Village building mod...Have no idea how to do

[James Almasy]

I want to create a village mod with a special twist. i have it planned out, but i do not have the skills to make a mod like this. Okay, as in the game, you buy things with money right? well the twist is, once you have 10,000 gold, I want this guy, race debatable, gender too, to be a contractor. What he does is follow you to where you want to have your village built, and he'll place a marker there, as well as a map marker for fast travel. he'll hire serfs (race debatable, not slaves.) who will help clear some land for the first house, yours. first house starts as a shack, 1,000 gold, this also serves as the village's count's house, ie you. all houses start off as shacks, takes a week to finish a shack, if you go there while they're building, you'll see scaffolding and people walking around, fixing the place up.(may think of having different phases of scaffolding, such as beams of wood scaffolding, halfway done house, and almost done house.) also, same price for other shacks. Shacks can be upgraded into houses, manors etc. But only your house can be a castle. it will start in the wilderness, but i want to have walls, towers, defensive structures. there's a lot of room for improvement. Seeing as it's going to be one heck of a mod, anyone who volunteers to help make the mod will be listed on a scroll, hidden in the town well cavern on an altar. my email is the [email protected], but since my wireless is bad, it may take a while to get an answer, from a couple of hours, to a couple of days. feel free to discuss some pointers and ideas about this. I'm going to try my slight of hand at the mod.

[BlaCkBlitZ]

So its like Real time Settler in Fallout 3? Someone made a vilalge building mod as well there.

 

I like this idea, building a settlement in a fantasy medieval setting. But you definitely have to add structures like stables, vineyards (smaller versions instead of Skingrad's), crop lands and Inns. These will give you daily/weekly/monthly profits as they brew and sell ale/beer or sell crops. Adventurers staying in the inns and buying horses for travelling.

 

Also there can be a Work Camp/Work Camp HQ, which puts idle serfs to good use by dispatching them to other places to work (not literally, unless you can make it so) and earn more profits.

 

I like your upgrading twist as well. It would be great to add things like, potted plants, fences, cages or piers (those who want to settle by a lake), flower beds and such for decorations.

 

P.S. Nirnroot can be grown on the crop? Or as potted plants. This gives me an idea, selling drug-related herbs! Secretly of course! Maybe these can be only sold to fences but you gain a really huge profit.

[Trandoshan]

I have seen many many mods in my pitiful existence, and I know many of the limits of the game engine. So I am here to address a few problems this idea has.

 

Ah, this reminds me of morrowind, where you could eventually build a stronghold when you had advanced far enough in one of the great houses. Those were possible due to the fact that the city built was planned in a specific spot, and as you advanced in the questline the script enabled more meshes in the area to appear, representing the construction of a city in progress.. This was possible because the cities were already planned, but the houses were not enabled in the world.

 

What the OP is suggesting is near impossible. You can't place a city just anywhere out of the blue with any mod. Even if there was a mod that worked based on the heightmap, the structures would never align right on an uneven surface. This is one of those mods that I would love to have if it were remotely possible. I could be wrong though...

 

Perhaps if there were several pre-determined locations you could copy the "Cropsford" quest or "Kvatch Rebuilt" mod as a base-line for the creation of a mod.

 

Though again, placing the town anywhere you want it to be seems impossible due to mesh/terrain/ect restrictions. Again, I could be wrong

[James Almasy]

Great ideas blackblitz, but my modding skill is low par, and it's gradually increasing. I also need to learn scripting, and how to make models. Trandoshan, as far fetched as my idea may be, I plan on having a script to where the landscape could be cleared, so if either of you, or anyone else, know a document/ lessons on scripting, let me know.

[James Almasy]

Trandoshan, before i forget. I may plan to build it outside of the border, more frontier if you ask me. We'd have to tweak the oblivion_default.ini's bBorderregionsenabled=1 to =0 to build outside the border, which goes on to a certain extent. My first guess on how to make the city possible is by the weatherleah script, to where it's run down, then is upgraded to fixed for the brothers.

[grmblf]

What you want to make it's not impossible but it's really difficult to get, as you should place the objects from a script, getting position, setting position, calc angle, taking into accont ground inclination and other objects that could interfear such as tress and rocks, ... a lot of work really, and it'd need high knowledge of scripting and maths, yes, trigonometry and all this nasty things, to calculate the offset between two buildings, etc. QQuix is doing something similar in his Evolving Society mod, perhaps you'd want to ask him, but I think he hasn't finished yet testing the feasibility of this project.

[Vagrant0]

What you want to make it's not impossible but it's really difficult to get, as you should place the objects from a script, getting position, setting position, calc angle, taking into accont ground inclination and other objects that could interfear such as tress and rocks, ... a lot of work really, and it'd need high knowledge of scripting and maths, yes, trigonometry and all this nasty things, to calculate the offset between two buildings, etc. QQuix is doing something similar in his Evolving Society mod, perhaps you'd want to ask him, but I think he hasn't finished yet testing the feasibility of this project.

Except that ground inclines cannot be detected with scripts, and using objects like trees and rocks to try and piece some of this together would be rather iffy since they don't all have meaningful pivot points. You would still often have issues where buildings just don't fit the terrain right. This is not because of the lack of ways to detect the terrain or create a matrix of points which can be used to locate objects. This is because the simple fact of the matter is that there is almost nowhere in the world that you can just drop in buildings and expect them to fit right with the terrain. Every building or house mod ends up needing some minor changes to the landscape to avoid clipping or make sure that there are no gaps, and make sure that parts of the building, like doors and windows, are accessible. There are also significant issues with doors and NPCs which outright negate any ability to use interior cells without having to move NPCs around manually with a quest script.

 

In short, the best, and only real way to do something like this would be to have pre-determined sites where everything is placed, made initially disabled, and enabled according to the progress of building the town. This is not to say that it is the only way that it might work, QQuix does spend quite a bit of effort pushing things beyond what should be doable with the game. What I'm saying is that for most modders who aren't expert scripters, trying to make a town buildable anywhere using existing statics and objects would be well beyond their ability.