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.

I'm not very familiar with how mod merging works. Do you need a separate program, or is it fairly straight forward to add esp and esm in the CK? Also, you should start a wordpress/blogspot site so we can compile ideas, show progress, and keep things organized. Have you written some basics synopsis for the settings and plots?

I'd love to help. This past month I've taken the time to learn the CK so I'm likely similar to mellophonist's skills (though he/she appears a bit better than myself). I could decently contribute in: -Navmeshing -vvveerrryyy basic scripting -Dungeon/interior design -Optimization -writing and dialogue I can't do voice acting atm as I don't possess a mic, though this might change. I'm also a huge nerd and pretty good at brainstorming all things fiction and fantasy.

That's what I'm currently doing, but they still seem to settle anyway. Is it because I'm trying to stick them through a static object like a crate?

Hey, finalizing my first interior I've made learning to mod, but run into some problems that I can't find the solutions to. -I've set up a gargoyle trap but when you get close to the gargoyle you can hear them panting. This kind of eliminates the surprise when the ambush gets triggered. Is there any way to delete this sound until they break out of stone form? -Don't settle on Havok just won't work: I have two swords sticking out of objects, but they keep either settling anyways or, if I use the script "defaultdisablehavokonload" they end up staying still but not in the position I intended. -Hearing NPCs through walls: I can hear NPC through wall if I'm in close proximity, but its unrealistic as there supposed to be large stone walls in between them. I thought "acoustic spaces" we're supposed to fix this, but this seems to be a different thing entirely. Any help is much appreciated.

I'm glad you like my idea. The only reason I'm still going to vouch for initiates island is because A: It allows for a social dynamic by adding in various initiates you must compete with and B: Since there's already an expedition to sarthal, I think it my be a bit repetitive to have "lets go on an expedition to an island. (player finish modders quest) Now your back, lets go on an expedition to Sarthal!" It be fun to have say, 4 other initiates with you who all have strengths and flaws. However, they all get killed on the island due to giving in to some desire or lack of wisdom. For instance, there could be a room of muting (think of Potemas cavern with that weird drain effect). One of the initiates is an extremely powerful mage (much stronger than you), but physically frail. In this room his magic is suddenly useless and he's killed by an enemy because he's physically frail. Hopefully as a mage player you're not overly multifaceted in your skills and so find the sudden loss of magic a real challenge. Another situation could be an initiate losing control in their desire for magical power. They gain an item/power on initiates island that allows allows near limitless access to daedra. However this initiate summons too much, loses control, and is killed by their summons. Player must then defeat said summons. (The item reward could be interesting for this scenario, though I don't know how well the scripting would work. It could be a ring that allows the player one or two extra summons, but with a 35% chance your second or third summon is hostile to the player.) Anyways, I'm ranting. New islands no matter how small are awesome. Why? Because a lot of the veteran skyrim players (especially mod users) have already clocked 400+ hours into the game. The problem with adding current dungeons, quests, items to the original skyrim worldspace is that.....its in the original skyrim worldspace....the one we've played for 400+ hours. With an Island, (or new valley/mountainscape, like the lost vale etc) the new landscape is just a huge refresher. I'm a brand new modder, but I'm going to release my dungeon I learned the C.K. hopefully sometime this weekend. Was a real learning experience for me, but slowly learning the ropes. I think I can help out with one of your interior cells.

Wonderful idea! The largest problem with the mages guild questline is that.....you don't really need to be a mage to do it. Once you get past the door, and the scripted ward spell class, I don't really remember anything pertaining to magic for completing the quest. So, I'd recommend: -Magic based puzzles. -Enemy encounters where magic is required to win. How about this: the Island of initiation. This way, you can start from scratch on your quest, and not have the complicated process of trying to interject within the Winterhold storyline itself. (unless that's what your ultimate goal is) between Muribel and when you cast the spell to cross the bridge, you could run into some guy who states: Some Mage blocking the front door: "Are you ready to depart, initiate?" Player: "What?" SMBTFD: "To Initiates Island, of course. What, you thought casting a simple spell allows you to join the ranks of our esteemed college?" Player: "Well.....I just thought....." SMBTFD: "No matter, I'll be departing soon with the rest of the potential students. You can find us in the docks below the college if you think you possess the magical fortitude." The Island can have a storyline that has more to it than just a big place for testing. Also, lots of drama between you and your fellow initiates (competing for a limited number of slots at the College)

1. Lack of immersion. Skryim lacked the "detailed" touch of Morrowind and Oblivion. Think of the empty Thalmor embassy in Solitude: it was that kind of stuff that irked me while I played. We shouldn't have to have great mods like "whiterun outskirts market," that should have been realeased with the game in the first place. Had bethesda delayed the game's release by 6 months and spent that whole time just doodling and filling the worldspace in the CK the game would have been a much more polished product. Remember the complexity of the castles in Oblivion, with their secret rooms and thief friendly robbing environments? Remember the small attention to detail in Morrowind in something like a guardhouse? Skyrim missed that in favor of releasing a more flashy but hollow product earlier. 2. Unique melee combat: After playing chivalry: medieval warfare, you realize how much more original a 1st person melee combat system can be. LMB.....LMB....BLOCK....POWER ATTACK.... over and over again simply got old. How about some parry, stabbing, overhead and left vs right swings? Real differences between swords, maces, and daggers than just speed and reach? Skryim's combat was merely Oblivion's with an extra bit of polish. (in some ways, worse, why get rid of hit physics!) 3. Quests, storylines, and factions. Dawnguard was probably the only decently paced and developed quest in the game.....and even it had some major flaws. (meaningless choices that lead to the same conclusion.) In Morrowind, one felt a desire to work for Morrowind's faction so as to break through the sense of being an "outlander." Working with the factions to try and make your place in the world. Oblivion's quests were generally more interesting. For the next elder scrolls, I'll take 5 decent Dawnguard quality storylines vs 15 mages guild ones.

Its def time for the modders to pool together and make some DLC worthy content. So far its all been graphics/gameplay/items/utilities. What has been produced by the community in this regard has been phenomenal, no question, but there really hasn't been the "world content" explosion I was expecting since Skyrim's release. Its time to make new dungeons, new quests, new landscapes, new voice actors and factions. Has a team of modders ever thought of getting compensation for the effort of creating a full fledged DLC worthy mod? If they, for instance, charged 1 dollar for every download of their mod it would give them a nice incentive to finish the mod and make sure its a polished product. Or is it totally illegal to sell anything made in the Creation Kit?

I'm about 25% done with a short quest mod myself, and I've been going for a quality over quantity approach. I'd like it to play seamlessly within Skryim and feel like any other quest you could run across in the vanilla game. In other words, I don't want anyone to get that "oh, this is a mod," feeling while playing through my dungeons. Sometimes playing a modder's dungeon I just get this bland, amorphous box kind of feel to their worldspaces/interiors. Bethesda designers just have that "touch" that makes the difference between a cell with a bunch of copy-pasted hallways and a dungeon you can really get lost and immersed in.

From what you guys are saying it seems modifying base skyrim has some built in difficulties when trying to fix the immersion problems of the game. I think the best project possible would be to simply make a whole new world space. An island, say, that's a 1/4 the size of the original skyrim's size but is meticulous in its details and feels fully realized from the bottom up. Instead of 5 empty, lifeless cities have one legitimate city that feels alive. Shops, beggars, sewers, alleyways, neighborhoods, nobles, brothels, and a fully visualized economy. It should be surrounded by farms, even suburbs. It needs to have its mansion estates to rob and slums that you can get lost and feel endangered in. The landscape outside can't just be a bland repetition of the same trees, ponds, etc etc. The small touches that oblivion had in its "unique landscapes" mod made the difference between shutting the game off or constantly saying "just one more hour.." I think the main problem comes is dealing with the console limitations. Its the standard that Bethesda makes the game with while on the P.C. we can push boundaries as we get a better feel of the limitations on the engine. I'd much rather play a detailed and fully realized new world than a patched up Skyrim that has a large helping of makeup.