Silgrad Tower's Planning thread [Old Discussion]

[Candlemaster]

Okay, well, assuming Morrowind isn't 20,000 leagues under the sea by now, how much of the province would you like to do? Just the area you had from Oblivion, or are we gonna go all the way and make all of Morrowind, including Vvardenfell? (one map at a time obviously)

[Deeza]

The good news is, in a little under a month's time we should hopefully get some more details, as there will be a new book coming out:

http://www.amazon.com/Lord-Souls-Elder-S...119&sr=1-1

But to answer candlemaster's point, I think it goes without saying that the heightmap will need to include all of Morrowind, including Vvardenfell, in order to provide realistic LOD (if we assume Skyrim is about the same scale as Cyrodiil, the sea around Vvardenfell island would only be about as wide as Lake Rumare's thickest points).

But as for making the whole province? Certainly I would like to, and I think many others would too. But we've got to be careful not to get too ambitious here. Overreaching ambition has killed a lot of projects for TESIV, and we don't want to repeat that experience here.

I don't think there's any harm in giving some thought to what the rest of the province would look like (we'll need to in order to give the mod a realistic background flavour, like travellers coming from down south and talking about the situation there, etc.)

It would seem to me that the natural starting point for Map 1 would be to plan out the strip of Morrowind's coast which parallels the eastern edge of Skyrim, since this would have the most direct continuity with the region generation used in the vanilla game, which apparently will be "Volcanic tundra" in that area (ie. we could keep the same basic presets as the Skyrim side, but blend in some uniquely Morrowind aspects like the Mushroom trees and mucksponge etc.)

[Sniper4]

To the best of my knowledge, the idea is to use TESV's scale, but to cover less ground.

In the final version of our TESIV mod, there was just so much left unfinished that we've had to scale down our landmass in order to remove unfinished landscape, allow roads, etc. We want to make sure we don't have this problem again, so the idea is to focus on a smaller parcel of land, rather than trying to make the large section of Morrowind that we tried to make. Of course, how much of the map of Morrowind we choose to make will depend on TESV's scale. According to Todd Howard, Skyrim in TESV will be as large as Cyrodiil in TESIV. That means that if we try to make the same landmass in Morrowind, it will be even larger in TESV... and even more un-finish-able.

We are probably going to have to make our cities smaller, too. The city of Silgrad Tower in TESIV still has several unfinished interiors, and so much unused grassy space, yet we are so close to release.

The reason I suggested the TR- based map idea was not only to concentrate our efforts, but also to start small, so we can figure out just how much land, cities, interiors, quests, etc we are capable of making before we spread ourselves too thin .

In summary: To the best of my knowledge, we are using TESV's scale. We're just not going to try to make as many cities, miles of land, etc right out of the starting gate. We need to make sure that we limit ourselves so that we don't end up with miles upon miles of unfinished terrain, towns and cities with unfinished interiors, etc.

[Deeza]

Sniper4, I think that we're basically in agreement then. My point was not that we should try to make the whole province, but that because Morrowind has such a dramatic landscape (which if the previews of Skyrim are anything to go by, the engine will be more than capable of displaying), we will need to do a heightmap including the rest of the Velothi Mountains, Red Mountain and Vvardenfell etc. just to get the visual effect, even if we never properly mod a single cell of the rest of it.

So, to kick-start this discussion, I have attached three maps of the traditional ST area. In addition, here are links to ST's own concept map:

http://www.silgrad.com/oblivion/images/m...p_col3.jpg

And the excellent Tamriel Rebuilt Map of this region:

http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/?image=g/maps..._data/maps
(Political version: )
http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/?image=g/maps..._data/maps

Now bear in mind, all these maps are pre-Red Year. But they still raise questions: Which part of this area are we going to focus on? Which settlements are we going to keep or leave in ruins? Are there completely new settlements now?

[AnImpatientFan]

I think Skyrims world is slightly larger scaled than Cyrodiil? (20-30%?)

Skyrim is a slightly smaller province aswell so if we were to use the scale of Skyrim, ST wouldn't be that small.

[Deeza]

That's new to me. Has there been a new interview? Some journalists seem to believe that the claim that Skyrim was "bigger" than Oblivion refers to density of content, not necessarily to the size of the landmass?

But I suppose that,even if we assume the scale is 20% larger, we're still talking about an area of land about 1/6 the size of Skyrim even if we do the entire area that was done for TES3, or equivalent to the right bank of the Niben Valley, or about a quad assuming the cells are approximately the same size.

That's not small by any means, but it is potentially manageable, especially if, as TID suggests, we concentrate on smaller areas of it.

[AnImpatientFan]

If the journos are correct and Skyrim is 16 sqaure miles I have calcuated that it would be approximately 32 cells from the border to the inner sea.

If we were to use Skyrims scale on the current landmass we would have about 1 quad of space.

If we were to add Blacklight we would have slightly less than 2 quads.

[Deeza]

Thanks for that map, it's really helpful. So how does that scale compare to the TES4 mod then? How many quads do we use currently?

Edit: Worst come to the worst we could reduce the workload by going with the PGE3 map coastline, which is narrower than the one you just linked to. Perhaps that's more accurate though?

[AnImpatientFan]

I think we have 32 quads now....

TBH I'm worried about the distance between cities being too small.
That's why perhaps expanding the borders but downsizing towns that are nearby each other might be a good idea. (Imagine having three cities within 20 cells of eachother.)

I guess we could always use the Red Mountain/Argonian Invasion excuse for removing settlement.

[Deeza]

Wow! 32 quads???

As for cutting the town number, that's my thoughts exactly. Plus it gives us a great chance to make some really interesting dungeons, if we include some of the tes4 locations which had to be left out for size constraints as ruins, because we would already have a detailed backstory made ready for each dungeon.

Which three cities were you thinking of, then? Presumably Blacklight, Soluthis and Silgrad?