I think it would look best, if it came down to that, if there were doors leading right through a mountain, then there would be a cave you would go through to arrive to a door on the side of another mountain in another province.

If someone could find a lore friendly way (by water passage) to make a ship that could basically teleport between some provinces as an additional option, that would be pretty nice too.

As someone studying game and level design right now, this man is very right.

There could even be a wiki set up for all province mods, with at least basic design docs for each province, as well as larger guidelines for how it will all work. This way there can be sections where custom resources can be made available, and each team can see what the other is up to.

You all should be aware that because of how TES files are formatted the method used in Requiem for a Capital Wasteland and Morroblivion should still hold true.

So for you all looking to make a lore friendly Morrowind region it would easy enough for you to import Morroblivion then mod them to what their contemporary self should look like.

This would also be a great platform for reintroducing old Oblivion mods into Skyrim.

That'd require people to actually write design docs

I firmly believe that most problems with province mods (or any huge mod) could be solved if people knew what a design doc is and how to use it. At the very least it gives an excellent idea of just how insane a task you're about to undertake. I'm speaking entirely from experience here.

I'll be honest - I don't know how I feel about that much cooperation between province mods. In my mind, once you go that far, it might be more beneficial to just form a single team and get a province done rather than having five teams working on separate provinces but always working around each other. This was a big difference between MW and OB modding (at least until relatively recently): in Morrowind, if you wanted to make a lore friendly province mod, you joined Tamriel Rebuilt. In Oblivion, you started your own mod.

The whole point of working in a team is compromise. You have to give up some of your ideas, but in exchange you get the ideas of others. You also get things done a lot faster than if you were working alone.

Not that I'm against cooperation and coordination between teams, I just don't think that making everyone work around a specific set of rules and constantly work around one another is the best way to get things done.

It is not legal to import assets from other games into Skyrim, nor is it legal to discuss it.

Personally, I would be in favor of a single super-team, to get one province done at a time as quickly as possible. Not sure modders will want to follow something like that or not, but it worked well for Tamriel Rebuilt.

If anyone wants a concept artist for their mods, let me know.

I draw people the best, but I have fairly good mapping skills and I can lay out a city or landscape with in a day.

http://dreamingxashley.deviantart.com/

And by mods, I mean one of these province mods.

That'd be great, the issue is finding enough talented people who are committed to a team effort; most of the people who are known to be good modders, more or less, prefer doing their own thing or getting credit themselves. But a team of 100 committed, selfless modders who can cover all the bases would be able to crank out provinces like nobodies business.

If you were going to start a single province mod, I would actually suggest Cyrodiil.

Reasons:

1) Bethesda just did it, so it is very unlikely that they will do part of it again as a DLC
2) Cyrodiil directly borders Skyrim, so transitioning between the two provinces would be relatively easy (you could even start with a border area like Bruma)
3) Cyrodiil is a known quantity, so you would have a set of starting ideas that are held in-common by your team-members and the larger community
4) Cyrodiil does not need to be very exotic, which means that you can get by with slight modifications of most Skyrim foliage and terrain models
5) Many still complain about the genericness of TESIV - you would be able to take that world and make it more interesting (and more Roman - like the legion armor)
6) The political situation in Cyrodiil has become much more nuanced since TESIV (an uneasy treaty and unpopular Thalmor agents undermining political authority)

Just a suggestion though. Obviously, the decision needs to be made by those who are actually involved and ready to do the work.

P.S. - An added bonus for whatever you decide to do: Tamriel Rebuilt has already done a lot of the grunt-work for figuring out how to coordinate and administer a large team-mod. Borrow from their systems where possible, and learn from their early mistakes - don't begin from square one yourselves.

we've just been there. D:

i'm more keen for highrock, i've even got one of those "desing doc's" N' likes.

I'd actually vote for High Rock too. We've just been to Cyrodiil, and it would probably be the hardest province to actually agree on (should it look like TESV, the 1st PGE, something in between?). I'd say that Highrock looks more like Skyrim than Cyrodiil, and is also much smaller, and therefore more manageable. It also has great political backstory, not only with the recent upheavals in the empire but also with the typical infighting (as seen in Daggerfall) and the Thalmor infiltration and purges (mentioned in Lord of Souls).

Alas, a single uber mod is a pipedream.

Not if it is tackled by closed teams as it has been in the past.

As I posted above the entire continent is available to mod on in Oblivion with Tamriel heightmaps ... if such a project can be done in Skyrim CK and other tools then it would be a multi-step process. Get the continent heightmap done first then break off into provinces.

With Tamriel Heightmaps there is also the ability to change the heightmap shape and design for each province landscape. Then also there is the possibility that there could be multiple teams working on even one province and that if (in some fantastic future) one could mix and match the provinces and say have Cyrodiil choice 1 or 2, highrock choice 1 or 2, etc. And it would all be in one world space.

The more self contained a province mod project is the more insular it gets and the more it is likely to have compatibility issues. Having the heightmap available then if one only wanted to make one city even one house on a province they could because it is available. Obviously such a mod might conflict with an entire modded province but from there is the ability to integrate or make patches.

Not at all what I meant. I should have said one uber mod team - all the folks who want to make provinces banding together and finishing one province, rather than having a lot of separate teams working on their own province, with the possibility of it all matching up in the future.

Ahh - I see yes I did kind of misread you there. Sorry

Even what I proposed would not be one mod no matter how uber it is.

Elsweyr

Uber team or not, I think it would be wise to open a wiki dedicated to "Other Lands" projects for Skyrim, so that different teams can discuss choices, share assets, and collaborate together on various issues. Each team/project/province/land could have it's own main page complete with design documents, and then keep information related to the projects, such as how to join etc. there. Plus, modders looking to join one of these teams can look through and see all the different teams, and modders looking to start one can see if their project has already started, and join a team instead of starting one.

I agree that it would be a good idea, but that's the sort of thing that the leaders of the projects would need to keep up with. I don't think any of them have weighed in on this thread so far

Well so far we've seen you, and even if you're not working on a project I can honestly say you're highly respected, and Iliana's weighed in too.

If we have the heightmaps for Tamriel already why doesn't someone put together a project similar to the unique landscapes project but for areas outside of the province of skyrim? This project for oblivion seems similar in scope to creating a whole province and was largely successful. Of course I may be completely wrong because I've never messed with modding landscapes/quests/cities.

I, personally, would love to see High Rock. Since it's basically unanimous that a province mod, should it actually get off the ground, should be done in chunks, so take High Rock for example, instead of some of the team working on Camlorn and some on Daggerfall, the entire team should work on Jehanna and the region that actually borders Skyrim.

High rock would be a good choice. It's similar enough to Skyrim that we can re-use most vanilla assets. Cyrodill would be a good choice because we have such a great reference (the previous game), but not very many people want to go back to a world they just spent 6 years in lol. Morrowind will be easy to gather excitement for, everybody and their dog wants to go back, but therein we have a problem: If we keep Morrowind's graphic style, it'll look awful compared to vanilla Skyrim, and if we change it, people will complain about defiling their memories lol.

Eldarie who made Valenwood Improved for Oblivion and a team of other German modders are planning to create a High Rock mod. She is a proven modder so I have confidence her team will release something in a couple of years.

But it pays to be wary of unproved modders who say they are going to create an entire province until they have actually released something. Its much easier to claim you are going to create than sit down and actually spend the hundreds and hundreds of hours (much of which is pretty tedious work) needed to pull it off. So if people proposing a province mod want to attract other modders to join their team, I think the first thing is to release a single complete town (with npcs, interiors, scripts, etc.) as proof of work so others will have confidence in their ability and want to join them.

Personally I wouldn't want to take on anything on the scale of half a province or release a mod by myself again, but I might contribute to a team one day for a project that does not seem overly amibitious.

@Iliana that's great news! It's good to see a serious team take on a project like this. Methinks I need to make a wiki to sort and advertise all these projects sooner than expected lol....

I personally think only morrowind and cyrodill should be the only provinces worked on for the simple fact that the areas and structures can be replicated. As far as lore, whatever the modder puts in will never be true lore. So I think modders should stay away from lore and stick to quest and areas.

Those two provinces would be the easiest for that very reason, however it's just not that simple. In Morrowind's case for instance, simply replicating the buildings isn't enough - If you do that, the province will look terrible next to Skyrim. And personally (and I know that there are others that feel this way too), lore accuracy is not just "a nifty bonus", but it's downright required, even if it'll never be considered canon.

isn't that the mod that completely removed the Green Pact?