[[WIPz] A Brotherhood Renewed]

Hit a nice snag today - drive is about to blow itself out. Spent an hour or more fighting BSODs to make sure I could pull my latest files from it so they don't get lost. Lesson for folks - if you're making regular backups, don't get lazy and have to do what I'm doing now. Trying to weed through partially destroyed installations of Firefox to get back pieces you still need is not fun, and neither is realizing you haven't backed up your mod files in 2 weeks, which naturally means you've done tons of work on them in that time. All while sitting there listening to the sure sign of coming death - *click* *click* *click* *scrape* as your files are slowly being copied to external storage. Then of course having to outlay for a new drive you really didn't want to get and can't really afford to do but knowing you need it.

In short, don't get lazy about your backups!

BTW - Chrome sucks as a browser. Just thought I'd share that. Interesting toy, too quirky and awkward for real use.

[[WIPz] A Brotherhood Renewed]

I'm glad you like the screenshots.

I actually meant that using the two versions would be better than using only one of them. Like you, I also agree that having a rogue silencer who, out of paranoia of what happened in Cheydinhal, decided to perform his personal purification of his sanctuary. Having a paranoid person as the leader of a sanctuary can be destructive and it would be another way to explain how the Dark Brotherhood is truly going downhill in Cyrodiil.

And, yes, it's easily done to switch from one version to the other.

Simply add the same warehouse door on the same position as the one that leads to the purified version, but make it initially disabled. Then, when the player manages to restore the sanctuary somehow, use a simple script to disable the door leading to the purified version and enable the one leading to the restored version.

As for the emplacement, in the Dark Brotherhood Chronicles project, the DB bribed the warehouse worker for keeping their location secret.

May I send you the file?

Yeah, I know how to alternate the door, I was asking that to find out if the layouts were the same so that it won't mysteriously become another layout after it's been reclaimed.

The warehouse works just as well as the abandoned house, probably more so since it won't seem awkward with the Thieves Guild stuff there.

Definitely like the idea of the rogue paranoid silencer. And yes, you can send me the file

[[WIPz] A Brotherhood Renewed]

Very nice Cliffworms. I like those shots alot, and they both fit very well into where the end of the quest line plays out.

You say you had them in mind as a sort of one or the other thing, but I think that your first one where the sanctuary is purged by a rogue silencer would be perfect for the beginning phase and the second functional one would be ideal for what you get after going in to clean out whatever infestation exists in the one with all the dead folk.

Are the designs feasible enough to make that work? I think that would be truly a very cool thing and moving it to somewhere under the dock warehouse is fine so long as that's not going to involve an external worldspace edit.

[[WIPz] A Brotherhood Renewed]

Yeah, already checked it with Ayleid Steps loaded, I'm in a different spot down there and all I've done is make a connecting passage to the actual sanctuary.

Oh, hey, gots me a shiny Senator tag now too

[[WIPz] A Brotherhood Renewed]

I would vote use SI.

Leaning that way myself, the interior ruin resources are pretty nice.

never seen a link, I'd give it a look. I can testify to Vista and the CS work fine (as long as you avoid the UAC restrictions - disable UAC or install to non-system location).

Link is in my profile, I'll warn you ahead of time though, it's not someplace I stick to my usual reserved manner.

The CS issue is odd, Dwip has his game installed on a totally different drive outside the influence of UAC. CS won't let him save new files, but he was able to copy and rename the SI DLC file and the CS put up no complaints to saving over it.

Anyways really like this. I too haven't really liked the look/play of other sanctuary adding mods... just don't seem to fit into the DB current status.

If I get some time (hahaha)before you get this done I might do up a location. need any meshes? for the alter to Sithis got any ideas (ie concept art) or just basically moddeled to look somewhat similar to the Vile Lair one?

Pacific Morrowind

The Vile Lair shrine might be a bit over the top, but an altar with a likeness of Sithis would do nicely. Bonus points if it fits in decently with Ayleid architecture along with whatever else gets used in the other sites. Without a custom mesh, an altar/shrine to Sithis would probably have to involve creative use of Oblivion realm pieces and I'm not sure those would work out as nicely in the end.

[[WIPz] A Brotherhood Renewed]

I don't normally do WiP threads, but the situation with this one is a bit different. Be advised that this entire subject is likely to be considered a spoiler for those who have not completed the DB questline. And for obvious reasons, this will only appeal to folks who play through that guild. Like me

At the end of the Dark Brotherhood quest line, once all of the other members have been killed and it's just you, Arquen, and some random assassin, I always felt things just got left hanging there. You go to Bravil once a week to talk to the Night Mother, then back to Arquen to deliver the message. Woopie. How utterly unexciting. Wouldn't it make more sense to turn your focus back on to rebuilding the guild? Haven't you been told one way or another than there was once a sanctuary in every city? Well shouldn't Arquen know all this? Why not have her prompt you into doing something about it! You can of course continue to go about collecting your measly pittance of a sum of money each week, but surely it might be a bit more interesting to pile that into a Brotherhood account and have it spent on rebuilding your guild's former glory. So that's more or less the plan. You, Arquen, and random assassin guy are going to rebuild your guild.

Each sanctuary will exist the whole time during the game but will not be populated with anything but junk until after it's been officially reclaimed. If at all possible the existence of them will be concealed until Arquen reveals their former locations as needed. Each one should be doable individually, or in parallel, doesn't matter. Restoring them will mean finding them at first, making sure they've been cleared of nasties, the Sithis altars consecrated, and then recruiting some assassins to handle the day to day in each one. Each one will have the standard living quarters, training areas, and altar to Sithis type stuff. Vampires welcome in locations reasonably able to support them, such as below the IC - there will be a couple of new vamps roaming the sewers.

The locations chosen so far:

1. Sideways Cave. That place is awesome and would be a perfect base for an IC location. And a good excuse to mix DB with the always cool Ayleid ruin set

The new sanctuary will be connected to the bottom level of Sideways Cave on one side, and to the Arena Bloodworks sewers on the other. Both of these are sufficiently removed from civilization that it's reasonable to say nobody remembers the place is down there. The sewer side will be inaccessible until the sanctuary is reclaimed, the gate can be opened from the back side. Sideways Cave provides a cool ready-made dungeon crawl protecting the back entrance, and the player will have to complete most of the crawl to find the sanctuary.

2. Leyawiin. An abandoned sanctuary lies under the Greyland Estate house. The drug dealers who moved in have no idea it even exists and have therefore not disturbed it. They've apparently been too busy producing Skooma. If the player has already gotten rid of them, then this part will be fairly quick. The now abandoned house provides cover as we presume the city guards won't allow anyone near the place. If the player has not yet removed the drug dealers, Arquen will prompt him to do so so the sanctuary can be reclaimed. She'll even go so far as to suggest speaking with the legion guard who handles it, since you may as well get paid for the effort.

Special case: If you spared the Argonian Shadowscale, Scar-Tail, you will be able to recruit him to head this sanctuary once it's reclaimed. The game does not kill him off if he's spared, but he could die from incidental exposure to spawns in the area.

3. Bravil. Always seems stupid that the citizens openly display the Night Mother and that the current listener lives there, but there's no sanctuary? I think that tavern on the south side of town serves as good cover for a DB base underground. This one can operate more openly and won't require killing people in town, and won't be infested with monsters. It will however have been hidden and the door not activated until the player is officially on the quest to restore this one. Simulates the populace not wanting to give it away, etc.

4. Anvil. The sanctuary here is largely unknown, save for the warehouse operator who tends the entrance. Once sent to reclaim it though, it is discovered that the former Speaker performed a purification of his own. Something for which Sithis was not pleased at all and it's up to you to settle his wrath and get things back into place.

One might notice these are being built with avoiding direct access to the city cells. It's easier to deal with compatibility issues when you're not having to fiddle with rock method hacks. Also, there will be an attempt to tie in with the mod Whispered Warning. If that mod is in use and the player chose to leave any of the previous sanctuary people alive, they will be the prime choices to run the reclaimed sanctuaries. It seems only fitting if you went out of your way to warn them that you'd probably trust them with such duties. Since these people are dead otherwise, well, they won't be available. Have to find someone else.

There may or may not be more built. I figured 4 was enough of a burden to go on for now. I am also fully aware that other people have made sanctuary mods but they don't fit what I wanted and are usually openly available despite the obvious fact that the DB is in very serious trouble in the game.

I'm willing to accept a sanctuary built by someone else as well, provided it follows the same conditions of being concealed within another building, dungeon, cave, hole, whatever. No touching the city worldspaces directly. Would be highly preferable to not touch anything on the surface land at all even. Also, bending lore is ok, but I'd really rather anyone who wants to provide a spot not utterly break it with things that don't fit. Preferable to stick with vanilla content, and restrict use of 3rd party meshes and textures to a minimum. The only custom model+texture it would be nice to have is something to use as an altar of Sithis since we can't gank the one from Vile Lair without raising copyright issues.

Undecided as to whether SI content would be acceptable or not. Lots of people have SI these days, and SI surely has some neat stuff that could be incorporated. it just tends to limit the audience too much for some reason, despite SI's penetration lately.

The plan is to have any additional submissions merged via Gecko once done. Shouldn't be overly difficult to do that as long as nobody touches the outdoors.

Anyone who wishes to submit a module is free to build the quest and the stuff needing to be cleared out from the sanctuary being reclaimed. The quests all need to be hooked up so that Arquen is the one who delivers it.

Any questions, suggestions, etc, just ask.

Assigned Areas

Chorrol: Dwip [Done]

Leyawiin: the-manta [Done]

Anvil: Cliffworms [Done]

Imperial City: Arthmoor [Done]

Bravil: Arthmoor [Done]

Bruma: Manni

Skingrad: Manni

Kvatch: Not planned, but will accept something if offered so long as it doesn't require editing exterior worldspace cells. Would also be best to avoid it being attached directly to the city since several mods rebuild it and don't use the original worldspace to do s.

[[BETA/WIPz/RELz] Improved Imperial Infrastructure]

No, I don't have a cell map of all the places the roads go, but that's not a bad idea. It would certainly come in handy, and bg can add another map to his cell grid thread

Ugh. Grass. I really really hate that you can't make the CS show you the grass. I basically went by hand down the road from Faregyl to Skingrad and used no-grass textures on the landscape on both sides of the road. Since that got uber tedious, all the other roads I just used the "I" menu with the landscape editor open and did texture replacements in each quad a road passed over. Much less hassle and the results didn't look as bad as I thought they might.

The "I" menu is very useful, it will at least tell you which textures can generate grass, the numbers to the right are supposed to indicate it's density or something, with 0 being none at all. So if you replace the grass generating ones with the non-grass equivalents you'll solve the problem. Still tedious, but leaves no doubt.

[In Game Music - Do you personalize?]

I've pulled in the Morrowind music, and some stuff out of The Witcher and Baldur's Gate 1+2.

The silent tracks idea is cool, I may try that at some point. How difficult is it to string the silent mp3 files that come with Gecko into one much longer one?

[Splitting my mod]

The thing I'm leery of is the LAND records. Now I've just downloaded and looked at TES4Edit, and the notes there say that LAND by default aren't loaded. Should I attempt to load them and divide them as well? Are they what I think they are - records of the changes I've made to the land? If they are, then I suspect I should delete the appropriate ones from each.

You should always have tes4edit load LAND and PGRD records - especially if you intend to clean other mods you're using. LAND and PGRD (path grid) records are the two most common victims of dirty edits. You don't want to delete either of them because any landscape changes you made will disappear if you do that. Unless of course you're really wanting to delete landscape changes.

[Splitting my mod]

Before you split, make it easier on yourself. Use EditorIDs to help you identify which is which. All of your outdoor cells should get one. If it's part of the tavern, name it Tavern01, and so on. Then the stuff for the city, call it City01, etc. That way when you open up TES4Edit (or Gecko, but I don't like Gecko) it'll be much easier to see which cells stay where.

The harder part comes from knowing which NPCs stay where, and which new statics go where, and all that too. That can get a bit trickier especially if they're used in both places.

[[BETA/WIPz/RELz] Improved Imperial Infrastructure]

I don't know if I commented about this on the Beth forums, but the idea of expanding and improving the existing roads is something that's been sorely needed. There's a lot of them that just run off into nothingness where there should be some vague sign of a border crossing, even if it's just a sign saying you're now entering Morrowind, or Skyrim, or whatever.

Bleaker's Way - yeah, that was piss poor planning. Build up a whole village, then have no roadway to it. Unless you were on the Daedric artifact quest that takes you there, chances are you'd never pass close enough to see it, even with an LOD mod revealing it there. But at least it didn't get deleted, unlike some other guy on Nexus who uploaded a mod, claimed it was a new village, but didn't bother to mention he'd COMPLETELY DELETED Bleaker's Way and just hijacked its site instead.

I'm also not entirely sure just how much progress Wayfarer ever made. When he sent me his broken-file-that-was-fixed-but-not-quite (!) he said that was everything he had, yet his thread seemed to imply he had more than one module. So in all honesty I don't know if he ever did anything more than mark up a map with grand plans, then realized what he was up against while doing the Malada road and just gave up. I've seen it happen far too often with super big projects.

Now before someone asks, no, I'm not yet comfortable with the idea of passing his ESP along for someone else to work with. Though he's dropped completely off the map as far as I can tell, it's still his and we should give him a bit more time before doing something like that.

Section_31, you've already completed work on far more than Wayfarer had, so that's something. And what you've got looks good and makes sense, as far as I've seen in the CS anyway. Haven't tossed it in-game yet to have a closer look.

[[WIPz] Wellspring Vale]

You had me back on page one with being able to buy paintings and haul them off to my other homes. Now you come along with more screenshots and all I keep thinking is "sold, where do I pick it up"

Building around the Ayleid stuff is a nice touch. But then I have a fascination with Ayleid stuff.

I'm also surprised you guys have all found such a large area that's not been developed yet. Kudos on that for sure.

And grond, you're doing a Sutch mod? Geez, how many of us have those things burning away in the background now?

[Mirror Your Mods]

ModDB.com is a good fallback, but I don't like the number of hoops you have to jump through to finally get a listing approved there. It took 4 days to work out why they weren't approving RAEVWD - I apparently wasn't uploading enough pics to bury the user in images

[Best Weather Mod?]

one note about the original Real Lights plugin - it has a nasty save bloating bug involving the welkynd stones and several of the dock lamps like you find in Anvil. The longer you use it, the more raging duplication will be going on. I know it's a bit of a steep download but the RL module from All Natural has had those issues removed. The end result is very much worth it though - Real Lights adds so much to the game that many people don't even realize is missing.

[[REQz] Mesh editing for SI]

Well there's no texture creation or editing involved. As far as I can tell those continue to work properly even on the pieces which have already been modified by Sjors.

So yes. All it involves is mesh editing. Closing off the back sides of some things. In thinking about this a bit more I think it would be for the best to break the tunnel off of the huge Bliss piece so that it can be positioned better and won't be such a hassle to fuse with the tunnel piece for Crucible. Unfortunately nifskope is uncooperative for me in that regard. I don't know squat about Blender other than how to install it and stare blankly at the controls. But if anyone needs some things explained better, that I can do

[[REQz] Mesh editing for SI]

I posted this inside the Open Cities thread on the official forums but I figure it may be a bit buried there as only people interested in them tend to cruise the thread. In order to be able to complete work on OC New Sheoth, some meshes need to be modified in order to pull that off. Sjors already did a great job on the ones on the north and east sides of Bliss, but the border between Bliss and Crucible still needs work. So I'm hoping someone is willing to help

These three screenshots give some idea of what I'm still up against:

Arden Sul Tower

Bliss/Crucible border passage overhead

Bliss/Crucible border passage tunnel

The top side of the large mesh for Bliss is too high ( the orangeish roof ) and also extends over the top of the Crucible wall by quite a huge margin.

The Sacellum tower on the west side is too fat and blocks off one of the passage ways inside Bliss. The door from Bliss to the inside of the tower is also blocked off because of how the entire tower mesh was built. I've been able to isolate three parts of the door frame but because the actual hole for it is in one giant wall piece which wraps around both sides of the tower, I can't just cut it off the mesh using nifskope. It's also not feasible to raise the tower so the door is accessible because then I'd literally have to raise the entire city of Crucible up to match height with it. Not easy to do because I'd then have to raise land around the bottom of it to match, which isn't going to work. I also can't fudge my way around it with a fitting stairway piece, because Bethesda didn't provide one for the SI set and there are no adequate replacements in the Cyrodiil set.

The passageway where the two large heads meet also needs some work done. I can cover up the floor part of it with altered Cyrodiil pieces that fit. But fusing the tunnel together properly is beyond my ability. Adjusting one of the cities to line the tunnel up end to end is out of the question as it would mean altering significant portions of the landscape on either the north or south side of New Sheoth.

I've taken a look at Blender. If ever there was a piece of software impossible to figure out, these guys deserve the award for building it. I also haven't got the funds to pay for a copy of something that's usable by a noob like me. I know I'm asking a hell of a lot, but there's no other way to get done what I want to get done. I can send anyone interested all of the working copies of the files to view in the CS. There's already enough done thanks to Sjors to at the very least finish Crucible without any further work.