Status ?

[Coinneach]

Definately a wise decision to focus on one area for now, but definately not wise to cancel some all together. Maybe focus your world building attentions to one or two areas, that way you can slowly expand if more join the team.

[Efcaz]

probobly the best thing to do is dont bother with side quests (for now!) and focus compleatly on the main quest:

only make citys viseted by main quest this is a good way to get the main quest down, then do other citys when main quest is done

NO EASTER EGGS, making easter eggs is a good way to slow down progress

for now keep mostly what oblivion already had (armour wapons spells ect) if some thing is needed (levitation for wizard towers) iprovise for now if possible (teleport pads in wizzard towers that take you up one floor)

npc's that have no inclustion in the main quest do NOT need to be made again making one could take away 5 minutes of precious time

only once the main quest is completed 110% should any work go in to extras

hopefuly this should help IF the mod gets back on track

[raggidman]

I'll lay out the options (adding one mor thought ) and I think you have to decide what fits your current resources.

Start medium to Large
Do a Vivec / Balmora / Ebonheart triangle
this will concentrate your efforts in one area - do you have the resources for this now?

Start Huge
Do the cities that your Main Quest will focus on
this will spread your efforts out all over Vvardenfell and require detailed planning of the Main Quest - do you have the resources for this and is your Main Quest planning that advanced?

Start Small
Work down the coastline from the North Western Tip doing the small fishing villages and the two Imperial Ports (the small Fort in the North and Seyda Neen in the south) a comfortable area inland ... this will enable you to involve newcomers in manageable projects that one man alone can do at need and create a large playing area in a short time with a lot of variety - and it faces the coasts of Solstheim and ST so you can make connections at an early stage for the nostalgic to visit to and from the locations over there - do you have the resources to do this now?

[Dave_91]

Medium to Large - We're missing certain canton interiors and most exteriors (if I figure out collision, it'll be a good boost for the WIP canton models). We're also missing the Imperial castle tileset, as I believe it's WIP and hasn't been included in any ST updates (however I could be wrong). We have some flora-related assets to use for the Ascadian Isles, like shrooms, trees and plants.

Huge - Hmm... not sure. Perhaps I'll add to this later.

Small - It's a bit like the medium to large option... we've some of the tilesets (but not all), with trees and flora.

[raggidman]

there are 2 Imperial tilesets - if not in vis dev, the other will be archived

[Dave_91]

Alright. Well... I think Balmora would be awesome to see... it was the second largest city and we have a decent amount of assets to use for that (interior and exterior). I can try to make some trees and rocks for practice, as well as complete the (static) Silt Strider model I started a long time ago. Cantons can wait because they'll probably take a while to map and get textures for.

So should we start by working on the Ascadian Isles and Balmora, then decide where to go from there?

I think Phitt's Dwemer set will be merged to the ST esm soon so we may be able to use that for Mzuleft and any other Dwemer ruins in that region.

[blackbird]

You can also do some redoran cities. There is also a redoran set avalaible.

[raggidman]

ty Blackbird. Redoran might well be good for stage 2 or if the resources available for one of the key locations are not available and a new triangle has to be formed.

[Dave_91]

Stage 2 (western Ashlands?) could include Maar Gan + Ald'ruhn. There was also a stronghold there.

We should probably concentrate on getting one location done at once. I'd say start with the Ascadian Isles (with Balmora). Unless anyone disagrees?

The forums and whatnot will need sorting out before claims can be made though.

[Lightwave]

It's great to see so much interest in the project again, well done folks.

Something we really have to decide on ASAP is whether we are going to swap to a 1x heightmap or continue with a 2x heightmap and perhaps it's time for a poll to get that out of the way.

Both 1x and 2x archives are already available for absolutely anyone to download in the other thread, complete with the originally placed NPCs, placed buildings and wilderness meshes (dragged over from Galadrielle's content converter - meshes which we can only use short-term) and all the LOD files.

If we're going to do a proper TES4 mod, really we should region generate. I know some people have problems with the way it works and maybe the region generator works betters on certain types of landscapes, but when I region generated on the 3x Cyrodiil heightmap (that's 9 times the surface area of the original game) the outcome worked really well, so it's possibly a matter of finding good presets - in that example I used Bethesda's originals. But we can't region generate without enough having a sufficient variety of relevant meshes in the first place and as things have been tough here of late we'd ended up thinking of replacing the TES3 meshes with our own, since the placement ESP already has every single building, tree, rock etc ready placed in exactly their original places, saving a tremendous amount of time.

And landscape textures could be region generated too; the original Vvardenfell landscape only has single texture layers, spread over large TES3 sized squares, so when converted to TES4 this looks just as clumpy (though sometimes more so because the textures don't automatically blend in TES4 - Bethesda introduced layers for that and the Oblivion textures aren't always as smooth a colour/pattern transition from each other). That said, with the placed content on the land it doesn't notice nearly so much and the TES4 textures are already 4x as detailed (and with 3D grass in many places) - if we region generate the textures we'll have to mark out all the cobbled and dirt roads again which means more effort and delay to the project's progress.

Really, if we're going to get the mod moving in the speediest and most instantly rewarding way we can get down to recreating those fabulous towns in a new way, we should work with the placed content on a 1x heightmap and keep the converted landscape textures. Every settlement (including ruins, forts, tombs caves) are already there and people can set about swapping those and building their own without any guess work as to their original location was.

We could conceivably region generate the wilderness content at any later stage if desired, it doesn't have to form a priority right now, but to avoid wasted effort we should decide whether we're going to do that before we perform the alternative of swapping any TES3 wilderness content for TES4 content.