[WIP] Argonia - The Black Marshes

[AndalayBay]

Banner Image will be posted later.

We're back! Like a bad penny... New name, same old mod.

Brief History & Introduction

One of our oldest threads from the archives on the Silgrad Tower forums is dated Mar. 11, 2006 and involves SwedishFish who appears to have been one of our founding members. Early posts assigned naming codes to current members. Much literature was written by KuKulZa in those days but, barring very early, undeveloped versions of the settlements currently known as Sloughpoint, RockGuard and Soulrest, very little was physically developed in the first three years. In 2009, Ibsen's Ghost took up the reins as leader with Koniption working hard to develop unique models, Deeza contributing to the lore and modding and sandor as administrator. Before then, The Black Marshes had seen several teams but has since seen dozens of contributors and several forums. The period between 2009-2012 saw the most physical changes until AndalayBay joined the project as the lead programmer and new administrator in 2011, when the quests started being added to the mod. We will no doubt be thanking many others for their support and contributions upon full release.
 
Making full use of the Shivering Isles, The Black Marshes project adds the mysterious lands of Argonia, one of the darkest and most dangerous regions of the fictional universe of Tamriel. Other lands from this fantasy world have been explored in detail, such as Morrowind and Cyrodiil, but the lands of the reptilian Argonians have remained shrouded in mystery... until now.

Our aim is to recreate a region which no player has explored in the Elder Scrolls series since Arena. The finished mod will include many new cities, new architecture, detailed new quests, and most importantly a large new marsh and jungle landscape, filled with deadly new enemies and dungeons. The finished mod will feature five quest lines: a Main Quest line and quest lines for the Hist Tribes, Shadowscales, Trillium Magnata and Sotho Tren. There will also be some miscellaneous quests.

Features

The completed mod will have:

• Entire province of Argonia to explore, completely landscaped, with lots of unique and nasty creatures.
• Five full questlines plus some miscellaneous quests.
• Custom races, unique items, tons of new flora and ingredients, new weapons and armour, unique books with background and lore.
• Lots of dungeons, including some unique to Argonia that utilize custom tilesets.
• Several different varieties of Argonians and new races (Naga, Marsh Cat, Lilmothiit, and Paatru).
• Many new creatures specially selected or created for the province.
• A transportation network, including custom mounts that can be purchased.
• All major cities of Argonia featuring shops and inns, plus many towns also with shops and inns.

Current Development Status

All the quests have been written. We just need to finish some features and get the quests added to the mod.

Credits

There are tons of people who have helped create and test Argonia. There is a file listing the full credits that will be published with the mod.

Thanks to all those who have supported our mod and offered ideas or suggestions.

Argonia is not a province mod with a couple of quests thrown in. It is a story that requires an entire province to tell it.

[AndalayBay]

Olympic break over. We've already had some folks submit files and I just released a new version of our resources package for the team to use.

[AndalayBay]

I finally got the plugin renamed and split into a proper master and plugin. Now work can continue in earnest.

[AndalayBay]

Work continues. Hey at least I'm updating this about a month after the previous! Qwerty is fixing up our creature animations and doing other various modelling tasks. Mercer is fixing up our creatures in terms of streamlining the numbers and varieties we use as well as their statistics for things like damage. Then he'll start working on our levelled lists. I'm working on the mod starting criteria and the first quest. I'll also be doing some landscaping in the transition zones between Argonia and Cyrodiil. Then I'll start working on the remaining quests.

The actual change log is much bigger than that, but we don't want to reveal too much.

[DaggerfallTeam]

Exciting!

Question! Will Argonia use the TWMP Heightmap?

[AndalayBay]

Did you read the OP? This project has been in development since 2006, so no TWMP. I should also mention that this project was part of the Beyond Cyrodiil project that sprang up from Silgrad Tower. Lastly this is a quest mod first and foremost. That means that most of the locations are quest related and you can't just run around exploring. You have to complete the quests to make the locations accessible. I don't think we have any locations that aren't quest related. We might. I didn't create them so I don't know.

Also, I haven't updated in a while. Work continues. Vorians is rebuilding Lilmoth for us. Mercer is still working on creatures and qwerty working on models and animations.

I have finished the new mod start sequence and am getting side-tracked fixing up the cities that are part of the second quest.

[AndalayBay]

Work continues. Vorians has finished rebuilding Lilmoth. Now we need someone to populate it with NPC's and shops. The buildings need cluttering too. Mercer is still fighting his way through our creatures, levelled lists and landscaping fixes. I'm still working on quests.

[Mercer]

On 7/22/2022 at 8:56 PM, AndalayBay said:

Lastly this is a quest mod first and foremost. That means that most of the locations are quest related and you can't just run around exploring.

The part I like the most about Argonia is actually the exploration part. I wonder if there is an easy way to make it more exploration friendly. I'll think about it...

[AndalayBay]

We need more developed areas in the east. There are a couple of towns that never got done and we could do with more dungeons or caves.

[AndalayBay]

Haven't posted in a while. Work continues. Mercer in particular is waiting for me to fix up our border regions and LOD. Previous teams just pulled the landscape up into what we like to call "Horrid Hills" to prevent the player from leaving Argonia. I am adding proper landscape and LOD regions so Argonia won't look like an island anymore. Unfortunately this introduces a lot of floating objects and I don't think I'll be able to ground them all in my lifetime...

[Mercer]

Are the floating objects only outside the border? If so I don't think you should burn too much fuel on this.

Also, how do you fix the floaters? Manually or CODA?

[AndalayBay]

1 hour ago, Mercer said:

Are the floating objects only outside the border? If so I don't think you should burn too much fuel on this.

Ironically it's exactly the opposite. Outside the borders will be generated so there won't be any floaters. There's a ripple affect when you adjust the landscape, so the floaters are inside our borders. There are floaters farther inside that I expected so I wonder if the original region generation wasn't done properly. Ibsen did complain about how much he had to fix manually.

1 hour ago, Mercer said:

Also, how do you fix the floaters? Manually or CODA?

Manually because there are so many different objects. I have Coda scripts to do it, but the sink values would be different due to the range of objects, so it would be hard to script. I really wish we could redo the region generation, but there are a lot of hand placed objects so I don't think it would work very well. I might try regenerating the Naga Cradle jungle though. Then I could replace the Mania scrub with something more suitable...

[Vorians]

Are the hand placed objects fairly unique (as in, easy to identify when viewing the cell records in xEdit)? If so, copy them out to a new ESP, regenerate the regions (deleting anything generated in the same cells as any settlements), then restore the hand placed objects from the ESP.

[AndalayBay]

9 hours ago, Vorians said:

Are the hand placed objects fairly unique (as in, easy to identify when viewing the cell records in xEdit)? If so, copy them out to a new ESP, regenerate the regions (deleting anything generated in the same cells as any settlements), then restore the hand placed objects from the ESP.

Let's take that to the private forums for further discussion. This is our public forum for folks dropping in to see our progress.

[AndalayBay]

No updates in a while! I'm still working on the region regeneration. All the distant stuff is done. Now I'm working on fixing our regions. The old team copied Cyrodiil regions to create the regions for Argonia, but they never replaced the objects with Black Marsh equivalents. Apparently they generated the regions and then Ibsen used search and replace to replace all the placed objects!!! Then he manually fixed the landscape and the placement of objects. No wonder this mod has been in active development since 2009. That is completely insane.

Even though I'm not quite as insane, it is still taking a long time. I might try running the region generation on the Naga Cradle Jungle, but I'm not sure how it would turn out. I can certainly generate individual cells and that's probably what I'll do.

[AndalayBay]

I have successfully regenerated two of our largest jungles! One of the jungles was never completed by the previous teams due to the way they did the region generation. They had to replace and adjust everything manually. Now to fix the east coast. Here's a couple of screenshots to whet your appetite:

Under water:

[lynzylu]

Oh these look so lush!

 

 

 

 

[AndalayBay]

Yeah we want the jungle areas to be dense jungle. I felt that the areas under water should have lots of vegetation too.

[AndalayBay]

Time for an update. All the region regeneration is done. There are a couple I didn't do, but as you can see by my updates, they are a lot of work and take quite a while to get looking just right. Here's another tantalizing glimpse for you:

That's our new world map. I'm afraid my artistic skills aren't up to making that look like parchment. One area that I might generate at some point is the southern coastline. I did the eastern coastline.

[Moss]

Is there a download for this or are y'all waiting until it's finished to release? Sorry if I missed the download I'm new to this site and the text is hard for me to read.

[AndalayBay]

Not yet. It's still a work in progress and work continues. We need to get all the quests done before we can release. We will upload it to Nexus once it's done.

You can switch the theme at the bottom of the forums. That might make the text easier to read.

[AndalayBay]

Time for an update. I just finished overhauling our armour. We've had a lot of contributions over the years from various team members creating armour to people pulling in modding resources. I started with fixing up some vendors in Gideon and soon discovered the rat's nest that is our armour and weapons, so I've started to clean things up.

Here's our armour that's available for players to use. These are the complete sets. We also have some random pieces and a set of armour that's reserved for NPC's like guards or tribal hunters. Those pieces are not included in these screenshots. The armour is not in any particular order. All pieces are available for both sexes, it's just that some armour has multiple head gear, cuirasses, greaves or shields, so I display one option on the male and the other option on the female character.

Light Armour

Note: the chainmail is just the cuirass. The rest of the pieces are the original game armour.

Heavy Armour

Our light armour quality ranges from leather to glass and the heavy armour goes from iron to Daedric. We skip Dwarven.

Fun fact: we have had over 200 modders contribute to Black Marsh over the years. These include team members, modders who gave permission for us to use their creations and those that created modding resources that we have used. We have a list of credits which Koniption assembled many years ago and I continue to maintain.