Description: The sole purpose of this mod is the bring the "Black Horse Courier" to Morrowind. It is going to feature in-game news items that are readable by the player. This is going to work (in theory) like the Black Horse Courier works in Oblivion. NPC's will be setup throughout the world that distribute these news articles as things happen within the game. On top of that, there will be "Local" news article vendors as well that distribute news items that are specifically related to the happenings within a specific city. Some news items may also be added to the loot drop table. Each city will feature a local vendor that disperses news items via in-game dialog. As events progress in the game, so will the available news items from the vendor. Also some news items may use version control to track changes. For example, a quest may happen which causes a new news item to be released. Then as the game progresses and new things happen in that quest, new news items may be released about the same subject.Expanding on the previous news items. Similar to the way that major news outlets continuously update their news articles when new events unfold in late breaking news.

Within 1-2 weeks from now, I will release the first beta release version. This will feature the basic structure of the news items. Also the first 3-4 cities will have their NPC's already setup, and have the first few news items available as quests progress. My first goal is going to be covering all the news items in Seyda Neen. After this city is done, my next target is going to be Balmora.

Currently asking for feature requests, ideas, suggestions, and what not. News item submissions are welcome, although they may be subject to editing, adjustments, or alterations. Some submissions may be accepted, while others are not. It depends if they fall in line with my vision for the mod. Credit will be given in the readme.

All of the updates on the progress of the mod will be presented here, along with the first screen shots, and samples of some of the news items.

sounds mean!

though, sounds like something only "the flig" could do. cant wait to see what you come up with.

Great idea, I'm surprised it hasn't been done before, actually.

Some ideas:
- News of Sleepers waking up, if you have cleaned out the local Sixth House base. (almost every town has a Sixth House base that directly affects it) I think most the info can be found http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Sleepers_Awake
- They could be riding on Guars, instead of on foot. (and there's no horses here, since M'aiq at them all )
- Local Misc Quests could be integrated for each town. Like http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Larrius_Varro_Tells_a_Little_Story for Balmora, or http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Mysterious_Killings_in_Vivec for Vivec. The murder in Seyda Neen, of course.


Actually, it's not very complicated at all. Basic Journal checks (or OnDeath checks for the 6th House idea) will likely be the main method.

Who's Flig?


Those are all good suggestions. I will incorporate them. I like the idea about the Guars. I would need to figure out how to get them to sit on the guars, I would have no idea how. I would have to play around with it a bit.

Good suggestions, thanks.

And yes, most of what I was planning on was checking the journal. Since you can get information on every single quest in the entire game, that will power almost all of the news item releases. On top of that, the on death checks can pick up the ones
that don't show up in the journal.

Perhaps you could use the ideas from http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=6112. (you'd have to investigate availability of any resources you would use)
Or find a way in Blender to mount/combine a dummy-NPC on a guar, then just treat them both like a Creature. (you can use dialog filters the same way for both NPC & Creature)

Flig = Fliggerty. One of the most knowledgeable scripters and MWSE experts around

Our resident genie. He does the impossible.

Oh ok.I know who Fliggerty is. His website, posts, and ideas have helped me a lot. I have seen him around a lot. I just have never heard him called "Flig" before.

Cool thanks for the feedback.

lol, sorry for the confusion .

some ideas:

guild-crap: ie, once you become the head of the fighters guild, the news papers talk about it.
great houses: once you build a stronghold. papers. etc
morang tong: the death of somebody on a writ is in the papers. with info about the morang tong IF the writ was shown to a guard.

I had plans for the stronghold completion news items, as well as the head of guild. I plan on releasing new ones as guild progress is made. I am not sure if I am going to do that locally, but my thoughts are veering towards "guild" news items. So for each major faction, I would have a faction
news manager or something that would be in control of releasing news items about relevant subjects for that specific guild/faction. This would allow me to later write compatibility patches to add NPCS for other peoples custom factions if I decided to later on down the road. I could just create
an addon plugin that will add an NPC in the relevant area for that faction, and then add the news items just as I am throughout the rest of the game. For Morag Tong, that is a really good idea. Especially with that condition logic. I like that idea.

I suggest a name change. No horses in Morrowind and you'd think Vvardenfell, being as xenophobic as they are, would have their own news agency.

The Black Guar Courier. http://www.lionking.org/~black/art/morrowind/hazmat_petnigel.jpg

Heh, I like it. "Black Guar Courier" it is. Great idea. Right now they are all going to just be standing as standard NPC's. I am working on it now. My main focus is getting the first draft of the news items for Seyda Neen written up. I have also been thinking. I am going to do it in one of two ways..
either I am going to make ti allow you to get the news items from Dialog, or just have it add all of the proper news items into the NPC's inventory and make them a merchant. I think I am going to do it as NPC items. Since, this is going to be the most affective, and less likely to cause conflicts with
other mods. So for a local NPC (like Seyda Neen) I will run a script for BGC which will just do a lot of journal checking and a lot of add item calls to put the proper news items into the couriers inventory at that given time. Each time the player talks to the NPC I will just re-run the script and update their inventory as appropriate.

I have also decided to add branching news items. For example..just to give you an idea. The tax collector in Seyda Neen. I am going to have one initial news item about him missing. Then another news item about him being murdered. Then depending on what the PC does, I will decide
what the new news item is going to be. One might describe the player and about the money and the murdered. But if the player didn't kill the murderer (or decided to keep him secret) then the news would not know this, so it'll create a news item stating that the murderer was never found but
local sources believe it to be one of the citizens of Seyda Neen. I also might do a few other things with the news items.

Once I do the initial news mod, I am planning on setting up a few quests in the game that deal with the couriers..not sure what they are going to be yet. I have also created it as a faction, so perhaps when everything else is done I will set up something so the player can join the faction and do quests to get up in ranks. Right now though I am mostly focusing on the main news items, and basic npc setup.

Can an Admin/Mod please change the title of this post to "Black Guar Courier" instead to reflect the name change. Also, I have seen people who create a thread about a mod be able to update the first post when updates happen for the mod (when screenshots become available or something else). When I try it says I do not have permissions, how do some people do that? Just curious.

Also, I am going to contact http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=8971 this guy and see if I can use his texture. This is going to be the first step towards getting the NPC's so they can ride the guar. Once I get permission from someone to use
a black guar texture (if not I will have to make my own) then I am going to work on learning how to make them mountable and see what options there are. I really like the new name idea.

Maybe have some info from the other parts of Tamriel? Also find out some holidays and have some info on them? :shrug:

Good suggestions. I will add those too. I didn't think about that.

You will want to PM one.

You need a http://www.flickr.com/photos/25411109@N05/5329459073/in/photostream/. I can make you a nice one....might want different interiors because this one is in a Raven Rock house. Or you can take the idea and make your own.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25411109@N05/5330068598/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25411109@N05/5330067800/

I will do that tonight, thanks.



I like the idea. What I am going to do then is having 1 printing press per "city". The printing press is going to directly relate to that city. I am going to try to have the press within each city that looks very close to that city. I want to use the same style/structure inside and out as
the rest of the city so it looks like it matches. I also want to try and make sure that each house location doesn't conflict with any major mods. I do not use the better city mods, but I still want to place the presses in a location where they will not interfere..perhaps right outside the cities
or in places that are not affected by better cities mods (the main ones at least).

So I will have 1 printing press for each city in Morrowind. Then I am going to have a central office. I am going to make it into a very large printing press. This "large" headquarters is going to probably be where I have a lot of the individual news items (holidays as they come out, and various other things).
Not sure the exact structure but that is the general idea.

Overall if you want to submit some houses for the mod it'll save me work. SO your more than welcome. I might make a few adjustments alterations on them as I put the into the mod, but mostly they'll stay the same. The main thing is just making sure that each black courier headquarters in each
city looks like it belongs in the city. The one for the main headquarters is going to be the challenging one..I do not want it to be overly large. I am also planning on setting it as a player faction. Once I am done with everything else, I am planning on setting it up so that people can join the faction
and do a lot of stuff with it (including rising in ranks), maybe even allowing them to put together custom news items based off pre-defined choices. Not sure until I get to that point.

On top of all of that, I have gotten permission to use the black guar. So I am incorporating that into my mod as well.

Also, this mod is going to require all expansions. I am not planning on splitting them up into 3 separate mods. It's going to be one large mod that is going to cover everything in Morrowind, Bloodmoon and Tribunal. It's going to allow me to add a great deal of details to the faction and how they operate, inside and outside of morrowind.

I think you should take a minimalistic approach with this. There isn't really any need for printing presses or headquarters. All you need is a street vendor in every settlement where news would be appreciated (Vos springs to mind as somewhere that would probably resent any kind of news), and a rock solid framework which will allow you to sort stories by settlement, faction, etc. That way you can focus on producing content relevant to the core concept of the mod, rather than getting bogged down with stuff which isn't really related.

Of course, this is just how I'd do it, but I reckon you'd be best off keeping it simple.

Edit: Also, I'd suggest you start with a proof-of-concept mod just doing the news for, say, Seyda Neen.

Seconded.

I agree to an extent. I do want to make this into a massive mod eventually, let me explain how I plan to approach this.

I am going to first do Seyda Neen (which I am working on now). This is JUST going to have 1 NPC standing there doing the basic selling of news items as I envision it. I am actually already in teh middle of making it and about 40% done with this first concept.
Once I have that totally wrapped up, I am going to be releasing a beta concept of the mod. Just go give people an idea of where I am going with this and get a little feedback. After that I am going to revise Seyda Neen. After that, I am planning on getting a printing press setup. I want to incorporate this into
the game as much as possible. So the printing press will be next. I am going to play around with ideas of the design (hopefully from Aquan if he gets around to it. Then I am going to get that done and finish up the entire Seyda Neen area. After that one is done and I get some feedback and implement some suggestions, at that point I will do the black guar mounted NPC's. Then from that point I am going to expand over to Balmora, and a lot the smaller towns around that side. Some cities will have printing presses, others will just have a basic NPC (like really small fishing villages. Some villages might even have NPC's that are explaining that they are trying to bring the Courier service to those cities, to give it a more realistic feel. Once I get those other 2-3 cities done I will release another concept. At that point (over time) I am just going to continue to expand throughout all of Morrowind and then a headquarters there as well.

Once that is totally complete, I am going to do the same thing for Bloodmoon and Tribunal, and then finally at the very end I am going to set it up as aplayable faction and start setting up a varietyof quests you can under take. I am also going to work up the ability for players to be able to customize news items. The courier headquarters (once the player reaches a certain rank in that faction) will send the player out to try and get good news stories. Then the mod will disperse stuff throughout the world that are going to act as "clues" or something similar that is going to go towards late breaking stories, or unsolved mysterious. The player is going to collect these things throughout the course of the quest (little articles they find, things they read, NPC's they talk to about some of the events). They will be able to interview witnesses and things to news items. Then the player can determine how they want the news to unfold. So basically they would go back to headquarters and answer a series of questions, and based off their answer that is how the news item is going to be built..then these new news items are dispersed to local vendors. It's hard to explain what I had in mind, but this mod is going to end up being huge. I know exactly what I am wanting out of it, and extra stuff just depends on what feedback I get from the community. It'll end up being far from simple in the long run, because I have exactly what I want in mind when building it.

I will however be releasing the Seyda Neen prototype within a week or two just to give people a feel for where this is headed, and get some feedback.

Sounds like a really neat idea. I can't wait to see how this turns out! I actually have something similar planned for my mod. Just something fun for the player to follow along with.

Good luck!

Just to give an update on the progress of this mod. I have written up 4 basic news items so far. I have setup the basic NPC in Seyda Neen and placed him.

Now, I am about to add about another 5-6 news items based off certain things that happen in Seyda Neen, then I am going to write the script for the NPC to add the relevant ones to his inventory every time the player
talks to that NPC. At which point I will do a little touch up and release a quick version of the mod to get some community feedback while I start on the mounted Guars and some other details.

I have also created the faction, and setup a good bit of dialog for this first NPC to give the player some background into the faction Black Guar Courier, and some other minor details. I have currently included some text
pertaining to how to join, but this is just filler text until I get to the point to make this an actual playable faction as well.

so... you're making a different news paper for each town? or one news paper sold in each town?

I am making an NPC to sale news items in every town. They deal with local news. Then I am going to have a printing press in each town as well, more of to add depth to the mod and for the faction addition later.

Then I am adding a corporate office around the heart of Morrowind. They are going to have a variety of vendors, as well as some general Morrowind news items. Not really a news "Paper" but news articles. I like the
idea of a newspaper though....I am going to have to think about that. I might just stick with News Items, kind of like in Oblivion..they have 1 sheet of paper for every type of news...so each event get's it's own sheet.
THat is how I was planning to build it, and how I was putting it together currently.