Monday, May 23, 2011

Crowded Cities Improved

I must immediately apologize for the delay between when I posted the video for this post and the time that I now have to actually publish the post on this blog. I finished editing the video the night before going out of town for a wedding, which I didn't really think about until after I had already uploaded it. Hopefully I haven't had anybody overly concerned for my well-being. I am most assuredly alive and well.

So the past couple weeks have been spent doing quite a bit of research on how to add more life to the cities of Cyrodiil. I was really hoping to make a post and video similar to Living Roads, which covered several mods that add a larger population of travelers, guards, and traders to the previously desolate main roads of Cyrodiil. However, there aren't as many mods that add to the city populations, which is likely due to the conflict between adding more people and taking the time do make their behavior in the cities believable in relation to the original residents. The one mod that adds NPCs similar to those found in Crowded Roads was created by the same author and was not surprisingly named Crowded Cities. Sadly there are several issues with the design that make the new citizens appear and disappear in the player's line of vision, which doesn't allow to the new NPCs to blend well with the behavior of those from the original game.

To remedy this problem and other small issues with the original mod, a new author rewrote a few sections of script and released the mod upon my request as Crowded Cities Improved. This new mod is still being worked on, and the author hopes to add more realistic behaviors to the new NPCs eventually, which will make the mod an even more valuable addition to the cities of Cyrodiil.


Some have noted that despite the nice appearance of having bustling streets filled with travelers and the like, the interactions between the player and these new NPCs are often too generic to be believable. For my game, I edited the script for the mod to eliminate the possibility of interacting with them, allowing your character to assume that these people are either too busy to take part in conversation or just don't like you enough to give you their attention. As with strangers in the real world, it make sense for your character not to be able to effectively communicate with everyone. Hopefully this non-interactive version of the mod will be released publicly soon along with the next update of Crowded Cities Improved, but until then, be sure to try out the current version. You can find Crowded Cities Improved on TESNexus.

That's all there is to say about NPC additions to cities at the moment. I'm hoping to go into detail on more mods that add to or further affect gameplay, so be sure to keep an eye out for that. Until then, goodbye for now.

2 comments:

  1. Just wanted to let you know that what your doing is really awesome. I'm checking on your block every weak and the videos and descriptions are really really helpfull. Thanks!

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  2. Thanks for posting! I know I've been falling a bit behind, but any kind of support helps me keep going. I'll be sure to put out another post sometime this week.

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