Ah, that sounds more user friendly. Ok, we need to find which ones are most compatible. We can then test them out to iron away any issues then start to compile the list of recommended additions.

Well, I reckon the best hunger/thirst/sleep mod out there is Vim & Vigor Advanced.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15773

It forces the player to eat, find water and sleep sensibly, else imposes fatigue penalties. However, it does require COBL, and I know not everyone likes that.

Unfortunately it's presently partially incompatible with my favourite exertion/encumbrance mod, Realistic Fatigue.

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10925

The problem seems to be at the V&V end, so I'm hoping the modder can be persuaded to sort that in the next release. I've left them a comment, and will try to follow it up at an appropriate pace. I think there's a Bethsoft Forum thread on it too.

While we perhaps shouldn't force people to use COBL, I certainly think that we should have COBL-friendly water sources. Anyone know if that's possible - adding COBL to the basic Mesagea 'switches on' a host of water sources? Or would it mean having two versions of Mesagea?

On a related note, being aware of hunger mods has a bearing on any timeskip/fast travel functions. If you travel on a ship that takes 5 days by timeskip, then you arrive collapsed with hunger. Better to make the journey in realtime, albeit waiting out the journey. You can come out of wait mode every 12 hours to eat and sleep.

fast travel could be a problem then. Would it be possible to automatically consume food and water (if you have it) whilst in fast travel. That way if the player is daft enough to go by boat over a week to a destination with only a days worth of water, he cant complain when he winds up dead.

The trouble is that hunger mods can't cope well with fast travel. You have to explicitly eat, it's not automatic. If you limit the travel time to about a day, it should be OK - you just arrive tired and hungry, a bit like some real journeys!

It's the many-day journeys that are a problem. I know Mesogea is BIG, so I'm proposing that any fast travel is either limited to 1 day, or else it will happen in real time. Typical will be boat travel. The trigger for the journey to begin only happens when you're in the cabin. The journey finishes when the correct time has passed. Clearly the average user will wait this out 24 hours at a time, but it allows the hunger mod user to wait for 12 hours then eat, then sleep 12 hours. Or whatever the hunger mod demands. Repeat each day until arrival. The player can't leave the cabin until arrived. Or else he can, but the boat is in the sea in the middle of nowhere - perhaps a separate cell.

If it's surface travel, e.g. cart, sedan chair, trained mammoth, etc, I'd suggest that it's only to the nearest rest stop which is at most a day away. Again, this would reflect real travel - no cart driver would keep going continuously for 5 days. You could do this on one bought ticket which is valid for all stages of the journey.

And if it's something like mage magic or propylon chamber, well that's instantaneous anyway!

We could also look at sailable boats, so only certain boats could be used for fast travel, so the boat could be set in a certain direction, then rest used whilst the boat carries on its journey. Not sure if that is at all possible?

Is it possible to capture the 'Wait/Rest' command before executing it and perform a quick check on the player's inventory to see if they have enough food and water before beginning the journey? If so, you could offer the player the choice: if they have enough food and water to make the journey, they could proceed, if they didn't, they could cancel the action and either do it in real time or find rations. Once the player agrees to proceed, a script could suspend the hunger/thirst mod, move the player, recalculate the player's inventory and health/fatigue based on the mod's settings, and then reactivate the mod at the destination. I don't know anything about these kinds of mods, so I'm not sure if this is even possible, but I thought I'd bring it up just in case.

That would keep it simple and for that reason more preferable. I think players would get tired of setting out on a fast travel just to wind up dead.

There's an interesting sailing mod by Reneer that's appeared - looks like future versions may be very useful for our needs.

http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index ... p=12139815

If so, it should allow boats to automatically follow a preset course in realtime, perfect for a voyage. What would be nice, but don't know if it's planned, is the ability to interrupt the voyage on some sort of event, such as pirate attack, storm, or sea monster. Perhaps reneer is open to suggestions. Watch that space...

I'm slightly wary of a clever cradle to suspend and reinstate hunger mod - what if you want to use the journey time to recuperate from wounds or illness (as in religion topic)? Maybe, but I suspect the difficulties in doing so would be more than just waiting it out in the cabin. Or you just get out of synch with your regular early-to-bed at 9pm

That would be ok if you were on a ship with a crew you can trust. But taking a ship yourself would not be very recuperative.

We could maintain the fast travel aspect, pay for the voyage and you will get fed and watered too.

Take ship yourself and youd better be well enough and have enough provisions to do it.

Exactly so. Fast travel should be paying or persuading someone to take you there. Travelling yourself always requires effort on your part, so no rest! Mind you, I'm one of the purists who disapproves of fast travel on your own horse...

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1792

In principle, I disapprove of fast travel alternatives, but in practice, I use them sometimes myself. I don't have a lot of time to play games (because I spend so much time modding them!) and I don't always feel like spending an hour wandering across the countryside being attacked a dozen times when I'm just trying to get back into town and onto the next quest. But then, my motives for playing Vanilla Oblivion are different from my motives for playing something like Mesogea, which I hope will provide a different kind of experience. That's the thing about mods: if they are well done, they can be
different enough to change how you play the game.

But the point of this post is merely to point out that more alternatives is always better, in the long run, for a game. If you take away fast travel alternatives, you will lose a lot of players. The people who don't want to use it can always just pretend it isn't there. And for a world the size of Mesogea, fast travel is going to be a must for many players.

I like the idea of paying for fast travel, and disallowing it for non-paying players. With ships, the idea is well established, but what about people traveling on foot or by horse? Would you find guides or armed escorts and pay them to lead you safely between settlements to activate the fast travel? That provides an interesting gameplay irony: if you play as a merchant, you could hire guards and get fast travel; if you play as a caravan guard, you are actually the one ensuring that the merchant has his fast travel privileges by protecting him from bandits and wild beasts!

One of the things about the vanilla game I didn't like was that you could fast travel somewhere uninterrupted, but if you did the same trip in real time you'd likely encounter something hostile.

For overland travel, you could restrict it to armed convoys between towns or defended wayposts. You pay a fee, wait until the departure time, and off you go. This mimics safe travel where bandits or wild animals wouldn't dare attack. If there are dangerous zones in which even convoys would be at risk, then they just wouldn't run. If you want to go into the badlands, you go at your own risk. My feeling is that if you choose to rove far from home to do some adventuring, part of that adventure is making it home in one piece. It adds to the immersion that every step out is one more you'll have to come back. If the return journey is a hassle, then don't go in the first place!

It would give an excuse to have fortified wayposts between towns if they're far enough apart. A small fort with some facilities - beds, food, animal fodder. Maybe an armourer and healer, and doubtless some locals trying to sell things to the travellers. These could also be the horse changing posts for imperial messengers. If these wayposts are at most 12 hours apart, it avoids any trouble over hunger mods.

Even the shipping travel could just go to the next coastal port; are we thinking of any journeys that are non-coastal?

I liked the Morrowind idea of fast travel only going to certain places, effectively defining the 'civilised' world. Roving into the interior always felt like an on-the-edge adventure, far from home. I always felt a massive sense of relief and achievement when I made it back to a friendly town after that. I certainly don't get that feeling in vanilla Ob.

If we have to have fast travel in unsafe zones, would it be possible to have it interruptable by random hostile events? This would still allow some sense of realism.

All of the things you have mentioned here about realistic travel conditions are a must for people who want to take the journey and be as immersed as possible. And I agree that fast travel should only be along more or less safe routes: anyone looking for a lost temple shouldn't be fast traveling there! Wilderness is wilderness, after all! But I'm not sure I like the idea of tampering with a basic game feature like fast travel too much. For all the people who say they hate it there are ten who use it but won't 'fess up. And I don't want to lose those people. Mesogea is big: if people spend too much time wandering in the wilderness being attacked when they don't want to people will start to see the mod as frustrating, boring, or prohibitively restricted.

With a couple of restrictions, fast travel can be satisfactorily implemented:

players can only fast travel to places they have been before
traveling along well-known and protected routes should be easy and cheap
traveling along smaller and wilder routes should still be possible, but expensive
traveling into unknown wilderness shouldn't be possible with fast travel, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to hire some guards and maybe a guide who knows the area

I don't think that implementing random encounters in fast travel is necessarily a good idea because, generally speaking, people only fast travel when they are in a hurry so it only punishes players for using a feature. Players who want random encounters will just not fast travel.

The other thing to keep in mind is that some players are not as interested in exploring wilderness and fighting monsters: players who want to role-play a non-combat based character like a healer, a businessman, or a wandering minstrel may be more interested in interacting with NPCs than fighting. Admittedly, there aren't a lot of non-combat options yet, but there is definitely a market for them and they are something we should consider, as we've discussed in another thread.

Yep, I can buy that!

I dont think an oblivion style fast travel would be something bad, the fact is mesogea will not have the mapmarkers in the magnitude they are in oblivion. This mod is done part time, so im guessing the world will be filled with a few major cities, maybe 30 landscape places (eg dive rock) and, when finished, about 200 dungeons. This sounds like a lot but when you spread them out over the land you will realise there is quite a distance between them.

The point of this post is to say that even if you fast travel to the nearest location of your quest, you will still have quite a distance to go. Also, if we take out the psychic ability to know the exact location of quests, the problem of getting lost by fast travelling to an area you dont know so well is quite big.

All in all, fast travel (with hunger as described in previous posts) should be at least available.

I also strongly support alternative fast travel (by mount, guide ,boat ect)

Just my two cence.