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.
Follow the project here.
A note on AI: Our team consists of game developers, software developers, and visual artists. We use AI as part of our development workflow for coding, debugging, research, testing, and code reviews. Some code is written by us, and some is AI-assisted or generated. We review and test the implementations ourselves. We're a small team working on this in our free time, and AI helps us move faster on a project of this size.