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My Cyrodiil Upgrade Mods

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Kingdom of Almar

Busy Busy Busy...and tired...

Whilst what I do keeps me house bound and thus near my computer and able to make mods, it sometimes demands so much time and attention that I am unable to do anything but eat, sleep and...well you can guess what comes next. Right now is one of those times and it will remain so for possibly 2 more weeks. So do not expect too much from me at this time. This is why I have been strangely quiet since releasing TEC btw.

Since anything that requires me to concentrate is out right impossible to work on right now give the constant demands on my time and attention, I have not been able to do more than very minor bug fixing.

What I have been doing instead is making the Blackmarsh Province terrain, but even here I made several mistakes but it is going well.

If your interested, at the bottom of this news item is a developement shot of the Blackrose area of the black marsh province. It will probably change a lot before I am done but it shows my idea of a marsh land in Oblivion, the purple stuff is water as seen in the Construction kit, if you viewed this in the game, it may look like a flatter Blackwood region.

The first screenshot is what most of the province did look like after I auto generated it, clearly its no where near what I wanted so I have been hand editing it to make it look right. The second one is what it looked like after I had hand edited it.

I am currently converting the other auto generated areas from what you see in the first pic to something more unique as seen in the second pic. Though not all of the Black Marsh will be swamp, the coastal areas will be different and the center of the region will be dark and dangerous to Imperial types.

The Elder Council mod goes final! 1.5 Released

The Elder Council mod is completed and finalized and presented today as a thank you gift to those who supported me during March and April when all that trouble broke out. I said I would thank you properly and I keep my promises.

Todays release sees the completion of all plans made in March 2008 and some that I made since then that got squeezed in to the mod over the past 3 months of production. I will be adding more to this mod in the future but for now, production of this mod is ended and it takes its place along side my other mods and will be updated or improved just as they are. Arenthia especially is likely to see a lot of work.

Before I show you the change log, please read the important info below.

IMPORTANT

FIRST: Download the Core V3 Archive again, it was updated for 1.5 and includes new normal map files. .

Change log for 1.5

Tweaked the Rat Quest again, if those experiencing rat spawning problems find this does not fix it, then I recommend they do a mod reset. I have not been able to duplicate the here in my game since the last fix was made to this quest. But I have added more checks to treble check the right rats are spawning in the right location.
Changed the Drunken Dragon Tax Quest target from the original NPC to a new one I created to solve a "Dark Brotherhood killed the other one before" problem.
Tweaked the Imperial Ranks quest to slowly add the player to other factions as he rises up the imperial rank. Viscount and Count are especially important ranks now.
Added Peasants are Revolting Main Plot Quest.
Added Open Revolt Main Plot Quest.
Added Going Native Main Plot Quest.
Added The Wild Hunt Main Plot Quest.
Decorated the Palace Chapel and set up NPCs to use it on Sundays.
Created the Wild Hunt Shrine.
Created the Lower levels of Arenthia for use with the new Quests.
Tweaked the Nobility system slightly to award points for good role play.
Added new a TEC Secrets feature that popup as a reward for players that play the mod properly.
Removed Palace Faction membership from the Legioneers quests.
Revamped Faction membership to allow other Cyrodiil Upgrade mods to detect specific ranks in TEC.
ImperialWatch = Barron Rank
ICFaction = Count Rank
ICPalaceFaction = Duke
By checking for the players membership in those factions, any mod can detect if the player is one of those ranks in TEC.
Added the Administrators office and NPCS and Dialog (basically created and finished it in one go).
Added misc Imperial rank based messages to the guards.
Customised the stuff on sale in Arenthia Shops.
Added special Arenthia only items to the shops.
Fixed the Normal Maps for signs and banners etc in Arenthia (Core file updated to V3)
Added Rent a bed options to both pubs in Arenthia.
Tweaked both the Banchee and Cameron Barkeepers packages so they use the bed in their own pubs spare room.

As you can see, that is a lot of new stuff.

I rewrote the readme docs to explain most of the mod in plain english, and added it to the support page. So if you dislike reading change logs. Just click on the download link and take a look at the info on that page.

Download

In case you missed it, this mod took 3 months to get to this finished stage from the planning stages. 1.6 may follow soon with any bug fixes I do but you have to admit, to revamp the palace, create several quests and build a new city from scratch within 3 months is very good going.

I am now looking at making the Province of Black Marsh as my next project. But will not be deciding that as a definite project just yet.

The Elder Council Mod enters its final days of production.

The day when all my original plans for the Elder Council Mod will be completed and working is fast approaching and whilst the completion of those features will mean the end of the mods primary production, I will be adding more features to the mod in the future. Lots of new features actually.

The mod still needs few lose ends sorting out and I may do that in 1.6 yet but 1.5 is more or less exactly what I wanted it to be when I originally sat down and planned out this mod. Only with a much bigger border town hehe.

The mod has 431 mp3s of Quest/Lore and general dialog already so its no small mod. It is in fact the biggest mod I have ever made.

The main plot if interesting because it combines several lore based stories in order to act as an introduction to Valenwood lore generally. You get to know a little about the main characters from Valenwoods past and even take part in "The wild hunt" as promised.

I must say I am very pleased with how the plot turned out, it works on every level and should provide a nice solid base for players seeking to know a little more game lore than Oblivion provides. It even explains why Border Watch is full of Khajiit in a lore based context.

I never claimed to be a lore fan of any kind but I think I may the Elder Scrolls Game lore really shine in this mod and I would be very surprised if the quests alone (without the palace stuff) do not make converts out of some of you.

Anyway I guess you want to see some screenshots ?

Well, lets not give too much away but still show you some of the lore based scenes in action. Humm, I know, lets have a look at some revolting peasants first.

Now few pics from the Wild Hunt

The ritual starts, the lights come on and the priest chants.

Then the transformation begins.

And the all charge off to....no...I am not tell you that yet :)

I will tell you one thing about this mod, if Beths quests are Mopeds in that they do what it says on the tin and no more. The quests in this mod represent a Harley Davidson because 95% of what they do is never revealed to you players.

So to help you understand all the little bonuses you got or missed out on due to bad role playing, I have added a new feature in 1.5 that pops up with a message box and shares a secret about the mod that cannot be revealed except by completing key parts of this mod. This will I hope reveal the depth in this mod that players will not expect to exist but it definately does exist and is waiting for you to figure it out.

Of course, the tips come too late for your current game but that is intentional, they give you a reason for starting the mod again and enjoying it twice :)

You may also notice a slight change of style of the main plot from other mods I have made in that they offer tips and advice during the quest to help players who struggle, these are offered only occasionally but in the spots I expect players to struggle with. Let me know what you think about these tips when you see them. Its really an experiement you see.

Also....

Thanks to CNC asking an interesting question, I am able to tell you mod makers right now how to use the Imperial Ranks in this mod to trigger your own changes to the world in true Cyrodiil Upgrade Style. Having your Castle quest trigger for the player when he reaches a specific rank in the game instead of giving the castle to a peasant that has not done anything yet.

These are the ways to detect 3 of the many ranks in TEC that the player can earn. Barron is fairly easy to get. Duke much harder.

At Barron Rank the player is added to the ImperialWatch Faction
At Count Rank the player is added to the ICFaction Faction
At Duke rank the player is added to the ICPalaceFaction Faction

That means a simple check to see if the player is in those factions will allow your mod to be triggered by Imperial Rank Promotions. Of course, other mods may use those too and trigger the changes in your mods early but the worst that will happen there is the changes will be out of sequence. I plan on using this system to let Kvatch Aftermath know when the player reaches DUKE.

Some examples of the sort of code needed to check this in your mods would be.

if (player.GetInFaction ImperialWatch == 1)
Message "player is a barron"
endif

if (player.GetInFaction ICFaction == 1)
Message "player is a count"
endif

if (player.GetInFaction ICPalaceFaction == 1)
Message "player is a Duke".
endif

As you can see, its easy to do.

Zero Support except for you because your special.

Players suffer from 3 delusions. The first is that any rules do not apply to them, the second is they are the only one doing what ever they are doing, the last is, I'll be happy about it.

Some time ago I stopped supporting players publicly and started supporting only those who were helping me or part of my Engineering Guild. So hundreds of you have taken it upon your self to pm me for help instead.

Whilst this was one or two users, I really did not mind. But now I am spending 4 hours a day dealing with these messages and it has become as bad as it was before I quit back in March. With everybody just wanting me to answer a simple question and they will be happy and go away. Only it is usually not a simple question and when I reply they get in to a long drawn out debate over pm about what ever it was they originally posted about. Or they ask a question thats been answered to death on the forum in great detail.

This may come as a shock but whilst your surfing the net, playing games, talking to your friends. I am replying to PMs. I am not modding, I am not fixing anything, I am not surfing or playing games. I am just replying to PMs when I have done that, I go to bed and get up to reply to even more PMs before going to bed again.

Already I have wasted 3 days out of 7 because of this, getting zero work done on TEC during those 3 days.

So anybody thinking of pming me for support should now read THIS THREAD before doing do.