Ever since I started out on my work for additional vault modules, I wanted to add some realistic ways to 'purify water'. When locked down in a vault for 200 years, you'll need a way to recycle water as much as you can. Right? I mean, you can't survive a 4 days without, let alone 2 centuries. Unless frozen.
But the developers for the vault-tec DLC where lazy, or in a rush. Anyway, all you get is a huge pump which, ones powered, gets you a whopping 100 water. That's all. Well, you can slam a few hand pumps into the ground of course. Any other underground location to build vaults without water? too bad.
So, Last year I set out to do so, by taking a good look at the actual thing(s) before deciding what to create. I quickly chose to create the big basins even though they are mostly seen in the open air, they just fit the idea perfectly. I kept them relatively small, as in reality these things are huge.
It took me a while and several attempts to give up on creating a single object, containing the water. The same method I used for the water stream (akin to a horizontal waterfall) did not yield satisfactory results in this case.
My earlier models where a lot deeper and you could actually jump in... and be stuck walking around at the bottom. To be able to swim and get a murky 'underwater view' there had to be a water collision and it has to be a 'water' type activator. Although that works, combined with the rest of the installation, everything is considered to be water... That doesn't work.
A second problem I encountered was the sound. I needed both the humming machine sound and the sound of water rushing, in case of the stream.
Where the humming should be localized at the pump side, preferably.
My final challenge was to see if I could add a marker for an NPC to pretend to be hard at work while doing nothing. But alas, this would require the object to be defined as 'furniture'.
All in all my attempt failed to somehow create a static object, which I could then use to create 1 or more SCOL (Static COLlection) (s).
Instead I had to cut it all apart.
I raised the bottoms for the basins and stream so they would no longer extend below the normal floor. This because you hardly see any difference and they take up less space + you can build them all at ground level. ...and you can jump out, just in case ;)
Added the sound to play looped, after some time figuring that one out, and added the lot to the CK as activator. (needed to play the looped sound)
Then I created a separate water object for each basin, which only can have 1 'level' instead of the 2 I initially intended. (the outer ring should be lower)
At first I created a perfectly functioning collision for the water, although it's only knee deep now, but that turned out to interfere while trying to get the water to snap to the basins in-game. So I got rid of those and added the metal rods and their collision instead.
Funny side note: during this trial and error process at one point the water would immediately sink into the ground with a flushing sound :D
I opted to leave out the 'marker' for now, but I might add one later, which would be a separate object you would need to build and add in place.
At the same time I worked on the water stream, which fared a lot better on the water front, with a 'sliding texture' in a similar fashion as waterfalls are done. In this case I used the animation sequence similar to the basins for the humming machinery sound and the activators 'looping sound' to add the sound of rushing water.
After creating those big, open, objects with visible water I turned to the other objects I found in many examples. The desalination and reverse Osmosis units seemed perfect additions to give it all a realistic look.
In the future I might add some big pipes set which will fit nicely alongside these pieces. That's actually what those 'stubs' are for that stick out the floor next to the basins, in case you wondered.
4 comments
I'll be looking forward to your updates and next mods if you make them like this.
You are absolutely right in your reasoning that something like this would be needed. 200 years of waste water....I'm thinking that alone would be a serious crisis.
Just using this above ground would be awesome. I'm sure some sim settlers would enjoy this, although I've never used it, so I don't know much about how things would work with that part of things.
I never used Sim settlements or anything like that myself, but I reckon these will look as good above ground as they do below. Apart from power there is no need for anything special to build these anywhere. Adding power connectors might solve that.