Another city mod

[Khet]

Planned stages of construction and their progress Green means finished parts Red means currently underway Pink means I've found help for something and finally blue means I'm seeking help for something!

 

Shaping the island and adding foilage

Add the first few buildings (the tents) and the docks

Add more buildings for when the player obtains the island

Set up the custom placed building markers

Add the NPCs

Set up the enable/disable scripts for the buildings and NPCs

Interior Design

Design quest locations and misc quests Ideas needed for Misc quests!

Add dialogue to NPCs

Script the quests

Everything else I forgot to mention

Begin voice acting

BETA!

Finish voice acting, make changes based on feedback, touchup/add quests

 

 

I'm currently looking for people interested in making meshes/textures for different stages of construction for the buildings (three stages each). If you're interested please send me a PM for a list of the buildings I've used to get the size/shape of the construction stages relatively correct.

 

Also, I am looking for help with the following:

 

Books - Whether lore-friendly, a small collection of your own poems or short stories I don't care! I'm sure we have some very creative folks here! Show off your work! (send me a PM for these)

 

Side Quests - Still looking for ideas folks! Anything that'll fit within the scope of the mod!

 

Excessive amounts of praise - Hey, everyone loves it, eh?

 

 

 

 

I made a post in the suggestion/idea forum asking if there's interest in such a thing but after talking to a friend and coming up with some ideas I've decided to go through with the project. Currently the city is unnamed (ideas welcome!) but this first post will outline my basic ideas and thoughts for the city, denizens, and quests. Every (serious) idea will be considered and this will probably be done by myself mostly, with some help from a friend of mine for a few custom meshes. That said, time to move on to my poorly designed outline!

 

Edit: Thought of a name and found a location. The city will be called Evanore and will be in it's own island worldspace, accessed by a new ship placed in the Anvil harbor.

 

Main Features

 

-Player is the 'mayor' of the village. You (the player) becomes mayor by either a lengthy quest chain for an important figure (and perhaps required to be Champion of Cyrodiil) or buy the city for a substantial amount of money (high disposition with the seller required) Other ideas welcome

 

-Custom placed buildings. Some of the buildings in the city would be able to be placed by the player using pre-placed Markers. These buildings could perhaps include a Manor (for the player), a Barracks and perhaps a few other buildings. Building ideas welcome.

 

-Building related quests. Certain quests will only activate after the player builds a certain building. Such quests could include a plague hitting the city after a chapel is built which would require the player to help formulate the cure. If the player ignore the cure-quest certain (or all?) NPCs would be permanently killed. Another quest would be a bandit attack after building the barracks where you have to help the guards push back the attackers.

 

-Prosperity. Perhaps the most ambitious and difficult part of this mod. You could embark on certain quests to increase the wealth of your city. These quests could entail resurrecting an old mine which still has materials to be mined but has been infested by bandits or creatures. Set up a 'trade route' with a merchant from another city. This could also change the amount/quality/type of items sold by merchants in your own city. The prosperity of your city could be reflected by decorations (statues, fountains, few more gardens) the clothing of the NPCs and perhaps even the decoration of certain rooms in the houses.

 

-Criminals. Stealing the idea from Ren's Guard Overhaul criminals would occasionally pop up in your city and the guards would have to apprehend them. The frequency of criminals could be based upon the prosperity of your city. The more prosperous the people are the less criminals appear.

 

-Visible growth. Another very difficult part of the mod would being able to SEE your city grow. By this, I mean each building type would have stages in construction that the player can visibly see. The only other option to this is having the buildings just 'appear' out of thin air.

 

-Guilds. Your own personal Mages/Fighters guild (and perhaps a few new guilds) that the player cannot become the leader of, but CAN choose who would be the leader after they're constructed. Perhaps a consequence to this would be the prosperity of the guild for choosing the right/wrong canidate for the leadership, thus requiring the player to talk to the townsfolk and do some careful decision making. Of course each canidate will have their positives and negatives so there wouldn't only be one right choice and one wrong choice and all other choices are null.

 

-Taxes. The player can choose the tax rate of their city. Each rate has benefits and consequences. Lower taxes would be less income (perhaps need a way to control this than just adding gold to the player's inventory. A coffer used for upgrades or something) but the prosperity and happiness of the people would be higher. Again, higher prosperity means less criminals. Too high of a tax rate could drop the prosperity of your city and cause more criminals to appear. The prison would have limited cells and if it's too full then the criminals would continue to run free. Continue with a high tax rate and people could begin to LEAVE your city. (permanent or not I haven't decided)

 

 

So, these are just some basic overview ideas to whet your appetites and get those wheels turning for ideas. Every idea that is accepted will of course be given credit. Keep in mind however that I will most likely be working on this alone (aside from the meshes as stated above) and I DO have a limited knowledge of the CS but I'm slowly starting to learn more and more. Furthermore, if I do feel overwhelmed by everything then I might perhaps ask for volunteers to assist.

[Khet]

Well, taking a suggestion from Vagrant0 I've decided to limit the amount of custom-placed buildings. So far these will be limited to just the manor. He brought up a rather good argument about pathgrids, AI scripting, linking and all that. So, for the rest of the buildings they'll all be using just a disable/enable script (until I can get good enough to make some custom meshes to show the advancement in construction of the buildings). Secondly, I found out that my chosen location conflicts with KOTN mod (Priory of the Nine is where my city was going to be) so once I figure out how I'm going to move the city to it's own island worldspace which will be access by boat. I've yet to decide whether or not to have a requirement of purchasing the boat, or just buying passage there. Again, thanks to Vagrant0 for this suggestion.

 

Currently there's no screenshots or anything of progress because I had to start over and I'm also trying to figure out how to get two scripts to work together (If one condition is met in one script then another script starts or ends) or if I have to write everything into one giant script. Hopefully tonight I'll have the island fleshed out a bit and a basic layout of the city finished.

 

Finally, with the Island idea the entire city will be in the same worldspace as the island (kind of like Open Cities) but the island itself will be a seperate world space than Tamriel if I can set it up like this. Otherwise I don't think there would be much of an issue if I have to place the island in the Tamriel worldspace since it would only have to render the water and MAYBE some barely visible land.

 

Thanks to those that have offered their help and suggestions so far for this mod. With any luck I can have at least a beta version out for play-test before the end of 2012

[Vagrant0]

You might want to considder how you want your NPCs to be handled, do you want them paired with each building (once you build a blacksmith, a black smith shows up) or did you want it more variable, where you get to either track down people, or just decide where you want them to live. The first method can be handled rather easily, the second method can be very difficult depending on what ways you use to determine who is vailable for what, when. For the variable method, you are probably best off using factions, or faction ranks to control most of the packaging logic. This is because it is much easier to just add and NPC with all the packages to a blacksmith faction (also owner of the building), than it is to try and control things through direct scripting on the actor.

 

Regardless, your best option would probably be to start out making everything in the "complete" or "nearly complete" stage, and figure out how you want to get things there from an empty island. This means that you should try to do all the layout, npc creation, packaging, and major system work before doing anything involved with enabling npcs, buildings, or affecting the layout of the city. Essentially, you want to take a more or less backward approach to making the mod. If you want to have the options for more than one NPC to fill a role later, this can usually be done just by duplicating that base NPC, and changing that duplicate to something new, and creating alternative packages.

[Khet]

The original plan was to just have NPCs paired with the buildings and they would be enabled as the buildings are enabled. Some buildings however would be 'vacant' for a short time (two days to a week after completion) before an NPC moves in but those would be mostly houses. The only exception to this rule would be the Guildmasters (outlined above).

 

The problem for me is, I'm not that great at scripting. Most of the scripts I've done have been nothing more than reverse engineering other scripts to work for what I needed. It was a good learning spot but I don't think I'd be able to do any of the scripting without being able to test it every step of the way (which would mean I'd have to get the town layout done first).

 

If worse comes to worse however, I think I could ask folks around here to help with my scripting, seeing as there would still be a LOT more for me to do.

 

With that in mind, I believe I'd also be willing to accept help for an 'exterior' decorator in terms of placing the trees and rocks and such. Doing it all one by one is a very slow process! That... and I can't seem to get vertex shading to look right.

[Vagrant0]

The original plan was to just have NPCs paired with the buildings and they would be enabled as the buildings are enabled. Some buildings however would be 'vacant' for a short time (two days to a week after completion) before an NPC moves in but those would be mostly houses. The only exception to this rule would be the Guildmasters (outlined above).

 

The problem for me is, I'm not that great at scripting. Most of the scripts I've done have been nothing more than reverse engineering other scripts to work for what I needed. It was a good learning spot but I don't think I'd be able to do any of the scripting without being able to test it every step of the way (which would mean I'd have to get the town layout done first).

 

If worse comes to worse however, I think I could ask folks around here to help with my scripting, seeing as there would still be a LOT more for me to do.

 

With that in mind, I believe I'd also be willing to accept help for an 'exterior' decorator in terms of placing the trees and rocks and such. Doing it all one by one is a very slow process! That... and I can't seem to get vertex shading to look right.

Yes, that's another reason why I suggested building the town in it's "nearly finished" state, then figuring out what process you want to use to make the town get there from a "starting state". By doing this, most of the things you need for setting up the scripting are already in place, so doing the scripting, even if doing variations, is much easier to figure out. In a sense, rather than trying to develop the town one piece at a time, you are explaining how how that town came to be. And, as you'd have quite alot of project laid out, getting help from a scripter would probably be easier to get.

 

As for landscaping, if the environment is similar to any other region, you can use the region editor to auto paint and populate the cells you are using. Then go through cell by cell, cleaning things, removing things, moving things, repainting parts of the ground, and such. But that can end up creating issues with any cells you've already worked on, and can, if you save, reload, regenerate, save, reload, regenerate, since the things generated in that session can only be removed that session. Learning how to do it manually, although a bit more time consuming, can often have better results in the long run.

 

For shadows, it's best to use a light grey instead of a black or dark grey except in those places where you need severe shading. Even something slightly darker than white can end up making that area have enough contrast. But really, you can hold off on doing shadows, and finer touches until after all the main components are in place. You may even want to forget doing shadows entirely since you will be having all those buildings disabled from the start. Most people just aren't that observative.

[Khet]

Ah, now I see what you've been saying. But for landscaping I was talking to a friend of mine and she offered to help. Right now I'm just waiting to see her results as I set up more of the town. With two of us, at least the landscaping won't take -as- long.

[Khet]

Well, I got the basic layout for the town. The layout most likely won't dramatically change from now until release unless I find someone to make custom meshes/textures for the buildings, which I'm not too hopeful for since it would be a TON of work. It's more of a town-size than a full blown city like you would find on the mainlands. It consists of seven houses, three in the middle of the town, two to the left of one of the player manors, and two more on the left side of the town. The two guilds are at the bottom of the town, and the barracks is above the chapel. The two buildings marked with an X are the manors (only one will appear, you choose the location) and the remaining spot will be taken up by... something. I don't know what. Finally, all buildings use the Leyawinn architecture and the one most likely prone to change is the barracks if I can find a building that would fit better (right now it just uses LeyawinnHouseUpper05) the houses are all lowerclass save for the player-manor which uses the Blackwood house. The mages/Fighters guilds are their respective units. And the chapel is the Priory Chapel and not the chapels you find in towns. This might change, if it does I'll have to change some of the city layout... but I kind of like the feel of the smaller chapel myself as upposed to the 'full size' version.

 

Edit: I can't believe I forgot the pictures. There IS some overlapping used since if I zoomed out far enough to see the whole thing the houses dissapeared. But it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

 

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f80/Bakohryu/Screenshots/EvanoreLayout2.jpg

 

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f80/Bakohryu/Screenshots/EvanoreLayout.jpg

 

Edit: Decided what to have in place of the other player manor which will be a tavern.

[Khet]

I've decided to remove the guilds for the time being and replace them instead with three merchant buildings. The guilds WILL still be in, but I'm planning on moving them outside of the town. As of now, I'm currently setting up the quest to enable/disable the needed buildings as the player advances through the mod.

 

Also, any ideas for side quests (as in, quests not pertaining to the construction of the town) would be -greatly- appreciated. I've an idea for a few, but not nearly as many as I would like. So, if you've been thinking about that 'perfect' quest idea that you would love to see in a mod, here's your chance!

[Khet]

Quick update: Thanks to QQuix I finally got my construction script working and I'm in the process of setting up the main quest for the town. Right now the buildings just 'pop' into existence because I don't have any meshes/textures for a half constructed building or anything of the sorts so unless someone wishes to make meshes/textures for the different stages of construction this is the only way I can do the construction of the buildings If someone IS interested please send me a PM for a list of the buildings I'm using (to get the size/shape relatively correct)

[alex2avs]

Quick update: Thanks to QQuix I finally got my construction script working and I'm in the process of setting up the main quest for the town. Right now the buildings just 'pop' into existence because I don't have any meshes/textures for a half constructed building or anything of the sorts so unless someone wishes to make meshes/textures for the different stages of construction this is the only way I can do the construction of the buildings If someone IS interested please send me a PM for a list of the buildings I'm using (to get the size/shape relatively correct)

 

well...this is an earlier model of mine

 

http://i453.photobucket.com/albums/qq254/alex2avs/Untitled.jpg

 

an uncompleted farm house :)

 

those are just some demo textures (retexture after Bethesda's ones)

 

 

If you want I can upload it