Ill kick things off

Obviously there is some iterest generating around this idea, so I figured I would kick this off.

Something I thought about while I was in bed last night...

It's pretty much confirmed that all the lands of Tamriel are height mapped and terrain rendered in TESV. Because of that, I'm seeing a huge interest in people making "goto *province*" mods, including our own Cyrodiil idea, the dozens of Morrowind threads I've seen (honestly, I don't get it, I didnt like Morrowind, but I guess im the odd one) and the misc High Rock, Elswyre, etc... mods.

I'm still all about Cyrodiil, and thats where I want to focus my efforts, but I think Diabolikal started something with his Nirn project. I would like to see Diab step up and take the plate on creating a community standard for these mods. Organizing all the mods of these types and being like "hey guys, there is a team doing this region, a team doing this region, and a team doing this region." Trying to set some standards on the quality of content, the scope of expanse, and how well said mod meshes with Skyrim.

This way, even though you have a half a dozen different "travel to *province*" mods out there, that are all different in there own right, you can add them all seamlessly to Skyrim and feel like you are playing one unified mod project.

Let me put it into focus like this. You guys remember FCOM? Was a pretty awesome idea overall and added a ton of content from several huge mods. But there was no unity in it. You could install it 3 different times on a vanilla install, and get 3 different results. People on different machines got different results, and sometimes, adding something small and seemingly harmless after a good install, would just screw everything up. It was very finicky by nature of the fact all mods were designed seperate with no unity.

It would be good when discussing the additions of huge content addons in Skyrim, we try and get the community on board with a set of community standards. So that we can prevent the above and make a much more stable collection of mods. It would also mean that mods with partially edited work could be picked up later by other people, are still be published half finished.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents. I know its not worth much. And obviously, I'm pressing Diab to take a huge burden. But he seems the most expereinced at picking something like this up.

I think currently the main focus should be just on one province, if you start worrying about them all straight away then it will be too overwhelming. If the whole of cyrodiil works together then if the other provinces are a bit different that's not a huge issue as they would be different. Maybe at a later stage we would communicate with other teams to get things like world wide transportation in place, but to begin with it's too much to consider.

That's my thoughts feel free to tell me I am wrong

Being aware or other regions is incredibly important for these sorts of mods. That doesn't mean that you need to develop everything at once, it just means that you need a good overview of how things should fit together as a whole before people charge ahead and waste time on things that will just need to be removed or heavily edited later.

The biggest problems would be things like conflicting landscapes and conflicting lore. If everyone is careful to only affect the area that they're working on then it will make everything a lot easier. For example, don't do a quest to destroy the Thalmor because that would affect more than just your area.

Also in terms of editing grid cells, to do it properly you need be aware of and extend into surrounding cells. With that in mind, the landscape should be finished for a cell AND it's surrounding cells before it get's assigned to someone for population & quests.

I think it isn't so much being aware of other mods, more just making sure that the mod doesn't affect anybody else's work or if it does then to ensure that both parties agree to change.

Yea i second Demonata on this, we should only focus on Cyrodiil (as of right now) anyone or any team is welcome to do another region (not our team that is lol) and then once both teams and regions are near complete, or maybe more so on the side of completion, we would collaborate and fine tune everything based on each other's addition. Such as using each other's content to make traveling easier, we would collaborate with the team that is recreating Morrowind (for example, if such a team exists, or will exist at the time) to make traveling to and from Cyrodiil and Morrowind as seamless as we hope to when traveling from Skyrim to Cyrodiil. We may even go deeper by including Skyrim to Cyrodiil (and to any other X regions, assuming they exist) quests. But we would always keep close the the region's affairs. You mentioned the Thalmor example, lets say we do a quest involving destroying the Thalmor (or any other faction) we would make it clear that it would only be for that region. Destroying the Thalmor's presence in Cyrodiil would probably have minimal effect on the presence of them in Skyrim. Unless we collaborate with the other regions' teams if they exist and allow the "_____" faction to be wiped out completely, it would be lore friendly with the other regions.

On a side note we have declared the existing land of all the other regions included in skyrim are unusable. [Copied from my topic on the nexus forums]:

"I took the time today to noclip into these already existing regions and i have declared them unusable. The collision of the land dissipates after traveling so far, and the scaling is waaay of due to the fact that these, in my opinion, are what bethesda used for LOD's of the regeions, if the player where to get that high in the mountains. I also believe that there is a quest that takes place in the sky? Ive read that somewhere. The large body of water separating Vvardenfell and the rest of morrowind is nothing but a mere river, Solestein is nothing more than the size of a house, the large body of water in Cyrodiil near the Imperial City is also nothing more than a mere creek. So it would be unproductive to use these as the lands as the actual lands. What we may do is edit these and add onto the LOD's so you can see the distant lands in more detail, such as the cities, towns and maybe larger landmarks. Then we would recycle the Gate(s) near Pale Pass and have you "enter" a separate external land, the land being Cyrodiil, not 100% seamless but very effective, none the less. If we were to edit and recycle the existing ones, we would just be working backwards."

I agree with your statements. What I mean about being aware of regions relates more to content styling. If a house is built in Cyrodiil but it's right near the border to Hammerfell it would be useful to be aware of the architecture styles of the nearby region in Hammerfell. It's not essential, but it could be very useful.

Diabolickal wrote:
On a side note we have declared the existing land of all the other regions included in skyrim are unusable.

The scaling is off every where or the farther from skyrim the worse?
Concerning other provinces, there should be coordination among the modder teams (If scaling is wrong and cyrodiil border ends further then other teams need to develop their terrain accordingly). For a factions wars a global mod can be utilized (i.e. more universal system, with relationships between different "counties","provinces","gov. states", pc can help some gain power over others earning reputation with one and loosing with another).

p.s. is there already a site/topic/forum where a large mod (think all tamriel/nirn) is ment to be assembled?

Jacen wrote:For a factions wars a global mod can be utilized (i.e. more universal system, with relationships between different "counties","provinces","gov. states", pc can help some gain power over others earning reputation with one and loosing with another).

Anything like that can be implemented when both the mods are nearing completion as otherwise if one of the mods fails the the other group have wasted loads of time.

Jacen wrote:

Diabolickal wrote:
On a side note we have declared the existing land of all the other regions included in skyrim are unusable.

The scaling is off every where or the farther from skyrim the worse?
Concerning other provinces, there should be coordination among the modder teams (If scaling is wrong and cyrodiil border ends further then other teams need to develop their terrain accordingly). For a factions wars a global mod can be utilized (i.e. more universal system, with relationships between different "counties","provinces","gov. states", pc can help some gain power over others earning reputation with one and loosing with another).

p.s. is there already a site/topic/forum where a large mod (think all tamriel/nirn) is ment to be assembled?

Its all way off. I personally now think Bethesda just used it for LOD purposes and was never planning any expansions relating to the other regions. I could be wrong, but even they themselves would even have to redo them all.

Jacen wrote:p.s. is there already a site/topic/forum where a large mod (think all tamriel/nirn) is ment to be assembled?

Not exactly. The Nirn Project (nirn.wikidot.com) is there to help with expanding the playable are into the rest of Nirn, but it's not a single mod, it's there as a resource to help coordinate lots of smaller mods like this one.