chacotaco91

I personally prefer text over poorly done voice acting or voice acting that lacks content and feels rushed. Bethesda's choice to make the player character voiced was a really bad decision for their "freedom of choice" Fallout and Elder Scrolls games due to reducing its RPG elements and making it more difficult for the modders to add their own content. My "ideal" 1st released overhaul mod would accomplish -Completely ditching voice acting for the player, though keeping all his same dialogue throughout the game in text form. Thus, when modders add NPCs they just have to worry about voicing those. -An "expanded main quest." Altered start, more missions and objectives mixed throughout the story. -More traditional RPG elements to gameplay: more interesting perks, the need to use melee weapons to conserve ammo, enemies with specific resistances, food/hunger, weather/elements survival system, ammo crafting, etc -Harder difficulties that involve something more than "ENEMIES TAKE A LOT OF BULLETS"

Since the Skyrim mod scene is littered with unfinished, half-started mods (which is sad, seeing that if all the work of those half-finished efforts were combined, they would form into a complete mod) I'd say tempering your enthusiasm will pay dividends for you in the long run. Having that "finished" mod feel (for a new lands/quest mod) is something I've only really seen in maybe wrysmooth and Helgen reborn, and I believe the amount of time, patience, and effort that goes into that process is pretty staggering. Often times I'll play a quest mod, and it's the little things that kill the package: a room that isn't properly cluttered, or a dungeon that felt rushed in development. My recommendation? Focus the mod around your particular modding strengths and try to simplify everything else. If you like making dungeons, but finding scripting a drag, have dungeon filled goodness with a more limited questing system (lots of notes that trigger quests, for instance). Also, one thing I've noticed just looking at forums and such is a lot of modders have difficulty with the voice actors (and thus quest formation part) of their mod. I'm not sure if that's a totally astute observation, but just putting that out there. I've always had an idea for a new lands mod that involved a new Island that you go to with on some kind of expidition. It would be mostly heavy on the dungeons and landscape and exploration would be an intergral part of advancing the storyline. The only NPCs would be those from the boat waiting on shore, and it would be simplifed down to a few people to trade with and a few characters who progress the story.

Hey, I'm having a problem. I have an NPC that is lying dead in a manner that tells a story. However, he has a master vampire nearby that always summons said NPC when in conflict with the player. I want to make this dead NPC non-summonable/resurrected. Is there a script I can put on this corpse, or a tweak on the master vampire to stop this from occurring? thanks

I'm with the "As Night Began" beginning Mod team if you want to check it out: (http://www.darkcreations.org/forums/forum/437-as-night-began/) Hopefully, when we have a lot of content to show off more people will jump on board: particularly a talented scripter. We'd love to have you if you're up for it. Right now we're just creating the interiors and worldspace, meaning we mostly just need people familiar with the C.K. basics to go in there and create content.

That's not what I meant. He doesn't need to make some huge quest mod, just some small additions to get his material out there and usable by other modders if he feels he doesn't have the motivation to do a huge, long term project.

That looks like wayyyy too good of work to throw away. All you need is: -a few people to make interiors -A simple quest line that gives the people a reason to go to the island and a short something to do. That's it! Then, just allow people to mod your worldspace with their own quests, dungeons etc. As the previous commenter said: since the DLCs are done, a brand new land by modders is desperately needed.

Looks like some great work! Can't wait to give it a playthrough.

This is beyond my technical knowledge, but it seems the problem is that the beyond Skyrim uses a universal height map to try and maximize compatibility for those creating separate provinces. In my opinion having the highest possible functionality between the various High Rock modders is the way to go. Particularly in trying to use as many of the similar assets as possible, so that if we do ever find a way to combine (portal gates between invisible lore spaces) there will be some sense of continuity. I'm not totally sure of course, as this is the first time I've even heard of beyond skyrim.

Quick question: do we need to communicate with the beyond skyrim teams? It seems there's a lot of different mod teams (with much more manpower than ours) trying to accomplish High Rock individually by region (though seemingly with some overlap. It looked like two teams were having difficulty figuring out how to do Northpoint after they realized they were in competition, which was only exacerbated by the fact that one team is German and the other English) Thankfully (or sadly?) however, Wayrest doesn't seem to have been picked up by any mod team, so I think its yours to grab. Some people seem to be running ideas, throwing some models around and making some layouts, but more than anything it seems like nobody has put out as much content as yourself. (plot and worldspace.) Anyways your download worked! So far, you've got a real eye for making natural enviroments: citys that feel like cities especially. Thankfully, with beyond skyrim's help, we can start pooling in Assets to make the player feel immersed in a land far from Skyrim. Also: Docks, Docks, Docks!...... Wayrest is all about its Docks, and it seems High Rock (from the wiki) has had a long, long history with problematic pirates and corsairs. (The Dark Brotherhood of Wayrest was sacked by Corsairs! that would make for an interesting dungeon). We definitely need a dirty, dingy dock workers questline, involving disgruntled revolutionary workers and cut-throat merchants.

Just got back from work, so I'm ready to get started. FYI, I work 4-5 days a week, very long shifts, but have ample free time on my off days. When I downloaded Wayrest.7zip, I got the warning "unexpected end of archive." I was able to load it in the C.K. but when I looked for the worldspace there wasn't anything new listed. Quick question: I noticed that Wayrest ESP has only one master: skyrim.esm only and not update.esm as well. When I'm modding, should I avoid checking update.esm? i.e. does it cause problems? I thought it would be the way to go since everyone is forced to use the update via steam, but would it complicate things if Bethesda releases major updates? Anyhoo, just made a sourceforge account, and my screename is the same: chacotaco91

Sourceforge seems more legit than mediafire. At this point, us just getting hold of the ESP to poke about seems like the most important step. I'd imagine constant data transfer becomes more important later on in the project. Anyhoo, there's a few problems I see in not using at least Dawnguard DLC as a major resource. Dragonborn is meh, as solstheim is pretty far from High Rock. 1: crossbows. They're just cool, and I really see the town/city militia of High Rock, manned by the smaller stature Breton's having more affinity to crossbows than say, longbows. 2. The Vampire enemies/assets work well with some of your Vampire Plots (I think I saw more than one.) 3. The Skyrim wiki states: "Bretons are said to enjoy intellectual pursuits; they often have an affinity for anything related to logic and ordered complexity" So, I have a difficult time seeing a lot of their architecture being real loosey goosey, or that "flowing nordic style" the NPCs in Skyrim talk about. The Volikhair castle architecture wasn't overly used and definitely has a more structured look to it. If we could get it retextured to be a little bit brighter and less vampiresque... we could have a pretty decent new Castle resource to use. Also, a lot of the Snow Elf assets looked really good, though they were often oversized. Now that I think about it, I imagine southern High Rock as having almost Northern Italian-like architecture for some reason. (Solitude decent?) Just my 2 cents. I should also note that the mod webpage I listed: the beyond modding team, are also making a particular region of High Rock (Northpoint). It might be a good idea maybe swap ideas or maybe even content.

Also, need to know about modders Resources: I own all DLC except Hearthfire. Will we use both dragonborn and dawnguard, or one or neither? What are the main architectural themes? -I'm guessing Dwemer in Skyrim will work as intended -I'm guessing no Nordic ruins or assets (or maybe a few?) I think lore wise, Nords did settle in High Rock some. -Imperial forts seem pretty universally good to go, though we could probably use some textures that reflect stone in a warmer enviroment. -Lots of use of the Reach area aesthetic. I'm trying to get your idea of what you want the general Wayrest aesthetic to be.

Yes, blogspot is free. I believe you only pay if you want fancy features or to have a url without blogspot.com at the end. If mediafire doesn't work, is it possible to host it on the nexus and make it hidden except for a select few users? Also, I assume most of us are familiar with torrents, though I'm not sure how one would go about uploading one. (I guess we would all just have to make sure we we're torrenting at the same time, lol.) I'd get the main homepage up asap before we start getting too complicated on this one forum (or what you were talking about: a nexus forum page just for the mod) Pool all the resources together on the forum and we'll start calling out what we're working on. Then, post Pics on the blog showing how each of us is coming along. I'll get started on my first dungeon (starting something simple, as I'm probably the least experienced here), I'll do cavern number 11, generic with spiders. Also, as I've just released my learning dungeon (called Prisoner's Peak) on the nexus and I'm ready to put some of my new CK skills to the test!

I think this is the way to go: a well defined area with high attention to detail and testing. Trying to fill out a a worldspace bigger than say, half the size of Skyrim's would probably lead to some corner cutting and quality loss for a mod team. One of my biggest gripes with Skyrim is it seemed as though Bethesda could have spent around 6 more months just tinkering in the C.K. before the game's release. Things just weren't fleshed out enough, from city interiors (talking about you, empty Thalmor embassy in solitude!) to those little interesting areas that should have dotted the landscape more (abandoned cabins, caved in mine doors, graves, battlefield remains etc etc.) Elder Scrolls games are all about immersion, which itself is reliant on doing all the little stuff right. If you fail that then all your left is just a mediocre hack and slash game with a lot of walking. What do we have to work with in term of modder's resources? Probably can't stick a bunch of Nordic ruins around High Rock lol.

Glad this mod is taking place in High Rock, as its one of the lands of Tamriel I've really, really wanted to see get realizzed. Just saw your Worldspace and it looks great! Also perused through your plot, seems very solid. Actually when all is said and done the plot itself isn't that important, as most stories broken down follow fairly similar patterns. Its all about characters, execution, pace, and atmosphere. From what I've garnered, blogspot is simple to use and allows for multiple site masters with different levels of control. For instance, you could give me rights to make posts (like showing pics of an interior), but you as the main site master you could say, control comments or who does or doesn't have access to posting. I'm fairly sure wordpress has similar features but I couldn't say which one is superior. Anyways, here's an example of the Beyond Modding team's use of blogspot for their homepage: http://beyondmodding.blogspot.com/ I think it would be the best option as it kind of keep things "clean" using a blog site. We'll avoid getting lost in the sheer deluge of content on the nexus and having to jump from forum to forum trying to pool ideas.