It’s almost exactly three years since I mentioned that I was making a sequel to my http://princessstomper.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/silorn-manor/. I’ve started making it about three times, too. Yes, I have almost as many WIPs as I have completed mods, but I normally do get around to them eventually.

After reinstalling the game again and yet again losing any progress, I suddenly knew how to make the mod work. You can blame Korana for this, because I got the modding itch while poking round her excellent Millstone Farm mod. I got the idea for this one from my Oasis house mod for Fallout 3 – the way to make the player feel like they are high up in a tree, whilst still allowing a stable, functional village base. I also knew where to set it, after falling in love with the Sercen ruin during regular Oblivion gameplay.

Sercen is the manor directly opposite the White Tower, just on the water’s edge. It’s the first thing you see when you exit the sewer system after escaping from prison at the start of the game. It’s also infested with respawning bandits, and filled with traps and secrets, making it the ideal challenge for the player without any additional work from me.

I just added a door to one corner, and a short “Sercen Lower Level” cell, which has traces of “daylight” and plant growth, and a hidden door leading to the village.

The village interior-as-exterior cell is a short hall of the Ayleid architecture, opening out to an open “village square” that is rather long and narrow with five terraced buildings in the Ayleid style. It’s on a wooden platform (an enlarged bridge piece), through which trees are visible below and above to give the sensation that it’s all resting on branches of giant trees. (I had some fun with my first test: I still had Natural Vegetation plugged in, which makes everything supersized! I couldn’t see anything at all because of the size of the branches!)

When you look up, you see foliage cover, and some inaccessible walkways to give the impression that the village is much larger than it is.

At the bottom of it all is the Shivering Isles gateway island (so, yes, the mod will require SI), so that when you look down you just see green-upon-green. Then there are densely-packed, enlarged trees to fill the leaf cover that you can see through the slats on the bridge. I’ve put trees right into the buildings so you see the leaves hanging down over the top. The “trunk” parts poking through bits of architecture in the village square are mossy logs turned on their sides and covered with ivy and creepers. Because these Ayleids are more integrated into Cyrodilic culture, I’ve kept the flame-lights yellow, rather than the pale blue they were in Silorn Manor (where the Aureal bloodline is stronger).

For the “lore” of the village, I’ll be expanding on the in-game books I wrote for Silorn Manor, basing it on this paragraph:



Now that I have most of the “exterior” complete (I need to add doors and fix a couple of glitches), I’ll now follow the same process as I did with Silorn: spend a good few hours writing the backstory and sketching out who lives where. This is so that each interior will be "functional", e.g. a baker's house would be filled with bread.

How many services they require dictates how large the interiors are. If it’s just a dormitory suburb of the Imperial City, you can get away with eight or nine inhabitants living in smallish houses. If it’s a self-contained town, I might have to divide those five interiors into apartment blocks and have maybe 20 residents and a lot more shops.

Here's some screens:

http://princessstomper.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/sercen03.jpg
http://princessstomper.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/sercen04.jpg
http://princessstomper.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/sercen06.jpg
http://princessstomper.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/sercen07.jpg
http://princessstomper.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/sercen08.jpg
http://princessstomper.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/sercen09.jpg

Great news! I like your Silorn mod very much and have it constantly in load order.That would be great to have possibility to visit another Ayleid village! :celebration:
You mention Millestone farm as a source of inspiration for this mod. Are you going to implement same posibilities as cooking ans making some useful things in your mod too?
I'm looking forward to hear more about your new mode! :biggrin:
PS Nice screenshots! I'd like to see all this pretty scenery in the game!

This looks stunning. Can't wait! :celebration:

Glad you liked Silorn and like the screenshots so far.

My rule of thumb when it comes to modding is normally to "do what Korana would do, and then dial it back by 30%"
It's striking a balance between interactivity and Death By Minigame. On Millstone Farm, I particularly love the "painting" feature, but found running a bath arduous because I couldn't easily find where anything was - so if I was going to do something like that (which I will), I'd have the soap and water within arm's reach. As for cooking, I realise that the "bread oven" in Silorn Manor was so simplistic I might as well not have bothered, but neither do I want to be hunting down a dozen ingredients: for me, just two or three is fine.

An idea I'll be importing from one of my Fallout 3 mods is having scaling, self-repairing armour. I got that one from Knights of the Nine, but you only get that cool stuff if you're a "good" character, which shuts out anyone who wants to do the DB questline (which is why I've never actually completed it). I'd just take something quite simple and elegant from the existing armour list and make a unique set, and (like KOTN) have a scripted armour stand so that when you replace the armour in its home, you get a fresh set scaled approximately to your level when you take it out again. Because that is a giant cheat, I'd make that one like the Fallout 3 workbench system - you do need to hunt down a dozen obscure ingredients to be able to "repair" it and get your snazzy armour.

As for my Sercen interiors, after my three failed attempts I was thinking of copy-pasting-modifying some of the interiors from Silorn Manor, since a request at the time was that the player should be able to live in one of the smaller homes, so I'd like to include a smaller player home as an option.

For the main manor house, I can either copy-paste-modify Silorn Manor itself (having a lot more greenery, giant roots coming up the walls, etc to make it more 'tree-like'), or I can try to construct a large dwelling out of wood, probably by taking the Leyawiin shacks and bolting them together. What do you think?

Also: I'm going to make this one as companion-friendly as possible. Though all my mods are pathgridded and most have spare beds, I've not normally made certain chairs/beds persistent and sometimes the bed is just for show (and therefore not easily accessible).