Let it die gracefully. No wait ... !
This mod has suffered because no leader has been willing to do much or any actual modding work, it's been too conceptual and too idealized. Any ideal that this will somehow be the best Vvardenfell of the other rivals is flawed without anyone to do any visible work.
I suggest a new style of leadership. A strong leader, one who is infinitely more powerful. I give you ...
No wait ...
No seriously, I'm willing to suggest a virtual dictatorship for a short period where someone like Zurke can just get on with it, unobstructed, as they see fit, because no one else is and this is the only way others may get interested enough to jump on board and get anything done rather than dilly dally or worry about the current imperfections and limitations of what we have available - we can improve on those much later.
When I found this project in December 2006, it hadn't actually produced anything. Other than some models and lots and lots of concepts, someone had been struggling for months to make the heightmap. I'd already converted the original heightmap to TES4 the month before and in January 2007 we got official permission to use the 2x landscape. By the beginning of March 2007 I'd released a texture converted 2x landscape with all the original NPCs placed. Some people placed some buildings, yet it all seemed to fizzle with no more than 2 people trying anything. By mid 2007 the original leader and founder, KuKulzA, had given up and InsanitySorrow and Dave_91 became leaders with cire992 and myself in the core. The leaders voiced some doubts over the 2x scale, so in September I gave out 1x and 2x landscapes, completed with NPCs and all placed buildings (from TES3, using Galarielle's NIF converter). Very little feedback from anyone, so I left it as I've continued to leave it, just waiting a firm choice ...
AFAIK cire992 was the only one committed to doing any sizable CS work and left in dire frustration early this year. We finally decided on a 1.5x landscape some months ago, so I did the same with that as the other maps, gave a fully populated landscape for people to see and mod with. And waited for someone to put something on it (i.e. other than the temporary TES3 content) ...
It's not that this mod is too big to make - ST is a bigger landscape. It's not that not enough people are interested in seeing this mod made - there's frequently a flurry of fresh faces showing interest and of any TES project this is probably the most popular one there could ever be. Some are even interested in modding, they wait to be told what to do, and hear nothing more than "welcome aboard" or get told to wait for something. I've put a lot of time in to convert and give a visitable world, hinting with those screenshots what the most basic conversion of Vvardenfell would look like. I just want
anyone to start modding on this landscape. We're missing some meshes, sure, but just use what we've got for now. Almost anything can be swapped and replaced later and this includes everything, right down to landscape textures and region generation.
And there's been too much 'planning' but no solid plans. There's not enough dedication from the existing leadership, no promotion (the web site is
still March 2006!), there's been too much doubt and too much discussion without results. I have no wish to be a leader of this mod as I cannot give the commitment to do this mod myself when no-one else is - I agree this is a vital quality in a mod leader. I will be here to rearguard us from the ESP technical horrors that have killed other mods and will be willing to mod myself when I know I'm not acting alone.
Archiving the mod for a future date is essentially all this project has been doing for the last 2 years, so action is the only realistic alternative I see now. Let anyone who wants to start working on towns and villages and if there's a conflict of interest then fantastic, it means we have enough people working on things and can share ideas.
Btw, TES5 (if it ever happens) is unlikely to see off the existing work poured in to this mod. Unless Bethesda go out of their way to radically change the ESP structure to make it impractical to decode (such as encrypting it which would only cripple the modding community) then it'll always be possible to convert most of the work to a TES5 compatible structure and continue with that engine.
These are my thoughts,
Lightwave