I was thinking that it would be a lot of fun to go into a game and meet a lot of characters ingame that are actually the avatar of the folks in the moding community, both here and on the Nexus.

The idea is simple. Everone interested, downloads a worldspace map (.esm master) and a blank .esp. They then open these in the CK and lay claim to 1 cell (x,y) in the map plus an additional secondary cell (x,y).

This would be based on a first come, first served basis. If your claim has already been take by someone else, you'll receive an email telling you to use your secondary x,y cell, or if that's not available, to pick another.

Once you recieve confirmation, you can start work on your own home, exterior and interior. Of course, it doesnt have to be a house, it could be a mine, a cave, a dungeon,...anything you want.

Two things that must be present are
1. An avatar representing yourself. To this you can add your own dialog, armour, and possibly your own quest.
2. A message must be created with your name, and attached to the entrance / entrances of your mod.

Other Info

The plan so far is to include 4, 5 or possibly 6 cities. These too, would be partly claimed (not a whole cell) and your chosen town/city dwelling/shop/blacksmith/mansion area would be given to you. This would probably result in having to duplicate your avatar so that the player meets you in the cities and out in the wilds. You would be neighbours with other folk who want to participate.

It could even be possible for some folk to get together and collectively create small hamlets,...if they so choose.

The possibilities are endless, just use your imagination.

Of course every persons avatar would be marked as essential, so you wouldn't be killed off.

The thing i think that would be really funny, is picking other peoples locks and 'exploring' their property. Again, you could set numerous deadly traps inside to prevent the player from doing this.

Obviously, there would have to be some guidelines put in place. It's just a storybook at the moment, but depending on the interest, it might make it to the production table.

Another point, this isn't going to be a short term project. I think we're looking at a year minimum, so there would be no hurry to get thing done, or abandon your current project for the time being. All getting done at a leisurely pace.

What are your thoughts on all of this ?

[Edit]
Here's what folk on the Nexus think -

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/706420-your-thoughts-on-a-community-mod/

Here's some screenshots taken in the CK, of the Worldspace -

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tambos.turf/Skyrim/Worldspace_Top.jpg
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tambos.turf/Skyrim/Worldspace_Medium_Angle.jpg
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tambos.turf/Skyrim/Worldspace_Low_Angle.jpg

This is the bare worldspace, with the base textures put down. The area you see with the little yellow squares is a 15x15 cell area, just to give you a rough idea of the size. The main mountain ridges you see, define the border of the worldspace, although this could be changed, to use the area to the South West, if needed.

It looks a lot better ingame,...trust me.

i want in. sounds fun

first! so i wanna claim (0,1) or (1,1) LOL. what about navmeshes, they will spread out over more than 1 exterior cell. i have a relatively safe idea how to circumvent this. do we have to create a likeness avatar? or can we create imaginary avatars that "represent" us, or even beast/non-human type?


is the esm not tamriel?

contest idea: first one to cause a mod conflict CTD gets sent to The Pit Of Despair for a day

I was hoping folk like yourself and all the other more experienced modders would be interested. It's going to be quite hard to keep tabs on everything that's going on, but I'll try (probably set up a database).

It's early doors AD, but if there's enough interest, then I think it will work...and will work well.

Things like navmesh will be done towards the end, so folk needn't worry about that. By all means, you could make make a temp navmesh for testing, but when it nears completion, navmesh will probably be done in the region editor by myself any anybody else that want to give a hand. I'll just split the worldspace into regions and folk can do the bit they want (if they want).

The esm is not Tamriel and is not parented to tamriel. I still haven't figured out how to arrive at it yet though. I was looking at a few options on the Tamriel map and the gate to the south looks like a possibility. Either that, or it's jump on Lucky Daves' boat and hijack it

I've posted the same on the Nexus, to see what the reaction is from that end, but it's early doors. Here's the link -

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/706420-your-thoughts-on-a-community-mod/

I'll add the link in the first post as well.

i would love the idea of a "Lost"-like mythical island where the player goes on a hot air balloon ride in tamriel gone wrong hahahha - like the balloon is hit by a bolt of lightning that rips reality into a parallel plane where the "island" exists

about the navmeshes - if they are pre-made in the esm, placing your statics on top of it with load doors then finalizing will spread into a neighbor's cell (has anyone conclusively tested if it is safe to have multiple overlapping navmeshes?)

my alternate idea was to use NavCut collision boxes over your architecture and drop a load door onto the unfinalized vanilla navmesh (in my tests it has worked fine as long as the reverse side in the interior is finalized, but i never tested with overlapping navmesh edits on different esp's)

The navmesh is not and will not be pre made. It'll be made once all the participating modders have submitted their esp back to me for merging into the esm.

Like your idea of the hot air balloon

[Edit]
I should also tell you that 0,1 and 1,1 is on a snowy hill iirc.

ooo, i gotcha. that would make more sense. so all esps would eventually be version-controlled into the esm? if thats the case it would make the load-sharing a lot better if each modder made their own navmesh to the cell borders then as each esp gets "consumed" into the esm, you only need to do seam work to jigsaw them together (i think, or at least the just the navmesh into the esm)

if i get to have cell 0,1 can i do the hot air balloon quest? heheeheh

Yes, it's much easier to control exacly what people are doing. ie. not making dirty edits to Skyrim.esm and not altering other parts of the worldspace that may affect other folks cells.

I think that 'could' end up being a lot more work than is neccesary.

I have tried the region navmesh and it seemed to work quite well. Of course it was an un-populated region, so things may turn out differently once a lot of statics are in place.


Hehehehe, wait and see.

Again, if it's a community project, then wait and see what the community thinks. It won't be my decision. I am NOT the boss. Probably, just the co-ordinator. I do like the idea though. Do you think you could get it to work ?

lol, got pre-excited.

well even if doesnt become the "enter quest" i still wanna sneak a hot air balloon ride in there somewhere. it can work, by forcing 3rd person, locking controls, then spline translating the player actor across xmarkers placed in the sky. the balloon itself is an "armor" that dismembers the entire human figure hard-weighted to a single bone, and given an armor-slot of one of the misc unused biped nodes and set it to priority-eclipse all other visible nodes. this is all theory i havent tried it yet, but theres no reason why it shouldnt work (ive done all of the individual things separately and it works, just not all at once). if you want it controllable, it wouldnt be too hard i think. since the balloon is an armor it will always follow the player even if it is in a bunch of pieces. the downside is once you land the balloon you might end up naked or partially naked if the balloon objects force-unequip other armors

but then again, its not like you can really "drive" a hot air balloon anyway, so most likely it will be a nice scenic ride across tamriel before getting struck by 1.21 jiggawatts of electricity

edit 1 -i just thought of something, if you disable everything except sneak controls, you can use the sneak input to control elevation on the balloon. standing = elevate, sneak = descend. the xmarkers can be chain-link-ref'd and you can run GetNthRef in combination with OnTranslationComplete (set to increment an int value each time to return the next nth ref). then send the sneak status to either move that marker up or down its z axis so that the translate will ascend or descend. you can create a fake "OnSneak" event without resorting to an update loop by casting a blank empty ability on the player that activates/deactivated on a IsSneaking condition, and use the OnEffectStart/OnnEffectFinish to send your event data to the xmarker in real time

edit 2 - actually it might work better if you set the balloon model as a defunct weapon, and the balloon is the 1stperson STAT (which by default if it doesnt have a named weapon node, will attach to the player at its 0,0,0 local origin). that way there wont be any "body shift" when the player sneaks

(sorry dont mind me i'm "talking out loud" so i can use this page as notes when i get to writing the script in case i forget)

^^ Most of that went right over my head, but I'll take your word for it.

I've added some links to the first post, containing screenshots of the worldspace.

yea, im mostly jotting notes down so when i get to the CK later i can use this as reference. i'll make a prototype tonight and see if it actually works

Consider me interested, I call dibbs on being landlord of one of the taverns

- Hypno

If it ever gets off the ground, you can do/have whatever you want (within reason).

Well I'm keeping my fingers crossed for it. It'll be cool to have so many different artistic perspectives working on one project, each interior will truly feel unique

BTW, Amethyst, those "notes posts" were an interesting read. Thanks for providing a brief window into how a veteran brain ticks

- Hypno

The hot air balloon should be dwemer in design. No one else seems to care for technology beyond the steel age (depite thousands of years in which they could have developed given the relative peace and stability of the Septim Empire) and I just think it would make a lot of sense.

Thanks for that idea for the hot air balloon control method. I was thinking of a way to make a spider tank (basically imagine a large dwemer spider that you get in the cockpit of and control) and I think that's how I'll accomplish it. That project is down the road though, right now I'm just learning the basics of blender, so making a good cockpit might be beyond me atm.