Folks. I am well on my way to having the lower class dwellings ready and have also sourced some others so we should have a nice little town soon. Several questions:

Where will be site it? What cells?
How will we do the NPC's etc. Will we do each interior and NPC/NPCs?

I will path grid the location. Further pathgridding will be done by cell so the cell will have to be claimed.

Anything else you wish me to add? Street furniture? lamps, lanterns, shrines etc?

Or will I site the town then one person can do the NPC;s another the streets etc...

Anyway, some pics:


http://img505.imageshack.us/my.php?image=s...88759319oo4.jpg
http://img208.imageshack.us/my.php?image=s...08776108qw5.jpg
http://img338.imageshack.us/my.php?image=s...28794427gb5.jpg
http://img444.imageshack.us/my.php?image=s...38814132gg9.jpg
http://img443.imageshack.us/my.php?image=s...48830907vw9.jpg
http://img509.imageshack.us/my.php?image=s...68740208fd2.jpg

Pics look great! I'll post again when I have more time.

Wow! Looks like a town I'd like to explore - very pretty with the low sun colours too. Nice work!

An addition I'd suggest is that of a fountain in the main plaza, and maybe some statues. Ornate benches bequested by former town dignitaries. Possibly a separate market square too, where later modding can add stalls and merchants. In terms of town layouts, perhaps there would be a 'beautiful' plaza (fountain, garden, topiary) that would have the civic buildings and high-class houses, while the market square would be functional and where the main hubbub happens. Ok, shades of IC, but I think every town in history has had separate zones for the haughty elites and unwashed hoi polloi!



Thinking of initial quest, it might be worth approaching this from a different direction:

Do we have any requirements it has to meet?

What do we want the player to experience when new to the Mesogea world? Perhaps there are items we want to acquire (weapons, potions, books/maps), perhaps carry out some activities to demonstrate some of the new features, or just show off the world a bit. Almost everyone playing this will already be familiar with how Cyrodiil 'works', so it could be an opportunity to demonstrate some of the unique Mesogea flavour. If we know the sort of things we want to include, we'll have a much better seed for conceiving a plotline. OK, it's a project management approach, but sometimes a bit of structural rigour can enable the creative side to flourish!

It could be that it's too soon to create the starter quest, as we'll want to include game features that don't exist yet. In which case we could still think about low-level post-beginner quests...

Guan:

So many ideas now for the city. Its a bit too linear for my liking at the moment so I have raised a few more hilly areas and added a poor docks section. Im going to open a specific forum for the capital city so we can split bits off for folk to work on.

The idea of introductory quests is excellent. Would you take a look at the idea? It would be a great help if you could do that, then perhaps we can farm out work to the others in the team to build bits of it up, do the scripts etc. Shall I create a forum for the town and all of its associated work? You could moderate that if you will?

Angel:

Looking forward to that, I think the next release should have so much more content that modding will be far easier. Really we all need to be saying what we need in the next release so that we can build up the world, add interiors and work by sections using plugins.

Will do! I'll likely need some pointers from your hard-won experience managing a forum, but I can PM you about that.
I'll also take a bit of time to absorb the lore, as well as finally download the CS and familiarise myself with the landscape. I should then be in a better position to pull together quest ideas.

Sounds great. I will make sure everything is set up for you. Dont look to me for advice on running a forum
I spend half my time looking at the buttons and the other half wondering if the one I pressed will start a war somewhere. Seriously I will help as much as I possibly can.

This is slightly OT for this thread, but I didn't want to start a new one just yet. It's about the strategy for creating and releasing the Mesogea world.

I see a couple of concerns that limit us: size of download and modding manpower available.

I suggest that size of download could be made less of an issue by organising some of the quests and infrastructure to be optional plugins. Clearly the main world should not be dependent on these, and they should be independent of each other. I'm thinking of detail-heavy immersion plugins, perhaps similar to Better Cities, as well as standalone quests.

Following from that, after initial beta release of the world, we could sequentially release several 'taster' versions of standalone quests. This would keep Mesogea in the news, as well as attract more modders. I think it'll be a critical mass issue - once there's something tasty out there, more people will take notice and some will volunteer their modding expertise. These could be based on some of our real quests in development - the PC can achieve the first sub-goal, to be then told: "For more, wait for the full release version. If you want it quicker, join the modding team!" That sort of thing.

We could even have a low-bandwidth 'Lite' version of the world which is designed for taster plugins, as well as the full version.

Any mileage in this?

Sounds good to me. The plugin idea is good. what i intended to do was to build a modding version of the master file, then put that out to modders. As Silgrad tower are doing, they stake cells and locations, create a plugin to the master file then submit the plugin. The plugins are then merged to the master file for release. We are not limited to the size of a plugin too much, so we could quite easily provide a master file download and then numerous plugins to add huge content. After a long period we could then merge them to the master for the next big release, that way people would only have to download the main file once in a while. I can also split the master file into 100MB chunks rather than 250MB so that download would be much more reliable and probably a fair bit faster.