Exterior Claims

[Dave_91]

How should we manage this? Obviously a modder cannot claim a whole region to mod, that'd be hard work... two ways I can think:

Split regions into smaller areas, like about 5-6 areas where the modders can mod.

OR

Use a similar method like ST, where govern of the region (steward) is given to someone, and they manage what claims are in that region (like dungeons and random houses/huts) and other building things.

OR

Merge both together...?

We're going to have to work it all out sometime soon.

[Dave_91]

Bump. I'd like some feedback regarding this. It's important we plan ahead before we get people who'd like to mod the landmass.

[KuKulzA]

i say someone oversees the progress in a region and the claims like option 2 similar to Silgrad's system, maybe with slight changes in responsibility

[Dave_91]

:yes: Agreed. I'll let this topic run for a few more days to see if anyone has any other ideas. Then we'll start planning it in more detail. If that sounds alright.

[KuKulzA]

Originally posted by Dave_91
:yes: Agreed. I'll let this topic run for a few more days to see if anyone has any other ideas. Then we'll start planning it in more detail. If that sounds alright.

sounds good to me

[Dave_91]

Good, well in advance, I think we should perhaps cut out the regions from v colour heightmap of Vvardenfell in photoshop, then divide those up into sections. Maybe we could have like, 6-7 sections on each region for claim. hrug:

[Seniosh]

See the problem with claiming a region is that there's nothing concrete and absolute to be done. you have to landscape... and set up claims. One thing i've noticed about Silgrad's regions, is that progress has been slow on them, and none of them have bothered to ask for or set up dungeon exteriors, caves, ect ect.

I think a good idea would be if you had small regions, each having maybe 3-5 dungeon/cave claims in them, so that you can TELL the guy who's doing the region generation to set up the claims exteriors.

That way you ensure that claims get set up (and can be linked ingame) and you give a modder something less abstract to do.

Of course i'm not a region gen guy, so i can't really say how easy/hard it is to generate a region.

[Lightwave]

How accurate do we want to be; is absolutely every cave and tomb from the original to be recreated? And are these to be laid out similarly to the original, or will that be totally up to the modder to choose?

You could use the texture map and cell grid map I put up a few months ago at lightwave.4shared.com (the top two files in the Projects\Vvardenfellx2 directory). Or use the vertex colour map with the grid map if you want (the dimensions will be the same).
The grid map should directly overlay over the region map and give you the accurate cell boundaries. The bottom left is cell is at (-66, -77). I placed a very small pink o at (0,0) on the cell grid map, which would help when figuring out how to mark up other co-ordinates. There's a lot of cells to be covered; 13,716 lie above sea level. There's at least one spectacular underwater daedric ruin just off the north-west coast to be included also.

Some landscape areas must be treated separately to the more generic wilderness. Mostly this applies to towns and other sizable settlements, forts and ruins. These will have to be listed and identified on the texture map and treated independently. Some of these may not be possible to build at this stage since the meshes aren't available yet, but the area must be marked as a separate claims area.

Since there is too much for any one person to practically administrate I agree that the claims must be carved up and overseers (dukes, duchesses, call them what you like) appointed to 'lease' the areas to modders. If you want to add a bit of imagination to this, each overseer can set up residence in a nearby settlement so when modded areas are resubmitted, they can wander out and take a look. They'll have to give overall reports to KuKulzA obviously so really it's up to KuKulzA to decide how much control he'd like to give his barons/baronesses over their designated land.

Smaller blocks of cells will encourage many more modders to take part in this project and although the quality may be more variable, it'll much be faster to complete the blocks, give a more consistent feeling of progress, make it easier to peer review a completed area and correct problems. Large blocks of cells would be more daunting.

I think somewhere 3x3 (9 cells) should be the very smallest to consider; this would give 1524 blocks - a lot - but 3x3 chunks are quite achievable; indeed in some barren mountaineous areas little or nothing needs doing since the land is sufficiently textured. 4x4 (16) cell blocks would give 857 blocks. I feel that the largest size to consider using would be 5x5 (25) cells; this size gives 548 blocks. Anything larger could bog down a modder, plus there's more chance of these larger blocks crossing a ruin or settlement - areas that should be claimed separately. So decide on one of these denominations.

There's nothing to prevent several of these blocks being allocated to a single modder in one go if it's felt they're reliable or that the larger area is require to bridge several similar areas (e.g. the fields of a plantation).

To achieve all this, I think we should first start by marking up the entire grid-map in whichever block size is felt best (e.g. 4x4 cell blocks). Then identify and designate the settlement/ruin areas and re-mark them up separately. AFAIR the TR allocation system used different shades over each area to show that it was free, being worked on or completed.

Each overseer needs a list of the cell co-ordinates of all blocks in their area, and the co-ordinates of any settlements/ruins; this will be check-list used to give out claims. It will be up to the overseer to record when these areas have been allocated and to check up on any that seem to be taking a very long time.

How we handle the front-end to this I don't know - e.g. some javascript/php showing which blocks are available, which have already been assigned and which have been completed. The simplest is to just upload a blown-up grid map for each region and have it manually shaded by the overseer when an email/pm request has been sent to the overseer to and the area allocated.

These are my thoughts anyway,

Lightwave

[Dave_91]

For the dungeons, I believe that we'll be making about 90% of those in Morrowind, which will be similar to the MW versions in design and layout, but not exact. A few places may be changed, I suppose. The other 10% will be dungeons that weren't in MW, or should have been, or were, but should have been bigger or better... like the Dunmer Stronghold ruin, Barismayn (or however it's spelled).

I agree with dividing the landmass into sections, a map with some sort of plan for the size of the sections would be good. Then we can appoint dungeons, how to mod the areas, what to do/not to do etc. Sounds good.