Gameplan for Silgrad Tower v3.0

[Razorwing]

Originally posted by Cuthalion
Razorwing, how many quests are supposed to be in V3?

That's a good question. Nothing's decided that I know of. The more the better, and the easier for the player to discover them the better.*


* I'm an amateur when it comes to quests but I think I had one good idea by sending the questgiver of my quest on long walks around Soluthis, increasing the odds of the player running into him. During the span of a week he travels across half the city. If that fails I also added a notice to a noticeboard to hint to the player there's a quest to be found in the vicinity.

[Atreides]

Hi Razorwing, 3.0 looks to be a very interesting update. I downloaded 2.5 but haven't installed it yet since 3.0 isn't that far away.

I was curious about a few things:

Will 3.0 feature additonal dungeons or small towns/villages?
Will there be new Morrowind creatures?
Can you provide any taste of what any of the new quests will be about? Faction, misc sidequests, main quest related, etc.

Also I had downloaded the public release v6 for 2.5; assuming there will be an update rar from 2.5 to 3.0 instead of only 3.0 full, should I install public release version 6 also. Meaning should I install: 2.5, then public release 6, then 3.0??
Since these public releases aren't put up in places like PES and other download sites, I'm not sure if they are modders resources or actual small updates for playable 2.5.

Thanks.

[Wolvman]

I don't know about the first three questions but the install order for ST is V.2.5, Public Update 6, and then V.3.0 when it comes out. V.3.0 will probably replace the 2.5 esp/esm though so you don't actually have to have it to run the new 3.0 version coming out most likely.

[Atreides]

Thanks Wolvman, I appreciate the response.

This mod just keeps getting better and better.

[Razorwing]

Here's a copy of an article I just posted on silgrad.com's front page.

[blockquote]After a thorough discussion on The Forge, Silgrad Tower's regulars and core members have taken the decision to continue our mod's development in closed beta form. No matter how much we want it to be what we want it to be, no matter the grandeur of the plans we've drawn up, no matter how hard we can see it before our inner eye - we're just not there yet. In fact we're quite some distance from being there, from being at a level an Oblivion player should expect when downloading a mod to play.

- Players have been disappointed when the visuals in the mod they downloaded (the public version) don't match the visuals from the screenshots and videos (the private version).
- Players have found the barren landscape confusing and wondered if they installed the mod wrongly.
- Players have wondered where the heck our cities are since our landmass is huge and we have neither a road network nor an in-game map.
- Players have wandered around our cities looking for quests, and while we have quite a few of them you won't find them in obvious places.
- Players have suffered from low FPS in quite a few places, especially in Soluthis, effectively rendering parts of the city unplayable.

When we release our next version you can bet we've fixed all those problems. All our regions will have been generated, we'll have a road network and an in-game map, much of our cities will be completed and free of FPS problems, we'll have a slew of quests - and there'll be no difference between the private/public version. If it takes us a year to get there, so be it. Like I myself noted in the discussions; When the time comes for our next release, I don't want to see a single unhappy player

We've already made notable progress on our gameplan. We've generated 12% of our regions so far, and that number is likely to climb to 17% within a couple weeks - and with a landmass the size of ours those numbers equal thousands upon thousands of cells. Sandor, whom is often at the forefront of generating regions, recently generated close to seven thousand cells for the Silgrad- and Steadhelm area.

TheImperialDragon has drawn up plans for our road network and is continuing to work on the in-game map we'll use. Cuthalion recently took up the reigns of the Mages Guild in our mod, so hopefully we'll see quite a few interesting quests stemming from that. Personally I've optimized our models, thanks to amorilia's terrific nifoptimizer script, yanked out unnecessary parallax maps, downsized some grossly oversized textures, and continue to update the old collision with new - which all in all should solve a fair share of Soluthis' and Reich Parkeep's FPS problems.

Nothing makes us happier than seeing new faces join the team though! The process will work much like it did in the past, except this time you as a new member won't have access to the latest asset updates since they're in the private development section. You will eventually though, because as you complete more and more claims you'll eventually become ST Modder and become part of our dev team "for real". Whether you want to pursue our vision of seeing Morrowind on Oblivion in hi-poly & hi-res form, or beef up your skill through working with more experienced colleages, or are just looking for a warm, supportive and friendly community to be a part of - your very welcome.[/blockquote]

[Razorwing]

Some time ago I crossed off one of the goals mentioned in the original post, namely optimizing the textures in Reich Parkeep. I don't believe it did as much as I had hoped, so as I mentioned elsewhere I decided to move Reich Parkeep into its own child worldspace. It'll be the third time the city moves; first I moved it out of its original two worldspaces to Soluthis, then sandor moved Soluthis to the main worldspace (I couldn't do it myself due to low system RAM and was very grateful for the assistance), and now it'll be tucked back in again.

Last I heard we've generated 20% of our regions, so we're nearing that goal pretty fast. I don't know if that's counting blackbird's Latrys North submission or not though. If you haven't checked that out yet you should, he did a good job on it and the roads look terrific. Any takers on Latrys South? Maybe we can beef the generator count up to 30%. Together with blackbird's work I'm sure the island could turn out to be a wondrous place once it's fully generated. I've never generated a region myself so take this with a grain of salt, but it would seem like Latrys South would be less work than another region might be - because one could glean tips from the presets blackbird used.

Not sure how Deepen Moor is going. But things seem to be moving regarding the Forgotten Forest and hopefully Trankintor can sink his teeth into that challenge sometime after New Years.

The small Deepen Meadows region has gone unclaimed since the start, which is a good thing in my books because for an oldie like me it just wouldn't feel right to see the region built without hovels and shacks like the ones from TES3. Awhile back I closed the claims thread, partly because a modder was interested in taking the claim once there was models for it and partly because we had a guy working on those models - the same guy who made the Timsa-Come-By flower and planter - but I fear it has tapered out into nothing. Maybe we can use Phitt's models, or maybe I'll make the models myself eventually, or (praise the lord) someone beats me to it.

Ashunor Valley has gone unclaimed as well. The region is meant to be like a cross between Ascadian Isles and the Grazelands. I think someone claimed it once but it didn't go anywhere. Pity, because I made a lot of custom stuff for the region that I've yet to see ingame. The muckpods (in meshes\ST\Flora\Shroom\) for instance are pretty much exclusive to the Ashunor Valley region, as are the many rocks in meshes\ST\Rocks\AscadianIsles\. Most of the latters are retextures of other rocks I made, but still. I'm dumbfounded as to why that region has garnered so little interest. Any suggestion on how we can change it to make it more appealing? Meaning, make it more appealing for you to generate/mod it I mean ideas are always welcome but if the design of the region does change then it changes because someone wants to handle it.

I guess that's the roundup of where the regions are. There's another region called Velothi Mountains, easily the largest region in our mod in terms of base area, but the bulk of that base area is restricted from the player. It's spread out over our outer quads. It's not been open for claiming though, rather it'll be handled internally in the core team.

As for dialogue we have a full complement of male Argonian and Breton voices, by your very own SACarrow and myself. More voice sets are in the wings and will surely become part of our mod before long.

I put together a few road claims for parts of the road network that could be outsourced to others than us working on regions. No takers yet, but hopefully it'll catch the interest of someone in time. It'll get done one way or the other, but it would shave quite a bit of time off of Silgrad Tower v3.0's release date if we got some help with that.

Finalizing models and bringing them up to par is an on-going job of mine. I could easily spend six months perfecting all of the models. My modelling skills have increased over time, as has the capabilities of the exporter compared to the old days. But as one poster in our promo thread noted - and I'm paraphrasing a bit - spending a lot of time on models compared to everything else that needs to get done is a wasted effort. To a large extent I agree with that comment. Players are going to care a lot more about how Soluthis is modded and what they can do there than if the models look or behave a bit better. I love modelling, and I rather like improving older models, but if I spend too much time on that I'll wind up either pushing the release date or not finishing Soluthis. So I'm improving their look and collision, but bit by bit and over time.

[blackbird]

Thank you for promoting my work.

[Seriphyn]

How long do you estimate til 3.0 is wrapped up and released? Am eager to play it...haven't bothered installing 2.5 since 3.0 sounds better anyway.

[Razorwing]

Originally posted by Seriphyn
How long do you estimate til 3.0 is wrapped up and released? Am eager to play it...haven't bothered installing 2.5 since 3.0 sounds better anyway.

It's at least six months away.

[Seriphyn]

Sixth months? Oh dear...well I suppose this is a very big release...adding Silgrad which i remember from Morrowind to be massive...and generating the landscape so it isn't so barren...is that the main cause of its length?

Since it's a lot longer than I thought, I am willing to assist in voice acting, only problem is that i do not have a very good microphone, so it may sound 'noisy' and not really adequate for maintaining the suspension of disbelief. Unless you can fix that yourself...

Another issue is since I'm only 18, it may sound 'young'...well maybe, i don't know...would you require voice actors?