One of the locations that has been "haunting" me is this gas station. It took about 2 months of learning and building the Vault 44 and main quest until the mod could be played to reach this location. The Vault is still not completely done. It will need more NPCs, clutter, dialog, terminals etc... but I wanted the player to actually play the mod from start to this point. Of course once you exit the vault (yes, you leave the vault. big surprise) you can go anywhere and even completely miss this location.
The fun part was designing the layout, buildings, NPCs you meet here, loot. Obviously I need to work a lot on the surroundings, but it's actually quite fun. Just flat surface looks bad, but adding hills, ditches, dry river beds, rubble and so on, gives pretty fast nice realism to exterior. So, I do design on paper and in Word / Powerpoint to sketch out any ideas and areas before starting GECK editor. I don't have a scanner, but could take some digiphotos plus add my files on this area (without spoilers of course). The Vault 44 was also fully designed in powerpoint diagrams before doing any cells in Geck. I'm pretty happy with the end results. But more on this topic in the next blog post.
Oh, I've edited curretly about 70 "chunks" in editor and my desktop calculates the Level-of-Detail meshes about 4 hours now. Since I have Quad Core I can do something else, but luckily there's FFXIII on XBox360 waiting to be played. Also I leave CPU doing work while I'm at work on weekdays.
