Posted by Matt Grandstaff on Bethesda
Our latest ‘My Creation’ feature comes from Cirosan – known for his modding projects for Fallout: New Vegas (Cirosan’s Classic Overhaul and Ulysses Companion Mod) and, more recently, Fallout 4. Currently pursuing a triple major (English, Philosophy, and Humanities) at the University of Louisville, Cirosan enjoys tabletop gaming and reading in his spare time. When it comes to modding, he goes all in. We reached out to Cirosan to see how his project came to fruition. Get the full story behind his Full Dialogue Interface mod below.
The Full Dialogue Interface mod is mostly a story of collaboration and a little good luck. To give some background, I suffer from a chronic pain disorder and a chronic stomach disorder, and this often keeps me stuck at home. But I like to keep myself productive, and modding is one of the ways I do that. My previous mods for New Vegas are a direct result of being stuck at home for long periods of time and needing some way to keep busy, and for the Full Dialogue Interface mod, it was much the same circumstance.
About a week after Fallout 4 was released, I was stuck at home and browsing the most popular mods on the Nexus at the time. Pretty far down the list – about 50 or 60 entries down, I think – was an intriguing mod simply called “NewDialog.” It was uploaded by a Russian modder named shadwar, and it overhauled the dialogue interface into a list and replaced the paraphrased dialogue options with the full line. There was one hitch, though: it was entirely in Russian. The mod itself, every piece of documentation, every author comment – everything. shadwar had left no instructions or explanation on how he had done such a thing. I thought there could be a great demand for the mod if it were available in other languages, so I immediately downloaded the mod and started poking around, trying to figure out how shadwar had pulled it off. Between copious use of Google Translate and a few educated guesses, I had a pretty good idea of how the mod worked within an hour or two.
There was one big problem, though: nearly every line of dialogue in the game needed to have the paraphrase switched out for the full line, and there wasn’t any good way to do this except by hand. I spent the afternoon writing a program to automate the process, took a nap, and about seven hours later had a completed English version of the mod.
Keep in mind, in my enthusiasm I hadn’t even contacted shadwar about translating his mod or collaborating with him. The English version of NewDialog was ready to go, but I needed shadwar’s permission. I contacted him on the Nexus as I was putting some finishing touches on and, fortunately, he got back to me within 20 minutes. He said that there was already a team working on translating the mod to English, and that there was no need for my help. I immediately responded that I already had a finished translation ready and just needed his permission. More than a little surprised, he generously granted it and the English version of NewDialog – which I renamed to what I felt was the more descriptive “Full Dialogue Interface” – was uploaded and available for download.
Not being fond of social media, I didn’t have any Facebook or Twitter accounts to spread the word about the mod, so I hastily made a Twitter account, messaged a few games journalists I was fond of, and went to bed.
The response was overwhelming, and I’m still very humbled at how quickly the mod took off and how fortunate I was to be able to bring shadwar’s work to a larger audience. To this day, Full Dialogue Interface is still labeled as a “NewDialog translation/port.”
Over time, the mod grew to support all the languages that Fallout 4 was released in. I did that without really realizing how much work it meant, but I saw countless comments from people all over the world asking me to support their language, and I added more as the requests rolled in, still using that program I threw together to make new translations seven hours at a time. I should note that since then, another modder named mcguffin has since released the Fallout4Translator tool, which does everything my little program did way more efficiently, and it’s what I use these days to update and support the mod.
Despite making the interface files that form the cornerstone of the mod, shadwar and I haven’t had much contact. Beyond our initial exchange, we corresponded briefly about troubleshooting some issues users were having, and then things went quiet for months. The last time I spoke with him was to get his permission to port his mod to consoles, which – again – he generously granted. However, I wish to stress how significant shadwar’s original mod was to what Full Dialogue Interface is today, and FDI certainly wouldn’t exist without him. Essentially, shadwar built the foundation, and I’ve just been maintaining and updating it since.
Since the mod’s initial release, I’ve ported FDI to the Xbox One, made it available in all the languages Fallout 4 was released in, and expanded that support to also include all of Fallout 4’s DLC. An alternate version – the “Lite” version – was also something I created based on user feedback, which retains the original diamond-shaped dialogue layout but replaces the paraphrases with the full lines and removes the forced ALL CAPS for player responses. I do my best to keep the mod updated with every patch and DLC that gets released, but I have a big load of classes and it can sometimes be hard to find the time.
