The Official "Let's Talk About The Future Of TR" Thread

[Xui'al]

Will the Core be compiling a list, and then voting?

[Eraser]

A list of what?

Some people have stated interest in working on morrowind more, but most people just don't have much of an interest.

[Gibstov]

This is not a fully developed idea, but a brainstorming on organization.

I was thinking how teams could be organized on the next province, and came up with a novel idea.

One thing I noticed about walking through the maps is that the towns are ghost towns. I understand why, no dig there, the interiors have not been completed yet, no npc's, etc.

What if instead of building the entire exterior world first, then the interiors, etc. The goal was to build cities first, completely. This should be easier with the new "pocket worlds" in Oblivion, where you can have many different exterior worlds.

OK..On the organization.

What if members could hold a couple of different roles, and have voting rights in those roles?

Each major city, would have a mayor. This would probably be more of a management role then a modding role. This team member would be responsible for everything in their city. From the complete layout of the city, what each building in the city would be, what minor npcs are in their city, and what minor quests are that take place in thier city. This team member would probably have the role of provincial member who could vote on the larger provincial quests etc.

Within each city, there would be guild members of the guilds within that city. The leader of the guild member team of that city would have the responsibility of all the minor guild quests,npcs, layout of the guild hall that takes place in that city. These guild members would also have a provincial role of guild member, where they could vote on the major quests of the provincial guild. (IE: The city Mage guild leader gets to determine the low level Mage guild quests for that city. But he also has a vote into what the overall major Mage guild quests for the province will be)

This idea isn't completed thought out yet. Just curious what other people think.

[Xui'al]

Gibstov, this is a very well thought out idea. I only have a few issues:

-Personally, I don't like the vote idea. I think there should be more open discussion, rather then just a vote.

-About each city being seperate is interesting, but it would all mash together quickly anyway. I personally like to work with a handful of architectural styles at a a time, so I don't think groups per city would work.

[nietzsche]

Releasing crap work is stupid. They'll just come here and say 'OMG!!!!!111 OMG LOL THIS RILLY IS SUKY THEIR R BUGS AVERYWH3RE AND THEIR R HOL3S IN TEH FLOR!11!!1 OMG LOL U GUYS SUK!1!111 LOL'

This is so true. It is also very funny. I was really laughing my ass off reading this. Thank you for bringing some joy in my day

[StaticNation]

even when people get OB they will still play MW (i will)
people still play daggerfall
and all the other beth games

TR needs to release Morrowind

the game was named morrowind, it should at least have the full province

no matter what it should be released

if the project goes to the OB engine at least release what we have for the MW engine so that all these years of work wont go poof

[Xui'al]

I also agree with StaticNation. I also think that things would be going at a quick pace should we be able to work on the other maps and get the ints done, not just map 1 fixing.

[Gez]

Lots of people worry about having a computer powerful enough to play Oblivion, and about getting the voice files to mod for Oblivion, and about getting enough disk space to use as many Oblivion mods as they use Morrowind mods (with voice files, you can double the average size of a mod)... For all these reasons, people will still play Morrowind and mod for it.

[Resadyn]

Im not sure about realeasing morrowind because its certainly not finished yet. Just wandering around yesterday ingame I noticed about 10 holes. 10 holes in 20 minutes!

However, when we move on to oblivion, to stop the hordes of newbies who try to claim huge claims, rank each claim's diffuculty from 1 to 5(or 10). The higher the number, the more diffucult the claim, the higher the number. Each person also has a sort of 'interior designer' rank. Named something like that. That person can only claim an interior if its is one rank ahead of them. If they succesfully complete the claim that is higher than them, they move up to the next level and can attempt harder claims. This could also work for exteriors.

Lets have an example with Noob. Noob has a ranking of 2, because after he joined he completed a interior with a rank of 2. Noob can still go back and do a 1 or 2 ranked interior, it just doesnt help him. But if he does a rank three interior with a decent amount of errors. (AND Fixes them.) He moves up to rank 3.

[Orix]

Sounds like a good system to me Resdayn. I for one hope to be interior and exterior cell creating with the release of Oblivion. Despire the CSs being fairly similar, I never really felt like getting into it with Morrowind, although with Oblivion I have a small project I'll be working on to get me up to speed with creating envrionemnts, npcs and quests.

After that's done I hope to contribute towards TR with something other than voice acting, heh.

That said, I cant wait to do some fully voiced characters for Oblivion.

[Vegor]

He's not referring to finishing Morrowind.

Wow, relax people. I see the matter of finishing MW province brought up again and again.

Emphasis mine.

As always, you succeed in quoting one tiny bit from a reply and loose all perspective of the entire post. The main point he had in the first part of his post was the following:

It's been made clear however, that its construction will not be halted for (at least) the remaining time until O comes out.

Which has nothing to do with finishing Morrowind totally in the TES3 engine, it just means we won't stop working on it until Oblivion is released, which makes perfect sense. You failed to see what he meant with this though and replied with this:

Wrong. Have you even read this thread? I think it's much more of a given that we will not finish.

Which is a rather pointless reply since it refers to finishing Morrowind entirely in TES3; which is in no way relevant to the point he tried to make, but rather an assumption you had. Either you misunderstood him, in which case the reply makes sense, or you just read his first sentence and assumed you understood the point of his entire post. You wronged him while he was absolutely right.

So, all I can say is:
Wrong.
Just as blatently as you like to say it.


Now to continue my post on-topic.

I don't know if seperating teams for cities will work very well. However, what we plan to do is create the mod in small, independant patches which can obviously be played simoltaneously when more are released and finally make an overlapping patch with the main quest for that certain region. That way, we have frequent releases, attract new modders and can concentrate all our work on one area. Much like our current maps, which were also created in a later stage of the project when there was work done in random spots and nothing really got finished. Only when one patch of land and it's interiors and quests are nearly finished will we move on to the next.

I imagine one of these patches to contain no more than one big city. So the entire team of TR will work on one city. The exterior can be handled by several members working as one team, while the interiors can be handled by individual members. Smaller settlements could be one modders exterior and it's interiors should be handled the same as city's.

And the idea of ranks is not the thing that should be strived for. Actually, the group of modders should become more equal, instead of a core that does most work and a large, undefined group of members just doing random stuff. The new 'closed project' will be a possible way to achieve that. That way, project will become less of a pool with a huge amount of unknown modders swimming around. Instead, it will be a compact group of good modders that all know what they're doing and know each other better. There won't be ranks in this group, except for the core which should be there for organisational purposes mostly.

As I said before, the main purpose of this is to have only good modders that know what they're doing working on the project. It definately shouldn't be done from an elitist point of view to create a ranking system with the core pulling all strings. And I know the current core rather well, so I'm confident they won't make the decision based on that.

[El Scumbago]

In reply to Vegor's opinion about the ranking system; Yes, it might look elitist, but imo it will create for low-ranked members the desire to 'upgrade' themselves' reach a higher level in the heirarchy, thus trying to create more and better interiors. That's just a theory though, and I'm not familiar with psychology or I knew if it'll work.

And thanks for defending me from Sload, though I prefer to believe he simply misunderstood the point I was trying to make. Flame wars are not constructive.

[Orix]

I understand your point all too well Vegor, you've certainly changed my opinion. I suppose it would make modders feel like lowly underdogs to start off as level 1... even if they were an expert Morrowind modder, and who's to say that the quality of work of a person would remain at level x once they've reached it? They may work hard to get there but let their quality slide after reaching a title and I doubt people would react well to being downgraded either!

Those that show that they can create work, and learn from their mistakes, and learn how to fix their own work would show real progress. People who dont could be given more advice from the more experianced modders or given tutorials to work though, without being too patronising. We should definately support any mod base we have to the best of our ability while making them feel like an equal, it'll keep more people happy and probabaly convince people to do more work.

People who are new to modding, or perhaps have a problem with commitment to things should be advised to go for something they can realistically handle, rather than what they think would be cool, yet ultimately out of their league.

[Morgoth]

People who dont could be given more advice from the more experianced modders or given tutorials.

Maybe we could set up a tutorial forum, and newer people who are having trouble with something can post what the problem is there. Then, the more experianced members could check this forum, see who needs what, and walk them through it on Aim or Msn. Just a thought.

[El Scumbago]

That is essential the way I see it Resdayn, and if I may, I'd like to expand your suggestion regarding the tutorial section.
Although we have a small tutorial database, it consists of old tuts, not all of which are as detailed as they should be when checked by someone who's never seen the CS before (no offense, it just happens that I had this experience.)

Later on, I searched for more tuts, some of which I haven't read and practiced with yet, and I present this idea: Any of us who is as expert as possible in a certain part of TES modding (interiors/exteriors/modelling/texturing/whatever) could gather some tuts and, using his experience, make a fully understandable tutorial in a downloadable .pdf form, guiding even the most techno-useless person step by step.

Thus, we could have an excellent tutorial section that can be used by pretty much anyone.

If you guys agree on that, it'd be my pleasure to make the first one and upload it, as an example to show the level of detail and simplicity I suggest there should be, using a couple of interior tutorials that helped me understand pretty much all that there is to be understood about that certain piece of TES modding.

[Vegor]

That was pretty much the idea I had. Instead of explaining everything in threads and doing it over and over again, people should learn it by themselves and we should have a vast tutorial and FAQ section explaining everything that's required to join. But we can't explain it to everyone in MSN, AIM, PM or whatever because that's just too much work, especially when a lot of members decide to quit after a week. It takes a lot of time and the members could just as well educate themselves as long as we have good tutorials and FAQs.

[El Scumbago]

Glad to see you agree, sad to steal your idea!
A newbie-friendly navigation menu would also help. DDue to lack of time (and sleep) I will upload tommorow an idea for a new look of the TR website, giving emphasis in the way links are placed and named.

[Vegor]

I can really take credit for that idea, it evolved from discussion with several core members. You can also say it's the logical next step after the new members forum. That forum was meant to direct new members to the right FAQs and tutorials and lend them a helping hand. However, it became to random and uncontrollable. This new system should provide a wealth of links to things to learn in an easy way and though it will disallow them to start modding right away, it will motivate them to really learn about modding before starting with it. Starting with modding and then learning it just causes a lot of mess.

[Haplo]

Lets have an example with Noob. Noob has a ranking of 2, because after he joined he completed a interior with a rank of 2. Noob can still go back and do a 1 or 2 ranked interior, it just doesnt help him. But if he does a rank three interior with a decent amount of errors. (AND Fixes them.) He moves up to rank 3.

That would not be fair. What about people who LOVE to do Dwemer ruins, or big cave/tomb complex interiors, and are really good at them. What if they suck at all other types of interiors? Those types I listed above are pretty hard to do, and would be ranked around 7-10. If he starts out at 1, how will he get to 7-10 if he is crap at other interior styles?

If we had that style of splitting, then it should be based on style-orientation. A-Interiors are common/Imperial, B-Interiors are Dunmer, C-Interiors are Dwemer, etc. etc.

However I do not think we should categorize like that at all yet.

[Sload]

even when people get OB they will still play MW (i will)
people still play daggerfall
and all the other beth games

TR needs to release Morrowind

the game was named morrowind, it should at least have the full province

no matter what it should be released

if the project goes to the OB engine at least release what we have for the MW engine so that all these years of work wont go poof

You need to do all the work, then.

[Zalzidrax]

Sload, if you have nothing productive to add to the conversation, please stay out of it. You have already made your pessimistic views abundantly clear, so unless you have something more to say, refrain from doing so. Thank you.

And if you have a problem with this opinion, PM me instead of sidetracking the thread please.

As for a ranking system, I'm not sure why we'd need anything more than "team member" i.e. competent, and "not team member" i.e. not known or incompetent. Obviously there's going to be a difference between scripting quests and making interiors and exteriors, so maybe there should be qualifications for the different types of claims, but there is really no need for a complicated heirarchy. Having layers of ranks comes across to me as sort of pompous and immature to me anyway.

[Morden]

I agree with Zalidrax. A ranking system makes things over-complicated and needlessly separates the community. I'm even against the term Core for what its worth. I use the term 'Mods and Admins'.

[Morgoth]

As for a ranking system, I'm not sure why we'd need anything more than "team member" i.e. competent, and "not team member" i.e. not known or incompetent. Obviously there's going to be a difference between scripting quests and making interiors and exteriors, so maybe there should be qualifications for the different types of claims, but there is really no need for a complicated heirarchy. Having layers of ranks comes across to me as sort of pompous and immature to me anyway.

Yes, it should be something like this:

Administrator
Moderator
TR Member
New TR Member
Honourary Member

Along those lines. No more or less.

[Dexter]

I would be most pleased if people would stop bickering at each other.
This is also the last time I'm going to nicely ask people to behave themselves before I start dishing out punishment. That goes for everyone.

[Eraser]

Administrator
Moderator
Honorary member (former admins and mods can't be lumped with the forum members)
TR modder
Forum member

[Morgoth]

Administrator
Moderator
Honorary member (former admins and mods can't be lumped with the forum members)
TR modder
Forum member

Sorry Eraser, I just didn't know where to stick you guys...

And as for Dexter's punishment, *Stares at +1 Fists Of Banning* I promise I will be a good little member and cooperate.

[Resadyn]

I've always thought that we should add npc's and doormarker's in the original interior so that someone doesnt have to come along later and do it. It would be same quality, if the reviewers knew what to look for. Also, strecthing it a bit, but we could get some really killer in depth dialouge if the maker of the cell was allowed to add dialogue specifically for the npc only, but could add stuff for there cell. Not quests, just dialogue.

[El Scumbago]

There are 2 reasons that limit interior makers to just making interiors. The first one is that not all of them know how to make an NPC, which is a complex thing if you check a related tutorial, and the second is that not all modders in TR can speak or write English perfectly.
Let alone the fact that many NPCs are parts of quests, so they would need scripting too.

Besides, anyone who has the appropriate abilities can claim the NPC that is to be in his interior.
So, anyone who wants can do what you proposed, there no limits.
But having ints packed with NPCs serves no purpose at all.

[Resadyn]

Where can you claim an npc for your int? Ive never seen this.

[presh]

I would like to see Morrowind finished, though I understand that this is unlikely with oblivion coming. (I won't be buying it though - I don't think it will run on my laptop, and I'm not settled enough to buy a desktop pc to run it on!)

Anyway, it would be hypocritical of me to comment on others lack of progress when I have been to busy to contribute lately.

How about we just let those who want to carry on with Morrowind do so, and those who want to mod oblivion do so? If they can be run from the same site all the better, as people might get an urge to mod for morrowind after doing some oblivion interiors or something.

[Stalker]

That's exactly what we're going to do.

[El Scumbago]

Resadyn wrote:
Where can you claim an npc for your int? Ive never seen this.

If you're making a map 1 interior(which is unlikely at this time) and the NPC that is to be placed there isn't claimed, you can claim him at the NPC claiming forum.

If you're making interiors for other maps, there are no NPCs to claim since it hasn't yet been decided what their role, race and background will be.
In other words, NPCs are available for one map at a time. When that map is completed, NPCs for the next map are getting specific appearence, roles and goals and are open for claiming, etc etc.
Hope I filled you in on this.

[Sload]

Actually you have no choice and it's reviewed with the interior. You make the NPC for your interior with Map 1, you don't with the others.

[Haplo]

Administrator
Moderator
Honorary member (former admins and mods can't be lumped with the forum members)
TR modder
Forum member

Um... yes they can. That's what's been done in the past, the only thing that's different is that they retain moderator capabilities over the admin forum so that they can still view it, and a lot of the current administrators/moderators think that is a stupid/pointless thing to do.

But anyway, I'm going to be in the lit. forum now.

[Gibstov]

Gibstov, this is a very well thought out idea. I only have a few issues:

-Personally, I don't like the vote idea. I think there should be more open discussion, rather then just a vote.

-About each city being seperate is interesting, but it would all mash together quickly anyway. I personally like to work with a handful of architectural styles at a a time, so I don't think groups per city would work.

Maybe vote wasn't a best description.

The way I had envisioned it was having different forums available to the team member depending which groups they were a member of.

For instance: Some one who was a member of the city of Almelexia and a member of the mages guild would have access to the following forums.


Mages Guild (Global)

Amalexia
-City Forum
-Mages Guild


Where as a member of the fighters guild and city of Amalexia would have access to the following forums:

Fighters Guild (Global)

Amalexia
-City Forum
-Fighters Guild


Where say the Mayor of Almalexia would have access to:

Morrowind Quests (Global)

Amalexia
-City Forum
-Mages Guild
-Fighters Guild
-Thiefs Guild
-Temple
-etc.
-etc.
-etc.
...


And a team member of the city of Firewatch and a member of the Mages Guild would have access to these forums.


Mages Guild (Global)

Firewatch
-City Forum
-Mages Guild

The idea is to break the larger project into a bunch of smaller projects. And hopefully have some "healthy" competion. (Though everyone is striving for the end goal of completing the larger project)

Edited: Should of used the preview

[Resadyn]

I really, really like your idea Gibstov. I especially like how can you be in multiple groups. I for one cannot stand working constantly on something like straight "Almalexia".

Also some questions.

Question- Would the mages guild global include quests/interiors/npcs/scripts? Would there be positions inside of almalexia like "Almalexia Interior designer"?

[Sload]

Oh no! Here comes Sir Sload Disagreesalot with his bad habit of pointing out problems!

There are some issues with Gibstov's idea. Here they are in nifty Sloallet Points:

*The use of teams does not work. It limits what someone can work on, ie I can only work on something if I'm a member of its team. The claiming system works much better.
*A city does not require its own forum, much less its own set of forums with one for each guild in it.
*Guilds do not need a team. One person can make a city's guild. There would rarely be more than 2 people working on the same guild at the same time.
*Limiting the visibilty of a forum where discussion of progress is going on is bad. Sure, the whole "TR Member" status idea is fine, but this is too much.
*Way to much of yon hi-are-key.* Way way way to much.
*The claiming system in general works fine now. How would this idea improve on it? How would it increase progress? How would it make organization easier?

*If I sound things out it usually means I'm not sure how to spell them.

[Zalzidrax]

Ack! I agree with Sload!

[Sload]

I must be wrong, then.

[Nomadic1]

That or you're right and I've been rubbing off on you I was going to point out the exact same things.