TPF Anniversary Month & More News

It's a birthday party - TPF turns four! I first started working on the manual guide in the week after Christmas 2017 and since then the bloody thing has blown up in ways I could not have imagined.

To celebrate the (approaching) fourth anniversary of TPF, we, the TPF staff and I, are bringing you an entire month's worth of awesomeness: Throughout December there will be giveaways and screenshot competitions hosted on our Discord server. In fact, we've already distributed the first round (Dragon Age Inquisition and Control game keys) over the past few days!

More information on our anniversary festivities will be further down in this post. For now I have some other news to share with you.

Return of the TPF manual guide

Yes, it's happening.

Over the past couple of days, I have been updating the manual guide for a TPF 5.0 release. This will incorporate a ton of TPF-X stuff, moderately increasing TPF in size and scope without breaking with the original concept, and most importantly bring the manual guide back up to date.

So why the change of heart?

There are several reasons. First up, I had a break now and used the time to rebuilt TPF from the ground up to then expand it for TPF-X. This allowed me to re-evaluate a lot of my mod choices and fix things that annoyed me in the past. I continued to document everything (in the MO2 notes) so really bringing my changes back to the main guide isn't that much work in the end.

The second reason is that I have felt like I hung all those amazing fork creators out to dry. I'm incredibly proud of all the TPF Addons out there and really want to support them. I can do that best by continuing the manual guide. I have come to the conclusion that the manual guide exists largely as a documentation for myself and for Addon authors to refer back to and that is already valuable enough.

Picking up the manual guide again is made significantly easier by the fact that I will not be managing the Wabbajack installer for base TPF. Cody, who has already kept TPF alive these past few months, will likely maintain the WJ installer for TPF 5.x which is amazing. Additionally, my continued work on the expanded version of TPF (TPF-X) will be much less of a hassle as I now have TPF and TPF-X in a single MO2 instance.

There is no current ETA for TPF 5.0 but I am hoping for a beta in late December, and MAYBE a full release in the final week of the year to coincide with TPF's anniversary.

Now I imagine there is some disappointment over the lack of TPF-X news. It's just a huge project unfortunately. The good thing is that TPF 5.0 is the heart of it so getting that wrapped up and out there for play-testing will play a big role in pushing TPF-X closer to the finishing line.

Welcome to Paradise 2.0

The other big release that I am determined to get out TODAY is the 2.0 rework of my Fallout 4 list Welcome to Paradise which is compiling in the background right now. It is taking forever because all downloads have to be hashed again and I have them on an HDD. Fortunately I also have an energy drink and an iron will so there will be no sleep for me until WTP 2.0 is out.

To give you a bit of a sneak peek, here's the feature overview from the changelog:

• New lighting and ENB combination for more consistent visuals as well as brighter nights and interiors.
• Better shadow INI settings to reduce pop-in and blurry shadows (thanks SpringHeelJon!).
• Replaced Boston FPS Fix with Previs Pack to eliminate some crashes and improve performance in even more areas.
• Replaced Workshop Re-arranged with smaller, more managable workshop additions.
• New retextures, most of which were added to the WTP texture packs for better performance.
• MCM settings can now be applied automatically via a universal WTP preset thanks to MCM Settings Manager.
• Finally some documentation in the form of the new WTP Visuals and WTP Gameplay pages.

None of this is particularly exciting by itself but there was a great deal of polishing and neat little additions that I am overall very happy with. WTP will be in a much better spot and become essentially the FO4 equivalent to LOTF (albeit with a few more gameplay changes).

Speaking of ...

Legends of the Frost 2.0

As mentioned before, the LOTF 2.0 release will bring the list into the post-AE age, maybe to the latest version of SSE/SAE, definitely with Creation Club support. I am now testing the creations myself to figure out which of them I like enough to include.

Note that LOTF will never require the Anniversary Edition DLC. When CC support is added, it will be optional in a second MO2 profile.

So far I have finished Saints & Seducers which I thought was decent overall, but not particularly exciting. I did like the Solitude Sewers a great deal. I am currently considering to start a series of either playthrough videos or quick reviews of various creations in the form of Patreon posts.

There is no ETA for LOTF 2.0 currently.

IRL Stuff

Shit's happening, friends. I was accepted to the University College I applied to (still can't believe it) and have been officially done with school since Tuesday. I will be moving back to my parents in two weeks, then to the Netherlands in January. With all the moving around stuff plus various other preparation work I am not sure how much energy I'll have for modding work at the end of the day. Mind you, if I have nothing going on, I'll just kind of disappear and do nothing at all so if I'm kept busy otherwise that may actually have a positive impact on my general productivity. Hoping for the best!

Anniversary Month

Coming full circle ...

For the rest of December, regardless of how my work on LOTF/WTP/TPF/TPF-X progresses, there will be a bunch more activities. Aforementioned giveaways will continue as we have more game keys to give away (contributions from you guys are highly appreciated as well!).

There will also be several screenshot competitions that will start very soon so keep an eye on the server for that (just kidding, you will be pinged).

And finally I want to do a survey to gather some feedback and general user data on TPF so that will be up soon as well.

---

Well, with all these news I hope that I made a few people happy at least. I will go back now to stare menacingly at the progress meters in Wabbajack as it compiles WTP.

Happy modding!

Phoenix