Yeah, maybe no floating rocks, but maybe you could have something more like a Venice under the ruler of Big Brother, you know, have canols and temples, and have a strong, authoritarian government to rule over it all. Maybe have the city be very 3D, and and make it as confusing as the residents seem to say it is.

although I still vote ald-ruhn
I think it would be great if there were a whole community living between the cantons in shacks just over the water
like a slums or just a lower cost of living area
somewhere you would be able to buy low quality indoril armor or something
edit: WAIT! I had this idea the other day and wrote it down.
it's an idea about the social structure of vivec (the silver bells are interchangeable with anything really)

[b][u]Vivec Bell System[/b][/u]Ok, so I was playing final fantasy the other day (the one with “I’m captain Bausch von ronsenberg of dalmasca”) and I saw the “sandlewood system” where misc quests reward with sandlewood blocks and once you have enough blocks you can hand them in for a golden block.  I think that this could be applied to vivec, so that shops in higher end districts will carry higher end items.  It should go foreign quarter (free) -> Arena (5 silver bells) -> house cantons (10 silver bells) -> Delyn + Olms cantons (15 silver bells) -> Temple canton (20 silver bells) -> Vivec’s Palace (1 ebony bell = 25 silver bells).  There will be ordinators stationed at all the bridges, the first time you pass them they will approach you, if you do not have the required amount of bells the ordinator will deny you access.  If you have the right number of bells then the ordinator will not speak to you again.  Patrolling ordinators (whom there will be more of) will only speak to you if you have insufficient amounts of bells (they just know).  Ways of retrieving bells:Misc Quests: there will be a few “go here and deliver this” or “escort me to X and back”.  There will not be enough you supply all the bells you need for an ebony one.(1) Reputation: The higher your reputation the less bells you need to get to the next canton (10 reputation = 1 less silver bell)(2) Ordinators and residents:  Every ordinator carries a silver bell.  Every civilian (not in foreign quarter) carries a bronze bell (10 bronze = 1 silver)(3) Tombs:  Tombs in the Surrounding Ascadian Isles region will have a few silver bells.(4)Shady Sam: In the Foreign Quarter Sewers there is a man who will make silver bell replicas supplied with enough silver items (20 silverware, 5 silver weapons, 3 pieces of silver armor) and 2000 gold.  (5) Misc Places: hard to reach places, under pillows, in the sewers, The gondoliers will deny service to cantons that the PC does not have enough bells for, but if your personality if sufficient they may let you through for a bribe.  If you sneak into a canton (there will be more ordinators then usual) and the interior ordinators catch you, you will be exalted from the town for an entire month.  You won’t have anything taken from you, but if you enter the town during that month and are seen by an ordinator then you gain a 200 bounty.   Entrances to the canton sewers will be found from below, but ordinators patrol the canol works.  Ways to lose your bells:(1) Being arrested in vivec will result in the confiscation of your bells to be put into a chest in foreign quarter, but the chest is guarded.(2) If the ordinators hate you then they will examine the counterfeit bell and have a chance of confiscating all your bells to the same place.(3) Beggars will periodically ask you for bells.  If you give it to them they will give you a magic trinket or a small sum of gold in return.(4) A relative of the tomb in which you found a bell will ask for it back because they recognize it, but if you confront them before retrieving the bell they will quest you to go and find a virtually worthless heirloom allowing you to keep the bells and rewarding you with one for completing the quest.In total there will be around 60 defined bells: 10 misc quest bells, 28 resident silvers, 12 misc silvers, 10 tomb silvers. There is a potential 13-14 you can get off from reputation, not to mention the unlimited supply with shady sam and ordinators (though if you are already killing ordinators you probably don’t need the bells).  Vivec carries an Ebony bell.  Silver bells can be sold for 2,000 each, ebony bells are sold for 20,000 each.  If you lose your bells or sell your bells then they will not be refunded.

did a codebox so you don't have to scroll too much

voted ald-ruhn, there is a few expansions for it already but I then I have to choose between them and other mods I want to have in,so far other mods wins.

both maar gan and molag mar could do with some love,maar gan as an outpost frontier to red mountain and the blight could do with more activity than it has today,would make sense to me.
Molag mar much of the same,last civilised settlement in an otherwise unpopulated area,besides tel branora and a few camps and ruins it isn?t much in a large area around.

vivec and balmora have got plenty of attention already,specially balmora but of course it is always nice with more choises,but I vote ald-ruhn secondary maar gan and molag mar.

@ISGC: Yeah, I like that bell idea, the Gothic game series had a very similar approach. Problem is, I'm neither a quester nor a scripter and your idea would involve both of this. So I guess, I will just deliver the city and rest will be up to the community. This city will be a full ressource and you can do with it what ever you like!!!

@Saint_Jiub: Thx for letting me in on a bit MW lore!!! I understand what you mean, but honestly how often do you think about lore, when actually playing the game. For me the fun of gameplay has more priority than lore. Another which gets always forgotten by our lore experts is, that MW isn't a static environment. As in our world too, things change, old stuff falls apart and new stuff is raised from the ground. People of different races may have mixed up, combined culture and architecture. Scientists may have explored dwemer technology and taken some of it over for common use. Maybe my Vivec would have a dwemer steam heating system or similar, if you know what I mean. Plus we have magic, which can be an explanation for anything.

So my general opinion on this is, create whatever you like and if you care for lore, just try to give it an believeable background!!!


@all: You may vote until the next weekend, then I will begin working on this project. At the moment every thing seems still very even, I'm curious which city will win the race!!!


TheDaywalker :rock:

With the ideas you have for Vivec I'm giving my vote there, Vivec has always been my least favorite city because of it's failed potential, it could be an amazing city if given the love.

My second choice is Ald'Ruhn because it hasn't gotten as much attention as most of the other large cities

AS long as it's not Balmora though I'll be happy

I voted Ald'ruhn, since I love the architecture and there aren't many mods for it already. Your ideas for Vivec sound amazing, but isn't zackg already doing Vivec in his AI overhaul mod? Imo it would be better to have awesome overhauls of two different cities than needing to choose between two awesome overhauls of the same city. (Plus, I already use and like Vivec Expansion, so I'd like something for a city that hasn't really been touched yet.)

Just my thoughts though, I'm sure it will turn out great no matter which city you choose.

Edit: Just noticed you mentioned retexturing the existing tilesets. Will this be optional or required to work with the new stuff you're going to make? Personally I would prefer if it was optional, as I'm pretty happy with (most of) my existing textures.

@ghanima: I'll make a whole lot of additional tiles and they must match the existing ones in a way, so I will have to retexture all with my own textures. I can't know what texture replacer each of you guys has installed, so I think there is no way around this!!!


TheDaywalker :rock:

You can always make them work with vanilla textures, like many did (TR has many such models)

Yes, this was what I meant. I'm sure your textures would be great, it's just that I love Connary's textures (particularly if you did do Ald'ruhn) and it would be great if this would work with his Compendium whenever it's finally released.

it's alright, just getting the idea out there
I have a lonely list of mod ideas that I'm trying to smoothly get out, lol.

Eh, if you're an inexperienced player, Vivec can be pretty confusing.

I voted Ald-Ruhn. I almost voted Balmora but there already plenty of Balmora mods out there.

My vote's for Vivec. I always loved the yawning entryways and complex compound system, but it felt.. repetitive after a while. Some uniqueness to each compound would be nice, like perhaps some mushroomery for the Telvanni and maybe some extra aesthetic flairs for Temple and Vivec's Palace, for example. Also, not many mods change the Vivec exterior cells, so there would be little chance for conflict (as opposed to, say, Balmora).

Checking the votes, it seems as if Ald'Rhun is going to make the race at the moment. Well, I already got some ideas in mind and due to fairness, I will let you in on some changes I have in mind. Nobody should have to say afterwards "If I had known this, I'd have voted for Balmora!!!", LOL!!!

What bothers me most about Ald'Rhun is, that the exteriors (buildings) look like escimo tents on a camping lot, I'll definately make new buildings. I also personally think that all this seafood crab concept doesn't work very well for the region where Ald'Rhun was placed, would have been better somewhere around a coast. I know that this giant crab is somewhat important for lore of Ald'Rhun, so I'll have to figure out something. If it was after me, I'd take all that stuff away, honestly!!!

I want to place my version of Ald'Rhun in a large canyon, with a lot of caves, tunnels and underwork. Therefore I'll have too check, how high the landmass lies above the sea level. Maybe I will have to raise land and put new A'R on a kinda plateau, we'll see. I want to make exploring the city more interesting. I have been several times in A'R, but always just as long as needed to do the requirements of a quest, cause the city had really nothing to offer to spend some time on, at least not in the exteriors. You could go upstairs and downstairs again, maybe run around those little housings, if you liked to, but that yet was it.

Another thing I have in mind is new plants, that will match the region and maybe some new/ modified hostile creatures on the outside of the city walls. Ok, that should be enough for the beginning.


TheDaywalker :rock:

oh! a very radical overhaul
I like that
yea I think skar (is that right?) is fairly important to ald-ruhn, if not for lore, but just because it wouldn't be ald-ruhn without it, I guess.
I always wondered why everything wasn't entirely filled with ash!
I like the idea of a canyon city! can't wait for this (or any town should ald-ruhn be outvoted, lol)

I'm not a very patient person and so I couldn't prevent working on the first concepts, in case Ald' Rhun will win the poll, LOL!!! As I already said, I plan placing the new city into a large canyon, which is tunneled by a dozen of caves. I'd have loved to get rid of that crab thingy, but for christ's sake I will care at least a bit about lore and so I thought I will mix the stoney environment of the canyon up with some organic skeletal structures, taking over design elements, that remind of bones, rib cages, teeth and so on. Well here's the beginning of the giant gates, that will lead into the canyon. Maybe I will add an animated fence like the ghostgate has and weave it into the gaps of the construction, not quite sure yet.

What you think?

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/9493/gatesofaldrhun.jpg


TheDaywalker :rock:

Everytime you post pictures of something you modeled, whether the above, in Skyrim, or Avatar project, I immediately feel like I need to go back to watching countless tutorials to expand my skills lol.

Good Job :thumbsup:

Looks pretty nifty mate! :goodjob:

@zackg: You need not do many tutorials for this, it's just basic subsurf modeling, no tricks. Except from animation and stuff like that, I never really did a lot of tutorials. Most times I work after good old trial and error method. If you once figured out the workflow, what you do is repetetive all the time. Only thing that is important is a good imagination, at least if you're modeling without blueprints.

@SGMonkey: Thx mate, glad you like it!!!


TheDaywalker :rock:

I said I will wait for the results of the poll till weekend, well, guess I lied. Today I just opened Blender for some minutes, thinking of nothing bad at all and then suddenly it turned out into a solid canyon base mesh for new Ald'Rhun. But I'll be fair and grant all you Ald' Rhun haters a last chance til tommorow evening to vote for something else. Fact is, if I really had waited til weekend, I'd have already finished a complete Ald' Rhun tileset and I wouldn't have liked to dump that!!!

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/4984/newaldrhun01.jpg

PS: Guess the Future II gramatics I have used in previous sentence is not that correct, so all you young people please don't learn from that, LOL!!!


TheDaywalker :rock:

So will these be single, monololithic meshes or a tileset? Like the difference between Fidel's original underwater palace (single mesh) that Erstam split up into a tileset?

As it seems (reading between the lines) you're radically going to change Ald'Ruhn will this break any quests?

The base mesh will be one piece, would make no sense to brake it up, but there will be several single monolithic stones and other tiles for decorating issues. It may be, that some path grids will have to be edited, but I will keep the original interiors for this release. I never played any mods beside the vanilla ones, so i don't know about any possible conflicts.


TheDaywalker :rock:

I'm looking forward to seeing Ald-Ruhn's epic facelift! Great modelling TDW

Keep it up! But don't forget about unique places please :icecream:

Ok, poll is over and the winner is: Ald' Rhun!!! :celebration:

The base model has been overworked again and actually I have loads of fun with UV-mapping that giant thing. As I want you guys to be part of the building process, I will update screens frequently. So you got the chance to bring in your own ideas and help to work out the final look of the "new" city!!!

@Melchior: Unique places is yet at a good stage and I'll work on it besides this. Actually I'm designing a new flyable Dwemer skyship, screens comming soon!!!


TheDaywalker :rock:

Maybe make the city look very wind-worn on the top, and have it be mainly underground, away from the ash-storms. A question, will this be compatible with LGNPC?