Modding Tamriel

[InkognitoV]

First off, I'm brand new here, and only just downloaded the mod kit, so I am not fully aware of what it's capable of.

 

That being said, I wanted to ask a question to those who have experience in creating mods for skyrim:

 

Would it be possible to create the other provinces of Skyrim (ie Hammerfell, High Rock, Cyrodil, Valenwood, forgive the misspellings, I'm going off of memory) and make them accessible in game via the borders that are already in vanilla version of Skyrim?

 

Of course all the game area couldn't be loaded at once, but I was thinking that it would be made so that you would approach the border, and then it would say something like "Open Valenwood," so that only one province would be loaded at a time.

 

This would obviously require a lot of people working on it in order to complete it, but I just wanted to see what people's thoughts on this were. I personally think it is definitely worth thinking about, being able to access all of the provinces of Tamriel in one game, full of their own quests, dungeons, caves, etc. etc.

 

Thank you,

Ink

[David Brasher]

I haven't actually explored very far across the borders yet, but I have heard that the land contour has been generated quite far into the provinces around Skyrim. In an area like that, it would just be a matter of texturing and cluttering the landscape and putting your towns and dungeons there.

 

If you wanted to use separate worldspaces, then it would be possible to have auto-doors or trigger boxes that whisked the player into the other worldspace. It would be best if your entrance to the new worldspace was at some sort of a bottleneck, like a narrow mountain pass or a tunnel through the mountain.

 

It would be wise to beware of huge projects. Nobody has ever succeeded in making a mod for Morrowind or Oblivion which contained all the lands in the world of Nirn. it is just too big of a project. Bethesda can't even do it with all their resources. So it would be best if you focused all your efforts on building one single province. If you are not a highly experienced modder with a lot of time and with a large mod team, you might do well to focus all your attentions on one small piece of one province. Like try to build a single village, a single dungeon, or build a few hectares of textured, landscaped, and crittered land. When you are done with that and it is fully playable and bug-free, then you could build another piece to go with it.

[09nephilim]

I've been thinking about making a Valenwood mod...

Doing landscapes and dungeons using the existing kits is relatively easy, if time consuming. Bethesda did a series of youtube tutorials that are enough to get you to grips with making interior spaces like dungeons, and adding those to the world.

 

On the other hand, a mod for a province other than Skyrim would require you to make new kits. Otherwise all your Valenwood elf-ruins will look like nordic ruins, which makes no sense. I'm not sure how easy it is to make kits, I haven't done it before...

Also you'd need to make new creatures, new plants and; if you want the full level of detail, new items, clothes, probably even new hairstyles and tattoos, new dialogue, new animations, new effects...

 

Effort.