[RELz]Dibella's Watch

[Antiscamp]

Finally! An in-game map of Dibella's Watch to be proud of. All the coordinates are now correct and it looks pretty bleedin' good! Thanks to Lady Nerevar for her excellent tutorial on the subject, which helped me in the right direction. The new map will be available in the next version of the mod, where it will also be merged with the rest of it, to get away from the independent WIP-ESP.

[Tamira]

I'm happy for you that you finally finished this part of your mod.

The map looks really good and now obviously covers all parts of the country.

[Antiscamp]

Thanks, Tamira. By the way, I just published the map on TesNexus. It will also be along on ModDB soon enough. It's an easy publish, since I wasn't able to merge it into the .esm for some reason and it's still a separate .esp... Oh well.

Edited July 9, 2011 by Antiscamp

[Tamira]

And at last you allowed fast travel!

Now my girl may rest her blistered feet from time to time.

[Antiscamp]

Yeah. I've been thinking about fast travel for a long time, but I wanted the map to be representative first. First, I wanted no fast travel because I wanted the Morrowind feeling of exploration. It was a good thought, but I would have had to create some kind of travel system between the cities then and do other considerations. Allowing fast travel is the easiest solution though.

My characters are tired of running too. I dunno how many times I've run that road between The City and Wordham Village. Probably hundreds.

[Leonardo]

There is a mod in Morrowind that allow you to fast-travel anywhere and with the Fast Travel Ring mod you can decide if fast-travel should be enable or not.

[Antiscamp]

I didn't know that. I should try it out, although the good ole Silt Strider and Boat Transport really is characteristic for Morrowind and a way of transport and travel I really enjoyed.

[Antiscamp]

Version One Point O will be published tomorrow morning, as soon as ModDB authorizes it. It will be published on ModDB first, not any of the Elder Scrolls sites (TesNexus mainly), since ModDB has really helped this mod and shown interest from the very beginning, and I want to show that appreciation back in the only way I really can. TesNexus should also show appreciation and give attention to interesting, upcoming, but struggling mods like the total makeover-type mods Dibella's Watch is. Not only highlight "Japanese Schoolgirl Uniform with Melons Bouncing when you ride your Sexy Red Honda Motorbike". I bet many struggling mod-authors with great, suitable and serious mods would have fared well from a little more attention and not see their work surpassed by "Sexy Nurse Armor". Oh well, that's a different debate.

From the ReadMe: Dibella's Watch started out as just a small thing. I wanted to create an own little island where I could build villages and towns, since I was tired of having all my villages for Tamriel rejected since there was no space left to build on in Tamriel! Nowadays there's absolutely no free space over there. All corners of the land is taken by one conflicting mod or another. My solution to that, was to simply create my own worldspace. I started with The City, but the island grew from there. I drafted a design document at that relatively early stage, a document which I have probably scrapped in its entirety by now.

I made a few mistakes. I should have created the island in the Heightmap Editor before I started to populate it with villages, but I had no thought about it getting this large. It still looks strikingly good. There were good things to come out of that initial mistake though. I decided to only add land as I needed it for quests or a certain point of interest, which meant that the island never grew to large to be populated and never too large for me to lose interest. I see many modders starting out, creating large islands and cities with a hundred houses. But when it comes to filling all that, the energy is gone and their mods die of natural causes. I did not make that mistake. I made everything in Dibella's Watch count. Every house, every NPC, even every tree and stone has its meaning. All is hand-crafted, as well, there are no mass generated trees here. All trees, bushes and stones are placed by hand, by me, personally.

Dibella's Watch Version 1.0 has taken me eight months to complete; it has taken most of my free time and it has taken a lot of energy and effort. I liked some things about modding it, like creating landscapes, villages and NPC's. I also got into writing quests and liked that process a lot. what I wasn't good at though, was working with file formats, outside utilities and things in general outside the Construction Set. That is why Dibella's Watch is still Load Order sensitive, there are no BSA-files and the in-game map is still in a separate .esp, among other things. Trying to deal with all those three issues, rendered problems with the game and caused errors and the game not behaving properly. It seemed I had to sacrifice the gaming experience just to make the bleeding file structure proper. Therefore you have to excuse me and just live with the shortcomings. I'd rather have a perfectly functioning, fun game, where I've put my most energy on creating a beautiful, exciting new land, than having a perfectly packed, streamlined and neat file structure with a heavily glitching game underneath all that tidyness.

Hundreds and hundreds of hours have been spent by myself playtesting the mod. Hundreds. This doesn't mean that it's prefect, since my gaming style doesnt' necessarily mean that I see things that you see when playing the game in your style. Therefore, it is still important that you give me your feedback about what you like and what you don't. Even the slightest things. There will be patches in the future and maybe even substantial expansions with new quests and other cool things. For now, though, I need to rest from Dibella's Watch, but knowing myself, I will probably be back to it in a couple of weeks to patch and expand...

Dibella's Watch is a one-man-project. As such, a project of this magnitude, detail, completion and playability has rarely been put together before by one single creator (I know only a few other examples), alone, for Oblivion. It is unique. I dare you to do the same as I have done with Dibella's Watch! I am very proud of Dibella's Watch; it is my personal gift to the Elder Scrolls Universe as well as a tribute to the game series as a whole.

Edited August 1, 2011 by Antiscamp

[ub3rman123]

Oh my. I need to download that. And play it eventually. It looks epic.

[InsanitySorrow]

Would be nice to see this on TESA at some point

[Tamira]

Congratulations Antiscamp!

Dibellas Watch had been outstanding before the final release and will be all the more now that you have finished it.

Will download it today and enjoy it again. I am curious of all the new things you added since the last beta.

Now I miss the emote "I love Dibellas Watch"

[Antiscamp]

Thank you all. Yes, InsanitySorrow, I plan on placing it on TesAlliance too. I met my best Beta Tester on this forum, Tamira, actually.

I'm off to patching DW now, Tamira, so keep your excellent Bug Reports as detailed as before.

[Leonardo]

Late to the party as usual... Well what can I do when I've a couple of MMH Stewards to keep them occupy while I'm doing other things here and there.

Congrats to your release Antiscamp.

[Antiscamp]

Thank you, Leonardo.

You were one of the first to give this my mod encouragement, if not the very first, back in the days even before Beta 1. Thank you for that.

[Antiscamp]

Unfortunately, I cannot distribute this mod through the TesAlliance download as I had planned. TesAlliance only accepts files at a maximum of 64 MB's. Dibella's Watch is 213 MB's large. If this limitation changes in the future, I will upload Dibella's Watch to TesAlliance as well, since this website and the company I've found here, has had a positive impact on the mod's development.

I am planning an expansion to Dibella's Watch which won't be 213 MB's, at least, so I hope to be able to upload that one. More news on the expansion later as it starts taking form.

[Antiscamp]

A place in Nirn

hope the creator of this excellent map of Tamriel doesn't mind that I've used it to place a certain island in Nirn...

[Meo]

Couldnt you pack as four zip/rar? Is this method permitted?

[InsanitySorrow]

Unfortunately, I cannot distribute this mod through the TesAlliance download as I had planned. TesAlliance only accepts files at a maximum of 64 MB's.

Actually that;s not quite right there, the Downloads module has a limit of 64MB, anything over that can be uploaded through FTP , More details can be found here:

Uploading Large Mods on TESA

[Tamira]

hope the creator of this excellent map of Tamriel doesn't mind that I've used it to place a certain island in Nirn...

Now at last I know where to find it when I soon go for a swim

(make the fee 200 gold...)

[Antiscamp]

Excellent, InsanitySorrow. I'm getting on it immediately. I haven't used an FTP Client since the early 00's when I administered and wrote an entire website about the Swedish-Russian war of 1808-09, so it's going to be quite a reunion.

Tamira: Start swimming now. I promise you'll get there. I promise.

Edited August 4, 2011 by Antiscamp

[Arion]

Just wanted to say how much I am enjoying your mod. Thank you so much for sharing your creation with the community.

[Antiscamp]

Thank you, Arion. I appreciate it

[Antiscamp]

Dibella's Watch is now also downloadable on TesAlliance.

[Antiscamp]

For those of us who don't like the masculine way all the women in Oblivion move around when they're walking, Surazal has now added support for Dibella's Watch in his Sensual Walks for Female NPC's mod too. This comes highly recommended.

[Arion]

You interested in any quirks I have stumbled across? Such as exposed under rocks in the waterfalls?

As in rocks not buried completely and exposing the undersides of the falls?