DrDavidBowman Posted January 22 Share Posted January 22 (edited) I'm just testing the waters. I've worked in tech for a while and I'm considering building a portfolio to give me experience to move into gaming. I'm wondering if there are any people who want to work on a significant mod as a group? I'm personally thinking of something that focuses more on the story, world building and game play experience than radically overhauling core code. A mod something like a story-focused cross between the Expanse and Bablyon 5. My experience: Software Product Manager SCRUM Master Project Manager Short and long form writer (A long time ago - FPS mod mapper and coding experience) I'm thinking of an inital planning phase before starting the project build when the creator toolkit comes out, with a design strategy that enables iterative releases in chapters. I think there's some real potential with so many people loving space adventures. Anyone else interested in collaborative teamwork on something bigger? Edit: FYI, for clarity, I've led multiple software projects from discovery to delivery. Edited January 22 by DrDavidBowman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sp0ckrates Posted January 22 Share Posted January 22 (edited) Yeah, I'm interested. I have more than 200 Skyrim and Fallout 4 mods with more than 20 million downloads on Nexus, Bethesda & Steam. I'd like to give working on a team a go, instead of going it alone for Starfield. What did you have in mind? Edited January 22 by sp0ckrates Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrDavidBowman Posted January 23 Author Share Posted January 23 @sp0ckrates I think first of all working on the scope and scale of the project is key, particularly who wants to be involved. Then, what we are most interested in making, what is easiest to develop, and what we think will be most appealing to our target audience. That will then lead us in the direction of a road map, and a list of requirements that we can breakdown into epics (larger pieces of work) and individual tasks. (We'll also need to agree on a work management platform like Gitlab, Wrike, Trello, etc.) Personally, in terms of the game, I'm imagining the main character starting on a large battleship as some kind of recently transferred sergeant, minor officer or famous commander's child who has to prove themselves. The ship itself is on boarder patrol in a galaxy full of tension and poised for war. That kind of context gives a limited environment at the start and allows the stakes of any missions or actions to be high with lasting consequences. I'm really flexible around the ideas and would love to collaborate. With a small team and limited time it's key we get the most story and gameplay time out of the least development work. That's going to naturally look like something initially more linear, that we can then build on over time. The nice thing about having the first main environment being the battleship (maybe the XSS Agamemnon or similar kind of name) is that it's limited and can be reused. Also ships are powerful characters in their own way, e.g. Serenity, Enterprise, Rocinante and Galactica. Those are some thoughts on the starting points, quite straight forward in some ways, but I think a lot of the fun is the creativity, working together and seeing others enjoy hmwhat you've made. Are there any things you'd be particularly interested in doing with a larger project? Also any reflections or ideas from what I've said (again, I'm not fixed on anything at this very early stage)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deantendo Posted January 24 Share Posted January 24 I have an ambition. A big one. I want to totally overhaul the UI. There's very little which would stay. While i may be very good with Photoshop and good-enough with Blender, i just cannot get my ADHD-brain to use tools like jpexis or whatever else. I'm a visual guy and stuff like that may as well be the scribblings of a 2 year old child. I'm good with UI and UX. Mockups and style-guides for days... Even did a bunch of UI and UX for mods in Satisfactory. I'm 100% confident that i can design something better and much more useful (though that isn't hard considering the mess we got). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sp0ckrates Posted February 3 Share Posted February 3 (edited) On 1/23/2024 at 4:26 PM, DrDavidBowman said: @sp0ckrates I think first of all working on the scope and scale of the project is key, particularly who wants to be involved. Then, what we are most interested in making, what is easiest to develop, and what we think will be most appealing to our target audience. That will then lead us in the direction of a road map, and a list of requirements that we can breakdown into epics (larger pieces of work) and individual tasks. (We'll also need to agree on a work management platform like Gitlab, Wrike, Trello, etc.) Personally, in terms of the game, I'm imagining the main character starting on a large battleship as some kind of recently transferred sergeant, minor officer or famous commander's child who has to prove themselves. The ship itself is on boarder patrol in a galaxy full of tension and poised for war. That kind of context gives a limited environment at the start and allows the stakes of any missions or actions to be high with lasting consequences. I'm really flexible around the ideas and would love to collaborate. With a small team and limited time it's key we get the most story and gameplay time out of the least development work. That's going to naturally look like something initially more linear, that we can then build on over time. The nice thing about having the first main environment being the battleship (maybe the XSS Agamemnon or similar kind of name) is that it's limited and can be reused. Also ships are powerful characters in their own way, e.g. Serenity, Enterprise, Rocinante and Galactica. Those are some thoughts on the starting points, quite straight forward in some ways, but I think a lot of the fun is the creativity, working together and seeing others enjoy hmwhat you've made. Are there any things you'd be particularly interested in doing with a larger project? Also any reflections or ideas from what I've said (again, I'm not fixed on anything at this very early stage)? Thanks for the reply. I'm easy. My areas of expertise are editing textures, editing audio files, papyrus scripting, and the creation kit. I've also worked with Nifskope and 3DS Max to edit models. I'd be happy to help in any way I'm needed. What you're describing sounds like a new mission, or perhaps a DLC-sized mod. It might require a voice actor or three, a dialog script writer, a papyrus script coder, someone to create new characters, someone to create the battleship's interior and exterior, and someone to combine it all using the new creation kit when it is released. It would take several committed mod authors who are willing to have their mods posted on your mod page on Nexus. It would also require waiting for the new creation kit to be released, I think. The danger, I think is taking on a project that is so massive it never gets done and the team members lose interest. You might want to start small, with joint projects to get the team working together, then upscale when we've gotten to feel good about working together? We could create several small mods and then combine them all into one when they're all done. You could advertise with each mod released that your team is always looking for new talent. An example of starting small was the Skyrim SE mod called "GET Immersive Cheats (Expanded Edition)" which combined about a dozen smaller mods into one. Releasing the smaller mods peaked interest among players. Combining them all into one mod got the attention of YouTube content creators. Edited February 3 by sp0ckrates Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pellape Posted February 5 Share Posted February 5 (edited) If my ideas will fit into the project, count me in as well. But I do have limited time until June as I am a CG Student (2D and 3D) and we get new stuff to make every day. But between June to September, I will have a lot of fee time to spare. I started to mod Beth games 2004 and was mentioned in a video of the best 10 dungeons for Morrowind 2017 and I tend to make bigger projects than many smaller ones. Peek here and he do complain a lot of bugs in my mod but I fixed them 2020 and released it again The Caldera Ancient mine took 2 years to make and was released a week before Oblivion was released. Another big project that took 2 years to make is the Legacy of the Champion, Oblivion, which is influenced by the best Skyrim mod ever made which I think is the legacy of the Dragonborn. It is not only a house mod but a faction mod, with 60-65 quests so far and the house is loaded with scripts and has its own store for weapons, armor, spells and everything that I need as a player. The house also has some unique stuff I never seen elsewhere as when I get odd ideas, I sure implement them and some where extremely hard to implement but I seldom give up. i did had a lot of help from the community when I could not implement some crazy ideas. Oblivion is so easy to mod, compared to Skyrim and Starfield will not be easier to mod. Well in between i made a lot of small projects but rarely uploaded them to Nexus as we used other sites 15-20 years ago, which are gone now, so a lot of cool stuff is gone forever, not only my stuff but also a lot of high quality stuff that other made as well. Starfield? What i wanna make in Starfield is a similar mod to the Champion mod, or rather the Legacy mods, a museum where the player collect stuff that gets displayed in the house/museum. As all meshes in the house is either resources or made by myself, I plan to port them all to Starfield more or less. Will a hobbit house fit? I do not know as it is a shell anyway and could be changed to anything but something wooden I think at least. What is more important is the inside, that is bigger than the outside and go underground, towards Anvil and under the road you see in the video. Making factions and stories? That's the harder part, making up stories that will fit. In Oblivion it was easy and maybe it will later in Starfield? I do not know. So I think I will put the main base at a shoreline, maybe in a cell at the Jamison planet and have a garden there and no resources and portals to other bases where production takes place. Quests will be added to build the museum but I will not put 2 years to make a single dungeon, no way, as I had enough of that 2006. In Oblivion I added stuff to 60 dungeons with scripts, to avoid any form of conflicts, and that was low life poiintless dungeons anyway and the sewers under Cyrodiil, that are questless to 80%. Avoiding conflicts is something every modder must or should take in consideration and the best way of doing that is to use unique cells and make unique stuff and not edit any landscapes. The area where the house is, and the bases, are avoidable but the good side of the way Starfield planets works, is that it is 1 chance in a million modders will edit the same cells, if they stay outside the city cells and attractive cells. If i release this as a single modder or in a project, does not matter really. I am used to being a part of projects and teamworking, so it is nothing new to me. What i do know, a project like this has no end. Look at the Legacy of the Dragonborn, which not only support the Skyrim original stuff as it also supports a lot of other modders stuff, it is a mod that glue the whole community together. If I recall right, it has support for over 50 other mods and modders as they all get their own spot inside the museum if they ask for it or if they are asked by the author as well. There is no limit of what can be made for sure. The only limit is our own imagination. It also has its own WIKI. Damn time flies, 20 years this year as a modder... What will i be able to make? Well anything or everything. Edit stuff with CK and Xedit 3D , not only in Blender as I learn to use loads of different apps in school. NifSkope as well. 2D, textures, gimp, PS and now also in Substance. Scripting. Well I do like Oblivion scripting and I did some Papyrus stuff in the few mods I released for Skyrim but I have a lot to learn about Papyrus, and it is mainly about how to define stuff that is my biggest problem. We do a lot of animations in school, well that is what we are focusing at right now, so lets see how easy that will be to implement in Starfield? Nothing is impossible... Between 2006-2008 I was part of a lot of community projects for Oblivion but they are all gone, some got saved by other players and uploaded to Nexus, which was good as I did find some of my stuff there that i missed when I restarted to mod Oblivion again 2020. /Pekka. Edited February 5 by Pellape Spelling Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pellape Posted February 5 Share Posted February 5 (edited) I just saw something new, that I never seen before, and I wanna figure out how it was done for sure. Maybe this is something we or anyone could take a peek at in a project like this? But it will require a solid story is added about every NPC that would be included. The AI is looking up stuff at the web on the fly. I do think we will see more like this in the future really. There is a lot of info about each NPC in all TES games at UESP and I am not sure Starfield is ready for this, not yet maybe? Well, if this can be implemented, it will make the game or any game to feel more alive for sure. As far as I have seen, not a single WIKI about Starfield is close to UESP, and as so many WIKI is made, it is a bit hard to choose one to use really. If you know a good one, well a link would not hurt. Here is a couple of videos from that author and they only have a single mod made, which I do think is a bit odd, really. I will not speculate further why... I do wanna contact that author and maybe there is info about how it was done in the Skyrim forum? I guess other modders wanna know how to make similar for sure. It would also be possible to backtrace that project as well, I guess.... Best way to learn how to make stuff, is to peek at how other modders/devs solved stuff. Channel Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@art_from_the_machine Account here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/users/185078967?tab=user+files Thread at the DL page, 500+ messages: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631?tab=posts I could have made a separate thread about his, but for the moment I add it here... Edited February 5 by Pellape Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pellape Posted February 5 Share Posted February 5 (edited) On 2/3/2024 at 1:12 PM, sp0ckrates said: The danger, I think is taking on a project that is so massive it never gets done and the team members lose interest. You might want to start small, with joint projects to get the team working together, then upscale when we've gotten to feel good about working together? We could create several small mods and then combine them all into one when they're all done. You could advertise with each mod released that your team is always looking for new talent. An example of starting small was the Skyrim SE mod called "GET Immersive Cheats (Expanded Edition)" which combined about a dozen smaller mods into one. Releasing the smaller mods peaked interest among players. Combining them all into one mod got the attention of YouTube content creators. That starts to be a problem for Starfield. All make small mods and the modlist increases fast. I have 150 tiny mods installed now and that will not make much space over for much more if the limit still is 255 mods. A lot of them will need to be merged. One way to come around it easy is to make a new game after CK gets released and really take a peek at all the small mods, do I need this? Could it be added to a project? I did contact loads of authors for my Oblivion project, and got a lot of others stuff implemented and I added them to my contribute list and I made sure of that nothing I added would conflict with the original stuff. I bet this could be a mission for the project leader, to contact the authors of the small quality mods direct. Not all modders are reading nor writing in forums so they need to be contacted directly with PMs, and questions about permissions should not be done in public anyway, as I never done that myself, only in PMs and then the author can give their proper and honest answer. So far, not a single one said no, well one did wen I think about it. Then I added the possibility to add his mod as an dependent, which they did like and a big part of my project needed that dependency, on the surroundings of the garden. The dependency was optional, a separate mod included and the gardens surroundings worked perfect with and without it... One thing to think about is that if others small stuff is implemented, we have to make sure we will be able to support any issues with it.... It is easy to make mod packs and who is responsible for the support if something in the package is causing issues? The original author or the one releasing the mod pack? This was a big problem in Oblivion, which was extremely sencible for some modded stuff and could break easy if we where not careful and a lot of players did release mods called Better this and Better that and when someone release something with that name included, The Better mod, this is the best mod made, I will not install it for sure. If something did break my Oblivion when i picked it up again it was mods called better this. We also debated this at the Oblivion forum and all modders there agreed and also warned about using mod packs with no clear support. Edited February 5 by Pellape Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sp0ckrates Posted February 6 Share Posted February 6 On 2/5/2024 at 4:45 AM, Pellape said: That starts to be a problem for Starfield. All make small mods and the modlist increases fast. I have 150 tiny mods installed now and that will not make much space over for much more if the limit still is 255 mods. A lot of them will need to be merged. One way to come around it easy is to make a new game after CK gets released and really take a peek at all the small mods, do I need this? Could it be added to a project? I did contact loads of authors for my Oblivion project, and got a lot of others stuff implemented and I added them to my contribute list and I made sure of that nothing I added would conflict with the original stuff. I bet this could be a mission for the project leader, to contact the authors of the small quality mods direct. Not all modders are reading nor writing in forums so they need to be contacted directly with PMs, and questions about permissions should not be done in public anyway, as I never done that myself, only in PMs and then the author can give their proper and honest answer. So far, not a single one said no, well one did wen I think about it. Then I added the possibility to add his mod as an dependent, which they did like and a big part of my project needed that dependency, on the surroundings of the garden. The dependency was optional, a separate mod included and the gardens surroundings worked perfect with and without it... One thing to think about is that if others small stuff is implemented, we have to make sure we will be able to support any issues with it.... It is easy to make mod packs and who is responsible for the support if something in the package is causing issues? The original author or the one releasing the mod pack? This was a big problem in Oblivion, which was extremely sencible for some modded stuff and could break easy if we where not careful and a lot of players did release mods called Better this and Better that and when someone release something with that name included, The Better mod, this is the best mod made, I will not install it for sure. If something did break my Oblivion when i picked it up again it was mods called better this. We also debated this at the Oblivion forum and all modders there agreed and also warned about using mod packs with no clear support. Oh, yeah, no. Sorry for being clear as mud! GET Immersive Cheats combined a dozen of my own mods. What I failed to convey was the suggestion that a team make a dozen or so small mods, and then combine them into one epic mod. But I agree. Making a mod compatible with other mods would take much effort and time. I suppose it would be a fulltime job for one person on a team. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sp0ckrates Posted February 6 Share Posted February 6 On 2/5/2024 at 4:15 AM, Pellape said: I just saw something new, that I never seen before, and I wanna figure out how it was done for sure. Maybe this is something we or anyone could take a peek at in a project like this? But it will require a solid story is added about every NPC that would be included. The AI is looking up stuff at the web on the fly. I do think we will see more like this in the future really. There is a lot of info about each NPC in all TES games at UESP and I am not sure Starfield is ready for this, not yet maybe? Well, if this can be implemented, it will make the game or any game to feel more alive for sure. As far as I have seen, not a single WIKI about Starfield is close to UESP, and as so many WIKI is made, it is a bit hard to choose one to use really. If you know a good one, well a link would not hurt. Here is a couple of videos from that author and they only have a single mod made, which I do think is a bit odd, really. I will not speculate further why... I do wanna contact that author and maybe there is info about how it was done in the Skyrim forum? I guess other modders wanna know how to make similar for sure. It would also be possible to backtrace that project as well, I guess.... Best way to learn how to make stuff, is to peek at how other modders/devs solved stuff. Channel Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@art_from_the_machine Account here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/users/185078967?tab=user+files Thread at the DL page, 500+ messages: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/98631?tab=posts I could have made a separate thread about his, but for the moment I add it here... Let me know when you do add the topic. I'd love to discuss it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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