Drakevarg

Just to be clear - are you just stabbing Dagoth Ur to death and leaving, or are you destroying the Heart of Lorkhan? Because only the latter actually stops him. Doing so SHOULD teleport you to the Ghostgate entrance where you have a chat with Azura. If you are doing so and not getting anything out of it then yeah, seems your game is bugged. Not sure what to do then.

I've always wanted to see a version of the Dwemer Ballista from Dragonborn altered to look closer to the inert ones in Morrowind ruins, but I imagine that would require a wholly new animation skeleton.

Can't be that complicated compared to modeling. :P

I'm aware of the Red Year, yes. Actually considered making a mod around it once. No, when I say global I mean GLOBAL. 99% of the human race dead, everything significantly larger than a horse that doesn't live underwater or underground extinct, and most of the global climate altered significantly. Puerto de Cenizas is just one tiny island in the southeast with a current population of well under 1,000 (in-universe, not just due to engine limitations). I'm not just referring to the aesthetics of the island, but the state the entire world is in at the time this game takes place.

I see. Sounds very Skyrim. :P How do bounding boxes work exactly? Sounds an important thing to know, especially if one were inclined to, say, make boats that actually moved rather than teleporting you.

Sounds like it could be a fun project. Maybe try to find some kind of middle ground that keeps a bit more of the classic look? As a side note, finally came up with a rough region map for my island. Open to change as the project is developed obviously, but it's a starting point: http://i328.photobucket.com/albums/l352/Drakevarg/Puerto%20de%20Cenizas%20-%20Rough%20Regions_zpszcyzwpcw.jpg Brown = Mountain Grey = Cliffs Dark Green = Marshy Light Green = Grasslands Yellow = Desert Tan = Beachfront The world at the time the game takes place is recovering from a global volcanic apocalypse (sort of - more like divine wrath in the form of a mountain-sized dragon, but similar results), resulting in a tiny population and massive desertification. Anyway, the important take-away is that my map isn't just a vague white blob and it'll be much easier to figure out what everyone is doing now.

Nice work! Honestly I always liked the Morrowind Dwemer ruins myself, but it is an improvement at least to not make EVERYTHING rust-orange. But certainly everyone has their own tastes. How'd you get a working lift? Somehow I feel that would cause clipping issues where your character would keep wanting to recheck where the floor was every tick. Morrowind never seemed especially friendly for moving scenery.

Hah, believe me I know the feeling. But there is a middle ground to be had there. :P

Nothing wrong with a showcase in my eyes. Makes for a good portfolio in a pinch. X3

No doubt. It's half the fun of a decent sandbox RPG. Shame modern ones mostly just go for the "collect ALL the litter!" approach.

That could be interesting. Though it also runs the risk of being kind of underwhelming once you finally got the powerup out of it. "I waited half a year for THIS?," that kind of thing.

Hiring VAs before the dialogue is finished sounds incredibly short-sighted to me. Because as you say, plans change. Sometimes what seemed like a good idea on the first draft sounds utterly stilted on a later reading, and entire subplots are cut out or added. Text is easy to change, voice recordings notsomuch. Since I'm a writer at heart, my mod is definitely going to be story first assets as needed, with a middle ground as pragmatism demands. My current plan is finish the map overview plan > base the faction war questlines around the geography > figure out a main plot > fill in the blanks for the rest as seems most organic. Once I do that I should have something I would be willing to define was a "storyboard" instead of a "blurb."

Could be. Especially if there were multiple such rituals. The main one I had in mind is that one of the factions in my game has a ritual to fuse fire spirits to their weapons, but it only works in the middle of the summer. (Mages aren't a thing in the setting in the traditional sense, so enchanting can only be done through careful ceremony and so on.) I'll leave it on the backburner, see what comes of it.

No, just nocturnal. I'm mostly an evening person. My setting isn't Earth, of course. Reason I picked Spanish is kind of involved in terms of my setting's lore, but basically the Sailor's Tongue had its origins in deserters from a pair of nations that have been waging a mostly-naval war on and off for literally thousands of years. Those nations spoke Romance languages, so Spanish seemed like a good fit for a language that broke off and mutated from that. I just mean a basic overview of the plot like what the Star Wars movies have at the beginning with the scrolling yellow text. Y'know basic "here's where we are, here's the major players involved, here's a vague allusion to what it's building to." Nothing specific or what could be called a storyline, more like a step or two past an elevator pitch.

My setting stringently avoids gibberish words, Spanish just happens to be the proxy language for what's known as the "Sailor's Tongue," a sort of international maritime creole. Since the primary force attempting to settle the island is in fact pirates, that's the language they went with. I have zero intentions of having the regions correspond in any way with those squares, they're just there to help me keep track of scale and divvy up workloads. Part of why I'm working on projects like this in parallel with my studies instead of afterwards. Real-world knowledge to go with academic instruction. Besides, sometimes employers just want to see the paper. I'll keep that in mind when I've got something more than a Star Wars opening scrawl to offer. :tongue:

It's less "dump the idea because it'd be hard to do," it's "dump the idea because it simply wouldn't be much fun for the player even if I think it's neat." Telling the player they can only get a certain item during certain months of the year might work for an MMO, but in a singleplayer game it just feels like a punishment for not playing the way I want them to.

Thankfully I'm not quite so ambitious as to ever want to make my own AAA game. I blame most of the problems of modern game development on a shallow money-on-the-table approach. We don't need three million dollars spent on realistic sweat rendering nearly as much as we need developers who actually understand intelligent game design, and narrative-through-gameplay. And indie games prove all the time that heart, intelligence, and luck can make games just as successful as blockbuster budgets. It's always kind of hilarious when upstart hits like Minecraft and Undertale make bank with a shoestring budget and word of mouth. Not saying I wouldn't do mercenary work on big studio games to pay the bills, but keep my IP away from such nonsense, I don't need some idiot in a suit telling me how to make a game that sells. And to be fair, the times they've a-changed. I've been told that with such a degree I could easily make more than my parents put together doing "real jobs" in between my games. I think trust issues are part of the issue for me. Unless I knew my team really well I couldn't trust them to do things the way I want them too without personally reviewing every single thing they did, which I'm sure would get overbearing after a while. Part of why I'm motivated to have at least a basic understanding of how to do everything, so I'm not just some ignorant schlubb asking for things that don't work. As for storyboard, I have a basic idea and a few details in mind beyond that, but I want to finish planning out the overmap (subregions, locations of main settlements, etc) before I get into too much detail there. Gameplay informs story and vice versa, so I want the realities of the setting in place before I worry about what happens once you're there. Quite a bit of the story is set to go simply by virtue of knowing the world around it. I know who is in play and why they're there, I think most everything else will kind of write itself once I know the island specifically. That said, one factor still totally up in the air is the player character themselves. I don't want the faction war to be the main plot because a) it's just one tiny front of a fairly large scale war, so who wins ultimately doesn't matter much to the setting at large, and b) if the player simply opts not to care then all we have is a sandbox to muck about in. I need a story that either threatens everyone in the region equally, or affects the player character personally, making the story their problem and not just something they got dragged into. Sort of like comparing the Civil War questline to the main questline in Skyrim, if either of them felt actually finished. Edit: Here's the map I have of the island, Puerto de Cenizas, just so it's clear I'm not all pipe dream. http://i328.photobucket.com/albums/l352/Drakevarg/Puerto%20de%20Cenizas_zpsldh3coe0.jpg The lines crossing through it denote a square of 5x5 cells. (But geez that white is harsh on such a dark-toned forum. Might need to go color the water at least just so it doesn't blind passers-by. >_<) Edit 2: That's moderately more tolerable.

Sounds simple enough. Are there dialogue cues that can be linked to specific time periods? There's a couple of lofty ideas bouncing around in my head that will almost certainly be dumped as impractical for reasonable gameplay, but I kinda like idea of magic rituals that can only be performed during specific times of the year.

If I had to give myself a niche it'd probably be writer/director, but I'm picky enough to want to understand at least the basics of almost everything - I'm presently pursuing a Software Development degree with that in mind. Part of the reason I'm so picky about my work is that I spend a lot of time analyzing and studying game development as an art form, so I look at some of the games I consider artistic masterpieces - Thief II, Metroid Prime, Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, and yes Morrowind - and try to understand what it is that made them work, a process I don't think most people take as much time to appreciate. One aspect that I've really wanted to focus on with this TC mod is to follow the words of Miyazaki Hidetaka: "A well-designed world could tell its story in silence." I think to do that properly I'd need to be able to look at and appreciate game development from every angle, so that nothing is thrown down because space needed to be filled, but because it belonged there.

The static nature of NPCs in Morrowind was always kind of a nuisance to me but I figured it was a limitation of the engine - most mods I've seen that tried giving NPCs schedules felt very clunky and unreliable to me but I don't doubt there's a way to make it work, especially if you sync'd it with quest progression. If I could figure out how to do that on a large scale without it being a complete mess, I'd love the idea of an entire nomadic tribe that would move around a circuit as time passed, a bit like a larger version of Skyrim's Khajiit trading caravans. I get the feeling though that doing so would involve having a dozen clones of the tribe that spawn and despawn according to a script, which sounds like an easy thing to mess up.

I've always liked the procedurally built settlements in Morrowind, always thought it a shame the way the passage of time became basically irrelevant over the course of later games. Doing that in greater detail with the house sounds like a very neat idea. I'll need to learn how to do that myself for my own plans. Personally I would vote against the mage companion, if only because I've seen about eight million mods that include a companion NPC and they feel overdone to me. That's just my two septims though.

I'm quite aware of the size of the workload I'm setting myself up for. I'm actually benching an even larger RPGMaker project to focus on this one for a while because it's somewhat smaller and more likely to garner public interest, and by extension more likely to attract people interested in helping. Network building ftw. Anyway, I did try the thing with the CD back in the day but never could figure out how to see the files on-disc. But in my defense I was an idiot teenager at the time. I have a Steam copy now, so is it safe to assume the relevant files are all where they're supposed to be and not hidden behind arbitrary walls? [Edit: Checking the backup file I made prior to trying out Arktwend, which is what I have currently running in place of vanilla Morrowind, it looks like most of the stuff is locked in .bsa files, which I dunno what to do with. Might be related to the actual act of creating the backup in the first place, I dunno, but I think this is more or less the problem I wound up hitting when I tried getting the assets from the CDs. I dunno how to unpack .bsa's.] But yes, starting small is absolutely my plan, I'm not even opening up the Construction Set until I've got more of a plan under my belt and have taken the time to learn how to do things like "access assets without loading entire .esm files that I then need to delete the content of from my plugin." Once I do that it's just a process of slowly chipping away, learning as I go. I don't want to wind up like Arktwend with a strong opening segment followed by a gigantic but featureless map because I gave myself an arbitrary two-year deadline.

Not sure where else I would post this but feel free to move it if this is wrong. Alright, so I'm setting out on an attempt to build a Total Conversion mod for Morrowind, a la Arktwend. Completely removed from Elder Scrolls lore and basically just piggybacking off the engine and assets to make my own game. The only roadblock being of course that I have no idea what I'm doing. To be quite direct I've never made a mod before. I've played around with the toolset in the past, tried applying for a post with Tamriel Rebuilt that didn't pan out as my life took a different direction, but for the most part I'm a total rank amateur. This project is as much about the practice as it is about seeing my vision come to fruition. The main reason I'm going with a TC mod rather than just making a dungeon or something more low-key is that I'm incredibly picky. Every time I have an idea for a mod I start planning it out, then realize that for it to fully satisfy me I'd need to change aspects X, Y and Z around it, and it just snowballs until I'm contemplating a total game overhaul and scrap the idea for its overambition. So better to just throw out all pretense and make my own game from the ground up so I don't need to worry about stepping on anyone's toes but my own. Of course, this comes with its own set of obstacles. While I'm no sure this is the case with the Steam version as I haven't tried yet, but back when I used a CD copy of the game I could never access the vanilla assets directly, as they were stored to disc instead of files on the computer. And by extension couldn't build new content from scratch without loading the master files and then creating a plugin that manually removed the entire game map, a rather Sisyphean task. So if anyone knows how to start a mod with access to the main game's assets without actually loading in the main game into the plugin, that would certainly be appreciated. Aside from that, more to work with would also be nice. Are there any mods that would just be sensible to work into this project for their universal utility, such as MWSE, or would they just provide more obstacles to work around to get things the way I want them to? Finally I'm curious if there are any mods I should look into so I can just make use of their assets (credited, of course)? For example I've noticed a lot of mods seem to make use of the hood models from the Dark Brotherhood Armor Replacer, so I'm curious if I shouldn't just hoard a bunch of mods like that so I can lighten the load on my modeler, who is still very much in the learning stages. Open to pretty much any and all advice. I think I'm a bit too early in the planning stages to try recruiting anyone; only have a basic map (222 exterior cells, for an idea of scale), a broad story concept, and a bare-bones equipment list so far, so I figure I should have something to show before I waste anyone's time asking for free labor.