I was wondering why the shivering isles was so vastly unused? Surely modders out there can make some truly wonderfully demented & manic mods. The realm is a perfect place,not that many compatibility problems and people wanted mods to rule cyrodiil but it you can rule the shivering isles why don't ppl expand it make it truly worth the madgod presence or out come the intestines and he'll jump rope with them...Just a thought that poped into my mind while playing with the few mods available.

I've asked that myself, created a mod featuring a lot of quests and even an entire guild in the Shivering Isles...


... and people ask for a version that doesn't require Shivering Isles.

*sad*

yea i know what you mean at lest MMM is finally doing somethink only wish OOO wood too. Shivering Isles needs some big epic quests like Kragenirs Death Quest or somethink like Heart of the Dead but in a mad way of couse. Oh and any one that dont have the Shivering Isles by now is Mad :hehe: :bolt:

Doesn't Integration - the stranded light use the shivering isles?

yes some of it but its not shivering isles only quest mod.

maybe because...shivering isles main quest is far more interesting than the vanilla, doesn't need improvement... :homestar:
first, i wonder why ppl don't play SI at all. it's insane

all i need for SI is an un-leveling mod. i wouldn'T need else.

I really miss the sense of danger you have with OOO in Cyrodiil. SI is cool in itself and both Fran's and MMM make it more interesting from a combat point of view - but it's rather humdrum anyway compared to OOO in my opinion. Could definitely use an OOO style overhaul, although I doubt that will ever happen.

didn't say the main quest need improvement just need more of them. OOO for SI wood be nice to

I've thought on this too. My assumptions (for that's all they are)...

1.) Many of the game's most prominent modders are "old school", having been playing/modding since initial release. SI was of course not released until some time later. Due to that they may simply not think in terms of SI being a valid modding resource and prefer to stick with Cyrodiil proper. (You see something akin to this in most advice to new players, when they are invariably told to "update to the latest official patch", when in reality most truly new players will have acquired the game as GOTY, which when fully installed is already patched.) I'd go so far as to guess that some long-time modders have never bothered to buy, install, and/or run SI. I'm sure folk will jump in and correct me on this if wrong.

2.) Since SI is optional, some modders might not want to make SI specific mods, or mods that rely on SI resources, for fear of limiting their user base.

3.) I've always felt that SI is more fully developed and polished than the original game. Whereas in vanilla Cyrodiil many NPCs and locations exist more to provide atmosphere than anything else, almost everything in SI is somehow main- or side-quest related. In other words, most of its assets are fully utilized. Yes, there is room for improvement and additions, but by and large SI doesn't need much help to be totally enjoyable. As such there's less overt need to mod it.

All that said, I certainly wouldn't mind some high-quality SI mods. The sad thing about SI for me is that as enjoyable as it was (and it was my favorite part of Oblivion my first play-through), once it's done it's done. There's almost no reason to return there after the fact. My very favorite avatar-home mod (and my only SI mod), "Inquisitors Lodge" is located in New Sheoth Palace. Much of my avatar's gear was/is stored there. Yet I've gone there no more than once in the last six RL months. It's just too out of the way to visit without a very compelling reason.

Enough for now.... errand day (with a vengeance)

-Decrepit-

When I got Shivering Isles and saw New Sheoth I was really excited about the architecture, and I still feel that the Dementia side is the best and most atmospheric town/city in Oblivion. Then I loaded it all up in the CS and found out that the place was comprised of large pieces that fit together precisely, allowing for very little variation or flexibility. So without the know how and skill of a good modeller to either make a flexible tileset based on the Mania or Dementia ones, there was very little I could do with the SI assets to create a unique town of my own. So the furthest my SI modding got was a house, Pond Cottage.

We did have an SI challenge on Oblivion's Real Estate and that yielded some http://www.oblivionsrealestate.com/Find_A_Home/Shivering_Isles/shivering_isles.html, but beyond that.... I think SI is pretty much complete as is and chock full of dungeons and quests. I do love the SI's, the views are amazing, the city is the best I have seen, I love the landscaping....but I can't see how much could be done there and while there is a fair amount of space, there actually isn't really a lot when considering modding.

The Shivering Isles landscape is a lot more interesting than Cyrodills, however to enter the Shivering Isles you have to get drawn into a whole other huge storyline and bunch of quests, which some people don't like as it breaks their character

- and by that I don't mean the Shivering Isles is bad, I just don't want to go there with every character

But is it really? Dungeon wise I think the islands are rather sparce - lots of empty areas all around really. Not that I'd want a megacity of dungeons but there's surely room for more. I love the quests seen as adventures, but from a combat oriented perspective there are not that many memorable fights. Basically, there's not much drawing me back to redo quests really - although I loved the first play through. In Cyrodiil with OOO/FCOM I think it's fun to do, say, Nornalhorst over and over again as it's such an awesome challenge so fun in itself.

So basically I agree with Decrepit:



If using Midas Magic I'd recommend the Astral Mark/Recall spell - just set a mark in the Inquisitors Lodge.

I think you hit the nail on the head there, in order to get on in SI you need to be either mad or selfishly evil. The only reason for the Divine Crusader to head to the Mad House is to beat up the Daedric Prince and return all the mortals to Nirn. Then he goes home.

So while SI may be great, I think it actually has quite limited appeal compared to Bloodmoon or Tribunal, the former of which allowed multiple paths and the latter of which spurred you on for the sake of self-preservation.

I guess some more camps/dungeons could be squeezed in http://www.freewebs.com/neo5k/untitled.JPG. But you would always be a stone's throw from something. A lot of what you can see as clear spaces on the map are inaccessible areas and would require some serious work to make habitable. This was actually something that was a challenge when trying to find space in Oblivion too. Seems like there is a cave or Ayleid ruin around each corner. To be honest I don't think there is that much room for expansion, certainly not for towns, but something like OOO or MMM in Shivering Isles would be a very good thing. I just think that the lack of space may be why modders have not made a great effort to mod there. Also as someone pointed out you have to jump through hoops just to get there in the first place.

Then the question becomes what are you intending to add. If you want to add a house or a small village then yes, you've got your work cut out for you. If you want to add a secluded lair of some kind, populated by malevolent spirits with a desire to consume all life that comes within reach... not at all, in fact the seclusion and the fact the player has to work their way over inconvenient hills works in its favour.

By the same token, anything on the coast is emminently reachable, and there's a *lot* of coastline in SI.

Vac

The entire NE coast (E & ES of Ebrocca), the N part (N of Dreamwalk Camp) etc. I love exploring and I was kind of disappointed by how little it pays in SI. Seemed I just walked and walked w/o any enemies or dungeons for rather long stretches.

I think that the only thing shivering isles really needs first is the settlement needs to be bigger expanded, like hale make them more like cities and i think can easily done seeing there not many quest that plays in the settlements and compatibility issues and more quests. thats all in my opinion. I really like this mod called Sheogorath accords of madness but i dont think its finished yet...

I think another thing keeping alot of mods from being made is Beths policies regarding distribution of the add-on package resources -- meaning that you can not just make new versions of the assets to include in a mod like you can with the regular game resources so packaging a mod that uses the SI meshes and textures becomes more complex. (ie. lets say you want to make a retexture of the amber armor -- legally you can't just make new textures and release a mod with copies of the amber armor NIF with the texture paths replaced since that would give those without SI access to the armor that they did not already have ! - so to release it you would need to release the textures and have the end user make their own version by using the textures as a replacer or use your texture resource to create their own armor by changing the NIFs (since including the Nifs would be a violation of Beth's rules)

I was thinking about this, just before-- there's a book, somewhere, in Oblivion about gateways to Daedric Realms (if I remember rightly, it describes a Cave that leads to one, or something...); so it wouldn't be too hard to justify something like a Mage making a Portal to the SI as part of their study into Daedric Realms, and asking for adventures to go through, and report back on what they find. It would cut out the quest line, and give a reason for Good people to go there-- furthering the sum of knowledge on SI If there's enough interest, I'll look into working on it to-morrow, perhaps, just as a small side-project.

and all the camps in shivering isles are rather useless i think most of them don't need to be there.building a inn or two would be sufficient.

I dont think the isles is really an evil place pyke from the knights of the thorn is there and he seems to enjoy being there more then Cyrodiil saying its more peaceful there away from the politics and war.

That sounds fun. Maybe even make it a little quest to retrieve SI items, to give you a reason to go dungeon crawling.

I believe this is only an issue if you use original SI meshes/textures edited for mods which are NOT based in the Shivering Isles - mods which can be used without SI being installed.
For mods actually based partially or fully within the SI worldspace, I'm fairly sure Bethesda have no issue with SI resources being edited and uploaded as part of a mod. It was once asked whether it was okay to use DLC resources in a mod, and if I remember correctly, GStaff came back with the response that you can do so, if the mod actually requires the DLC itself to work. So if the mod adds things to the SI worldspace, the mod requires SI to work, and thus it's okay to use resources from SI.

What SI needs is a good OOO style overhaul, to get rid of the levelling if nothing else. If there was such an overhaul it would probably need to almost double the dungeon count as well, and if it was dependant on MMM it could use all those cool new monsters and some new NPC types to populate them. Perhaps an alternate way to enter or paralel main quest would also be good for people who like to roleplay a more honourable character. In my usual over-ambitious way I'm already considering having a go myself, but thanks to all the great MMM monsters it can't be that hard, right?

Totally agree with that. Not so much about increasing the dungeon count though, one gripe I have with vanilla Oblivion is that there are way too many dungeons, so many that you run into one around every corner and I thought SI made a decent comprimise for size vs. amount of dungeons.