Hello again everyone!

[Razorwing]

It has been close to half a year since the last time I was here. My absence was not caused by real-life concerns, though I appreciate that others used it as a reason. I stayed away because I could not find a kernel of enjoyment left in modding.

A major reason is that Reich Parkeep and Soluthis did not turn out the way I had hoped. It all boils down to the fact that I was not as good at city design as I thought I was. I didn't take the time to draw up any kind of plans for the city before I started creating it, neither the city layout nor distribution of guards nor characters nor... anything, really.

Perhaps my chaotic approach could have worked on the scale of a small settlement, but definitely not on the scale I chose for Soluthis. No matter how many hours I put into it, it still felt like an empty, disorganized, buggy, patch-work of a mess and that led to an ever-lessening desire to work on it. I kept thinking of other things I would rather do, i.e. 3d models, and then tried to justify it to myself and others.

The region around Soluthis did not turn out like I would have wanted, either. I simply did not think it through. I did not investigate and comment on the landmass when I had the chance. When I noticed the lands around the city were too flat for my liking I just figured I could make it hilly by creating and using models instead. It turned out there were two problems with that approach: creating rock models was not fun, and I was not organized enough to get the overall sense of the region one would need to draw up large terrain features. When I played Fallout 3, with its masterful mixture of landscaped hills and 3d rock models, it finally dawned on me how the rocky Soluthis region could have been like, if I had put my mind to it from the beginning and made the correct choices.

At the same time, the massive scale made it hard for me to feel like I was making any real headway on the region. I could spend an hour tweaking a wilderness cell to my liking, then zoom out and realize I had completed 1/1000th of the rocky region. Again, who was to blame? Me. I championed the landmass scale we chose; I had ample opportunity to affect the way the Soluthis region turned out; I was the one who was supposed to create all the rock models I would have needed.

The same feeling applied to the 3d models I created. I learnt new facts and skills as I got better and better at modelling for the game. The more models I created, the larger my library grew of - in my view - sub-par and bugged models. I spent an enormous amount of time updating my old models, but it still felt like I had a huge amount of work ahead of me, not to mention all the new models I wanted to make and which were needed. Again, there was no-one to blame but myself. I could have, and I should have, taken the time to research and learn about the deeper workings of Oblivion models as information became available.

At the same time, for many many years I had equalled modding with spending time by myself. Or rather, spending time pretending I was not married to a woman I did not get along with very well. Modding became a reason not to spend time with her; a justification for not socializing with her, and for staying up half the night and sleeping half the day away. I slept as long in the morning as I could get away with, just to shorten the number of hours I had to spend with her. After my divorce, which started in December 2008, there was no-one to "avoid" and I had oodles of time to myself. With what used to be my motivation gone, my interest in the world of modding slowly but surely declined - and at the same time, the problems with the city, the region and with modelling felt like they were mounting.

I guess I finally realized just how much work was still ahead of me to get both Soluthis and the models where I wanted them to be; work that I did not genuinly want to do, and work that I did not really feel I needed to do now that that motivation of avoidance was no longer there. It coincided with the fact that I got a new computer in late September -09, and I wound up playing games instead; Fallout 3, The Sims 3, some other ones, and most recently Civilization IV.

I still feel a connection to this world though, and I look forward to working with the group again at some point. Admittedly, many of my thoughts turn to the next game in the Elder Scrolls series, and how I can take a different approach to modding that time around now that I realize what my shortcomings are.