Page 1 of 1

Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Mon Sep 14, 2015 8:37 am
by Infragris
Continued discussion from here:
worsas wrote:Here is an update, which incorporates most of what I wanted to do with the file.

- I added many levelled creatures to the sea and the air. There are more than 2000 levelled creatures spread across the Abecean Sea now. I have added variants of the regular fish with a smaller wandering range so they will stay together and appear as a swarm to the player.
- There were a number of errors in the included interiors, mostly missing beams on the interior tiles and stuff of that nature, which I have fixed.
- I filled all of the fillme containers in this file and renamed them according to the ints they are in.
- All fish statics have been replaced with containers and ingredients related to the fish inhabiting the Abecean Sea
- All instances of the thistle have been replaced with groups of Spike rice, which I think feel more fitting in this environment.
- All wispstalk mushrooms have gotten a light source.
- The lighting settings of the goblin cave have been changed to be more on the lightness level of other caves or tombs on the island.
- A Colovian Barrow has been added at the backside of Stirk. The interior still needs to get reviewed by Scamp.

Currently there are still some unlinked doors. PC_i1-38, Lower has got a cave door in it that currently leads nowhere. Also the Ayleid ruin of Vabriasel hasn't been linked to its interior yet.
It would probably be cool to get one more Barrow on the island or one of the little neighbor islands, but someone else would have to volunteer for that.

Opposed to what I said I would do, I have not deleted PC_Flora_GC_Shrub01. Instead I will probably just replace it with a nicer looking shrub in the next Data version. There are really many issues with the flora as unfitting color, missing collision objects, alpha blending issues and other things that need to be looked into for the next Data version. I would also like to do something with the Stirk houses. They aren't exactly beauties.

Also, I had some additional ideas for the faune. The one very colorful slaughterfish seems a bit repetitive as the main hostile encounter at sea, so I'm probably still going to make a orangeback slaughterfish for the Abecean Sea. There are two other creatures on my wishlist, but I'm not sure if I wouldn't be overstretching myself with them. 1. A more colorful seabird to accompany the regular seagulls. Also, I have come across that little bird ape concept by Nalin, when I had to download our old Stirk alpha from Tesnexus. That would be an extremely nice addition as a passive creature around Stirk. But maybe I want a bit too much at this point.
worsas wrote:There is something I have spoken about with Scamp on irc: The seaground of the Abecean.

This is currently a huge area with a lot of underwater landscaping but little purpose for the player. We should encourage people to discover those underwater places by adding additional treasures on the seaground. 20 or more (mostly strongly) enchanted items buried in the seaground across the Abecean would be a good number. These treasures could be searched for by using 'Detect Enchantment', a spell that barely has any purpose in the vanilla game. Also, players may possibly get to see some of the underwater landscaping that way.

Does anyone have ideas for certain enchanted items or artifacts? They should be relatively powerful, as they will be hard to find and require a bunch of waterbreathing potions from the player to retrieve. Alternatively, it would be possible to add a weaker enchanted item and surround it with other worthwhile objects.

The local Stirk dialogue could have rumours about treasures found on the seaground.
TerrifyingDaedricFoe wrote:They could be relics of the ayleids, washed away from the sunken ruins by currents.
Saint_Jiub wrote:How about a shipwreck with some artifacts of Bendu Olo?
roerich wrote:All Flags Navy remnants and such things is a great idea, or at least a number of sunken ships (military or merchant) from different ages and races (Colovian, Altmer, Redguard, Bosmer etc.) Some of them with ghosts, other with aquatic enemies. Should there be Dreugh around here?
Saint_Jiub wrote:Sload I would think.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Mon Sep 14, 2015 8:50 am
by Infragris
We have Sload, Lamia, Dreugh, slaughterfishies, ghosts and other undead (perhaps some kind of underwater seaghost?) which can be used as underwater adversaries. At the moment, we only have the twin Ayleid ruins in the sea area. Besides shipwrecks, we should also consider adding some grottos (the mainland is choked with caves, while the seafloor has exactly none). Maybe even a sunken Colovian tomb somewhere.

Shipwrecks would require new assets: the vanilla ships are too obviously dunmerish (big telvanni root as cabin). New artifacts would also require new assets. Anyone volunteering to make shipwreck meshes could also take a look at our current ships, which are of relatively low quality.

Where exactly on the island will the new Colovian tombs be placed? I would advise the smaller islands to the south, which is an area of low interest right now.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Mon Sep 14, 2015 9:58 am
by worsas
I'll have to voice some concerns:

I don't think any of the vanilla ships with the telvanni root have been used at stirk or on the seaground. So that isn't a worry at all. Also, I don't see work on new ship wreck models or respective interior shells as a good investment of effort at this point. I agree that the uv mapping of the galleons should get improved upon, though. Also, do we really need underwater dungeons? I think that would only add additional, dead content. The intend behind the suggestion of adding treasures to the seaground was turning dead content into alive one. Adding dungeons will only add more dead content that needs to be revived in some way. Grottos would be nice, however. But maybe to make things less painful, foresee them for the yet-unworked coastal parts of the Gold Coast?

As for the underwater ghosts there might be issues with the alpha blending and the ghost disappearing underwater. That means that it would be needed to make a retex of the ghost that completely relies on alpha testing instead. A ghost whose robe is more littered with holes, maybe. The current Sload cannot swim. It would have to be given spare swimming animations first or an aquatic sload variant is made, instead.

Also, Ayleid Artifacts... if one wants to work on them at this point, fine. I wonder, if we can even realistically add metal objects to the seaground. Metal weapons from the 1st era or before would have completely dissolved by now. I admit, I didn't think about that myself before. Old Artifacts should look extremely rusted, at least. And that really sounds like special, additional effort for something that will only be seen in one place somewhere.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2015 9:09 am
by Infragris
I get your concerns, but these are mostly assets we will have a need for in the long run. Ayleid weapons, objects and armor are necessary to bring our current Ayleid ruins to life, and ships(wrecks) are basic assets for a coastal region. I'm looking at the dunmer shipwreck mesh i blender right now, and I think it should be possible to cannibalize some of its parts (the mast, railing, etc) and add them to our other ships. There is at least one quest proposal for Stirk involving a shipwreck, by the way.

Conservatively, we can add grottos, artifacts and sunken treasure chests without needing any new assets whatsoever. Treasures don't have to be Ayleid artifacts, we have a large number of new armors and weapons that we can use to make enchanted items with. This also sidesteps the decay issue. Or we can just add treasure chests with gold, ingredients etc. We could also add kollop beds or grottos with kollops for pearl divers.

I think we should add the grottos to the already finished parts of the seafloor. Right now, we only have the Ayleid ruins as seabed content, which is a waste of some beautiful exteriors. Simply adding a cave mouth here and there should be no more problem than adding the Colovian tombs on Stirk was. We could guide the player to these location through clever use of the detect key and enchantment spells, which are otherwise a little useless.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2015 9:46 am
by roerich
I agree that we shouldn't clutter the seafloor with content that most players will never notice. Adding some choice treasures, shipwrecks, grottos and sunken ruins would be a good addition, if we can get the players to actually explore them, also giving them a look at the marvelous work on the seafloor. Rumours and hints in old books are good ways to point the player in the right direction. A well hidden shipwreck holding a treasure could be a local legend, with many treasure hunters having sailed the region looking for the gold, employing Argonian sailors to dive and search. Like in one Vanilla book where Symmachus loses a ship laden with gold somwhere in the Inner Sea, if I remember correctly.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2015 11:36 am
by worsas
It is probably important to say that we are speaking about (i think) ~150 exterior cells. Easily half the size of vvardenfell together. The issue of the player probably not finding the stuff on the seabed is much more severe than you think. Unless you place something within the straight line between Stirk and Vabriasel (which again is at least 100 meter wide, so you can still easily miss something on that line) or directly around Stirk the chance that the player will come across it, is very low, even if s/he uses detect enchantment to search for stuff. Creating enchanted items and putting them on the seaground is a managable effort and if people will never find it, it is not a huge lost.

But an interior cell is an effort that should only be taken, if it is guaranteed that someone will discover it. For Vabriasel it is guaranteed, because everyone with some cells of distant land can see the ruin from stirk. But the one underwarter ayleid ruin does not feature an interior cell for example, which I find very reasonable. If we start to add underwater grottos, we'll put much effort into mainly dead content. We cannot effort that. We tend to make far too much dead content around here. A cave takes a lot of effort, if you want to make it nice. That's a fact I know from having made a bunch of caves in the past. If I was to make a throwaway underwater cave for somewhere out in the sea, I wouldn't put much or any effort into it but placing the tiles and a few occasional rocks. I doubt it would look very good.

Unless we give the player an amulet with waterbreathing and at least 3-4 quests sending him/her to the seabed, there is no point in any underwater dungeons. And even in that case, we should build the dungeons around the quests. I think there is some potential to the idea, but I have ambivalent feelings on the whole issue.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2015 9:22 pm
by worsas
One more update of the Stirk file. After this the only thing left should be:
- Adding the npcs
- Assigning ownership to objects
- Adding hostile creatures to dungeons and land areas
- Adding sea floor treasures

The dungeon of Wormusoel is now included in this file, aswell as Leons Colovian Tomb. Also, all doors are finally linked to their destinations. I also managed to figure out where the cave door in the Crypt of the Helvor Family was supposed to lead to (smuggler cave below Wormusoel) and I happily found all doors waiting to be connected in their places.

I also stepped forth and named all of the interior cells in the most concise way possible for me, reading up on Infragris' latest documents and looking through the old forums when I saw I need for it. Though, I think it might well be possible that some interior names need to change yet. I also deliberately came up with 'Kilhell Barrow' and 'Rickblood Barrow' for the two Colovian tombs. The Ayleid Dungeons I have called 'Wormusoel, Unsullied Halls', 'Wormusoel, Secret Passage' and 'Vabriasel, Marine Temple'.

The second Colovian tomb has been added on a discrete place on Stirk. i meant to use one of the little islands, but none of those where big enough and high enough above sealevel for properly embedding a tomb.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2015 11:47 am
by Scamp
Fantastic news and work!
worsas wrote:[...]Also, all doors are finally linked to their destinations. I also managed to figure out where the cave door in the Crypt of the Helvor Family was supposed to lead to (smuggler cave below Wormusoel) and I happily found all doors waiting to be connected in their places.[...]
Wait wait what, but surely most of the doors were linked already, including the doors between the smuggler cave and the crypt from the graveyard? Or did you have to link all of them now? :o That would imply I uploaded the wrong version initially.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2015 12:04 pm
by worsas
Scamp wrote:Fantastic news and work!
worsas wrote:[...]Also, all doors are finally linked to their destinations. I also managed to figure out where the cave door in the Crypt of the Helvor Family was supposed to lead to (smuggler cave below Wormusoel) and I happily found all doors waiting to be connected in their places.[...]
Wait wait what, but surely most of the doors were linked already, including the doors between the smuggler cave and the crypt from the graveyard? Or did you have to link all of them now? :o That would imply I uploaded the wrong version initially.
Must have been the case. The cave door in the crypt was not linked in the file I got. It's probably safer, you check the file again to see if everything's alright.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2015 3:01 pm
by worsas
Author wrote:Question; do we need interiors for the Imperial Galleon ships at the Stirk Docks and the Pirate ship on the other side of the island? We do have the interior models of those ships...
It was once decided to omit those, because they are not obligatory. If you want to create them, be my guest.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2015 8:10 pm
by Infragris
I think it makes sense to add the ship interiors, but I have some qualms about the quality of the galleon meshes. Are these the pieces with the curves floors?

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2015 10:42 pm
by Scamp
worsas wrote:The cave door in the crypt was not linked in the file I got. It's probably safer, you check the file again to see if everything's alright.
Haha, no worries. I forgot - i1-50 wasn't reviewed at that time, so how could it have been linked? :mrgreen:

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:26 pm
by worsas
:mrgreen:

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2015 7:58 pm
by worsas
Leon wrote:
Infragris wrote:I think it makes sense to add the ship interiors, but I have some qualms about the quality of the galleon meshes. Are these the pieces with the curves floors?
The floor is flat, the models are "ok" to work with, manage to finish one ship. The exterior Galleon models needs some collision and UV polish, those stairs are hard to walk on.

Worsas, maybe we should upload the Stirk files in the "P:C Quests & NPC's" section instead on this thread since every visitor can now download the file.
Hmm.. downloaded four times. Not sure what outside people would want with the file, though. Without a current PC_Data there is not much to be seen. We'll soon make it available for everyone on the net, anyway.

I think it should be possible to fix the worst issues with the ship interior shell and outside model. It's just an unwelcome duty at this point.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2015 9:32 am
by Infragris
worsas wrote:I also deliberately came up with 'Kilhell Barrow' and 'Rickblood Barrow' for the two Colovian tombs.
Only just saw these. If possible, I would like to instate a sightly more involved naming scheme for our tombs. For the mainland tombs I had earlier proposed long, rolling names like Gorovnbarachrad or Valgavinchovnim, the meaning and origin of which is not immediately apparent, and seems (to me at least) a lot more interesting - a bit like the pseudo-Assyrian naming scheme for caves in Morrowind. I would also advise against mixing languages: either the tombs are completely Colovian, or they should have normal, English names.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2015 11:28 am
by worsas
Infragris wrote:Only just saw these. If possible, I would like to instate a sightly more involved naming scheme for our tombs. For the mainland tombs I had earlier proposed long, rolling names like Gorovnbarachrad or Valgavinchovnim, the meaning and origin of which is not immediately apparent, and seems (to me at least) a lot more interesting - a bit like the pseudo-Assyrian naming scheme for caves in Morrowind. I would also advise against mixing languages: either the tombs are completely Colovian, or they should have normal, English names.
The idea behind these two names was that they were completely Colovian in origin, 'Rickblood' originally being 'Rickbla(n)d' and that both names got corrupted over the millenia. This is something which you have got in similar shape for many today location names in the real world.

I always try to imagine how the name looks and feels to the player when he/she enters the place. These two names I came up with are simple, but they are dark and weird (not in a morrowind-identical way) and at the same time evoke a certain curiosity, because there is obviously something wrong about them, suggesting that there must be more behind them than the English words on the surface.

Opposed to that 'Valgavinchovnim' or 'Gorovnbarachrad ' don't feel very Colovian to me. And they seem like a mere repetition of what you have got in terms of Cave names in Morrowind, except operating on a different language base.

Edit: I think that the names could be tweaked, as they are probably overly straightforward in their current shape. On the other hand, you should not assume players to have Hrafnir languages opened in the other window to check back the meaning of each location while they play. This obvious meaning is something foremostly affecting us, not the player.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2015 8:10 pm
by Infragris
worsas wrote: Edit: I think that the names could be tweaked, as they are probably overly straightforward in their current shape. On the other hand, you should not assume players to have Hrafnir languages opened in the other window to check back the meaning of each location while they play. This obvious meaning is something foremostly affecting us, not the player.
This is sort of what I mean: I'm not overly sold on my own naming scheme either, but I think something like "Kilhell" is a bit too on the nose, lacking in that mystery and vague threat you want to evoke. It feels unlike the sober Colovians to give everything a grandiose and frightening name. I guess some places should be affected by language slip, though I wouldn't apply it to every barrow.

If we want to get truly creative with these names, we should have a larger Colovian vocabulary. I don't think Hrafnir is still updating his languages. I'm not much of a linguist, but I might try my hands at this.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2015 9:58 am
by worsas
Extending the colovian vocabulary would be a nice base for further naming. But we may just aswell come up with names that sound like they could be ancient Colovian and don't worry too much about the meaning. TR does it that way. Some names are derived from known Dunmer vocabulary but others are just made up out of thin air. 'Andothren' is one example. To me it's one of the best names they have come up, regardless.

By the way, I'm not generally unsatisfied about your naming attempts in this project. The region- and town- names on our location map are just great.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2016 6:22 pm
by Saint_Jiub
Modified the most recent Stirk file, you guys can decide to use it or not. Small change to remove the remaining exterior tapestries. Right now Stirk's houses look very cluttered with the wall shields, windows, and tapestries and I think having some open spaces on the walls and allowing the architecture to breathe a little bit goes a long way.

[hsimg=]http://i.imgur.com/msDDZcW.jpg[/hsimg]

Again, no obligation to use it, the tapestries just bugged me when I was playtesting today and I thought I'd do something about it rather than whine and make someone else do it :P

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2016 7:54 pm
by Infragris
If you tell me exactly what you changed, I could replicate it, but the Stirk 3.5 mainfile is the basis for my NPC claim. It's already in quite a different state with NPCs, locked doors, stuff like that.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Sun May 01, 2016 2:19 am
by Saint_Jiub
Oh okay, I just went to the object list in the Cell View window and deleted any references to pc_furn_tapestry_xx in the four Stirk exterior cells.

Up to you like I said, but I personally think the city looks 100% better without them - they just make everything look too cluttered and I feel like they aren't really logical for an exterior environment anyway.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Sun May 01, 2016 11:48 am
by Infragris
You're quite right, I don't like them very much either. Looks too moddy. Some of these tapestries really need new textures too: those red/white ones are an eyesore.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Thu May 05, 2016 11:14 pm
by Scamp
Good call, I guess having tapastries outside doesn't make a whole lot of sense after all. Back then I was trying to find a way to make players recognize and distinguish the lower quarters from the upper one. Not very sensible, really - I don't feel bad seeing them go.

Speaking of weird things I did with Stirk, are we really keeping the pirate ship crane thing on the other side of the island? I must admit it's quite silly. I'd suggest keeping just the camp and ditching the construction stuff, it'd be way too obvious so close to the town in such a static way.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Thu May 05, 2016 11:37 pm
by Infragris
I figured that was the case. It' s not a bad idea as such, we should think about some kind of silken banner/awnings to denote wealthy houses.

The pirate camp should be redesigned with an eye on the Stirk main quest. It should be made way less obvious where they are at.

Re: Stirk Extras & Seafloor Upgrades

Posted: Fri May 06, 2016 7:58 am
by worsas
If you can think of a way to better hide pirates without an extraordinary additional effort, I support it. To distinguish the two quarters, maybe best done by adding planters to the upper quarter? I would avoid any additional modelling effort at this point, except for some of the required quest misc items.