load stutter?
can gunfight ranges be performant at double of vanilla? with quadruple the cells loaded, NPCs, etc
does it have MSAA? and does it not dither foliage, etc, like vanilla?
can "eye adaption" be disabled?
please ping me when the demo is out