DemonTide (Converting Oblivion)

[Reepicheep]

Updated Project Description (7 October 2007)
Demontide is a work in progress total conversion. It will involve taking everything away from oblivion and starting again from scratch - a new story based in the land of Nymm. It has no (or certainly few) links with the lore of TES.

This thread will contain no spoilers about the mod or its story, only the possible ideas and concepts that we are ready to put through to the public. It will also be a forum for your ideas, which we will consider. If you are interested in helping out in any way, I reccommend skim-reading through from about page 3, to get some idea of what we have planned.

At the moment we are searching for a scripter who can, in the very least, tell us what and what not is possible. If you have this ability, or know someone who might, please let us know - we won't be able to progress to levels we would like without it. Many of the ideas here may not have been tried before.

If anyone has any other talents that can provisionally help, please let us know.
Original Post (For the context of replies through September 2007)
Fantastic game we managed to get landed with here, really awesome stuff.

But I bite my lip and hold my breath to even imagine how much more there could be. The mods some of you guys have been churning out are fantastic and unbelievable and certainly something I would like to try my hand at.

I've already created and got a hang of making dungeons for my own personal use, I'm yet to finish making a full-on quest, but I figured I was best seeing the possibilities of my next plan before I got around to the actual idea of starting it.

My plan? Lets take oblivion as it is, then remove everything. Start the thing from scratch. I want to know how possible it is to create a new world altogether, with a new quest, new stories new this and that. I'm looking at, and ready to give, as many months as it may take, but without question, I'll be needing help and advice (and the more than occasional kick in the arse to remember that I'm supposed to be doing this)

Further details on my plan can come later. For now, I want to know how possible this is, who would like to get themselves involved and what recomendations and advice can be given.

[Crono]

Are you talking about keeping the actual current land of Cyrodiil intact but making new quests/stories to go with it, or making a whole new world, as such, with new quests and stories etc?

[Reepicheep]

Are you talking about keeping the actual current land of Cyrodiil intact but making new quests/stories to go with it, or making a whole new world, as such, with new quests and stories etc?

The latter. Whole new adventure. Complete conversion. Just like what was possible with Dungeon Siege and such.

[Reepicheep]

Okey, I took a further look at the Oblivion modding tool myself over the course of this evening.

First off, I want you to know that I chose this forum because it is relatively small and more communial than what other Oblivion forums may be. Until I can be sure, I don't want to attract too much attention.

From what I can tell, a conversion IS possible. I havn't tested the possibilty of starting the game in a location other than inside the prison, as in Oblivion, but that seems to be the only current drawback. I'm yet to try it, but I think this may be made possible by one of the files found in the My games/oblivion folder. I'll take some further looks at that, but I'll be optomistic and say that it is, indeed, possible.

So, I'm gonna take a big stab at the future and give this project a phase, step-by-step outline. This should give you an idea as to whats possible for development and if you have what it takes to join in.

Phase one; Concept

This is everything from story and character concepts to dungeon and land designs - with a dash of sub-plots, items, creatures... Much of this can be exchanged through written material, drawn out, made as a diagram. We'll see how things go.

Phase two; Physical Development.

I think its best that we create the world first, so that its there. I don't want to merge scripting and world building in one. Tackling the construction before we hit combining the cells, adding NPCs, putting quests to use could work better than trying both at once, so that we have a full-on idea of whats ahead. This is overworld, cities, dungeons and everything else our new world might have.

This will include creating the items and somesuch, so that we can place them at at the same time. Save some hassle later.

Phase three; Combining the world

As we would have it at this point, our 'world' would be a series of chunks of lands in completely different dimensions. Easily said, we just need to draw all the maps together with portals, put this next to that and so on. Could take some time, depending on how big we make our world, but it should be done.

Phase four; The world community.

Theres so much we can do here - really get our creative sparks going. Races, factions, characters, creatures, classes, character scripts, dialogues, shops. Lots of work there.

Phase five; The quest

In theory, by now, we should have everything. A world, its population and the items needed for any dungeon-crawling player. Now they just need something to do. A story would have been developed back in the concept phase and over time would have taken shape as a script (as in, play script). This will be applied first. After that, sub plots will be made here and there for those extra bonuses the player might need to finish the quest.

---

A full fledged story may take years of work, so I would suggest taking it one piece at a time. Develop the overall story and then take one major plotline at a time, follow all the stages for that point, call it chapter one and then make a start on the next one.

So thats my talk. You know what needs doing and you know if you can help or not. Send a PM my way, grab me of MSN, Yahoo or AIM, send an e-mail, whatever. Give me a runthrough on what you can do and we'll see what we can do about getting this off the ground.

[pooshoe]

reepicheep you are truly tenacious. i would love to do that aswell but i do not know how to use the CS proporly yet.

although i dont think any new worlds have actually been made before alot of people give up.


oh yeah anytips on getting things on the floor 
usually my stuff is in the air or half in the ground

[Reepicheep]

i would love to do that aswell but i do not know how to use the CS proporly yet.

Theres a lot of none-CS stuff that you may be able to give a helping hand in. Right now, I'm not gonna touch the CS until the concept stage is finally finished.

Thats all sorts from adjusting the concept to helping to write the script to dungeon design and voice acting. In fact, I reckon most of the input will be background things like that, and much of the CS work will be down to a select few. Namely me.

The project has made a start, and several volenteers have risen their hands (after I forced them to join in with blackmail and threats) to help.

You can too!

oh yeah anytips on getting things on the floor 

The 'Z' key is your friend. Hold it.

Means you can move things up and down. Very, very handy.

[pooshoe]

bye you can too (quote) what does that mean


Z key does help but but it is minly the z key ehih is the problem when i  use the z key when i move down because it was in the air it goes to far and its stuck in the floor and i always have to redo it

[Reepicheep]

You can help too. I just missed out the word 'help'. It still makes some sense from looking back at the previous paragraph.

Okey, use a combination of clicking and dragging until the object you want to place is just above where you want it placed, use camera movements (Right click and shift key especially) to get a close up view of where you want to place it and carefully place it there.

This link is useful. I reccomend you follow through that as best as you can.

[pooshoe]

i can help too, i suppose that means i give you ideas
BTW i have loads

[Elemental]

I have oblivion for the 360 so I can't use TESCS but I could maybe help with the story a bit and give ideas for quests items and characters and other things like that.  I also, have loads of ideas, this sounds like a real interesting project.  PS how would we do voice acting?