Status ?

[bob196045]

Well, this is the beginning of new life

You guys are on the right track, now you just need people who will do what they say they will do

Believe me I know what its like to make a mod with no modders

we been doing it for 2 years on the ES3 side, things take 10 times longer and some good ideas have to be put aside for indefinite periods.

But all you can do is keep plugging away

I'd like to see this mod completed, it seems to me only logical that Vvardenfell be available for ES4 to go along with Silgrad (its all morrowind)

with everything that HAS been done so far including models made for Silgrad that can be used in Vvardenfell (if thats not allready being done)

It shouldn't be too much to layout the cities

forget about all the plans for killer mud crabs and things like that for now and just make a mod, take the cities you plan on keeping as they were in Morrowind and put them together

I agree with Seniosh the boards must be controlled

I think Silgrads claim system is one of the best their is, I use it for ES3 in a similar manner, without all the detail but it works

Set the priorities and those get done first

I think it will all work out

Boards first

Get something to show next

and go out to the other forums and show what you've got and get some more modders to join

!!

Go team


Enjoy
Bob

[raggidman]

Sound and strong.


Add one Forum category at the top if you like:

Core Progress, Foreward Planning and Newbie Greetings Forum
Pinned: A sort of Showcase with currently favoured models, music, concept art, books, etc ..., without the chat, in locked thread/s ...

Pinned: Stuff that the Core sees potential for in the next and future rounds of Development in locked threads ... with links to the WIP threads

Newbie threads:
Newbies should see that stuff has been and is happening, and feel that they can be associated with that good stuff without wading through chat with folks who they do not know.

The Core can locate them and review their potential and direct them to appropriate Forums and threads and others can say hi there as a social thing without cluttering up active progress threads so much.

Newbies can add their own stuff to their treads etc ... so new ideas can be evaluated and where appropriate transferred to WIP forums.

Hopefully if people take to this it should add a bit of order and discrete filtering to the process of inducting new people and give people who have proven their worth a status boost, w/out going over the top, so that they can see that they and their contributions are respected and valued.

If skilled people bypass this and fit in that's fine. You need to recognise that some peole are not happy with regimentation and will delight in rebellion and doing as they please = fine too. In extreme cases if this process is by-passed and people's ideas are not fitting in or they are just beginning and are feeling lost, then gentle guidance to a newbie thread for further consideration and more work with them.

For example, killer crab ideas would be extreme or attempts to make every character totally bald, or totally hairy ... :alert:

If it is handled right you might find that someone wants to become the eternal noobie eventually and yet is marvellously productive.

Pinned: Noobies that produce solid stuff get it pinned (which immediately associates their work with the best) and then they can start in on the 'big forums'. This should give noobies something to aim for and the sense that Vvardenfelll people are exceptionally skilled and really know what they are doing.

[Dave_91]

Seniosh- That sounds great.

raggidman - I like that idea.

bob - I think laying out the cities should be easy. I've also been messing with modelling recently, and I'd be willing to help with asset creation if and where required (as long as it's something I can do at my skill level). Generating regions to work with (like team SoVvM have done) should be prioritised; the landmass blank isn't really appealing.

As far as modding goes: I think we should leave dungeons for the time being and concentrate on exteriors + interiors (cities and towns) as bob said.

So I'd say (not necessarily in any order):

Make changes to the forums and clean them up

If others agree, we can go with Seniosh's and Raggidman's ideas because they sound like they'd be most effective. At the moment it's confusing and we really should think about new members, and how the forums would look from their perspective when coming here for the first time - even if they don't want to join the team. (I'm just stating the obvious here, aren't I? )

Work on claims and coordination

Cire's efforts to create claims were great, and it's a shame they weren't filled. If cire is still willing to help with creating claim threads then that is excellent, however, if for whatever reason cire doesn't want to continue with claims then we can create some (temporary) quick claim threads and add to them over time (or re-do them). They'd need to be user-friendly though.

Work on a potential region generation

A few different ways of accomplishing this were suggested. One was to use the readily laid out meshes converted and ported from TES3, then replace those assets with our own equivalents. The other 'sturdier' option, if you like, would be to generate the regions ourselves like others have done. I guess we wouldn't have to do every region straight away - we could do one at a time. I think this would be good for the forum thread, and this will be a big step when opposed to the previous Vv topic, which only really showed screenshots of the WIP cities and villages, with the blank landmass.

Create a thread over at TES forum

This was suggested earlier. A 'save Vvardenfell' topic. I think this could work, but this may be harder than we think. If you take a look at the previous WIP Vv thread from mid-2007 (I think it was), we haven't really made much more progress since then, which looks bad, especially if people start asking questions about what we've been doing since then (progress-wise). If we create a 'what's been done since' topic, explaining how KuKulzA left, how we'd re-worked the forums and such that might spark interest, as some people may have been previously put-off with the baffling forums and earlier claims system (before cire's).

We also have the 'issue', if you like, of the other similar mods that are attempting to accomplish the similar goal of creating regions from TES3 (SoVvM and Sheogorad: Forsaken Isles by Phitt). I don't think we should consider ourselves in competition with the other mods (as we all have different ideas for what we want to do in terms of storyline and quest), so collaboration may be best way to go about this. The bottom line of that is that we're all doing it for fun anyway - we aren't getting paid for our efforts.

If InsanitySorrow reads this: My views on sharing and working with others has changed these past few months, and I agree that I've been a bit of a hypocrite from that point of view. I think sharing should benefit everyone.

Anything else?

[Coinneach]

Nice ideas with the forum reorganisation, I totally agree. I know I don't carry any weight on these forums, but if theres anything at all that the core would like me to do, I'll do it

[Rodan]

You should also have someone as well to work on the website. If anyone volunteers for that let me know and I'll give you the FTP settings.

[Siegfried]

I know this is going to come off sounding like blasphemy, but perhaps rebuilding Vvardenfell completely isn't the best idea-- it's just such a collosal workload, to get it done in any sort of reasonable time period would mean a dedicated team of 20-30 people. I mean, what if you were to just take a small part of Vvardenfell and recreate-- the Telvanni Islands in Zafirbel Bay are fairly isolated, rebuilding them would be a sizeable task in and of it's self, or what about Vivec city, but made the way it was supposed to be, with out the polygon count limitations of Morrowind's game engine, you could easily make a monstrous mod of it with extensive dungeons in the cities sewers.

The resources are there for the most part, but pulling everything together and organizing it all and then actually creating it may prove to be an even greater task than resource creation, and since Kukulza left there doesn't seem to be anyone willing to shoulder said burden.

[Dave_91]

Siegfried - Not sure if you (or anyone else) noticed as I didn't 'announce' anything, but I was planning to start discussing a Vivec City mod if I decided to quit Vv. That's why I started creating canton pieces. It's like Phitt's mod - he said to me in a PM before christmas that he had something like, 600 cells to create just for Sheogorad. I mean, he and his landscaper (or team) has done an eipc job so far, but what about TESVvardenfell? We'll have like, 10x as many cells (or 100x if we did the 2x scale idea), with many new meshes to create whilst doing that. Add to that the fact that we've no modeller/texturer. To complete such a task, even a decent sized team of modders, would either take forever, or be sloppy (no disrespect to anyone btw).

Do you honestly feel that a bigger, better, more detailed version of Vivec city only was remade for Oblivion (possible even going by original TES3 concepts), that it would make a good mod? Because I do. It'd be easier to focus on that too.

Not sure what others would think of that... but it's an idea that could at least be considered, right?

[DarkAsmodeous]

Why not just focus your efforts, but not close any doors?

Down at Elsweyr we're focusing on a tri-city area and filling in the spaces between, it seems to be working, and we intend to get the mod to a playable state in that region before moving on.

Just a suggestion, good luck either way :goodjob:

[Seniosh]

I think DA's suggestion is a good one. Don't just go down to Vivec. That'd get boring, especially because the cantons all look very similar. And it'd be such a shame to waste the amazing Hlaalu Tileset we've got.

My advice? Focus for now on the Balmora-Vivec-Ebonheart tri-city area. A dedicated exterior modder could knock out the city layouts of Balmora and Ebonheart (vivec, obviously, doesn't need a heck of a lot of exterior layout work). Then, it'd just be a matter of filling in the cities with claims, same as what Silgrad's doing. If you can re-organize the forums and get some dedicated modders, you should be able to start making a sizable dent in the cities.

Another nice thing about the region - there aren't too many different types of land. Mostly, you've got the lakes/plantations region between Vivec and Balmora, with a tiny tiny pinch of the bitter coast if you do Seyda Neen.

All you need to do is focus a bit, and make sure you don't waste effort on things that aren't critical. Don't do everything at once.

[bob196045]

This may not make any sense or it might

but you pretty much have it all layed out for you, just start simply with building the cities just as they are in ES3, then expand them from that
point. Its only been 6 or so years not much should have changed

you should have all the building models available except maybe Daedric and Telvanni andl the tilesets as well Yes ?

hrug:


Enjoy
Diet Bob