[BETA/WIPz/RELz] Improved Imperial Infrastructure

[Section_31]

Improved Imperial Infrastructure

Current version : Beta 0.3

by Section 31

================================

"Before Tiber Septim, Cyrodiil's roads varied greatly in quality, and were often impassable in bad weather and winter season." - Arcane University scholar

i.Preface

Over 300 years after the reign of Tiber Septim, it seems the roads of Cyrodiil have not received any major improvements. As the center of Tamriel Empire, the shape of roads as presented in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion barely represent the condition of a cosmopolitan province. Sections of major roads appear more like cross-country track not to mention the lack of any supporting infrastructures. Moreover, without roads or other infrastructure connecting Cyrodiil with the other provinces, it seems rather odd that the Empire could hold on and kept the provinces from seceding for a very long time.

Improved Imperial Infrastructure aims to transform Cyrodiil from backwater countryside into the craddle of civilization. This modification was inspired by the unfinished work of The Wayfarer. Its planned features include:

- New and extended roads to the border

- New border forts and settlements

- Enhanced major roads (e.g: less roller-coaster ride)

- Custom meshes for many new Cyrodiilic infrastructure

- Voiced NPCs

ii.Description

I highly recommend you to use VOILA along with Improved Imperial Infrastructure to adjust the crime-handling behaviour of the non-Cyrodiil border guards.

With the development of Elder Scrolls community, new modifications featuring the western provinces of Tamriel have been created along with roads connecting Cyrodiil with those provinces. The focus then, at least in the beginning, will be the improvement of major Imperial roads and some "untouched" border region. Thus far, the modification consisted of the following:

• Improved Green Road (the road which stretches from northwest of Leyawiin to crossroads next to Pell's Gate), it is roughly 85% complete
  
• Improved Silver Road (the road which stretches from east of Bruma to crossroads next to Sercen ruin), it is roughly 90% complete
  
• Extended road from Dragonclaw Rock further north onto Skyrim border and beyond
  
• A new fortified Imperial-Skyrim border crossing located on the road north of Dragonclaw Rock
  
• New small road or cobblestones connecting Bleaker's Way with Silver Road and Border Watch with Green Road

I have created compatibility patches for certain modifications, which are:

- Knights of the White Stallion

- Mountain Shack

- New Road and Bridges

- Open Cities with Leyawiin Reborn

- UL : Bravil Barrowfields

I might build patches for another modifications (or alternatively, you might politely ask the chief architect of another modification to create compatibility patch if you notice any peculiarity)

Lastly, if you want to extract the modification from the compressed archive, type "s31" (without quotations) as the keyword. This "barrier" shall be removed in the next release.

iii.Gallery

• Border crossing to Skyrim
  
• Fort and Border Guard barracks
  
• Road access to and from Bleaker's Way
  
• Bandit's hideout should not be exposed clearly with a dirt road leading directly to it from a major road, it should be hidden, with the old dirt road transformed to cobblestone and rerouted to Border Watch settlement.
  
• Non-sensical road layout, a U-turn with stairs on a major road? Why didn't the designers make the road straight? It must be assumed that wagons and horses can somehow move via stairs...

Features on the work:

• A custom tower with a circular stair
  
• The upper floor of the custom tower
  
• A custom tavern on the border complex
  
• Inside the tavern
  
• A musician to entertain visitors
  
• East of Cheydinhal, Blue Road is extended
  
• Another view of the extended Blue Road, completely compatible and complements greatly with UL: Cheydinhal Falls
  
• Somewhere in Cyrodiil...
  
• ...with new view.

Latest images (23/7/2010):

• Welcome to the Imperial province, traveler.
  
• Major overhaul of Skyrim-Imperial province pass
  
• Shadowgate Pass, connecting Morrowind and the Imperial province
  
• New location of Fort Farragut, with a new road below
  
• The view from the "new" Fort Farragut.

iv.Transference

• First Location (TES Alliance)
  
• Second Location
  
• Third Location

v.Acknowledgments

Arthmoor, daemondarque, PacificMorrowind, Phant0m32, and other folks at TESAlliance for their help and guidance.

Fawzib Rojas, creator of Oblivion Dynamic Dialog Creation.

The Wayfarer, from whom the idea emerged and convinced me to make certain it is not forgotten.

Edited July 22, 2010 by Section_31

[greenwarden]

Hi Section 31!

I think that is one of the potential pitfalls of announcing a RELZ on the Oblivion Mods forum. You are announcing it to just as many mod makers as mod users, therefore as interesting as a project sounds, we may all be working on projects of our own, and those will take priority over checking out a new mod. Not to mention the dreaded "real life" of work and school, all of which prevent me from playing as often as I'd like.

On top of which, the mod you have released makes changes that cannot be adequately surveyed and reviewed in a short amount of time. Also, your feedback thread on TES Nexus indicates that you released this mod as a password protected file, then declined to share the password...not the best practice for someone who is eagerly anticipating feedback. *shrug* If that is not true, then I'd advise you to clarify that on TES Nexus.

Anyway, I think this mod looks quite interesting, and when I am not busy managing my own projects (or mismanaging them as the case may be , I look forward to checking out your work. This looks like my kind of mod.

[grond]

O I remember this project. I love it. I've downloaded it and looked in the CS at the two sites you've taken shots of - Bruma and Bleaker's Way.

Excellent work! I know it's a Beta but it's very well done. I don't really play too much anymore but this will be in my game for those times I do!

Glad to see it's still alive. And welcome to the Alliance!

[daemondarque]

I was very interested in Wayfarer's mod, and very disappointed that it just ... disappeared one day. So I grabbed this the minute I saw it, and have been using it; unfortunately I've had less time to play than I usually do since then, so I haven't yet seen all the changes you made. Sorry I haven't posted before... but I will say right now that what I have seen has been awesome--some places in the game now actually make sense--do you know that I played my first three characters all the way through, and never knew Bleaker's Way existed? Who the heck puts a village in the middle of nowhere, without even a path leading up to it? Yet Bethesda did it several times... I haven't yet seen the border crossings, but I will get there! Any plans for future expansion of the mod?

[Arthmoor]

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.

[Section_31]

Thanks all for the feedback!

In case you're wondering, the reason why I put password in the archive is actually to ensure people (particularly newcomers to Oblivion modding) to read the so-called "Readme" (I prefer it to call it "Guide" though because it sounds more...official ) which contains the password to unlock it. From what I've observed, many modders often get complaint from mod users, complaint which can be solved if the users read the Guide/Readme. Thus, by locking it with a password, I hoped users will read the Guide on which they can find the password, and at the same time understand what this plugin (again, I prefer to call it "plugin" rather than mod ) is all about. And in the end, prevent barrage of messages asking me questions which can be solved in the Guide (or should I call it "Manual" instead...). Anyway, I've released another plugin to complement III called VOILA (which I already uploaded here on TESA), it isn't locked with password. I wonder how that will turns out?

Also, yes, not that I moan but Bethesda seemed not to finish Oblivion properly. When you look at structure and placement of roads, settlements, taverns, and some buildings, they often appeared odd and illogical. As daemondarque pointed, Bleaker's Way is one of those oddness. How the people living there get food when they don't even have farm or access to outside world? Heck, in the whole of Cyrodiil there is no meat source (apart from countless sheep). One major illogical is the placement of Imperial City and roads leading to it. I expected that the first time I play the game, when I exit Imperial City, I will see at least proper roads around the city, after all Imperial City is the very capital of the Empire. But no, instead I saw a very steep road right in front of the city gate! Road which can injured players, and cause horses to die from falling...

Anyway, enough rambling (was that considered moan? ). As for the Wayfarer's plugin, it's okay to keep it. In fact, (if it mostly contains only the improved road to Malada) I might create a new one, and/or focus on the major roads with extensions leading to the border. By the way, Arthmoor do you happen to have map of new roads added by New Roads and Bridges with their cell location (something like Cyrodiil Cell Grid Map modders resource)? Also, is there any advise on removing grasses? Those grasses seemed to be...rebellious

[Arthmoor]

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.

[daemondarque]

I just took the road from Sercen to Bruma ... so different from what I'm used to, I wasn't sure I knew where I was . But again, your changes made sense--the road looked very natural for the type of area, and above all far more interesting than it was before. You've done a great job! I did notice a couple minor problems: a few floating mushrooms down along the road edge near Sercen, and another one hanging in the air at the entrance road to Bleaker's Way (bravo--the path down into town looks very good!) ... and just at the north end of Sercen, where the road splits off to Aleswell, if you look up the hill there's a tiny land tear.

Sad when I got to the Skyrim border ... I wanted to go through the gate, and it wouldn't open. C'mon now! What's the use of disabling the borders if I can't take a ride on the wild side?

[Section_31]

@Arthmoor : Yes, I had hoped for the CS to show grass too, thanks for the tip anyhow.

Related to New Roads and Bridges, I also noticed slight conflict between III and NRB, the road connecting to the bridge north of Imperial City is buried and there's a land gap if III is placed below NRB. Also, if I use NRB OCLR Road Record, the NPC seems to exhibit strange behavior when traveling on the Silver Road. One of the NPCs insisted one going through the fences near southwest Sercen, while another NPC who rode a horse took a normal road to go up until he reached a certain point (this being near new intersection to Bleaker's Way) then he suddenly chose to "dive" to the road below and (after fatally injured) insisted on going "through the hill".

@daemondarque : Thanks for thy feedback, those abnormality shall be looked over for the next version. As for the Skyrim border, well, if you notice closely the road behind the gate was blocked due to "avalanche" . Okay, maybe not, but I haven't figured out how to remove those "avalanche" (a.k.a: hollow landscape texture). But still, you can enjoy the 'hospitality' of the border guards, they are more civilized than most of the native Nords of Skyrim.

[Section_31]

Is this plugin dead? Technically, since it is not a sentient being, this plugin was never alive. In all seriousness, the project is still progressing, albeit on a slower rate. If you're curious, why not take a little time to find out? Don't worry, I shall guide you on this brief journey.

Let us begin the tour. Ladies and gentlemen, please have a nice seat.

We are approaching Skyrim, the place where human descendants from Atmora first set foot on Tamriel. The large gatehouse in front of us is a part of the border fortification, which I shall explain later. We are still on the Imperial province here, if you seek a food or drink you might visit the tavern up over there. Travelers from both Skyrim and Imperial province often visit the place through their journey.

Located right in front of the tavern is a small canopy.

Let's take a closer look.

From this canopy, you can relax and view the surrounding landscape. Admittedly, there is not much to see here apart from snows and trees. Nevertheless, if there's nothing much to see, then how about something to hear?

I believe you've had enough rest in the tavern. Let us continue the tour. How about a little walk on top of the battlement behind the tavern? Surely you want to know the view from up there.

Imperial Legion soldiers guard this place day and night. They represent the might of Empire and their constant presence is enough to keep most criminals away. You can see one of the legionnaires overlooking the roads we traveled previously.

All right then, you might want to look what's inside one of those towers. Let's find out.

A torch will come in handy if you enter one of these, there are lights, but might not be enough. We shall go to the upper level of the tower. Be careful, and watch your steps.

We are on the upper level of the tower.

The visit into this tower concludes our tour on this place. We shall travel back through The Silver Road. A familiar view near the end of Silver Road. An Ayleid ruin next to an Imperial bridge. A symbol of clash of civilization. The Ayleids once rule this province, then the Imperials rise and become the masters.

Our tour ends here, ladies and gentlemen. We might be able to continue the tour around the Imperial province later. The Oblivion Crisis have brought devastation and many uncertainty.

May Talos guide you!

[daemondarque]

Glad to hear you're still working on this--the improved roads and border crossings have become an essential part of my landscape, but as always I'd like to see more. It's the small touches that add life and believability to a world.

[grond]

Great tour! I look forward to the next one.

[Section_31]

I never realized the file I uploaded into Improved Imperial Infrastructure download was actually an outdated VOILA! Anyway, I'd like to apologize for 61 unlucky fellows who have downloaded it. The correct files have been uploaded to TESA download.

[Section_31]

of the modification has been uploaded to YouTube. Along with it, here are some images for "sightseeing":

• Welcome to the Imperial province, traveler.
  
• Major overhaul of Skyrim-Imperial province pass
  
• Shadowgate Pass, connecting Morrowind and the Imperial province
  
• New location of Fort Farragut, with a new road below
  
• The view from the "new" Fort Farragut.

Enjoy!