Well with all the new materials such as wood chopping and iron ingots, This idea kinda sparked. Using materials like this, you could slowly build your own home using some sort of blueprint system and part by part construction. Best part is that it could be placed just about anywhere in Skyrim, using Scripts to prevent blocking, interfering with NPC paths, etc. This could be a great mod. I plan to implement custom Models, scripts, maybe Items. Good Idea?

I love it!

A few of my wishes for this:

This should be something for hardcoe players with a lot of time, money, and resources.

First, there should be an NPC that sells land. Yep, he asks you where you want to build and you chose on the map what land you want. (this will be good so you can limit problems by only allowing certain plots of land to built on.

There should be an NPC that has "Blueprints" for sale. When you buy a blueprint, you can pay him (his business) to help build your house. You can have money deducted automatically every in game week or make payments as you go until the house is complete. The more you pay the more the house is built up.

Him and his other guys can build it up at a predetermined speed. If you stop by, you can chop wood and help build to speed things up or just come by and drop off iron and wood to cut down the cost of payments.

Thoughts?

Somewhat Iffy about the Land Plot Idea, but I like the rest. The Ability to Hire other NPC's to help you build it faster or if you so choose to build it yourself, slowly but cheaply. The More Resources you supply, the cheaper the actual building is. The reason I'm not sure about the plot Idea is because one of the main things that made me think this a good Idea is the freedom to put it anywhere. For one I don't think every acre of land is owned by someone, and I really like the freedom of putting it almost anywhere. For Example: you find a place like this http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/631856881907249532/8325150A444888AAB5A9C5A673E5F66D2D49A3DE/ and MUST Have a house with that view, It's yours. Or perhaps even here POSSIBLE SPOILER http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/631856881894167556/703CEB8DFA606033169B34BD69FE725AB14EA037/ I'd love to have a house there.

Also maybe you have to "register" your house to a jarl to get a map marker added?

Pretty awesome idea.

Very cool idea. I know several places I'd love to build.

Once built then you can hire a butler and a maid, etc.

I was working on something like this for Morrowind, only you are taking it a little further than I had. Players could basically buy a prebuilt home which was represented by a temporary object. They could place it in the world and then move it via scripts - up, down, rotate, etc. Once they found the right positioning, they would finalize it, and then the scripting would replace it with the home and all accompanying objects. It was extremely script intensive, and required a heck of a lot of calculations. Of course, the script only ran for actually placing the house and then that was it.

There's also the way Bethesda did it for the player manors and the Solstheim village. They had it already built in a prespecified location and then used scripting to enable bits here and there over time, and you could also have certain options available to purchase and add on.

The downside to my method was that you couldn't get too carried away with details, because it was impossible to account for all the variations in terrain. For example, if I made it a house with a garden, a shed and a pond, the player might be able to find a good spot for the house, but the other items might get buried or too elevated based on the surrounding terrain. A way around this would be to add other separately purchasable items for the player to place individually, a garden or farm plot, a shed, pond and other things. The house alone was taking up quite a bit of time though so I never got around to the extras.

The downside to the Bethesda method is that everything has to be pre-placed, accounting for as many variables as you are willing to allow. This meant that all the objects were actually in the game and the cell, they just weren't visible yet because they were disabled by the script until it was ready to be enabled. That means, unlike my method, the scripts had to be always running, whereas mine were only enabled when the player placed the home, and disabled as soon as the house was finalized.

That's just a couple of things for you to consider, and maybe it will help you decide how you want to proceed. For Spencer Homes I might try to do again the way I was working on it for Morrowind, but we'll have to wait and see how well I can handle the new CK. With Morrowind, it took me about almost a year of working on various smaller projects to get good enough with all the needed subskills for a project of that scope.

If youve got the chops I say go for it. Like I posted earlier, anyone can come up with an idea, implementing it sucessfully is the tricky part.

If I can pick up the scripting language as fast as I picked up Oblivion's, I can one-man-army this thing into existence very soon.

I wonder if you could modify the trees in the game to be fully destructible, i.e. by giving them a sort of HP for slicing, and a break point for blunt.

For example, a sword would take away a small amount of the tree's hp, but axes would take away much more, and players could go lumberjack and cut down trees. Then they could do whatever with them (maybe an inter-mod resource, build a house, or sell the lumber, make a canoe, etc.)

Also, say a giant smacks a tree, and the force is greater than the break point, so the tree snaps and falls.

Another idea: try to replicate Far Cry 2's brush fire/ forest fire system, that was awesome.

Ok, getting a little off topic, sorry.

Building a house would be great. Let's hope it's doable.

I think another tricky part would be the navmeshing around a randomly hand placed collision object you placed in the game.

If things work basically like Oblivion then you'll have two major issues to deal with:

-AI path grids can only be edited through the CS. So if the player can drop their house anywhere, they may cause problems for the AI. Also, AI entities (companions/spouse) probably won't be able to enter the house, since there's no way to add a path grid after it's placed. Shouldn't be a major issue though as long as you clearly warn people about it.
-Doors can only be placed and set up through the CS; can't be done dynamically. This means your house will have to be open to the world (not a separate interior cell). Again not a major issue, but limits you somewhat. For example you probably won't be able to give the house a basemant.

There was a mod for Oblivion called Mountain Cabin (Mountain Shack? maybe) that you might want to look at for inspiration. It was a run-down abandoned shack that you could fix up through a series of quests.

building your own house whatever size and whatever dimensions you want as long as you had the materials would be badass!

Sounds like a cool idea. Are you talking about totally customized houses? Fallout had RTS(Real Time Settler) that allowed you to build a little camp/town that had pre-fab buildings. They were navmeshed and everything; and, if I remember correctly, some even had interiors.

"Presets" (I assume that is what you mean by blueprints) to choose from should be able to work very well, and could even include that basemant

Is that...

I just wanted to say I think this sounds like an awesome Idea.

I like the thought of having to actually gather material to help build it or speed it along.

I'll be watching for this one.

Good Luck!

Like I said in the OP, Navmeshes on trails will prevent the house from being placed there.

Is there a devo team for this id surely like to help with aspects of this.

Email me at 14manj01@gmail.com

PS: Each of the pictures people keep showing the places get creeper and creeper....

Sure, what's your experience?

cool idea, i dont know anything about modding programing or such things, but i do work with building loghouses irl, so give me a shout if i can help with something.

I like the idea ^^

making skyrim more like Minecraft, a dream come true!

Bethesda didn't use static navmeshes (with waypoints) since Fallout 3, why should they go back to the inferior technology for Skyrim?

In Fallout 3 you could dynamically "cut a hole" in the navmesh, and place a building there. I expect the same in Skyrim.

Sorry, I've never modded for Fallout.

Try out the http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=7070 mod.

I like this. Alot. There are so many amazing places to build a house in this game, I really support this!

I imagine within a month of the CK coming out, we're going to have 6 houses set there. It's a really nice area.