Dungeon Design Strategy

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Originally posted by Deeza
Personally, I have lots of ideas for making the inner marshes very intimidating, though I don't yet have the experience at region generation to put them into practice.

Let us know what those are and we might be able to work on them. However, I'm sticking to my guns about not straying beyond the beta regions for now. I'd like to keep our focus on that for the time being.

I like the cave idea a lot. The 'mudcave' was something that IATE worked on over at Silgrad here: Cave Textures so I guess we might be able to follow his lead. And naturally, my thinking is that many of our caves are going to be wetter than the vanilla ones. Nonetheless, in regions such as the Jungle areas (which are higher up) the normal caves should be fine and there are plenty of areas in Blackwood and areas near to Cyrodiil that could feature vanilla caves.

I'd also considered using Leo Gura's retextured caves from 'Lost Spires' which are very 'jungle-like' and employ some magnificent jungle sounds: http://www.lostspires.com/images/screens...een006.jpg . I might even be able to combine these with Koniption's ideas for caves which introduce a more 'spidery theme'. This is something we've recently discussed.

Agreed about the wonky ruins and weather FX!

[Koniption]

I think it would be best to have caves even in the muddy areas. Reason is that caves are a main source of quests and action, where you can add more "stuff" and details without hurting game peformance as much, than if you were in the exterior world. It'd feel weird to have caves in one part of Blackmarsh and have lots to do there, then when you transittion to a new area, there isn't much to do.

I'm pretty sure there are caves in muddy areas in real life. The caves would be wetter, though, and often-times full of lakes and underwater chambers, muddy colored or not. I mean, think about it: it's water going through caves that erodes the rock to make the interior cave chambers....mud = water = source of caves.

Koniption

[Xae]

Even the muddy areas could conceivably have some kind of rock foundation, like limestone, for solutional caves. The marshlands could be the remnants of a mountaneous area that was covered with water and mud from a glacier. I don't think most players are going to analyse the geologics of Argonia though it would be neat to stick to realism.

One thing that I've been thinking about is the entrances. MM7 had a thing where instead of there always being an activating item, there'd be invisible lines in front of caves. Step over them, screen pauses and prompts you 'Do you want to enter X caves?'. It feels more realistic than having some dude run around putting doors on all the entrances. It could also mean for more interesting caves to be added, like a larger cave entrance near the sea or maybe even a chasm with an adjacent tunnel system. Is it possible to script such things with an area trigger?

[Koniption]

Originally posted by Xaeaix
[...] One thing that I've been thinking about is the entrances. MM7 had a thing where instead of there always being an activating item, there'd be invisible lines in front of caves. Step over them, screen pauses and prompts you 'Do you want to enter X caves?'. It feels more realistic than having some dude run around putting doors on all the entrances. It could also mean for more interesting caves to be added, like a larger cave entrance near the sea or maybe even a chasm with an adjacent tunnel system. Is it possible to script such things with an area trigger?

Yes, it is possible to script such a thing. You'd need an invisible, pass-thoughable trigger collision nif. You'd probably also need a static/impassable/invisible collision mesh behind the trigger collision, in the same nif. The static collision part would be to prevent the player from going too far into the entrance to where they could tell it was fake (a safety precaution), and the trigger collision is what the player would step into to trigger the script.

Koniption

[Deeza]

Just briefly, some of my ideas for making the marshes more intimidating were:

1. Restricting visibility. Not so much that it's annoying (I know it would be a hard thing to get right) but to make it that little bit harder for the player to see where they are going due to the fog and mist. If the player can't see beyond the near distance it will make scary sound effects much more effective if the player can't SEE that there's really nothing there.

Just thought, wouldn't restricting visibility make the landscape load faster as well?

2. Would it be possible to make some kind of low-lying mist that goes up to round about waist height in some areas? That way you'd just have trees seemingly stick up out of nowhere and get you imagining just what you're actually stepping in...

3. Creating the right sound. Music should be a part of this, but more important is to get all the weird animal noises (both as ambient tracks and as specific activators, so you could for example have frog noises coming out of a hollow stump and so on). I have found dozens of free files we could use for these purposes.

4. Another idea - instead of starting up the battle music, in the marsh when something is attacking you, everything goes quiet. The frogs stop croaking, the animals stop making noises. The player suddenly feels all alone and knows that something is creeping up on them (we could even have this randomly happen sometimes when nothing's there, just to creep the player out)

5. "Real" will o' the wisps. These would be flames created by the burning marsh gas. They would appear as lights floating in the air, so that the player thinks a village is near, only for the lights to disable as the player gets closer (and something really nasty sometimes spawns right behind them...)

6. Have areas where bubbles of marsh gas rise up into the air. If the player gets out a torch or casts a fire spell near the area, it explodes in a giant fireball that takes the player with it.

7. A cheap shot I know, but has anyone considered invisible creatures with constant effect chameleon? Being chased by something you can barely see at the best of times (and even less with all the fog) could be pretty freaky.

8. Transparent images (like ghostly faces) that appear and disappear in the air? I don't know if this is possible to script, but if it's so subtle it's hard to notice, it could be quite eerie.

[Xae]

1. In some areas, definitely. And reducing the clip plane conserves frame rates but it doesn't necessarily mean it'll load faster.

2. That would be awesome, especially with some disgusting walk noises and the odd crocodile growl.

3. If OBSE is used, music could fall into a special category for misty areas. It'd be less like music. I imagine something like very small percussive parts and the odd drum fill.

4. This could be very effective, but instead of making it complete silence the 'music' could start out as an extremely low but steady drum beat that becomes audible after 10 or 20 seconds.

7. Ouch, there's a fine line between challenging and 'I hate this place so much'. Better if there are enemies in the waist-high mist that rise up and become massive once they get within 2 meters of the player. Remember the Marlboro from Final Fantasy? Something like that would be perfect for the swamps.

8. You could invent a whole new thing, 'marsh phantoms', where there are people and cities that are only visible from a distance. Player approaches, fog thickens, city disappears. Instead of ghostly images that could present scripting issues, you could simply use the ghosts from Oblivion that are the same colour as the mist.

Edit: How about something like this? Drums In The Mist (first in the playlist).

[Ibsen's Ghost]

All useful ideas. I'm not sure about the practicalities of such things but it would be worth exploring these ideas with the generation of Darkmoor which I guess you could see as a kind of trial region for what would eventually become Murkwood. By the time we've perfected the techniques then we can start to add them to Murkwood. It sounds progressive enough.

[Deeza]

Glad you liked my ideas! I look forward to trying some of them out when I get back to modding!

About the invisible creature idea, to stop it getting annoying, why not have it be a non-aggressive creature which is scripted to follow the player at a distance, as well as randomly disappearing from time to time. That way the effect could be freaky rather than "hate-mail the guy who made this mod" annoying.

Good thing you mentioned the vanilla ghost effects Xaeaix, I was thinking the same thing! Perhaps B2M might consider making a "phantom" Glenbridge that sometimes appears over the ruins that he's making now?

[Ibsen's Ghost]

Originally posted by Deeza
Good thing you mentioned the vanilla ghost effects Xaeaix, I was thinking the same thing! Perhaps B2M might consider making a "phantom" Glenbridge that sometimes appears over the ruins that he's making now?

I like that idea....a lot! Could it not be achieved simply by using some far nifs? The far nifs would be complete models of the buildings but the normal ones would be ruins. The whole idea would need some pretty sound reasoning though. A curse is the one that springs most readily to mind. Fog effects might cling to the 'real Glenbridge' to add to the effect.

The alternative is to use far nif models that are completely different from those of their normal nif counterparts and that represents an ancient city that once stood where Glenbridge was built. The obvious storyline is to do the old 'Poltergeist' story where the town is built on an old burial mound. Then one of the Glenbridge residents inadvertently awakens the spirits of the place. It's a little corny but such a storyline would fit with the storyline of 'Lost Spires'. If we were to create a 'Lost Spires 2' in BM, as was suggested a while back then this might be a fitting point for providing the 'warlocks' of that mod a route back into Tamriel. The story would be independent of 'Lost Spires 1', of course, although perhaps referring back to it for the fans.....I'm sure I could reinvent the story a little to eliminate the cliches.....on the other hand, creating a 'Poltergeist town' would be quite cool and easy to do in terms of basic animations and sounds inside the interiors.

[Xae]

Say that there's an ancient creature (never described in-game with the word "ancient") that lives in the swamp. An incredibly powerful being that is somehow tied to the swamp, and its memories of how things used to be are bleeding over into reality and causing these phantoms.