Morrowind Modding Showcases : III

» Sun Jul 27, 2014 4:40 pm

Morrowind Modding Showcases

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v603/Darkelfguy/MMS_Banner.png (Provided By Melchior Dahrk)

Description:

As a lot of you probably know, there's recently been a lot of discussion on the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1504099-the-future-of-morrowind-%E2%80%93-a-discussion-of-the-mod-community/, and how the community is perceived outside our own hallowed halls. A lot of projects have been announced as a result of the discussions in Melchior's thread, from a new http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1504605-morrowind-modding-wiki/ to work on http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1504428-i-would-like-to-do-a-major-contribution-to-the-community/, and this is all vital for the health of the community! But one thing that a lot of people mentioned in Melchior's thread was the lack of any significant YouTube presence for Morrowind modding. There are countless Morrowind Let's Plays, but when it comes to showing off Morrowind mods, there's really not much beyond Tamriel Rebuilt and OpenMW. We've been modding Morrowind for over twelve years now, and there's well over 20,000 Morrowind mods out there, with new ones still being released all the time! But at least 95% of these mods have no visibility outside these forums and whatever website they're hosted on. My idea is to create a place where we can showcase mods, both new and old (with a slight preference for new so as to show the world that, yes, we're still alive and well), and encourage people to try out new mods or maybe even get into modding for the first time.

Now "Morrowind Modding Showcases" is an idea I've been toying around with for years, going back all the way to 2009 when I briefly started releasing daily screenshot showcases of underrated mods that had received little attention. That attempt didn't last very long, as few people looked at those old screenshots, and truth be told they didn't look that good (this was before MGSO after all). I later tried writing and posting Morrowind mod reviews on my blog, but this didn't really work out either, possibly because I forgot to tell anyone I had a blog. More recently, just before the current round of the "Future of Morrowind" discussions, I started posting MGSO 3.0 screenshot showcases of old mods on Morrowind Nexus. These actually got somewhere, but after reading what people were saying about the lack of a YouTube presence for Morrowind, I thought Showcase videos may well be the way to go. I've been in talks about the idea with a number of people in the community, including Melchior Dahrk who thoughtfully provided all of the graphical art for the project, and most of the modders I wanted to showcase in the first episode. After nearly thirty hours of filming, editing, and narrating (and re-narrating some 27+ times), I finally have the first episode of Morrowind Modding Showcases online.

The format for each showcase episode goes something like this:

Intro Sequence

Popular Mod of the Week (defined as a mod with over 25 endorsemants and out for over a month)

House Mod of the Week

Gameplay/Misc Mod of the Week

Dungeon Mod of the Week

Items/Weapons Mod of the Week

Quests/Factions Mod of the Week

Landmass Mod of the Week

NPC Mod of the Week

New Meshes and Textures/Modder's Resources Mod of the Week

Underrated Mod of the Week (defined as a mod with less than 10 endorsemants and out for over a month)

Blast from the Past Mod of the Week (defined as a mod released between 2002 and 2007)

Credits

Most of these categories would be focused on the more recent contributions by the community in that particular category, but some of the categories would be chosen by community discussion, such as:

"Popular Mod of the Week"
"Underrated Mod of the Week"
"Blast from the Past Mod of the Week"

The idea is to get people talking about and sharing a wider variety of mods, while simultaneously increasing visibility of a number of mods and hopefully increasing interest in Morrowind modding and getting new potential modders hooked on making and releasing their own works.

The showcase videos themselves would be released once every week on Saturday morning and typically include around eleven mods from eleven different categories. Ideally most of the modders showcased in each video will give their permission for the mod to be shown ahead of time, but given the weekly time constraints, it may not be possible to get a reply back on the matter.

As I mentioned before, the first episode is now online, and you can http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsNAn5VYlTk. I apologize ahead of time for the quality of the video, the editing didn't turn out exactly as planned and a few of the clips have a bit of lag here and there. Ah yes, I should also probably apologize for my accent, I can be a little hard to understand sometimes. Here's the format for the first episode:

00:00 Intro Sequence

00:40 Intro Explanation

01:41 Popular Mod of the Week - RR Mod Series - Telvanni Lighthouse Tel Vos By Colt117

02:47 House Mod of the Week - Lakeside Hosue By Brucoms

03:26 Gameplay Mod of the Week - Smart Crosshairs By Adul

04:05 Dungeon Mod of the Week - Tureynulal Redone By Trainwiz

04:52 Items Mod of the Week - Board Games By Danae

05:37 Quest Mod of the Week - East Empire Company Expansion By TheDrunkenMudcrab

06:32 Landmass Mod of the Week - The Island - Aln'Baldrahn by Melchior Dahrk

07:34 NPC Mod of the Week - Dynamic Morrowind Towns By Bumperlips

08:24 New Meshes and Textures Mod of the Week - HiRes Robes By Flash3113

09:08 Underrated Mod of the Week - Dagon Fel Mill By Thondur

10:04 Blast from the Past Mod of the Week - Trade Disputes By Dalin

11:25 Bonus Mod of the Week - Hagrnat Flying Fortress By Gazoline

12:59 Concluding Remarks

13:22 Credits

Any suggestions or improvements you'd recommend would be greatly appreciated, and yes I know, there's quite a few things that can be fixed and made more pleasant.

Also, it must be pointed out that I cannot take credit for the idea of a showcase YouTube series, in fact this isn't even the first such series to be posted on YouTube. The first was PraiseTheSun's "Morrowind Mod Showcases" which aired four episodes in 2012, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0rp3t66LKw. I mention this because I want people to understand that this isn't really a new concept, and I'm merely improving upon the efforts of those who came before me.

Now this thread isn't really supposed to be just an advertisemant for "Morrowind Modding Showcases", but instead a broader discussion of improving the visibility of a number of mods and sharing mods we enjoy that perhaps others haven't yet tried, or at least haven't been aware about. So let's keep that in mind, and while I welcome all suggestions and discussions regarding the video, it should be remembered that the video itself is on the subject of discussing Morrowind mods in general and we should keep to that here as well. I've already gone ahead and cleared this topic with the forum staff, so everything here should be legal.

Thanks for reading, I hope you guys like the video series, and I hope this can encourage discussion on promoting more mods for Morrowind!

» Sun Jul 27, 2014 10:45 am

Nice! I think this is a great idea. I think your accent is perfectly fine and understandable, but perhaps a better microphone would make it more clear. I also think you should try getting rid of the black bars and the fps counter. The red fps counter in particular is a bit distracting. I think using MGEXE or Morrowind's built in fps counter would be less distracting than the current blinking red one.

I think a Youtube presence would greatly benefit the Morrowind modding community. It sounds like a good way of exposing the new mods that are coming out to those who aren't as familiar with the modding community or those who simply wish to see how the mod looks in a video before using it. I'm not sure I can give much advice on where to go with this, but I think making videos based around a certain theme or gameplay style would be great. Other than this just keep doing what you're doing. Your recent activity in this modding community has been nothing short of amazing and I hope to see you keep up the good work whether it be in your commentaries or mods.

» Sun Jul 27, 2014 12:57 pm

In full support of this project, and any tangential projects which might branch from it!

I've got a better graphics template for Episode 2. I'm not terribly pleased with what I threw together for the first episode, but that's just me being picky.

I second what cml said about the FPS counters from Fraps. If it's possible to remove them, that would be great. And maybe consider running Morrowind in a widescreen aspect ratio.

I think it could be an interesting side activity for people who use various media outlets such as Tumblr to have their own kind of Mod of the Week posts. I myself am considering something along that vein.

Oh, and I second another thing cml said: your own contributions to the community as of late have been immense, dark! Keep it up!

» Sun Jul 27, 2014 11:41 am

Well, I was not aware of the Telvanni Lighthouse before this video. Thank you! I agree your accent is quite fine, but the sound quality is a bit low. Altogether great work, though.