Fallout New Vegas

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Rocketeer and Alan Broad

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DagothRocketeer

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About this mod

A collection of annotated maps of the Mojave Wasteland, Sierra Madre Resort and Casino, Zion Valley National Park, Big Mountain Research and Development Center, and The Divide.

Permissions and credits
Back in 2005, a man named Alan Broad developed a program called Ptolemy for creating a high-quality, detailed map of Morrowind's Vvardenfell and all the locations thereupon. This program, being purpose-built for games like The Elder Scrolls, not only came with the map but served as a tool for creating game maps from bitmap images. It included a simple but robust suite of tools for creating and organizing locations based on their type, faction, importance &tc.

But until now, I'm not sure anyone ever used the program (obscure as it already was) to create more maps, despite Broad's efforts to create such a handy tool. Having gotten back into New Vegas recently, I got the urge to create a map that would catalog the world of New Vegas and the curiosities therein, and realized that I had the means to do so in Ptolemy.

By taking very large, high-resolution images of the world maps of New Vegas and its expansions, I have done exactly this. The maps not only detail every location to be found in the game (including many unmarked locations), they also detail the locations of anything I deemed of unique importance: one-of-a-kind weapons/armor/clothing, skill books, and snow globes. The expansion maps also include oddities peculiar to them, such as the vendor holotapes of Dead Money and the warheads of Lonesome Road.

There are actually two maps of the Mojave Wasteland itself: one of only the locations, and a separate map detailing the collectibles. I created two maps because a single map containing both would be extraordinarily cluttered, and because I was already pretty deep into creating the collectibles map when I realized I could have put them on a single map and toggled certain categories on and off to keep things nice and neat. Hindsight is 20/20, and all that.

Because the Mojave Wasteland map is so much larger and well-populated than the others, the collectibles map also has its items, particularly the weapons and clothing/armor, broken down into finer subcategories: equipment which is found "free," and may be simply picked up or looted from an NPC which is ALWAYS hostile; equipment which is carried by an NPC that may or may not be friendly to the player; and equipment which may only be obtained via quests.

Collectibles on any of the maps will be marked with a simple format indicating the name, followed by the location, followed by either the NPC who carries it or the quest which must be completed to obtain it. For instance, the unique grenade machinegun Mercy is found in Dead Wind cavern, and is simply lying on the ground. Therefore, its tag reads, "Mercy; Dead Wind Cavern." Meanwhile, Ambassador Crocker's Suit is worn by the man himself, and thus its tag reads, "Ambassador Crocker's Suit; NCR Embassy; Ambassador Crocker." Finally, the unique hunting shotgun Dinner Bell can only be recieved by completing a quest given by Red Lucy, and it's tag therefore reads, "Dinner Bell; The Thorn; Red Lucy (Bleed Me Dry)." I might be making it sound more complicated than it is; you should be able to tell at a glance exactly how to obtain any tagged item.

On any occasion that I felt required additional information, I have appended "(Note)" or something similar on the end of the tag. Any tag's notes, if it has any, can by read by viewing that tag in edit mode, most easily done by pressing Ctrl+E and clicking the tag in question. For instance, while the ghoul Rotface in Freeside carries Eulogy Jone's Hat, it does not appear in his inventory unless spawned by esoteric means, which I have detailed in the note for that particular item.

It should be noted that the program is, unfortunately, somewhat unreliable, and often when opening a map Ptolemy will produce an error relating that the map does not appear to be a Ptolemy Map File. This I can only speculate is related to memory consumption; the program, for whatever reason, uses a bewildering amount of memory when first opening or saving maps, and I suspect that it is a paucity of resources that makes opening the map occasionally fail. Smaller maps (including the original Vvardenfell map, or the smaller expansion Dead Money) almost always open without issue, and the program seemed to have trouble most often when I tried opening a map while also running Steam, New Vegas, Windows Media Player, and Firefox with about twenty or so tabs open, as was my natural state when creating the maps.

If you do have trouble opening a map, especially the largest files, make sure you aren't running a billion things in the background like I had been. I've also noticed that if you successfully open a smaller map, you have a much greater chance of opening any other map on subsequent attempts, although that could be illusory placebo machine voodoo. If all else fails, try the standard Windows solution: close and reopen the program, or keep trying to load the map until it works. ¯\(°_o)/¯

EDIT: It occurred to me that some people might want to have the high-quality bitmaps themselves, rather than the program and map files with tags. Therefore, I'm uploading the pristine images in a separate folder.

In any case, I hope someone else gets some use out of these. The maps are really quite lovely.

And, of course, infinite thanks to Alan Broad, creator of Ptolemy.