357 replies to this topic

[Elraine Kiyoshi]

Just a 'quick' note on the LOD generation; Depending on the size of the town, you could make it work like the normal cities with the open cities mod, without sacrificing too much power from lower end PC:s by using optimized DLOD objects. Having several sets of those for all the buildings that would be used during the mod. Once you upgrade a building/build a new one, the old DLOD object would be removed as the old building wouldn't exist any longer and the old DLOD object bound to that object would be removed from the world at the same time, while the new building would be using it's own, new, DLOD object.

You might also be able to do this by making several DLOD versions of the town/city and by using some clever scripting to change the way it looks from outside, by binding the DLOD version in use to some specific buildings and changing up everytime a specific building is created/upgraded, with the best part being that depending on how the city is designed, this might only be required to be done a few times and the binding to be done on the tallest buildings/buildings near the city wall only. You can also further alleviate this problem by making the area surrounding the city/town a big plain(Hills possibly, but none so high you could see inside the city.) with a huge wall surrounding it.(Again, only after one has been built, or if the town has a palisade wall to start with, so it can be created in a separate cell and not in the same worldspace, to reduce possible FPS hit.)

On a complete side note; If you're aiming to fill the island with trees etc. I think you'll be likely to exclude the lower end PC:s from the plans and focus on the mid range ones as making this too low quality won't be good either. Many might not like it, but I think the majority of us have at least a mid range PC with lots of high end PC:s in use aswell. A further reduced(Mainly in the amount of trees in the outside area/lowering the DLOD quality of items and the size of textures in general.) version could be offered to lower end users.

Second side note; Using scripts on the DLOD changes would likely(Not certain, not a scripter myself.) require OBSE and thus make the users of D2D version of the game unable to use the mod. This could be used as an added feature for those that can have OBSE running, but if the script creation is far too complex, it could simply be added later after the actual release of the mod. If someone knows anything of changing DLOD objects or how to create/bind and remove them, I think there would be plenty of modders who would love to have that information. This is something that I will keep an eye out for in this thread and in general when browsing other mods and threads.

Now(How many times have I said that already?) I'll be moving onto further suggestions;

---Multiskilled NPC:s, I think this could be done by giving the player an option to change the jobs of an NPC once every 'phase' of the settlement/town/city and giving the NPC a boost in the stats/skills used in the job after every phase change. Just to throw out an example;

John Doe works as a smith for the first growth phase of the town towards the city. He would gain +5-15 to armorer and +5-10 to endurance/strength(Possibly some lesser stat gains to other stats/skills used in his job on a lesser degree.) for every phase he works as a smith, while assuming there would be 5 phases before the town grows into a city. The player, Homer Simpson, after assigning John Doe as the smith, would let him to do that job for three phases before re-assigning him into the town Militia, where he recieves combat training. Now, since John Doe has worked as a smith for a while, he'd be familiar with hammers and recieves blunt weapon and heavy armor training.(Bound to the highest weapon & armor skill the NPC has, a smith would gain a small boost to blunt weapons.) Now Homer Simpson leaves John Doe to work in the town Militia for the remaining two phases before the town grows into a city. From the Militia Training he would gain similar amounts of experience in the skills he will be focused training on.(Also the amount of skill levels gained could be lowered after each phase, to simulate the NPC:s getting older and less prone to learn new stuff, while it would also simulate that things do get harder to learn over time as it will also be harder to find someone with more knowledge to teach you.)

Now let's >assume< John Doe was a complete buffoon with no knack in any skill before he started working in his jobs, so the base skills/attributes would look something like this;

Attributes;
Agility 30
Strength 30
Speed 35
Intelligence 35
Willpower 30
Personality 50
Endurance 45
Luck 45

Relevant Skills(Based on the training he gains from his jobs.);
Armorer 25
Heavy Armor 25
Blunt Weapons 25
Mercantile 25
Speechcraft 25

Attributes and skills, after the five phases of training in the assigned jobs;

Attributes;
Agility 30 + 5 from two phases of combat training ->35
Strength 30 + 10 from three phases of smithing work + 10 from two phases of militia training -> 50
Speed 35 + 0 -> 30
Intelligence 35 + 0 -> 35
Willpower 30 + 5 from two phases of combat training -> 35
Personality 50 + 5 from three phases of smithing work -> 55
Endurance 45 + 15 from three phases of smithing work + 10 from two phases of militia training(Character is starting to be quite good in physical endurance already, which starts slowing the training.) ->70
Luck 45 + 0 -> 45

Relevant Skills;
Armorer 25 + 30 from three phases of smithing work -> 55
Heavy Armor 25 + 5 from three phases of smithing work + 15 from two phases of militia training(Learning gets slower after time.) -> 45
Blunt Weapons 25 + 10 from three phases of smithing work + 15 from two phases of militia training -> 50
Mercantile 25 + 5 from three phases of smithing work -> 30
Speechcraft 25 + 5 from three phases of smithing work + 5 from two phases of militia training(Militia does need to get along with the townspeople afterall.) -> 35

The figures above are completely thrown out of my head and do NOT account for the skill gains through the NPC levelling, so some NPC:s might attain two or three master level skills and thus the figures above would need to be adjusted to fit in with the skill gains of the NPC during their level ups.(Which are based on the major skills of their class and the items they are provided with.)

Also the NPC:s do have a list of skills of skills, you would simply have to implement things in a way that you give each of them a 'custom class', disable level dependancy and add levels/stats/skills to the NPC:s in a script that runs during every phase and adds specific amount of stat & skill levels, while lowering the levels gained from that during each phase.(Separate scripts for this might be easier.) You could then add a general script that adds some health & magicka to all NPC:s, changes their level higher and changes their inventory if it is necessary.(If certain skill goes above a certain point, preferably high so it won't happen by accident.) It would also add a few skill levels to all their skills, I'd say either +1 or 2, so it wouldn't break the balance when combined with the training possibilities. This needs to be calculated after the amount of phases the complete city will have had, so the scripts can be stopped, to prevent the NPC:s from becoming godlike should Homer Simpson snap and want to go berserk there.

---Cash; This could be handled by creating a new item that has no weight, but is used in trades and purchases. Another option would be to use a script to move all the cash the player has to some container in an unreachable place, thus requiring the player to earn the cash again and when the player leaves the island the cash would be returned. Although there will always be a way to cheat the system(Bringing items to sell, console codes etc. Removing the whole player inventory might not be feasable due to quest items etc. and possible bugs, not to even speak of players wanting to use their customized armour in the new island.), this would likely be the best solution to avoid any issues that might come from trying to trade an item for an item or in the way of creating a separate currency.

~Elraine

P.S.Now on a personal note; If this mod ever gets finished, I'm more than willing to create a few custom companion plugins for this mod by using Blackies CM Partner-mod. Creating companions and plugin dependancy are the few things I'm actually good at while using the CS and adding several normal companions with a few 'HERO' types appearing once a month/week somewhere isn't all that hard, although they might be found wandering somewhere else. I'll have to think about this once you get to at least beta stage.

P.P.S. Sorry about the long post again, you're right about brainstorming being fun, I'm not so sure about implementing all of this being as fun though.

[QQuix]

LOD
I don’t think LOD objects can be manipulated by script. If they could, it would be easy to enable/disable them as the real building is enabled/disabled.
I don’t know much of this worldbuilding business, but, as I perceive it, the CS generates a single .lod file per cell and the lod processing is not very smart. It just uses that file when rendering distant cells.
I have just done a quick test and an initially disabled tree does show up when distant. The game does not seem to check whether it is enabled or disable.
When the island is built, we will see how bad it is. As you say, there may be ways to alleviate the problem. Maybe a solution will present itself in the meantime (*hopeful thinking*)

OBSE
I always use OBSE.
And, I am using Pluggy for the first time as it became too hard to manage all the data without arrays.
I don’t think this kind of mod can be done without OBSE.
Maybe, after the mod is released, it will be possible to derive a downgraded version. But I wouldn't count on it.

Adding companions and such
I am trying to create the basic engine in such a way that it will be easy (*positive thinking again*) for me to add/remove processes along the way. Expanding this concept, I hope it may be possible to make this mod an esm and allow modders to add new things to the island. At the time, I will welcome your expertise on mod dependency, as I know the concepts involved, but I've never done it myself.

And don’t worry about long posts. They are quite welcome.

P.S. As I enjoy programming, I have my fun implementing new things (the scripting part, I mean) if they are complex and challenging as this one.

[VincentAlliath]

I'm new to the forums, and I haven't exactly had a chance to go through the 6 pages of posts here, but if you need help with storylines and need something that is relatively lore-friendly and written well, I can help.

PM me, e-mail me... whatever!

I write well, and I can conform to task quite well. I've been wanting to do something similar to this for a fair while, and I'd love to be a part of it. As it stands, I can't do ANYTHING with the Construction Set as of yet, not even with Tutorials, so being able to WRITE the storyline and everything behind it would be great.

[juderodney]

If you're worried about someone getting so much money at the beginning of a new game, just start this quest after a certain point. (e.g. the Main Quest) That would take care of anyone getting super-rich super-early.

[QQuix]

Thanks, VincentAlliath.

As it is now, I am working on the mod 'engine'. It will take me a few months to finish it. Only then I will know which requirements and restrictions the engine will impose on the story line and side quests. And only them I will really start to analize/filter/select/merge the ideas presented by the community.

But, although the particular details of each individual idea will not be considered until then, they are all very important at this stage of the development. Just to give you (and other potential contributors) a couple of recent examples from just a few posts back: (1) I just added a new requirement to the 'rules' to be implemented in the engine based on an IHRE's suggestion for the sewer. (2) Elraine raised the LOD concern, which will make me (and others, I hope) keep an eye for possible solutions, which, in turn, may force some change on the engine, which may impose new restrictions to the storyline.

As you see, the ideas presented here affect the engine development and the engine specs will affect the implementation of the suggestions. It's like a spiral. I am now at the third turn of that spiral (third version of the engine). Each version is better than the previous because of the ideas presented by the community.

All of the above is a way to tell you: Please, add your ideas/suggestions/contributions to this topic. They are important and certainly welcome.

If you're worried about someone getting so much money at the beginning of a new game, just start this quest after a certain point. (e.g. the Main Quest) That would take care of anyone getting super-rich super-early.

Yes, that is an option.

[rondivu]

I'm new to this thread also, but I have been reading many of the suggestions. I am aware that you are starting to examine ideas of other NPC's and I have just come to the realization about NPC importance.

I don't mean the standard farmers, the masonry workers, the miners, etc, that are automated NPC's, but important figures that would help grow or strengthen the community as major contributors, earning you a fame as well as friendship.

What I mean to say is that it would be good for the character to be able to, after a certain developmental stage of the town/city, recruit certain individuals that are Masters of, say, Masonry.

However, these have more than an unusual requirement for obtaining their services (i.e. sidequest and miniquests).

Lets go back to that Master Mason (call him Bob). You hear rumors that Bob used to work for another province, was a great Mason but due to the death of his wife and child in a localized war, now spends his time drunk at the new pub (that you've just developed). You (as the character) try to help him get back on his feet, but he refuses and wants another drink.

Afterwhich the path to obtaining him depends on characters choices (which will ultimately affect his behavior towards you). The closer you are to becoming his acquaintance (first by getting him to stop drinking minisidequest) to friendship (getting him sober, helping him through tough times, and finally getting him established back into society) which will then give you a Master Mason as part of the work force, that reduces costs, or helps build stuff for you as a bonus to your house, etc. They won't effectively detract from city development, but rather, sidequests to strengthen what you already have.

A few of these SNPC's could be in various locations (Tamriel too), etc, but the idea is recruitement of authoritative and specialized NPC's to help to strengthen the community interaction as well as involvement with story and characters. This way, it really FEELS like you're town, with good friends (they don't all have to be master types, they could just be people to help build the town AND be you're friends/allies) OR underlings depending on the choices you've made and how you cut deals etc. (had to put the bad side in there too).

Afterwards, these character can be recruited as part of your council (if you choose to have one) or your war party (some are capable anyway), or they can take over the operations of certain things in the city for you (freeing up some time to do other things).

IDEA 2:
Just as an afterthought, if you're the CHAMPION, what happens to all you're skills and magic? You must be A master of a few skills and magical abilites, or alchemy, etc, so why not impart knowledge to help the community?

For instance, the Fighters Guild will be recruiting and they ask you to do a viewing. Your "special NPC" friend tells you that they seem lacking in weapons or skills. So she/he asks you what to do. You can help them about by training them at a specific ability or improve their equipment => thus improving the cities guardsman capabilities.

Or the Local Blacksmith isn't up to par for demand (i.e. he needs recruites or he isn't skilled enough to furnish the guards when they are in need of more arrows) then you can put in your time and expertise by helping him produce more (at the cost of your time obviously).

Anyway, that's all for now. Keep Modding!

[VincentAlliath]

So I was just checking out your original post a bit more, and thinking of Quest lines. I suddenly realized something. I had an idea for a storyline. It's still developing in my head as I write this, and I think I've got a good storyline setting up, and it doesn't require you to be Champion of Cyrodiil or anything. You can be anyone you want. Good character/Bad character. It doesn't matter. Anyone can do it.
I got parts of this idea from the idea I had for the new TES 5.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I personally hate those quests that you "have [suddenly] heard about". Something that you actually DO hear about is better.
So basically, you're walking through the Anvil Docks, and as you pass a [new] ship, you are stopped and forced to watch (like the Thoronir Quest) as two Imperial City Guards (yes, in Anvil), leave the ship and begin to speak about "that island". They'll be speaking about how when they retire from the force, they'll move out there, maybe start a farm.
(If needs be, you can have a new Black Horse Courier printout that a man delivers to you and it talks about the Imperial Presence in the Docks or something. Where the Guards said nothing about what was happening. Then, you get a marker to the docks.)

From there, things seem to get worse. You speak to the Captain of the ship (who was speaking about the island), and he tells you to leave, that he doesn't want to speak to you.
You get off the ship, and a man (a pirate, to be exact) comes up and asks you to meet him in Fo'c'sle, or the Bloated Float. He tells you to hire a room, and you do, and he comes in after midnight. When you talk to him, he talks about how he saw you on the ship, and he asks you if you'd like to know what they were doing.
When you say Yes (which you have to say. If you weren't interested, why were you asking the Captain of the ship?), he tells you that there are a group of "their kind" who also want to meet. A group who want the Imperial Presence gone.

Now, you have a bit of choice. You can say, "Maybe I will help you, Pirate." or, "You're a Pirate! Why would I want to help you?". Something along those lines, anyway.

The first option: He says, "That's more like it...", and tells you what you have to do. Which is to sneak onto the ship, and find a map.

The second option: He says, "No no! I'm not a pirate... I'm... a protester! I just want to go back to having the Anvil guards... these Imperial Guards have taken over our docks!"
At this point, you agree with him, and he tells you to go get the map.


No matter which option you choose, he'll tell you that they'll be stocking the ship that night, so all the guards will be at the Anvil gates at 6:00 PM. When you get on the ship, and you look around for the map (which isn't in the cabin), a Guard comes in, followed by the Pirate, and the Pirate says, "There he is! I told you you'd find him here!"
The Guard arrests you, and tells you that you're not going to normal jail. You'll be going to a... high security place. So you're transported to the ship's hold, and you get an update saying that you've been knocked out and thrown into the ship's hold. There is absolutely no exit. Just a trapdoor in the roof that is "bolted shut". You've had all your things taken (and they will be available at the end of your jailtime). If you sleep longer than 10 hours, you'll be interrupted by a Dark Elf and two Orcs. There will be other prisoners in the hold, and they'll walk around.

The Dark Elf tells you to follow him. With past experience of these sorts of people (the pirate), you say, "Why should I?". At this, he replies, "If you don't, my friends here will have a bit of fun with their new boxing bag!" so you follow the Dark Elf into the very bottom of the ship's hold (the Orc's stay behind).
To make this easier on my, I'm going to script format this. It'll be very brief. The actual thing will need more detail.

PC: So what's this about?
Prisoner: A rebellion! Surely we can get out of here with cooperation. You look like you might be able to do some damage... So what do you say?
PC: No. They have weapons and we have none.

When he does this, he summons a Bound Dagger and stabs you. You can't fight back. Instead, you pass out.

You come to and you're at sea (night time) on the Top deck of the ship (which isn't exactly a normal ship. It should be huge.). The rebelling prisoner is dead on the ground with the Orcs.

The ship's Captain approaches you.

Captain: I don't know if you had anything to do with him, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. That male without a father started screaming about how you'd cut yourself on a shard of iron down there. Well, our Medic went down there with another guard. Sure enough, you were lying there in a pool of blood with the shard of iron next to you.
Our Medic began to do his thing, and then two Orcs rushed the guards, and that male without a father there rushed the medic. The Medic and the Guards killed them, and then brought you up here... so did you have anything to do with it?
PC: I tried to tell him it was a bad idea.
Captain: Good.
*Sigh* Look. We'll put you in a spare bunk for the rest of the trip, okay? We can't turn back now to take you back to land, so you'll have to come. And it's not like we'll be going back any time soon after landing. Not until the community is ready to sustain more settlers. Your gear is in a chest inside my Cabin. I'll have it returned to you.
PC: Community? Where are we going?
Captain: You don't know?

At this point, the captain tells you the story of where they're going, and how you'll be free to go aboard land for whatever you need to do.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


That's all I've got for now... Happy with that so far? If you are, I'll keep going.

EDIT: Forgot to mention... As time builds up, you'll be able to commission a house on the island. You can end up with multiple houses with this, given that the houses will be on different parts of the island. You'll get to a point where you can rent them out, and you'll receive an amount of gold at the end of each week into a chest at the Real estate if you DO build a house.

Houses in Town.
-A shack. Similar to the Imperial City Waterfront Shack, but with less furniture. Those chairs in front of the fireplace piss me off. "Return in two days, and it'll be ready for you!" The rent on this place is 50 gold a week.
-A house. Similar to the Bruma House, although built of stone, and only one storey. "Return in a week, and it'll be ready for you!" The rent on this place is 300 gold a week.
-A mansion. Cheydinhal Style. Two weeks. 1350 gold per week to rent it.

Houses Outside Town.
-A tent. Tent with door, like the ones at the bottom of the hill of Kvatch. Takes one day to set up. Can't be rented. Good for hunters. Located by a stream, in a small clearing (relatively safe to get to. Surrounded by deer. Occasionally wolves/lions. Bigger animals on other parts of island. Takes about a minute from the main docks).
-Wilderness Cabin. Four days to set up. Can't be rented. Similar to Roland Jenseric's Wilderness Cabin. (Other notes similar to tent.)
-Tower. Five weeks. Can't be rented. Good for any type of character. Similar to Cyrodiil ruins, but intact. Rather than a castle, I figure a tower would be a nice change. Like a half-sized version of the Wizard's Tower Downloadable Package.

That's me done for now.

EDIT 2: Thought of another thing. We'll need mines... Caves are for monsters, mines are for miners. This mod, Miners n Pickaxes gives the player ownership of a mine. A system like this would be good, although the player shouldn't own the mine. I just figure that the Mine owners would need a working system like this... and, if you can do it, this would create an actual income for some NPCs.

[bshaeffer]

You ...could... create coins / tokens that weigh 1 or 0.5 each (or whatever).
That way, weight itself can limit how much 'money' the player can haul away.
High end weapons and armor will probably be worth more anyway.

If you avoid normal gold coins for currency, players can't "cheat" financially.
To get a house or horse (or whatever) you trade however many tokens.
A lot of them might weigh a lot - there could be NPC couriers to carry money.
Letters of credit from a treasury might also work for large transactions.

The CS value of each token can be whatever you want.
What a player can get for them in Cyrodiil will depend on Mercantile skill.

I sometimes wonder how physically bulky cash would play.

[ihateregisteringeverywhere]

Dagerfall had physically bulky cash and it worked great. Atleast in my opnion, you'd have to place your money in a bank and only carry small amounts of currency, so that you're not overweight all of the time.

To be honest the whole game felt kind of.... gave you a feeling of achievment. The world was huge, the quests complicated, the dungeons hard, traveling dangerous etc etc.

[QQuix]

I suppose it is time for another progress report:

I've just finished the scripts that handle the processes.

I have implemented the concept of leveled buildings/sites. At the moment, I am considering 3 levels for each building. Each upgrade improves its productivity. E.g. a Sawmill level 1 takes 1 log and produces 2 boards, a Sawmill level 2 would produce 3 boards and a Sawmill level 3 would produce 4 boards out of the same log.

At the moment there are three processes:
1- Housing process - handles house upgrades
2- Building process - handles upgrades of production buildings (e.g. Sawmill) and areas (e.g. Farms)
3- Production process - handles the daily production on each production site.

A process runs if its requirements are met. The types of requirements considered so far are:
1- Items (consumed) - e.g. Seeds are consumed to produce food
2- Building (consumed) - e.g. a level 1 building is 'consumed' when upgraded to level 2
3- Items (present) - e.g. you must have X units of food in stock in order to hire a new NPC (the food is not consumed in the process).
4- Building (present) - e.g. a Granary must be created before you upgrade a Farm to level 3.
5- House (available) - a compatible house must be available to be the home of the professional (I am assuming, for the time being, that the NPC is upgraded when its working place is upgraded)

Nice thing about those is that the values come from an .ini file, so if will be easier for me to adjust them later down the road, when fine tuning the processes.

Next, I will work on NPC processes, meaning: a fourth process to handle NPC upgrades.

I guess the requirements may be any of the above, plus:
- A certain amount of time working on a certain profession

I still must consider whether it is feasible / desirable to keep separate experience levels by profession or just a single, global level.

I will let you know when I finish it . . . and suggestions are always welcome.

- - - - - -

MONEY
Another possibility for money is to have it only at the Island Treasury in such a way that money in the treasury would be just another global indicator like Happiness or Health. As a matter of fact I don’t see much use for money in the island. At early stages the island production of raw materials will be used to improve the community. Only later, when you start to have significant surplus and have build some specialized buildings (like larger docks and trade offices) you will start to export and the resulting money would go to the treasury. Treasury money and player money would not mix. The player could not use his own money to accelerate the evolution and would not be allowed to take money from the treasury.
Of course, the player could use his money at shops or inns as he would in any other town, but this would have no effect in the evolution of the community.

P.S. My son gave me the CivCity: Rome for Christmas. It is fun. And it is somehow related to this work, as it has many professions and a chain of dependencies. But it has also many things that I don’t intend to have here, like geographical distribution of goods. It seems like an evolution of The Settlers.