Another thing to consider is AH building out the "Northern Realms" themselves which I'm much more interested in. Don't get me wrong I enjoy playing and designing mods as much as the next Grim player but, these would all be sub-lore.
AH has hinted at a lot of stuff to come. A race of rat people in one post, the thowmp that has a sand look to it, references to Nex multiple times, and so on and so on.
We really have no idea what the AH guys are doing, and they are probably not creating Glaive Krull’s, and all sorts of amazing mods that this community is posting daily. It took AH at least 11 years to create LoG—you can see petri’s first posting of the LoG project here dated November of 2001:
http://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/vie ... hp?t=21366 if you follow that thread for 8 plus years, it will lead you to LoG.
Our project is open-ended and community driven; where, if we leave this up to AH, we will have to keep waiting for the next expansion from them. The primary goal of this project is showcasing the communities’ mods in a seamless related world, not to showcase AH’s mods. As I mentioned in my last post, this is CFD++. I want to see those custom northern tilesets in the frostbites where Ogres that have been modified to look like abominable snowmen are trying to kill me. I want to say wow, look at what neikun created or how the heck did pferguso make it snow outside!
http://youtu.be/518q4QTzRUE If AH makes updates like a rat race, fine we will update our world to include that.
I would much rather the "Northern Realms" be left to them and we be as original as we can.
The AH guys love suggestions, and us building out a world would give them great suggestions to go off of. Under their Modding and Asset Usage Terms
http://www.grimrock.net/modding/modding ... age-terms/ they say the following:
To make sure that we have full freedom to develop games, we would like to emphasize that we retain the rights to use any ideas from mods. This doesn’t, however, mean that we are interested in harvesting ideas from mods but that our possibilities to further develop Legend of Grimrock or similar games would be severely limited if we couldn’t use any ideas similar to those found in mods. We may use footage and/or screenshots from any published mods for promoting Legend of Grimrock.
I bet they would love to see us do this, but to appease your concern (and maybe others) we could work on the “Southern Realms”, and create a new map for it
Ok moving on to technical stuff…
I think Neikun and Jkos have a great idea with everyone working on the same file(s). This is how it’s done in software shops everywhere; whether through VS Team Foundation Server, Jkos’s suggestion of Git, or what I use on a daily basis in my job: TortoiseSVN
http://tortoisesvn.net/ With tortoisesvn you check out the same file someone else is working on and then tortoisesvn will merge the changes, so you don’t have to worry about stepping on each other, and it’s free! I think with everyone using the same version control utility this could work!
If we come to a consensus that the file is getting too big then we could incorporate John Smith’s suggestion (between modules)
Maybe we can do an episodic story where you start in an open town and have the option to enter two different dungeons. One is a main story dungeon and the other is a side quest, but in the end one of the dungeons leads to another floor that is like a town, so it's like you're traveling across the lands via dungeons. Four dungeons per .dat, and at the end of the second story critical dungeon, we could have a reason for the player losing all their items, such as being arrested.
That way the first file everyone worked on together would give us like 100 hours or so of gameplay, and then we would have to load the 2nd one to continue on from there. Meanwhile, as we are developing the first module, we can request AH to create an update for persistent saves and loading modules on the fly, importing everything from the last module that we need.
Tallyho…
isn't as implausible as it sounds. It's worth a shot anyhoo, compared to the alternatives. if we want to do this and do it well, we need help.
