A taste of Morrowind - The Forgotten Garden

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The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion
Silgrad Tower - The Forgotten Garden teaser Mod (Beta v2.5)
Release Date - August 22nd 2009

created by the Silgrad Tower team
http://www.silgrad.com


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The beta version can no longer be downloaded, the final version will be posted in a couple of days. We are finalizing The Forgotten Garden and will make a final release. Thanks to all with interest in Silgrad Tower!


If you would like to rate our mod please check our http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=24937.

The Silgrad Tower team is proud to present our teaser mod, entitled The Forgotten Garden. With it, we hope to give players hours of entertainment as well as an impression of what our full, future release will be like. A lot of us in the team pooled together to work on the teaser and we feel it represents the best of our work, ranging from quests and AI to voice work and models.

"The Forgotten Garden" offers new lands to explore, several fully voiced, unique characters and hundreds of new, handmade models. You'll get to explore new dungeons and work your way through new quests, and may even find yourself the owner of an estate with plenty of storage capabilities. Once you enter Morrowind, you'll notice many differences from Cyrodiil... pay keen attention to the rumors to learn the lay of this new land.

Images:
http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/EntranceRoad.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/EntranceWall.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/Statue.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/PlantsWater.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/Plants.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/Lightpost.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/Docks3.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/Docks2.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/FishermansShack.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/Pools.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/ScreenShot26.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/ScreenShot28.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/ScreenShot23.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/ScreenShot24.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/ScreenShot32.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/ScreenShot34.jpg http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/ScreenShot35.jpg | http://s291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/FGaDistant2.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/ShackOverlook.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/GazeboOverlook.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/PathTomb.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/Tomb.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/Undead.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/CavernSpider.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/GardenNight.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/L1bmp.jpg | http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll299/TheImperialDragonSt/ForgottenGarden/Gazebo.jpg

Voice Samples:
These videos may have some echo created when making the samples. The echo is not heard in game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhMui5CH05Y&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpQaShrMrUQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYHZFeL1seU&feature=related

Premise
Long ago, Dark Elves belonging to Great House Redoran settled on a peaceful, green island that would one day become the most beautiful garden in all of Morrowind. On that island grew mysterious and exotic plants, unlike any others that dotted the vast and diverse landscapes of Tamriel. However, Redoran is a warrior society, not a society of gardeners, and they eventually left the island in search of land suitable for sustaining war. The garden was all but a forgotten legend just a few years later.

A few decades ago Lord Tadanil Balothan of the Redoran Council rediscovered the island, along with all of its natural mysteries. He founded a settlement, and named it The Forgotten Garden. Under his leadership the settlement returned the island to its former glory. Settlers, and even some guilds, are hearing word about the many wonders that surround this garden.

However, the Garden is facing a threat. With Lord Tadanil's recent passing, local bandits are on the rise. Rumours are spreading that the settlement will soon fall to ruins, with the garden left to quietly waste away...

How to install
Extract the contents of the downloaded archive to your Oblivion\Data folder. Then start Oblivion, tick Oblivion.esm and Silgrad_Tower_T.esm and Silgrad_Tower_T.esp, and you can start playing the mod. You'll get a journal entry shortly afterwards. Follow the clues in the entry to begin your journey. NOTE: The transportation spell only works outside city walls and when you're not in combat.

To uninstall, simply delete the following files from your Oblivion\Data folder:
Silgrad_Tower_T.esm
Silgrad_Tower_T.esp
Silgrad_Tower.bsa
Also open the Oblivion\Data\Music folder and delete the silgrad folder.

Known issues

Beta 2.0.
Despite our very thorough testing we have not been able to find the cause of, nor resolve, the problem of the FPS plummeting in many outdoor locations. This is why we chose to label our release Beta and aim our release toward high-end users. We hope members of the community will be able to help us pinpoint the cause of the FPS drop. If we can resolve that problem we can release a new version of our teaser mod that can be enjoyed by mid- and low-end players as well.

Beta 2.5.
The meshes have been optimized and some significant changes were made to the esm. Our tests showed that the FPS improved a lot, especially near the problem areas. Feedback would be highly appreciated.

If you use the Knights of the Nine add-on you'll hear a few rumors related to this mod. All other rumors from the game have been disabled while you are in ST worldspaces. Rumors from Oblivion and other mods will still be heard outside of ST worldspaces. Since our mod does not alter anything related to Oblivion there should be no other compatibility issues.


Interested in joining the team?
Terrific! http://www.silgrad.com/wbb2/board.php?boardid=246 for more information on how to join. The process isn't very formal, highlighted by the part in the introduction that half-jokingly says "Claim first, ask questions later." It's not as chaotic as that might imply, but it's true that we sort out most things by talking about them. Plus there's no substitute for personal exploration. I'm sure you could stare yourself blind at our claim threads and still not get as good an impression of what one of our overall mod's cities is like as you could by checking it out in the Construction Set to see how it hangs together.

We're always excited to greet new members, so check out the article and then http://www.silgrad.com/wbb2/portal.php so we can get to know you!

FAQ
1. When will Silgrad Tower be finished?
We don't have a deadline we're working against, preferring instead to maintain a healthy level of fun by modding at our own pace and often doing jobs on the side within our mod that might not count towards our goals for release, but are just plain fun to do. We'll release when the regions are generated, our cities have reached a highly playable state and there are roads connecting our towns and larger villages. Naturally we will continue working after we've released, and add more and more content to our mod throughout Oblivion's lifespan.

Please check our forum for news of our upcoming full release, http://www.silgrad.com/wbb2/thread.php?threadid=10290.

2. Why don't you just use TES3 models?
It's illegal to distribute Bethesda's models and other assets, meaning that if we ripped TES3 models we would be regarded as an illegal mod and couldn't operate on ESF and other crucial places. We're in it for the long haul, and some of us are already looking forward to an eventual fifth Elder Scrolls game which makes it even more important that we have a firm platform to stand on that doesn't compromise Bethesda's copyrights in any way. Besides that consideration the models in TES3 were highly optimized, to make them run on a mid-range computer in 2002, and would have needed extensive work on them just to bring them up to technical par with what you'd expect from Oblivion. For an experienced modeller, editing an old model in that way and making it look good is usually more work than creating it from scratch.

3. Are you modding Vvardenfell?
No, we are modding a region of the Morrowind Province's mainland situated west of Vvardenfell. This release is a preview of that work.

4. Will you make the whole Morrowind Province?
Perhaps we will expand our landmass in the future as the existing region gets completed, but modding the whole Morrowind Province is not our goal. Our goal is to make the part that we DO mod the best we possibly can.

5. What does the term "Dunmer" mean?
"Dunmer" is the name dark elves prefer to call themselves. The term "dark elf" is an Imperial invention.

6. What does the term "Redoran" mean?
To say it succinctly, it is a political power in the Morrowind Province who controls the western-most sliver of the Province. More information on them can be found http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Redoran.

7. Can I use your models/textures in my mod?
The short answer is no. The longer answer is that if you want to use something *specific* then please contact Razorwing (razorwing@silgrad.com), because you might be allowed to use it. An example is Tarnsman, who was granted personal permission to use the ingredient meshes in his "Morrowind Ingredients" mod.

Breaking our right to exclusivitivity would be a copyright violation and only result in locked threads/deleted uploads for you and tighter privacy arrangements for us. Given that a lot of modellers share their work freely as modders' resources there's no apparant reason why anyone would want to take our stuff; the only reason one can think of is if they are pursuing the same ideas we are - that of recreating the Morrowind Province. They would be welcome to do so, because a little healthy competition is just a good thing, but to try and do so using our own models and textures against us is unfair.

If someone wants to use our assets we would like them to become part of the team instead. We have a history of giving a wide berth to modders who come to us and wants to work together with us on their own pet projects, and they enjoy substantial freedom in the framework of the Silgrad Tower team. Not to mention access to helpful teammembers whom holds expertise in a wide area of the realm of modding, and whom all work towards the same goal. That's what is so great about being in a team, there's always someone there who knows more than you do about something who can help you out when you get stuck, and you may know more about something than he does, and so everyone has a good time and gets to see their creative dreams fulfilled in our massive, sprawling lands. The writer of this very readme was in the same place a few years ago as any new modder in the team is. I'm still here, and having more fun than ever. Give our team a chance and I'm sure it will grow on you the same way it has on me.

Internal credits
Interior modding: earendil, sandor, TheImperialDragon, Zurke
Exterior modding: sandor & Zurke
Light script: InsanitySorrow
Models: Razorwing, SACarrow, TheImperialdragon
Project coordination & technical aspects (esm, LOD, bsa, region generation): sandor
Quests, in-game map, region preset: The ImperialDragon
Voice work coordination & TES4Gecko adaptation: SACarrow
Voice artists: Casey, Ibsen's Ghost, Andy Slayer, Cambridge Spy, swthemer
Playtesters: Cambridge Spy, ed_conn, InsanitySorrow, simonp92 and ZDawg

External credits
Mr Siika for his cliffs, seagulls, chickens and fishing boat.
Kafeid for the Elegant Vests resource.
someone1074 for the capes & cloaks resource.
Ghogiel for the Bonemold armor, as well as Cryo and Shmbling_Horde for their Bonemold helmets.
Grimdeath, B3w4r3, Martigen, Syko Fox, Cryo, Mdogger, Xmarksthespot, Cryonaut, Orix, Renzeekin, and Grimenir for their Lore Creatures Expansion pack.
Prometheus for the statue set 'Prom' some of which adorn the Forgotten Garden.
Phitt for his help in greatly improving the FPS issue in the 2.0 beta realease.
Please http://oblivion.silgrad.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=167 for a full and up-to-date list of credits.

Special thanks to Koniption for her work on the lift the jellyfish; nick_op for his technical work on the LCE creatures and farm animals, and for animating the seagulls; and The Modax Jago for his work on the mesh and texture for the Kwama forager as well as nick_op for his skeleton, rigging, animations and SACarrow for his sounds and getting textures for two different UV maps working together as one on the Kwama forager. We would also like to thank Bethesda for making Oblivion, the makers and contributors of TES4Gecko for providing the ultimate modding tool, the makers of TES4Edit, TES4Files, and the makers of NifSkope for creating the perfect application for NIF-related work.

Contact
If you have questions regarding our mod, please http://forum.silgrad.com/ and a team member will answer you promptly.

Finally! I'll start downloading this now.

ur mod sux neeb :swear:

hah, jk, dl-ing. interested in seeing what you guys have come up with after all this time. btw, did you redo the Emperor parasol texture or are you still using the old one i made?

Looks very interesting! Now...how do I get there?

I'm pretty sure the emperor parasol models are still using the textures you submitted.


After you load the files, you'll get a journal entry. That should get you started.

Yay! Its finally here

Nice job!

Thanks for sharing and the linky, will add this to the list ! ! ! !

Haha!

Yeah nice job on this Silgrad Team :tops: This really is nice work, hope to see more.
By the way what did you use to generate the mountain?

About the massive FPS hit in outside areas; I found it ONLY happens after an item has been moved. Upon travelling to the Forgotten Gardens, it was quite smooth and played very well. Soon after, however, with me being me, I attacked the first guard I came across(Lol, it was pretty fun). The FPS hadn't dropped while in battle. Only after I killed the guard and the Chitin shield and Dwarven Shortsword dropped did the lag hit. So I figured it was either something to do with items (Maybe Havok? *Shrugs) or killing NPCs. I reloaded a game before the lag had hit, and went to the Gardens again. FPS was fine at first. I came across a Dunmer Vase, and knocked it over. FPS dropped. Reloaded again, this time grabbed a Green Bottle. Immediately upon grabbing the Green Bottle, the FPS dropped substantially again. So I'm assuming it has something to do with items in the exteriors. I tried this in an interior as well, and it *seemed* to lag for a split second after I had knocked a few items about, but immediately went back to good FPS. I'd also like to add that, after the FPS dropped on me, neither looking directly up into the sky nor looking directly into the ground helped the FPS. Normally my FPS shoots up to the 60s while looking directly upwards or down, seeing as there's nothing to process in the sky or underneath my PCs feet. It stayed low regardless of where I was looking, so maybe it has something to do with... Item calculations...? Like the Physics for them or something? *Shrugs*
That's just what I happened to notice, but I very much am looking forward to playing the mod, so I'll simply have to refrain from messing up the scenery or... Killing guards... Lol.
Keep up the good work Silgrad team!

Congats on the release. Looks great.

God dammit! My Main system is still in repair!

Guess ganna bookmark this! Nice to see ya got it together! Congrat!

*bookmark'd*

Yeah, Zurke, I'm pretty sure that's what it is. Corpses seem to trigger it as well. Anything with Havok applied to it, I guess. The slowdown only seems to appear in some areas, but I definitely don't think it's random. Every time I killed a monster -- Troll, Goblin, Rat, Guard, whatever, the corpse went limp and rag-doll-ish, and the game had massive slowdown. I also found out that a troll had killed 3 rats, at which point I had horrible FPS lol. At first I wasn't sure what was causing the slowdown, but I came across the corpses of 3 rats, and a troll nearby, so... Kinda pieced it together...
On a different note, The Mold Cave is amazing. And... Kwama Foragers... Wow... I never realized I had actually missed those little nuisances haha.

Edit: I forgot to say that some of the items/corpses tended to drop through/get stuck in the floor... Which might be another cause for the FPS drops. If a corpse gets stuck in the floor and goes into one of those twitching fits, and Havok's causing slowdowns... Well... That's a big reason there, right?

Sounds exciting. Downloading now.

A what a lovely day!
Hm, so I actually won't need ST itself for this?

Can't wait to marvel at the beauty of the place.

But I guess I'll have to since the download only gives me a 240Kb file..:S
Edit:Got it^^!

A BIG THANK YOU!
I've been waiting for this for a long long time, ST V3 to follow pleaaaaaaaase.

Tried the mod today and enjoyed it a lot. Thanks for making it!

I'm 99.9% sure the massive slowdowns are happening because of bad collision on some of the meshes. I tested it - when no other actors were around and when I got these slowdowns (FPS went down to 3-4) I typed 'tcl' in the console and the FPS went up to a normal level (around 40). Actors getting stuck in collision happens only with (Packed)TriStripsShape collision (and not with MOPP), so that's another evidence. Currently extracting the bsa to see if I can find something obvious.

EDIT: An example for 'FPS killer collision' is meshes\st\imperial\decoration\torchring01.dds. A regular NiTriStripsShape with Num Strips more then 1 (in this case it's 30) is very, very bad for performance. Found a few more that are like that, for example in the reichparkeep\statue folder. If you update every (Packed)TriStripsShape you can find to MOPP the slowdowns should be gone. And as a side effect dead actors won't get stuck in the floor/walls anymore as well.

Just played this through and it was excellent. I did experience the bad fps slowdown but managed to mitigate it somewhat with use of TCL in the console. I'm sure you will manage to correct this issue, and otherwise this was one of the best mods I've downloaded.

Outstanding job on the architecture, it reminds me how great Morrowind looked. Voice work was great too, especially Folkbjorn, he reminds me of MacAdder (fans of the British tv show 'Blackadder' will know who I mean). I am looking forward to more of your releases in the future.

Hi Skeletonking and thanks for playing I and we at Silgrad Towers appreciate the feed back. I cannot tell you how many hours were spent trying to figure out and fix this fps issue. We would have had it out atleast a week earlier. I will relay the info and put the greatest minds to work on it (mine is not one of them) .

Thanks and I hope we can resolve this and bring more mods to the community.

Downloading now!

thank you ST people :foodndrink:

Hi Phitt and thank you also for playing. I think we were on the same track as what is being mentioned in these posts but to pin point the issue was the problem. I think you and others finding what we could not is what we were hoping for. Well I will relay this and hopefully the model guys can make something of it. Thanks again for taking the time to play and give some feed back.

Thanks for sharing this info I'll add it to the check list.


@TheRagingBeast
We used a Geocontrol preset made by Gibbo912 to generate the mountains.

This looks awesome, but one thing is bothering me, as I don't quite know what it means:

Does this mean *no* rumors at all work in the game, even in the vanilla worldspaces (i.e. Cyrodiil)? I ask because I already use a couple of mods that use Rumors as journal entries leading to quests...

It only affects our own ST worldspaces, the vanilla rumors are fine (Cyrodiil).

Some of your meshes have the same problem as the collision btw, most noticeable are the statues. For example the (nice looking) dragon statues at the entrance - they have multiple thousand strips each. You can even see the lag when looking at them in Nifskope only (just open steadhelmbridgestatueleft.nif for example). Once you triangulate and strippify them in Nifskope to reduce the strips to 1 the lag in Nifskope is gone as well. I remember this was a problem some years ago when you could only export TriShapes from 3ds max. The strippifier in Nifskope was bugged and produced a result with lots of strips instead of just 1 when you strippified them. Might be a good idea to update those meshes as well.