Game Skyrim Forum

I like where you moved the hammock. Now I don't have to run into town every time I need a nap.

Meldor's new ladder clips with the crates. You need to angle the ladder a little bit more away from the building.
If you need a different shaped ladder try "in_nord_ladder_02"

Hm.. I thought I angled it far enough away. I'll see what I can do

I just downloaded it, and I have to say that it looks really great, and fits in perfectly with the original feel of the game. I already use better balmora river, so this seems like a perfect addition (well, actually replacement) to that mod! The only thing that I noticed that you might want to look at is the stairway south of high town. It doesn't really serve much of a purpose since there is now a wall around the district.

I so need to check this out soon. It's looking better and better. Have you started work on any of the other cities?

Yes and no. I've done some playing around with Seyda Neen and Ald'Ruhn, but I end up deleting the changes and starting fresh, so I don't really have anything to show for it yet. I'm also still tweaking Balmora, adding some more misc. NPC, etc.

Pelagiad is in the works. Nothing major for this one, just some small aesthetic changes (more clutter, more ivy, some differentiation of the houses on the hill and the cottages down below). Also, a few more people.

I've decided I'm not going to mess with Ald'Ruhn, for the simple reason that it already looks identical to the concept art, and I can't think of anything to contribute. I could add some random clutter and flora, but honestly I'm not feeling it. I do think I want to do Vivec, though. I like the closed cantons, I think they make for an interesting look, and conflicts be damned, I'm going to give them the Fairfax treatment! I'm planning on adding more NPCs and merchant stalls to the walkways, as well as flora, clutter, containers, etc. I'll try to make each canton feel distinct from the others without going with open tops

:bowdown: My dreams come true!

Hey, nice work here. I don't use BE either, so this is really a nice addition. Thanks. I really look forward to see what you'll do to Vivec, I find the city really grand and majestic, but at the same town incredibly repetitive and boring.

I have to chime in that BE seems a bit much for me as well. I'm always interested in simple and elegant, and this looks really nice so far. Can't wait to see it!

Edit: Fixed gaffe.

Well they are not compatible by default, but look at this (Yeah its "little" laggy but without Fraps capturing in full screen it was running quite okay)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMTRSghA5IM

Hey everyone, it's been a while since I posted here so I thought I would give an update. Settled in at college now, but I lost my Morrowind disc in the transition and I haven't been able to play at all since I've been here. I've already ordered a new disc (plus my very own copy of Bloodmoon and Tribunal! I've just been borrowing a friend's copy for the past few years), and it should be here fairly soon. In the meantime, I don't really want to do anything since I can't test it in-game.

On a possibly related note, since I can't decide whether or not to include it in Atmospheric Cities, I want to give some of the NPCs in major settlements pets. Redoran guards would have Guar, Telvanni nobles would have goblin slaves and the guards would have Durzog, Hlaalu guards would have Nix Hounds, random commoners might have (pack) rats or scrib, etc. What do we think of this idea?

Shameless bump, but I had a question for all of you.

I've been playing a lot of Assassin's Creed, and the idea of just adding house exteriors for appearance's sake with no attached interiors appeals to me (not just for Balmora but in general). What do you think of this idea?

One thing I like about Morrowind is that 'what you see is what you get'. If you see a house, you can get in it unless it's blocked for some reason.

I know that the Better Cities mod for Oblivion adds these 'fake' doors too but I can't say I like it personally. On the other hand building interiors takes time and you'd need to add new NPCs too...

I'd like to hear what everyone else thinks as well.

I love that in Morrowind, everyone can talk and everywhere can be explored.

I understand the reason for it, to fill an area without the work, but I think it would ruin what Morrowind's about (being a world, not a shell).

I agree with the above.

Morrwind, you can go anywhere. If you have a "fake" house, if you find out you can't enter a building, it just doesn't feel the same anymore.

Oh, and I accidentally voted yes before I read what you meant

Same here.

I think that it's a clever idea, and not necessarily unrealistic. There are but very few buildings which you 'd enter in RL.

Why don't you just create a few different housing exteriors with a single interior, that way you could just place multiple copies of it everywhere. Or, even simpler, you could get permission from people who have created houses in other mods to add them in multiple places. It's not like houses are all that different in real life. They are building a new development around the corner from me with 34 houses in it with only two different floor plans. The biggest differences are the exteriors. Granted, I think that's kind of lazy of them, and they've squeezed these houses so close together that you have to walk sideways to fit between them, but it is what it is. Its not like you're planning on having someone in every house with a bunch of quests. They're filler homes. There. I've coined a phrase for them. Now I can go on the rest of the day with an undeserved feeling of accomplishment. All in all, though, nice work so far.

@ basswalker: The Balmora Expansion/Vality's Balmora clip you showed, is that a mod you've combined yourself? I played around with that combo a while back when I heard someone else had done it successfully, but my computer laughed at me when I tried to walk through it in-game, thus I never got further than just putting them together. What kind of conflicts are in there, and has anyone actually merged them successfully to a point where it could be released (with permissions, of course)? Actually, I used the Balmora Expanded/Callenwald compilation that Pseron Wyrd was nice enough to put together at my instigation way back, so there are likely to be more conflicts in what I used than just the plain BE. I really need a new computer.

I've been strolling around your Atmospheric Balmora, and I quite like it, Lucien. I really like the little touches.

I did find one little thing that, for game-story-consistency sake, I would advise changing. In one of the Thieves' Guild quests, it very specifically says there are only five Altmers in town. So I have a screenshot of the altmer bread merchant you added next to the pawnbroker telling me that -- what a liar!

Might be better to avoid adding any additional altmers to Balmora for that reason.

Again, though, great job!

Ok, that's simple enough to change. Thanks for the catch

But anyone investigating all the new houses will quickly notice the duplication, and not be impressed. Same with copying vanilla interiors, I always notice immediatly when someone has done that.
It only takes 20 minutes to make a decent interior, especially if it's just a single interior piece.

Can you tell me if this conflicts with Wrye and Helios' Living Cities of Vvradenfell? What about Vality's Bitter Coast Balmora add-on? I love what you've done with Balmora from the screenies.

My personal opinion on the houses/no houses bit is leave the city layout as close to vanilla as possible. I think it will make your mod as popular as it can be if you simply attempt to improve the look and feel of the cities as they are. Adding generic buildings is very "un-morrowind-y" which personally would negate the initial appeal this mod has for me. I like things that try to make Morrowind more true to the concept art, but I don't like things that take away uniqueness of the world (like, say MCA which adds a ton of generic NPCs).

UPDATE: This actually goes VERY nicely with Vality's Balmora mod and works out alright with LCV. I'm going to have to edit one small thing to get it to work prefect with LCV, though: throughout the day in LCV, the carava-er moves around the silt strider platform, and he tries to be where you have a bench at one point and actually ends up standing on it, clipping through the awning you have set up there. Deleting the bench should actually give this a nice effect, because then he'd be actually standing under the awning which makes sense, 'specially on rainy days.

I would prefer it if the merchants in the merchant's square had torches to stand by at night, since my nights get ridiculously dark and rely heavily on lighting, making these guys look like total idiots standing around outside with no light trying to sell stuff. Might be a nice touch to put some bedrolls in labor town, too, for a sort of "implied home" for the less fortunate merchants and peddlers. Definitely make the bedrolls owned, though. Would hurt game balance to give the player easy sleeps in town.

One last thing. For some reason, there is a set of lights on the hill towards uptown (the set on the right) that don't cast light for some reason. Would be nice to see that fix'd. On the upside, the lights that do work look spectacular during the night, and add a real "city" feel to Balmora. It seems like a much more lively town, now.

I am not sure how I feel about what you've done to the canol, but the rest of the mod is so awesome that I think I can live with it.

I may end up making these edits myself for my own personal use, but I am certain you'd do a much better job, Lucien. Cheers!

Ahem, in order:

Surprised and gladdened to hear that it doesn't conflict with Vality's Balmora, though this next version might because I'm adding new buildings (you heard that right, folks! Each will have its own interior and an NPC or two inside) and they might go in the same place as the trees.

Kind of disappointed to hear about the strider port, I'll get that fixed up in this next version.

Merchants now have torches, the story behind that is that at one point there were lanterns affixed to the canopy, so I consciously chose not to give them torches, but then I deleted the lanterns because I decided they looked silly, and forgot to give the merchants any lighting of their own.

Nothing I can do about the lights up to high town, as far as I know. From what I understand, Morrowind can only display 8 lights in a cell, and any additional ones, while looking nice, will not actually display light. Apparently those are the ones to get the boot. I could delete some of the other lights in High Town, but the effect would be kind of spoiled if I did that. I will look into it.

And, finally, the canol is the canol :shrug: Not much I'm willing to change there. It's easy enough to fix if you want to do it for your own game, just delete the meshes and make sure that you get rid of the pathgrid leading down there, so you don't have NPCs falling into the canol

THANKYOU for the reminder. I had already modded my own version of the file but forgot to delete the pathgrids. D'oh. Very nice of you to think of that for me! <3 Luckily, I haven't seen any swimmers, and that probably has to do with everyone having their own LCV schedules (and therefor, they don't have enough time to wander down there before getting teleported to their new location on the bell).

I hope you decide to do small quests for the NPCs you add, or at least give them their own quirks to make them unique and 'real'. Might be worthwhile to brainstorm different archetypes to give them. For example, what about a dunmer that sits in front of his house all day threatening adventurers to get off of his property (fits with the xenophobia present in most dark elves of vvardenfell)? Or a recluse that spends absolutely all of his day inside, afraid of the outside world (maybe a khajiit who was once enslaved and now dislikes being outside, a sort of housecat by fear)?

If you think along those lines, it may not take too long to think of their personalities and give them a few dialog options to keep them from standing out as generic.

I'll see what I whip up. I don't know much about making quests, but I can see if there's something I can do. Probably only very tiny fetch quests, I don't feel like crafting an epic dungeon dive