[Relz/Beta/WiPz] Arthmoor's Collection

[Arthmoor]

Arthmoor's Collection

Dwip inspired this, so what the hey, right? I don't have a master thread for all my goodies. This ends now. Sheesh, I sure do have lots to keep track of. Not going to rehash too much of each mod description, those can be found elsewhere. Won't bother with release links either, I figure you guys all know where to get it anyway. (hint: there be files here)
 

Released Mods - Morrowind

Arthmoor's Morrowind Merchants

Original release date unknown, but likely sometime in mid to late 2002.

Adds 3 merchants to the game who can actually afford to buy your stuff from you. Simple, yet effective.

Ashlander Transports

Original release date unknown, but likely sometime in mid to late 2002.

Adds a network of travel providers to complement the game's other groups, specifically catering to the Ashlands region.
 

Released Mods - Fallout 3

Wasteland Travel Caravans

Released July 12, 2009.

Adds a set of travel providers with the same function as the Cyrodiil Travel Services mod for Oblivion, which in turn provides services like those in Morrowind. It's pretty basic stuff, and is thus far the only Fallout 3 mod I've done. Likely to remain the only one I've done as the game just doesn't have the same draw for me as the TES series.

Released Mods - Oblivion

Open Cities Classic

Re-Released April 2, 2008. Original release date November 2006.

Removes loading screens from all of the main cities, other than Kvatch and the Imperial City. The goal being to restore some of the lost touches from Morrowind. I took this project over as my first real foray into Oblivion modding. Oh yeah, I don't do things simple It's come a long way since the early days.

Really AEVWD

Released September 28, 2008.

I am a fanatic when it comes to visual quality. In my quest to flesh out the distant viewables, I tried numerous VWD mods. All of them had problems. Bugs, poor quality meshes, you name it. RAEVWD was my answer to that. Weeks of time was spent doing polygon reductions of the full sized meshes in order to preserve as much quality as possible while still lowering resource usage. Like I said, I don't do anything simple The result turned into the largest and most complete collection of VWD meshes + textures for the game and has since become the gold standard by which all other VWD mods get compared. Not too shabby for my second public release

Roads of Cyrodiil

Re-Released October 7, 2008. Original release date sometime in 2007.

Adds new roads to the game, along with 3 new bridges to the Imperial Isle. Another takeover project, which I seem to be good at doing. This one has undergone quite a few changes and additions under my control. For those who prefer not to fast travel, the new road routes are about as handy as they come.

In May of 2012, this mod was merged with West Roads and rebranded as Roads of Cyrodiil (formerly New Roads & Bridges).

Faregyl Village

Released December 22, 2008.
Version 2.0 released January 31, 2011.

The first mod done entirely on my own, aside from assists for custom assets that is. This expands the Faregyl Inn into a proper farming village with crops, livestock, and a smithy. A short quest involving the gold mine on the edge of town was added mostly as an afterthought.

Version 2.0 expands greatly on the town's backstory by updating the mine quest and adding two entirely new phases of the main town quest.

Cyrodiil Travel Services

Released January 17, 2009.
Version 2.0 released on May 11, 2010.
Version 3.0 released on July 1, 2011.

This one started out as a fairly basic alternative to the Cyrodiil Transportation Network, although I had been working on it before finding out that mod even existed. By the time I had, I was too far along to consider abandoning the project. Turns out to have been a good decision as CTN has some bugs. This is my version of reintroducing travel providers as they existed in Morrowind, in the form of agents at each major city (except Kvatch) who would charge a nominal fee to transport you to your destination and advance the game clock to simulate the time needed to get there.

The original release was out for some time when a nasty bug was discovered in the method used to transport the player to their destination. The only sensible way to fix it was to rework the entire travel script system. Eventually resulting in version 2.0 which was my first use of OBSE in order to support mod added destinations as well.

Version 3.0 expands on the available travel options with teleportation access in the Mages Guild, Divine Intervention spells/scrolls, and the classic Mark & Recall. The only thing not added was ship based travel because that would introduce too many hard to resolve compatibility issues.

Cell Sized VWD Water Plane

Released March 9, 2009.

While working on Brena River, it became obvious that the game does not properly render LOD water. If your water height is above sea level, it still renders as though it were at 0. Something had to be done, because leaving it as it was just made the ravine look awful from a distance. Building on what I knew about VWD meshes from RAEVWD, I ran an experiment using DaMage's "real water mesh" resource. One half ginormous editor marker, one half ginormous water plane. The first time I can think of anyone had made a _far.nif that wasn't a simplified version of the full size mesh, but something entirely different. It worked, and worked well, and Brena River looks fabulous because of it. Other ULs use it now too, along with the Elsweyr Anequina mod, and who knows what else.

Unique Landscapes - Brena River Ravine

Released April 4, 2009.

Yes, another takeover mod. Also a pretty huge leap over having only done a small village mod of my own prior to that. I took over the mod in a half finished state and added easily half of the current content to the mod. The Brena River area has been thoroughly transformed into the largest Ayleid ruin in the game, complete with a fun little quest and a large bandit camp. Most of this mod exists outside the standard game borders.

Vergayun

Released August 21, 2009.
Version 2.0 Released January 31, 2012.

My second village mod. Not nearly as elaborate as Faregyl. I wanted a nice simple little fishing village and found the perfect spot. Thank you Bethesda for leaving such gems out there for us to exploit. There are no quests here but the villagers all have some interesting dialogue and I also added a ship that docks there every 2 weeks. I may yet revisit this one and add a quest or two, there's an Oblivion gate right there begging to get dragged in somehow, and certainly enough teaser material with Seeks-Great-Fortune.

Version 2.0 expanded on things a bit by involving the Oblivion gate found behind the village. You can now experience a custom made Oblivion realm unique to the Vergayun gate. There is also a cross-over quest that interacts with my Gottshaw Village mod now too. You may thank the delayed release of the Skyrim CK for the added content.

Feldscar

Released February 16, 2010.

My third village mod. By now, it's become obvious to me and probably everyone else too, I've got the village bug. What can I say? I love to build them. They're just the right mix of size and substance to pull something off in a few weeks or maybe a month or two. Provided work on such a project continues uninterrupted. Feldscar partly fulfills the lack of more Nords in Cyrodiil. Sure, they're everywhere. Everywhere but where they belong! In the cold and snow. I also decided I wanted the village to be more tied in with other parts of the game and created a couple of small quests that make you have to go visit Feldscar's two immediate neighbors - Bruma and Cheydinhal - to see people you have met/will meet on other quests. The real meat comes from the larger main quest that revolves around the big rock behind the inn.

A Brotherhood Renewed

Released May 18, 2010.

The Dark Brotherhood is my favorite faction in the game, but the ending you're left with in vanilla has always felt just plain wrong. This mod is the end result of my desire to see the Dark Brotherhood rebuild itself after the end of the vanilla quest line. It's also the first mod in which I also acted in the role of a project manager. Sanctuaries were provided by 3 different people besides myself, and there were several bits of custom resource work done, as well as a small amount of voice acting in later revisions.

It turned out to be very well received. Lots of other people were thrilled to death to finally have some closure for their favorite faction as well. It even made the front page hotlist for Nexus and held the spot there for close to 2 solid weeks, and earned second place in the June 2010 file of the month voting.

It wasn't without a short spat of controversy though when one of the team members from Dark Brotherhood Chronicles lashed out at folks who commented that "the other" DB project still wasn't ready. It died down fairly quickly though.

Molapi

Released July 31, 2010.

Village #4 checking in. A small settlement on the island north of Leyawiin, where previously there was just a random small dock. Molapi is conquered territory, so the folks there are still holding grudges against the Empire. The quest revolves around this aspect, and will only become available if you return to the village at a later time to visit. I also chose to exploit my control over NRB4 by building the village up from the basic landscape the roads mod had on the island, so when used with NRB4 it feels like a natural fit.

Tamriel Immersion Experience (TIE)

Assumed control on October 20, 2010.
Various release dates going back 2-3 years prior.

Yep, I took over another one. I seem to have a knack for collecting mods that have been abandoned or are about to be for one reason or another. TIE is an overhaul that's geared mainly toward stealth based characters although it has plenty to offer fighter and mage types as well. Like most overhauls, many aspects of the game are tweaked by TIE. What makes TIE unique is that it accomplishes all this with no non-vanilla resources at all. Only an ESP, with creative scripting, CS use, and management of leveled lists. It is surprisingly challenging, and several users have said it blows FCOM away in terms of gameplay and tactics. All without miring the game in horrible lag. Bonus points for not even needing OBSE, so even D2D players can enjoy it.

Veritas Secreto handed control off to me in October when he decided to retire from Oblivion modding to pursue other activities.

Verona House: Bloodlines SI Version

Version 1.5 released January 1, 2011.
Original version release date is unknown as DTom's website appears to have vanished.

Yep, done did it again. This isn't necessarily set in stone yet, but given that the mod's legal terms allowed for it and it truly did/does need the fixup, I've released a cleaned, debugged (hopefully), and optimized update for Verona House: Bloodines. VHB is a quest that takes place after the main quest which involves a vampire cult which is bent on causing Cyrodiil some new troubles. There's a full scale city on the edge of Lake Rumare called Verona Bay, which itself is an expanded version of the original mod simply called Verona House. It's more interesting than I made it sound, but I don't want to spoil anything either.

If this turns into a full blown abandonment revival, I'd like to do further cleanup to make things easier to maintain should the need arise. It's pretty hard to debug someone else's work on something this extensive when you haven't even finished playing the mod yourself for the first time. Which is the main reason I even bothered to do this since I had already needed to edit the thing in order to progress as far as I have.

Alternative Beginnings

Version 1.1 released March 3, 2011.

Your basic alternate start mod. This one gives you options to be a fresh immigrant to Cyrodiil, to own one of the player houses, start as a gladiator in the Arena, and even begin your life in Cyrodiil as the victim of a shipwreck off the coast in which you must swim to shore. Plus a bunch of other options as well.

Alternate start mods are a dime a dozen these days but IMO I think mine offers the most choices in the most compact package while still providing for a believable basis for your alternatives. You can even ignore the main quest as it will not start until you find the body of the poor sap who was supposed to fulfill the prophecy.

Frostcrag Village

Version 1.0 released March 18, 2011.

High in the Jerall Mountains lies the impressive Frostcrag Spire. A magical wonder which you have apparently inherited from a long lost relative. As you arrive to claim your inheritance, you soon discover that there is a small village at the foot of the Spire which your unknown benefactor has failed to mention at all.

Frostcrag Village is a small Nordic settlement that sits in the shadow of Frostcrag Spire and serves as the homes for those who became the Spire's caretakers. It is a fairly simple place, with a tavern and homes for the residents to live in. Yet despite its simplicity, there are things to do here, so talk to the folks. Especially the tavern keeper, who as usual has loose lips about any and all who live there.

Open Cities Reborn

First beta release on July 13, 2010.
Version 1.0 officially released on May 31, 2011.

This takes Open Cities Classic and turns things on their ear. Each city is given a new layout which is more strategically sound, generally meaning that the castle is centered near the middle and the population is spread out around it more like a real city from the game's time frame. Walls on some cities have been replaced with more regionally appropriate resources. Bruma has a wooden palisade, Chorrol has half-height stone walls, Bravil has none and relies on being an island. Anvil and Leyawiin retain their city walls but are far more realistically centered around being seaports than they used to be. Cheydinhal has suitable low height walls which blend in with Morrowind-like architecture. Skingrad got a partial update when the walls along the central road were knocked out to relieve some of the claustrophobia.

Bruma Guild Reconstructed

Version 1.0 Released July 14, 2011

A fairly simple mod with a simple purpose. Put out the eternal fires that roar forever in the burned out Bruma Mages Guild once the quest line has advanced far enough. Rather than simply have it show up done one day, the reconstruction is handled in stages that take time to complete. First, the fires go out on their own. Then the rubble is cleared. Once this is done, it's up to you to instigate the next step, which is to fill it with stuff, and then have new members show up after that.

Reedstand

Version 1.0 Released September 12, 2011.

Argonians in the swamp. Who would have thought?

Reedstand is a small Argonian settlement in Blackwood just to the north of Reedstand Cave. It isn't much, but the locals have been here for what seems like an eternity, and have come to like their isolated little portion of the swamp. There is, however, trouble brewing. An eccentric wizard has caused corruption of the local plant life and landscape. The people have tolerated this so far, but they are growing impatient.

This is yet another village mod stuffed into a small gap that doesn't appear to have been used yet. For those who say Cyrodiil is too overcrowded, be more creative, or I'll end up filling in all the spaces

Hi-Res Painting Resource

Released October 6, 2011.

A resource collection of paintings I've made over the course of creating my other mods. All of theme are 1024x512 hi-res paintings which are of much higher visual quality than those supplied in the vanilla game. Yes, I know there are probably zillions of other resource packs just like it but most of them just didn't appeal to me. Since I found these useful, I figured others would too.

Urasek

Version 1.0 Released October 14, 2011.

A mining support town situated alongside Fort Urasek.

Ever wonder where all the mithril for all those pieces of mithril armor come from? Unless we're to believe it appears by magic, someone has to spend the time digging holes in the ground to bring it up to the surface and turn it in to useful ore, which is then sold to blacksmiths to make armor. The town of Urasek attempts to answer this in some small way by representing the last known operational mine in Cyrodiil where mithril ore is brought up. The town consists of an inn, blacksmith who sells ore and finished pieces, and the arrogant Altmer land baron who runs things.

I've checked lore sources and found next to nothing detailing how and where mithril ore is mined. Nothing says that Cyrodiil ever had any, nor do any sources mention exactly where the stuff comes from. So I felt this would remedy the situation without going too overboard.

Sutch Village

As many are aware, Bethesda once had plans to include the city of Sutch in the game. The E3 demos contained passing hints to its existence, the map loop in the game's intro had it marked NW of Kvatch, in the CS you can make out the land depression they prepared for it along with several cells tagged as being part of it, and it even has its own Oblivion gate.

For reasons unknown, it was cut from the game at the last minute and a ruined Fort Sutch plus the Oblivion gate is all that remains. As a result of this, several people have attempted reconstructions of the city. Plenty of projects have been abandoned, while others left their work for someone else to pick up.

This village mod is our take on restoring Sutch to the game. Based on extremely sketchy lore found in scattered places on the web, we arrived at the conclusion that the city itself has been destroyed and only a ruin is left behind. Rather than attempt to rebuild a large city over the top of a ruin, this mod takes the position that settlers have only recently come back to the area in an attempt to start over. There is a village northwest of Fort Sutch, containing a manor house along with some housing, an inn, some supporting farms, a vineyard, and an ebony mine. Yes, the only one known to still be functioning in Cyrodiil. The stuff can't only be available in Morrowind

Gottshaw Village

Version 1.0 Released January 31, 2012.

Another village expansion. Not nearly as extensive as others, but comes with a somewhat novel cross-mod quest with Vergayun that leverages OBSE to run it. It also has a farmhouse that builds up over time just like Cropfsford. What can I say? I'm a sucker for that. This mod was really more of a time filler due to the extraordinarily long delay of the Skyrim Creation Kit.

Miscellaneous Stuff

Any number of patches for things are among my released works. They're individually too trivial to warrant entries and too numerous to list. Mostly relating to Open Cities and Unique Landscapes.
 

Released Mods - Skyrim

Open Cities Skyrim

Transfers all 5 major cities in Skyrim out to the Tamriel worldspace. Skyrim's version is greatly complicated by the Civil War quests and the fact that everything is so much more detailed. It took a great deal of wrangling, but ultimately the civil war was made to work by simply reverting to having that happen back in the closed cities.

Alternate Start - Live Another Life

Version 1.0 Released February 14, 2012.
Version 2.0 Released June 8, 2012.
Version 3.0 Released February 25, 2015.

As with Alternative Beginnings for Oblivion, this mod provides a number of alternate start scenarios that skip the intro quest in Helgen. This does not circumvent the main quest, but it sets things up in such a way that you could simply avoid it if you don't want to get involved.

Due to corruption caused by early versions of TESVSnip, the mod had to be entirely scrapped and rebuilt from scratch for the 2.0 release. Lesson learned.

The 3.x series marked one of my first mods to impose a requirement to use all of the official DLC content as proper masters. Up until this point, the mod was making use of somewhat less reliable soft compatibility checks via Papyrus scripting. That started to prove too unwieldy though and was limiting my ability to expand on what the mod could do.

Gildergreen Regrown

Version 1.0 Released March 5, 2012.

A very simple mod with a very simple purpose. Upon completing "Blessings of Nature" by bringing back the sapling, this will have it grow back over the course of 6 in-game months.

Bring Out Your Dead

Version 1.0 Released April 1, 2012.

The vanilla game has an interesting mechanic where it will clean up the corpses of unique NPCs when they are killed. They get graves and everything, and you can rob those graves and take whatever the NPC last had on them. This mod extends that to all of the unique NPCs Bethesda left out and adds graveyards to the various cities and villages that didn't have them.

No, I did not draw inspiration for the title from Monty Python. I had the guy in Stephen King's "The Stand" in mind when I came up with the title.

Ars Metallica - Smithing Enhancement

Version 1.0 Released April 28, 2012.

My attempt at addressing some shortcomings in the Skyrim crafting system. This allows you to gain experience from smelting and using the tanning racks, as well as allowing for the melting down of non-enchanted armors and weapons for their raw materials. Members of certain guilds can also craft replacements for their "uniforms".

The Paarthurnax Dilemma

Version 1.0 Released June 9, 2012.

Everyone's favorite dragon gets his reprieve, if that's what you desire. Provides a real choice to something many feel Bethesda left hanging.

Run For Your Lives

Version 1.0 Released September 10, 2012.

Tired of your NPCs running head long to their doom in a dragon attack? So was I, and so were a lot of other people. This mod aims to fix that, and although it works most of the time, there are still situations where a dragon attack can happen and the NPCs will still act recklessly. At least your chances of depopulating an entire town are a lot smaller now.

When Vampires Attack

Version 1.0 Released December 12, 2012.

The same premise as Run For Your Lives, only this one covers the random vampire attacks on population centers that come with the Dawnguard DLC. Vampire attacks are actually much more dangerous since the attackers are spawned directly inside the cities and you often don't even know it's happened until you find the bodies. With a higher level character you could easily lose half a city's worth of people before bringing it under control.
 
Point the Way
 
Version 1.0 Released March 15, 2013.
 
This mod places extra road signs around at the various intersections in Skyrim, many of which had none. Additional signs were added to many that already had some. The over all effect being that you can now navigate the roads without having to refer to your map in-game all the time to remember how to get where you're going.

Oblivion Gates in Cities

Version 1.0 Released September 23, 2013.

A spinoff project that was partially born from frustration with memory issues introduced in Patch 1.9. Open Cities had these going back quite a bit further, and when I was temporarily forced to pull OCS from my load order, I still wanted these to be around. So I split the work off and made a standalone mod for the closed cities.

Provincial Courier Service

Version 1.0 Released November 8, 2013.

An immersion mod which was the product of a late night conversation about the poor courier not having a home of his own. I figured, hey, why not give him one? It's not much, but these kinds of little touches are more popular than you might think

Cutting Room Floor

Version 1.0 Released November 16, 2013.
Version 2.0 Released November 7, 2015.

Over the years of playing Skyrim, it became more and more obvious that there was a lot of content that had been sidelined from the game. A considerable amount of it was still in the data files, and this project is the result of that. Quite a lot of it has been found and the project is continuing to find more. It's also become somewhat of an unofficial sister project to the unofficial patch.

Version 2.0 went on to expand coverage to the 3 official DLCs as well. These may not have as much to dig up, but there's still enough there to be found.

Storefront

Version 1.0 Released November 21, 2013.

Ever wanted a store of your own in the market places? Yeah, so did I. Only it seemed more practical to let your spouse be the one to run it for you while you're out adventuring. Your stand will be in whatever city you live in, or near one of the HF houses if you live there.

Manor Roads

Version 1.0 Released December 17, 2013.

Simply adds landscaped roads from the Hearthfire houses in The Pale and Falkreath Hold that lead down to the nearby main roads.

Dwip doesn't like landscaped roads, but too bad

Practice Dummies

Version 1.0 Released May 18, 2014.

If you ever got tired of combat practice equipment not working, this is for you. It's just one of those things that seems to make sense and should have been in the game to start with.

Shadowmarks

Version 1.0 Released August 30, 2014.

Another small immersion mod. This one simply marks the player homes in the 5 main cities by your status (or lack thereof) in the Thieves Guild. Just like any other prominent residence in town.

Bee Hives

Version 1.0 Released October 20, 2014.

A really small immersion mod for the Honningbrew Meadery. Seemed odd that they could operate a major mead distillery without a local source of honey.

Castle Volkihar Rebuilt

Version 1.0 Released May 4, 2015.

A neat little mod I put together for the paid mods launch in April of 2015. Allows you to clean up Castle Volkihar and take it over for yourself. Initially listed for $3.49, it sold quite well for the 3 days the paid mods system was up on Steam. Should have led to great things for modders, but alas, Trolls. Trolls never change.

Kynesgrove

Version 1.0 Released June 24, 2015.

The first genuine move back into village modding. Rather than a hugely complex new one though, I decided it would be a little less time consuming to expand on one instead. The end result was the same though, reaffirming my love for villages and launched a series of them which is still continuing.

Darkwater Crossing

Version 1.0 Released June 27, 2015.

Continuing the expansion of villages. Yes, it was pretty close to the Kynesgrove release, but only because I was working on them in parallel. Later versions of this got another boost when I mixed some cut content in with it that had not been addressed yet in Cutting Room Floor.

Ivarstead

Version 1.0 Released July 3, 2015.

Must expand, ever onward. Ivarstead needed it badly though with all those NPCs stuffed into the inn like sardines. I've had comments on this one saying people forgot they installed it and thought it was all vanilla

Dragon Claw Stands

Version 1.0 Released October 7, 2015.

An old project that got shelved initially due to collision and scripting issues we couldn't figure out back in 2012/2013. Just a nice display mount to hold a dragon claw, with several placed throughout the various player homes.

Dawnguard Map Markers

Version 1.0 Released October 9, 2015.

A small quick mod to provide map markers for use while in the Soul Cairn, and a few for Forgotten Vale and Dayspring Canyon. This was mainly to address frustration at being stuck with having to walk everywher inside the Soul Cairn even after discovering the various places that exist. Jiub's quest played a major part in this as well

Shor's Stone

Version 1.0 Released October 20, 2015.

Another expansion, which integrates some more cut content not yet addressed in Cutting Room Floor. This mod also has a couple of nods over to Elder Scrolls Online as well.

Whistling Mine

Version 1.0 Released February 14, 2016.

Yet another village, but this time the whole thing had to be built. Poor miners, freezing their asses off in some dank cave. The kind of thing that makes little sense and just has to be dealt with.

Soljund's Sinkhole

Version 1.0 Released February 21, 2016.

People gotta live somewhere! One house just doesn't cut it for two grown men. Plus added a guard station since it's in The Reach and hostile Forsworn are everywhere.

[Arthmoor]

Works in Progress - Oblivion

None. I am effectively retired from Oblivion modding. No new projects planned, only bug maintenance on existing projects and updates to the Unofficial Oblivion Patch.
 

Works in Progress - Skyrim

 
Keld-Nar

Raminus Polus: This doesn't translate to Feldscar at all. It translates to Keld-Nar, a long abandoned village deep inside Skyrim to the north. Keld-Nar lies in between an ancient Nordic tomb, and a large black rock who's origins Keldon and I were never able to determine.

You know me and villages, right? Certainly you didn't think I'd abandon my ways any time soon did you? Though in Feldscar's time the village was long abandoned, it has since been resettled by descendents of Feldscar who migrated here about 100 years after the end of Oblivion. For you Naked Nord lovers out there, the custom followed them. It remains to be seen how other nearby villages react to this.

Located in Eastmarch, near one of the Dwemer ruins.

Lord Arthmoor's Palace

Originally slated to be an Oblivion mod, this will instead become a Skyrim mod. This will be loosely based around the Arthmoor's Palace zone from Alsherok/Shard. A large castle situated on top of a high black mountain. At the foot of the castle, near a river, is a small farming village that supports the palace.

There is also a large mine underground beneath the castle which is rich in ore. Obviously using blackrock doesn't really fit with TES lore but certainly something suitable such as adamantium or ebony would do as a substitute.

This may be a bit of an ambitious project, but we'll see. Hopefully after working on the other two I'll have a decent feel for things.

Unreleased Projects - Morrowind

Stuff we had grand plans for but never saw the light of day.

Graecia

This was most probably going to be part of a total conversion for Alsherok but for some reason it's sitting separate in a folder marked "unfinished". I couldn't tell you how far along it was, but I have vague memories of there being some significant work done on the coastal area and at least a few buildngs being in place and the start of a road.

SA HAven

Something Cam was working on, SA being short for Squirell Alien. Yes, our furry overlords were planning something big. God only knows what now after 7 years time.

Dwip.esp

Hey, it's probably not mine after all. So I can't really comment as I don't remember this one at all.

Alsherok Total Conversion

Ambitious plans were in the works to take the Alsherok MUD and turn it into a giant mod for Morrowind. We had a map of all the world regions laid out which would have been translated into game regions. There's an incarnation of the infamous projlist.txt which listed the beginnings of our progress toward completion. We apparently started in October 2002 and aborted some time in November of 2002. Yep, a short lived project that never really got off the ground. Whir had apparently gone so far as to raise landscspe in the CS above sea level so we could work on it. Some texture files and sound files had been imported, presumably into our ESP file. Looks like I also imported mundane stuff like lockpicks, probes (why Beth, why did you get rid of chest traps?), repair items etc. We got as far as race and class data being generated, and then the projlist log just died.

It would have been glorious, but reality set in somewhere along the way, and we still had a MUD to run and lives to live, jobs to commute to, and the project has been sitting on the server ever since. Ever mindful of copyright issues, we even had a credits file started but it consisted of nothing more than acknowledging Alsherok, us, and some pine tree thing I found. For reasons unknown there's also a pretty nice shot of Mournhold sitting here and even for 2002 these graphics could still hold their own today.

[Arthmoor]

Projects I Contribute To

Stuff I've had some hand in helping along, in one way or another. Yes, even with a boatload of other projects all my own I still found time to spread my talent elsewhere

Oblivion

Unofficial Oblivion Patch

To say that I've contributed to this may be a bit of an understatement these days as I have officially taken over maintenance of the project, along with the Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch and the Unofficial DLC Patches.

None of these are seeing anywhere near the level of activity they once did, testament to having finally squashed most of the bugs that were left over in Oblivion. Should Bethesda one day decide to release a final cleanup of Oblivion, it sure would be nice to see the unofficial patches included in that

All Natural: Weather

The mother of all weather mods for Oblivion. Some have called it the FCOM of weather. It combines Natural Weather, Atmospheric Weather System, Enhanced Weather, Real Lights, and Natural Interiors all into on master project and synchronizes everything so that there are no unexpected sudden changes in weather. Or so that's the plan anyway, we're still trying to nail this one down after 2 years

My major contribution has been in getting the Real Lights module cleaned up and completed. When I first set out to do this the Real Lights mod was plagued with bugs, excess records, messy scripting, and the dreaded PlaceAtMe command everywhere. Plus, it only covered a small portion of the over all game. Months went by before finally getting all of the cities, dungeons, caves, ruins, etc. from the vanilla game completed. Even with as long as this took, it's still the only lighting overhaul of the game that ever got finished.

My focus now is on getting the new weather particle boxes placed in the interior cells. A relatively recent advancement, Vacuity created some "boxes" that generate rain and snow particles. The obvious application did not escape me and I worked with him on testing and perfecting the implementation. Now it's just a matter of time in getting the boxes placed in all of the vanilla cells that have windows. So one day you'll be able to stand by a window and watch it actually rain or snow outside to go along with the sounds.

AFK_Weye

Playtesting, playtesting, more playtesting, oh, and some retextured meshes here and there and a couple of LODs too. Other than Dwip, I'm probably the most familiar with the mod of anyone who's played it. Having taken my characters through this mod in its entirety at least 3 full times now during the course of its development, along with an ungodly amount of partial runs and specific tests.

Elsweyr Anequina

I did the RAEVWD expansion module for Anequina. I also did a lot of early mesh optimization and texture optimization which survives to this day. It's in there somewhere.

Reclaiming Sancre Tor

Some time back there was a phase 1 beta test to validate that the locations to be used for the mod were in working order. I had a blast with my sneak peak at everything and even then you could tell the mod is quality work. I can only imagine how much better it is now that it's getting close to done and the beta testers are pounding out things on a fully completed version.

Old Crow Inn

I did an over all cleanup on this mod, getting rid of CS dirt, wild edits, trimming up landscape conflicts and polishing. Version 1.5 replaced the original on the author's download page. It's one of those quiet little mods few people have heard of or played. Now go fix that problem and play it!

Unique Landscapes

I'm on the current "council" for the UL mods. This is really just an informal title which amounts to three of us managing the project as a whole. I joined the council back in February of 2009 and as you'll see in my released works, Brena River was the first product of my being involved with the project.

Since then I've done cleanup work and optimization improvements on the older UL mods. I've also managed to inherit the Imperial Isle mod as my own, simply because the original author is no longer around and it needed some love. I don't consider it truly my own though since it's composed of Gondor's work plus merged chunks of two other peoples' mods who agreed to allow them to be used.

My role is still primarily in the cleanup and optimization area since Vorians handles the public thread management.

Darkness Hollows

Level 12, "The Emperor's Nightmares" was my contribution to the 2010 Halloween contest at TESA. It's probably the most bizarre modding work I've done, and it was loads of fun putting it together.

I also helped with playtesting of the core module and some pre-release cleanup.

Other Stuff

I've had a hand in helping with so much other stuff along the way I probably couldn't even tell you all of it. The tutorials section of our site here has some of it but I'm pretty sure even that doesn't begin to dent the impact I've had on the Oblivion modding scene.

Skyrim

Unofficial Skyrim Legendary Edition Patch

As with Oblivion, it's now more accurate to call this one of my own since I'm now in charge of maintaining the project. Both in terms of fixing bugs and in terms of merging in fixes contributed by others. No doubt the unofficial patches will continue for some time as Skyrim has its own boatload of bugs Bethesda hasn't touched yet.

As the work load for this project grew to an enormous size over the years, we made the decision to unify the patch into one version which covers the vanilla game and all 3 of the official DLCs.

Fallout 4

Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch

Continuing the tradition, the Fallout 4 project is still young but we expect to have plenty begin to show up. Bethesda's DLC plans are much more aggressive this time around and we know at least 6 will get done, so the chances of this becoming a unified version quickly are quite high. Over all, Fallout 4 is much more stable and seems to have fewer obvious flaws, but time will tell.

This will also be the first project I'm a part of that will become available to console users as well, assuming certain technical issues can be resolved first.

[Dwip]

What, all that and you skipped over the unreleased Morrowind stuff you said you were going to add?

 

Also, I keep forgetting how I picked up the Oblivion CS well before you, and you still beat Weye to release by like a year. Long dev cycles woo. Those early days of OCC were pretty exciting.

[Conner]

As often as you and Dwip talk about how much y'all liked Morrowind better than Oblivion, I'm a little surprised at how little you did for Morrowind compared to Oblivion.

[Dwip]

Well. A few things with that, really.

 

1. Missing Morrowind, at least in my case, is not the same as thinking everything about Morrowind is actively better, though of course many things were better. Many things better about Oblivion, too. That said, the out of the box state of Morrowind was much less in need of modding for various things than Oblivion ever was. So that's part of it.

 

2. You have to realize that we were making mods for Morrowind in 2002 and 2003, pretty soon after Morrowind and its xpacks were released. The thing about modding Morrowind in the early days was that while Bethesda tossed the CS out into the wilds for the masses to use, they provided zero documentation whatsoever. We had to figure out literally everything on our own, and do so with tools that were, for the most part, much less capable than what shipped with Oblivion. I can tell you that I for one would be a whole lot less prolific if I didn't have the Oblivion CS Wiki next to me all the time. My understanding is that the Morrowind modding scene has become a lot more capable in the intervening 8 years (...wait, what?), but neither of us was there for any of it.

 

3. Both of us were also far less capable at what we do. What you see me doing today is the culmination of almost 5 years of experience with Oblivion modding, plus about 2 years of Morrowind modding, plus call it 8 years of semi-applicable experience writing for Alsherok and Shard. Go back to 2002 and I've got 6 years of semi-applicable writing experience with Alsherok/Shard and...nothing. Like what I said above, it's a whole lot harder to do stuff when you have no idea what you're doing. That said, I was able to leap into Oblivion modding at a much more capable level, but even then, I don't think I was producing what you'd call quality output until 2 years in or so.

 

4. Too, in 2002/2003, both Samson and I still had hefty commitments with Alsherok. Most of my time and energy in those years was going towards Alsherok, and I considered Morrowind modding a sideline from that. Notice that once the Alsherok commitment tapered off and then ended, both of us got a lot more prolific, as getting good coincided with not having to split our time.

 

So, you know.

[Arthmoor]

What all that and you skipped over the unreleased Morrowind stuff you said you were going to add?

 

Also, I keep forgetting how I picked up the Oblivion CS well before you, and you still beat Weye to release by like a year. Long dev cycles woo. Those early days of OCC were pretty exciting.

Hey, it was late and I was tired so....

 

I'll get that info in place once I go look at what's lurking on the server since I was apparently a major bonehead at some point and lost my entire Morrowind folder on local storage. That should probably seem tragic, but as I don't remember what was in there it doesn't hurt so much.

 

Faregyl may have beaten you to market by a year but it also had far less content when it did.

[Conner]

@Dwip:

 

1. Hmm, if Morrowind had that much less call for modding than Oblivion did out of the box, one has to wonder why Bethesda went so far downhill on Oblivion even while they made vast improvements in other aspects of the game. (As in, did the wrong person get fired?)

 

2-3. I guess I hadn't realized it had been so long ago, time flies so as you get older.. but that does make logical sense.

 

4. This makes a great deal of sense too.

 

Finally, I need to apologize to you both, I hadn't meant it as a criticism to throw you on the defensive and in rereading it after reading your post I can easily see how my wording led you there, it was only meant as a surprised observation.

 

@Arthmoor:

 

Ouch, losing a folder of stuff you'd done like that always sucks. It doesn't hurt as badly as it could when you first realize you'd lost it sometime back when, but it hurts a lot usually when, at some point in the future you go "whatever happened to ____ ...oh, that's right! I had it in the folder with all that other related stuff... that I lost way back when. Damn!"

[Dwip]

@Samson - Yeah, I have a 2002 backup, but not a 2003+ backup. Lost all my later saves, among other things. Probably a couple mods in there, too.

 

And Faregyl only beat me by like a month. OCC and RAEVWD, however...

 

@Conner - Well, a couple things. First, they simplified a lot of things in Oblivion over Morrowind. We're missing some spells, a few skills, an entire armor type, and what have you. These things turn out to matter. Second, I don't think the engine entirely kept pace in certain capabilities, or at least Bethesda didn't think it did, thus the closed cities and lack of flight and certain other things. Third, Morrowind had much better realized dungeons than Oblivion did, both in scope and variety. Oblivion pretty much has caves, fort ruins, and Ayleid ruins. Morrowind had several types of caves, Dwemer ruins, Daedric ruins, shipwrecks, underwater grottos, and what else am I missing here because there was a lot. Variety matters. In addition, the loss of flight meant that we lost a certain amount of interesting dungeon architecture - it's been a while, but I'd hazard the guess that more was possible with Morrowind tilesets over Oblivion tilesets in several different ways. Lastly, Oblivion's level scaling really pissed people off, and that led to a lot of modding.

[Arthmoor]

One needs to keep in mind also that the reason Oblivion gets slammed a lot isn't necessarily anyone's fault. Yes, they had to dial things down a bit for the console market, but Bethesda actually had no idea just how far down that would be until the XBox 360 hardware went final. They didn't get final hardware until less than 6 months before the game's release. Which is why there are so many problems with the implementation. They had to gut TONS of stuff at the last minute. Anyone who's ever done development work of any kind knows you just don't do that and expect to come away unscathed. Basically, they overpromised and underdelivered. Out of necessity.

 

I suspect they won't be repeating the same mistakes with Skyrim considering the Xbox 360 and PS3 have both been on the market for years. So they've had time to figure out exactly what the stupid consoles can handle.

 

@Dwip: Ah, well, yeah. RAEVWD didn't require a lick of CS work, and if you'll recall, my initial foray into OCC was just to clean the mod and get rid of a few script bugs. So it's not exactly surprising I'd get something out the door before you

 

Also my second reserved post now has content. Enjoy.

[Conner]

So, Dwip, you're thinking that the real changes weren't so much attributable to the loss of a creative source per se as it was to the changed game engine and an attempt at taking the same ideas into a different direction that wasn't as popular as the previous choices? (I'll certainly agree that simplification has proven a problem in D&D's history too, and that the level scaling can be a tough balance to achieve if you still want players to be happy too, as well as that variety is a major plus. Add to those a major game engine shift that forced the closure of cities and stuff like a loss of flight seem fairly negatively significant too.)

[Conner]

Samson, I had forgotten about the console impact as well. I would wonder why they didn't do the dumbed down version of the game for the sake of the console market as a separate version just for the console market, but I suppose that would've required paying programmers that much more for essentially not only developing the game in the first place but to also then essentially make a last minute port of the game as a separate project entirely. Bet Skyrim still doesn't bring back everything that got stripped from Morrowind either though, there are somethings that consoles just can't really do as well as full PCs still, though not so many that they couldn't make Skyrim feature all the best of both Morrowind and Oblivion, but it'll take quite a bit of effort, which translates to time/money. On the other hand, maybe that's why they gave themselves eleven months from announcement til release this time.

[Arthmoor]

Remember, they've been working on Skyrim for at least the last 3 years. No doubt that includes their new engine for the game. I'm pretty sure they've given themselves enough time and that the next ~10 months are going to be mostly devoted to marketing and beta testing, with possibly a few bits of minor content added. I seriously doubt anything major gets done between now and going gold.

 

Going gold is probably less than 8 months out since they'll need time to get the DVDs duplicated and all that. So I'd have to say everything is already done and just being polished. We'll know more for certain once the Game Informer issue is out.

 

New engine = better capabilities. No idea what that means in terms of closed cities but I sure hope they abandon that idea to the dustbin of history. When every other modern RPG outside of Dragon Age can pull it off there's no excuse for it.

[Dwip]

Dwip.esp got described over in my thread, since it's mine. You're also credited in the EEC Expansion for something or another.

 

And I remember you doing a bit more than that with OCC, but I may well be conflating some things. Either way.

 

Forgot about the console stuff. Yeah, that biffed some stuff. That said, I think there's some case to be made for a certain lack of creativity in spots. They really dropped the ball on the tileset thing, I think. Too, while the quality of the quests went up in Oblivion, there are a lot less of them. Remember the Legion? The Imperial Cult? The Tribunal Temple? The three great houses? Yeah. Which is all to say that there was enough going on in base Morrowind that it wasn't so critical to get more stuff going on. The fact that Morrowind got two full xpacks didn't hurt either.

[Conner]

@Samson: Are you sure they've been developing it for the last three years? That seems a bit generous to me, and, honestly, getting a release ready doesn't really take 10, or even 8, months. I do agree that it's unlikely much new is going into it between now and then, but overall, this is still probably their closed beta at this point, if anything, not just sitting around waiting for disk duplication and labeling. As for a new engine equaling better capabilities, Dwip just pointed out that changing the engine from Morrowind to Oblivion was part of the problem rather than part of the solution. New just means shiny, not necessarily better. But I will agree that given today's general game industry practices, there really isn't a good excuse for keeping the closed cities unless someone at Bethesda with the power to make such a decision stand really prefers load screens between significant borders. I've mentioned before that I sort of do like them myself in some regards, so it's not an unreasonable possibility, but it really depends on how pressured they feel to keep up with other company standards and majority player persuasion.

 

@Dwip: So quests got a bump in quality over quantity, given how many there are in Oblivion, that may have been a good thing because it seems to me that there really isn't that significant a shortage of them. I don't know if expansion packs or DLC is the better solution for players, though clearly DLC works out better for investors in the company doing the development.

[Dwip]

I think you're off base in a few ways, here.

 

1. 2-3 year dev times are about average for major studio games like Skyrim, usually with initial design work going back some years before that. As far as a 10 month beta period, that seems right to me. One of the things that becomes very apparent when you get into modding these sorts of games is that beta testing for even small mods is HARD. Faregyl 2.0 has been in beta for a couple of weeks now, and it's much smaller than AFK_Weye 2.0, which spent the better part of a couple of months in beta. A full game is much larger still.

 

2. As far as the new engine thing, I tend to think Samson's correct here - it's likely that, absent console interference, the Skyrim engine will be generally better in all ways than the Oblivion engine, much as the Fallout 3 engine was superior in essentially all ways to Oblivion's. For that matter, Oblivion's engine was only a step back in a few specific ways from that of Morrowind - for the most part Oblivion is a much superior engine in almost all ways. The trend here is, for the most part, progressive evolution rather than devolution.

 

As far as the DLC vs. xpack thing goes, I think the historical trend in Bethesda's specific case is that their xpacks are much better than their DLC. That having been said, the slate of DLC we got with Fallout 3 was pretty solid, so I think they learned some pretty big lessons with Oblivion.

[Arthmoor]

It might also pay to remember that Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas *ALL* share the same engine in common: Gamebryo. There was no new engine created for them, only updated versions of the existing platforms which is why despite the newness of F:NV it still has no proper dynamic lighting and shit for shadows and all the meshes and stuff are in the .nif format. Bethesda rightly realized that Gamebryo can't hack it and that's why Skyrim is getting the new engine. Or at least I'm assuming that's the logic behind it.

 

How do I know Skyrim has been in development for 3 years? Todd Howard said so. If you can't take the head of the company at his word, who can you trust? The launch announcement and run up to release is the last leg of the trip. When you can have 14 page magazine spreads and start pumping out trailers, screenshots, and gameplay previews. They're way beyond the point of simple hype. I think they learned from the debacle that was the Oblivion intro (sometime in 2004 folks, remember?). Promise the moon, deliver green cheese. If you've ever seen any of the early intro videos, Radiant AI alone was going to be the most awesome thing ever. The world also had fully dynamic shadows. We got hosed on the technical aspects and I honestly think too much flak has been made about the rest of it because of all that.

 

Bethesda has also matured greatly in the DLC/XPack department. In Morrowind, we got two epic XPacks, but no real DLC unless you count the small little freebies. For Oblivion, we got DLC, but it wasn't much better than Morrowind's freebies. Depending on how you class KOTN, we either got one really epic XPack, or we got two XPacks. For FO3 I think they found the balance by producing five DLCs of reasonable quality. Not too short, not too long, and they all added something worthy to the game. Jury's still out on the first F:NV DLC. Word has it it sucks, but I bet that's more due to the stupidity of Obsidian's decisions on how the game ends. One should also keep in mind F:NV is Obsidian's shoddy work, not Bethesda's.

[Conner]

Despite appropriateness of a 8-10 month beta period, many companies use much shorter beta periods. Having never participated in a beta test group for Bethesda, I don't know whether or not they do.

 

As for the questioning of the 3 years of development, I wasn't questioning whether that seemed likely, just whether we actually knew that they had but Samson's clarified that point rather definitively.

 

Regarding the engine, I wasn't aware that all of those games had used the same one, but it does shed some light on certain common failings. On the other hand, yes, it probably was decided to use the new engine because they wanted features in Skyrim that simply weren't possible under the old engine, but it wouldn't be the first time a change was made because something was new rather than because it was better if it wasn't being changed for the presumptive reason. Finally, regarding xpacks v. DLC, I can only stand by what I said earlier. I think, generally, that the players get more out of expansion packs while the marketing people get more out of DLC. As for specifics regarding the games Bethesda has given us and the expansion packs/DLC associated for each, it does seem as though Bethesda's making an effort to balance between the two parties involved so that investors can continue to reap better rewards through greater focus on DLC than expansion packs while players don't feel like they're being ripped off because the DLCs are coming out closer to being smaller expansion packs instead of what DLC started out as. What they'll do with Skyrim we've clearly got plenty of time to speculate/hope in.

[Dallen68]

One also has to bare in mind that Oblivion was seriously behind schedule, and Beth had to rush the final stages to get something on the market. Xbox "might" have been a factor.

[Arthmoor]

Xbos was, Todd has discussed it before. They overshot the mark because they weren't entirely sure what the final hardware could do and when they finally got a production sample to work with, they had to make drastic cuts very late in the game's development cycle. That's generally a bad, bad thing.

[Dallen68]

So, back to what I was saying before something came up. Anyway, some of the subcontractors were threatening to pull out of the project by the time XBOX was finalized; so Beth didn't do all the testing and stuff they normally would have done. Also, this thing about dumbing it down for the XBOX is stupid. Let's see, it has a better video processor than your average computer, it has a very good CPU (4Ghz, I believe), and something like 5 gig RAM, so it would have been able to handle levitation, and open cities, and all that.

[Arthmoor]

WTF? Where does bullshit information like this come from anyway? Sorry, but people quoting figures like that that are clearly NOT true pisses me off.

 

XBox 360 specs:

 

CPU: 3.2 GHz PowerPC Tri-Core Xenon

Memory: 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM clocked at 700 MHz

Graphics: 500 MHz ATI Xenos

 

They have a variety of different storage media, with a 250GB harddrive being the largest one. There's also a 4GB flash drive, but that's definitely NOT the same thing as actual RAM. In fact, the storage medium is the only spec that changes from chart to chart, the actual core hardware never does.

 

That said, yes, the hardware the 360 comes with wouldn't have had issues with Open Cities. The weak GPU meant it would have issues with the game in general. The slow system RAM isn't helping things either. The only decent part there is the CPU. It's amazing the thing can even run a modern game at all really.

 

Now, tell me with a straight face that the above listed specs would blow away these:

 

Quad core AMD Phenom 2 @3.2Ghz

8GB DDR3 system RAM @1600MHz

ATI RadeonHD 4870 w/ 2GB @750Mhz clock, 900MHz memory.

500 GB SATA II harddrive.

 

(Yes, I know, this is now, I can assure you my PC of 5 years ago also blew the XBox 360 out of the water)

[Dallen68]

#1. You do not have an "average" computer. You have a gaming rig. HUGE difference.

 

#2. I was actually guessing on the specs based on my x-box's performances vs. my computers performance. (like my computer struggles to play a movies, I turn on "media centre" and stream them to X-box, and not one stutter, ever.) Even though, if your stats are acurate, my computer is like ... half the computer the XBOX is, well, except it has about 6x the memory. ( I was going to say twice the computer, but I rechecked, and it's half) . Therefore, I'll stick to "lowering the specs for the XBOX is stupid".

 

BTW, how do you have a 4870 with only 2gb? I have an x 1200 with 3, and it's not really intended for gaming.

[Conner]

Wow, look at what I started. Samson, I'm really sorry about having derailed your topic so badly, I really thought it was just a comment and then when Dwip responded I figured maybe it'd result in three or four comments before we went back your mod list.. I had no idea it'd turn into a whole thread of it's own about where Bethesda went wrong with Oblivion and how the Xbox 360 manages to run games it really shouldn't be capable of and...

[Arthmoor]

#1. You do not have an "average" computer. You have a gaming rig. HUGE difference.

 

The Xbox is not above even an "average" computer of today and it's doubtful you could make the argument that it was above average back in 2005 either. BTW, official unveiling date, May 2005. Oblivion's original target release date was November of 2005. April 2006 is considerably farther down the line. Yes, it cost them that much time.

 

#2. I was actually guessing on the specs based on my x-box's performances vs. my computers performance.

 

Sorry, there's a difference between guessing and flinging monkey poo.

 

BTW, how do you have a 4870 with only 2gb? I have an x 1200 with 3, and it's not really intended for gaming.

 

See, you're doing it again. An X2 or X3 doesn't actually have 2GB or 3GB of memory. The actual pool of memory available to units with those designations is half of what they advertise it. So if you have one that claims it's got 4GB, you really only have 2GB, because both cards are sharing the same frame buffer. My card has no such restriction since it's a single unit with one GPU that actually has 2GB of usable memory on it.

 

There's only one listed model at NewEgg with what appears to be an actual 4GB of VRAM and it costs $1200. That's also a 5970. Hell, they don't even sell 4870s anymore, which sort of makes me sad. I fully intend to remedy this with the purchase of a 6970 w/ 2GB sometime before Skyrim is released.