The Masser Project needs help!

[Rotten Deadite]

Hello ladies and gents and magical hermaphrodites.

I'm Rotten Deadite, the project lead on [url=http://www.masserproject.com/]The Masser Project[/url], a fan mod focused on bringing the Last Dovahkiin to the surface of Masser.

We're still in the early "discovery" phases of conceptualization, since the moons have not been fully explored in official Bethesda products, but what I'm currently worried about is the formatting and design documentation.

I'm wondering, how does Tamriel Rebuilt design their quests? How do you guys do it? Do you have one set of people design the quests and another set implement them in the CS? Or does everybody use the CS, and the only quests you can program are the ones that end up in the mod?

Also a brief word on documentation style. So here's a quest document I wrote up for a vanilla Skyrim quest, "Rising at Dawn." I wrote this document in an attempt to show an example of how a quest design document translates into a real in-game quest. But I'm worried that I may not have gone into enough detail here. Should the quest designer plan out the quest by stages? Or should that be left up to the developer, assuming they aren't the same person?

Does anybody know how professional development studios do this kinda thing?

[Aeven]

TR does not allow recruiting for other mods.

[Rotten Deadite]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not recruiting, I'm just trying to figure out how to organize this thing. I wouldn't come on here and try to pull your talent into other projects.

[gro-Dhal]

Our Head of Quests can explain this better, but here's the basics:

We have a 'claim system' that organises and regulates what individual modders take on. Initially the Powers That Be will decide that a particular settlement needs 2-3 quests, and will create a 'claim' for this. A claim can be associated with a particular settlement (what we call 'misc' quests) or with a faction like the Thieves Guild.

This claim is then opened up for design. Any modder can contribute, ideas are mooted and eventually somebody will lay out a set of quests that meet general approval.

After this, someone with scripting skills will volunteer to take on the claim and implement it based on (usually) a basic descriptive writeup outlining the various steps and NPCs involved. This can be presented as a flowchart or as a thorough narrative or whatever. The quest scripter has a lot of leeway to make tweaks and changes.

Eventually the quest is done and is internally tested, and the scripter makes any changes as needed.

Does this help?

[Rotten Deadite]

Does this help?

Very much so, actually. Thanks!

It seems to me that the Masser Project might eventually end up similar in scale to TR, which is to say dramatically huge. We might have to take a similar organizational approach, use the claim system, etc.

Do most large-scale modding projects use that same "claim" approach?

How do you determine whether or not someone should have exclusive rights to a claim they've made?

[Mwgek]

I know that the cyrodiil mod uses claims.

[rot]

I don't expect quests for a voice-acted game to allow for much complexity in their design or implementation, so there isn't really a need to go for the exact same questing system TR uses. But if you do anyway, you'll probably want to wait until a quest is fully done (designed, scripted, playtested) before recording voices for it.

[Rotten Deadite]

But if you do anyway, you'll probably want to wait until a quest is fully done (designed, scripted, playtested) before recording voices for it.

Boy, you ain't kidding. We're actually kinda depressed about that. Since all the people involved on the project so far are giant Morrowind fans, we're a little sorry about the style of writing often employed for voice-acted games: terse as hell.

It's the difference between writing a novel and writing a screenplay for film or television.

You can see the difference in Skyrim, too. The (comparatively) long philosophical conversation the Last Dragonborn has with Paarthurnax toward the end of the main quest line seems almost prolix and tiresome in comparison to the rest of the game. From a lore fan's perspective it was a breath of fresh air, though.

And nothing's funnier to me than when an NPC asks you if you really want to hear the whole story...? And then every response prompt afterwards has a "nevermind, let's talk about something else" option for the short of attention span.

Wow, am I off topic.

One interesting technique other developers have used is to have their voice acting done by the development team. It doesn't result in very good voice acting (I'm talking about the first Deus Ex game here), but it has the advantage that you can do tons of voice acting with constant script revisions without worrying about your budget.

I don't know if we'll do that here. We'll see.

[gro-Dhal]

Did they do that in Deus Ex? Some of that VA was hilarious and worth the money I paid for the game by itself

[Rotten Deadite]

"My vision is augmented."

Hah.

Hey, does Tamriel Rebuilt use subversion, or something like it? I've been wondering if we should invest in a similar solution. We've already got project management software that we'll try desperately to utilize.

[Nemon]

Hello ladies and gents and magical hermaphrodites.

I'm Rotten Deadite, the project lead on [url=http://www.masserproject.com/]The Masser Project[/url], a fan mod focused on bringing the Last Dovahkiin to the surface of Masser.

I find that website quite intriguing. As noted by most, we have no problems sharing the know how on how to do projects of this size. We did, however, mess around a few years so don't expect any expert advice on startups .

[Rotten Deadite]

I find that website quite intriguing. As noted by most, we have no problems sharing the know how on how to do projects of this size. We did, however, mess around a few years so don't expect any expert advice on startups .

Unfortunately the website's largely useless at the moment. When we start getting things like screenshots I'll work on it some more.

And don't talk to me about messing about. We don't even have basic information about Masser, like what the surface of the moon is made of, or even what it looks like. Rocks, sure, but trees? Where do the inhabitants get water, if at all? So yeah, messing about is what we're doing right now. On purpose, though, so maybe that makes it better...?

Currently our thinking is that the surface of Masser should look a lot like the surface of Mars. In appearance, Masser is unmistakably strange. Up close, its soil seems to be a dead mix of ash and dry dirt, incapable of supporting anything like Nirnian vegetation.

But from a distance, Masser's hills, valleys, and mountains become strange and macabre. The sides of mesas seem like torn flesh melting like wax. Where grassy plains would lie, mass graveyards are found. Chasms are huge, gaping wounds. Dry, cracked desert land becomes bleeding, irritated shingle-rotted skin. Hills seem to be moaning heads, faces screaming in anguish. Mountains are ridged like exposed bone and sinew. Clawed, bony hands grasp cliff edges.

I don't have any landscape concept art yet, but if you've seen art by [url=http://art.vniz.net/en/beksinski/]Zdzisław Beksiński[/url], then that's a good start, and we're sort of hoping to get a visual style that's as similar as we can get.

[Gez]

Hey, does Tamriel Rebuilt use subversion, or something like it? I've been wondering if we should invest in a similar solution. We've already got project management software that we'll try desperately to utilize.

Subversion is kinda outdated now.

Problem with revision control software is that they're adapted to work with text. For a binary format like ESP/ESM/ESS/etc., they lose a lot of their most interesting features, namely the ability to look at the changes between each revision.

Some revision control software specialized in ESP would be wonderful, it would make merging claims so much easier and you could see what references were moved/added/deleted with each change. Without this feature, it's merely a robust backup system that takes up a lot of space. It's able to know if a file was changed, but not how it was changed. So to avoid taking up a ton of space, we'd have to do something like keep each cell in its own .esp. Which means splitting them before committing, etc. Really not convenient at all.

[rot]

We don't even have basic information about Masser,

Might be obvious, but for inspiration these come to mind: Lucian of Samsat's True History, Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon, Gulliver's Travels...

[Sload]

Are you familiar with [url=http://www.imperial-library.info/content/tiber-septim%E2%80%99s-sword-meeting-cyrus-restless]Tiber Septim's Sword-Meeting with Cyrus the Restless[/url], which takes place on Masser?

[Myzel]

Wasn't Elsweyr on a moon? I may have things mixed up.

[Sload]

Only in the [NUMINIT] version of Tamriel, not in the normal version. And that was Secunda, not Masser.

[Melchior Dahrk]

Are you familiar with [url=http://www.imperial-library.info/content/tiber-septim%E2%80%99s-sword-meeting-cyrus-restless]Tiber Septim's Sword-Meeting with Cyrus the Restless[/url], which takes place on Masser?

Way to influence him early on; if someone's going to tackle Masser, some MK influence should certainly be there.

[Rotten Deadite]

Way to influence him early on; if someone's going to tackle Masser, some MK influence should certainly be there.

Oh my yes, we've scoured each PGE as well, and what we can get from Professor Numinatus of course.

We were thinking about going with a darker tone than Cyrano's work, but I don't think I'll be able to keep away from it anyway. And frankly I don't trust my ability to stay stone-cold somber for the duration of the project