Comments - Arkaash

Thanks for the support, Isaac!

I was so fed up of the paid mods debacle when I wrote this update that I completely forgot to mention that we will never charge for our mods - I've edited it in now.

As for offering to help, we certainly need voice actors and would love to hear what you can do, but our application system is currently being re-done and isn't usable. If you would like to help out, send a voice reel (of Skyrim or other fantasy lines) to archonent@gmail.com and we'll have a listen and get back to you :)

I'm not sure if that is awkward, amusing or ironic. It gave me a good chuckle either way :D

That would certainly help eliminate much of the lag, although not all of it. However, it would require a complete redesign of the city since you can see outside of the city from almost every point, unlike most of the cities in vanilla Skyrim which are almost entirely self-contained.

We do have a solution planned, though, which involves splitting the city into small sections completely surrounded by occluder planes that are activated and dis-activated by script depending on where in the city the player is currently standing. That way, only the parts of the city that the player can see will ever be rendered. This won't be a perfect solution since some of the higher up parts of the city can see pretty much the entire thing, but it will certainly be a starting point and we can work on problem areas in different ways.

In response to your post that I deleted, Irikedownroading, we are very aware of the painful lag issues in the city itself. There is still a lot of optimisation work that we can do, and plan to do, once the entire city exterior has been finalised. This should eliminate the crashes that you are experiencing (which are likely due to you reaching Skyrim's memory limit). LOD also takes a long time to do, so we are just leaving it until we're almost ready for release.

As for your post, please don't post that link, here or anywhere else. As evidenced by your crashing and lag, Luftahraan clearly isn't ready to be shown to people yet, so we'd all appreciate it if you didn't spread that around, although we will remove that repository shortly since it isn't really hard to find.

We have no intentions of releasing a beta for Luftahraan until the vast majority of content is complete and we are in the bug fixing phase. At this point we will release a closed beta - one where volunteers can have early access to the mod in order to help us fix any bugs or other issues.

The reason we're not releasing the mod in its current, incomplete state is that it would severely cheapen the overall impact of the mod. People would download it now, run around the city and the dungeons and possibly have fun for a few hours. However, they're then rapidly discover there wasn't much to do since most of the quests are still to be implemented, and stop playing. They'd then have relatively poor memories of the mod and be less likely to give it a proper go when the full release occurs later down the line. This is why game developers don't (or very rarely) release versions of their games to the public halfway through development, and why some developers have simply stopped development when their games leaked too early.

Hi, thanks for the words of support! :)

As for the percentage completion, it is hard to say. Much of the mod is finished, and the only work that remains is finishing a couple of dungeons, creating most of the quests and getting the voice acting in. However, quests are notoriously difficult to implement correctly, so we can't give you a particularly accurate estimation at this point.

Nope, it is still in development.

Thanks, Naistia :)

Not at all - we're just working on completing material for our next update. We may decide to release an interim update if it's taking too long, but Luftahraan is certainly not dead.

In all honesty, our main problem right now is that creating quests in Creation Kit is a complete nightmare and something that will rapidly drain the patience of anyone. If we were to have more team members able to make quests it would certainly be helpful so yes, we are indeed still looking for more people to help out, both level designers and otherwise.

As for your other post, thanks for following/watching/whatever it's called here-ing us! Having a look through all of our previous news updates should give you a good idea of the overall scope of the project, although feel free to ask more questions if you have them.

You do realise Luftahraan hasn't even been in development for two years, right?

I can't speak for you, but I for one would much rather play a product that has been a long time in the making but is of good quality and feels complete than something that feels rushed and looks like rubbish.

Perhaps you will have to wait three years. Who knows. But when it is released, it will be to the highest standard we are capable of as a team, and not something that has been rushed to reach a self-imposed deadline.

I can't really give you any information on a release date - it really depends on how quickly we can get quests done, and that depends on how many people that can make quests we can recruit. I can safely say that it won't be released before 2014, though.

There is indeed a custom city guard faction. As for being overpowered, hopefully not, although they will be competent enough to defend the city from attacks.

Thanks - these pictures were all taken with the K ENB, although not all of the screenshots we've released have used the same ENB.

Sorry Valin, I somehow managed to read your reply days ago without noticing any of the questions in it. I would say that 80-90% of non quest-related content, and about 10% of quest-related content is complete at this point. I really can't give you an estimate for release - there are a lot of things that need doing that may be very quick or many take forever. Hopefully the former. Either way, I wouldn't expect a fully release before 2014.

We do also have a large update coming your way in a couple of weeks. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it does involve something people can download, so hopefully that'll tide people over for a while (before anyone asks, it is not an alpha or beta of the city. The city itself will not be released until it, and its quests, are fully completed.)

Both the city and the surrounding lands are in the main Skyrim cell - the city is 'open' or so to speak.

Hi Valin,

We are still going, and do in fact have an update planned - it's just taking a while as it requires a lot of work. This summer hasn't been the best time for us to work, either - a lot of the team has been busy. Hopefully we'll be able to get the update finished and out relatively soon, although I can't guarantee any dates.

We're definitely over half complete. We've done about 1/3 of the dungeons, and after that we just have quests and VA to go.

We could release a beta, but there wouldn't be all that much to do, and it would be very unpolished - releasing it would probably do us more harm than good, as a lot of people would download it, run around for 20 minutes and then get bored, and be less likely to try the full release.

I realise development process has been long, and it still has a way to go, but it is a very ambitious mod and we want to make it the best that we can. I'm afraid you're just going to have to hang on for a while longer. We really appreciate the support you, and others, have been giving us, though.

The central feature of the mod is indeed the city of Luftahraan, but it is significantly larger and more detailed than the cities in vanilla Skyrim. In addition to the city, there is a significant region of land around the city that we have added, which will house some of our quests and dungeons.

The city on its own has over 100 NPCs, many of which are involved in quests, and almost as many interiors, so it certainly won't feel empty. We're not yet certain exactly how many dungeons will be included, but I expect it to be significantly more than 10. The main quest will also be extensive; almost the size of the vanilla main quest. I've no idea how many hours of play it will add but it will easily be in double figures.

Luftahraan is not directly involved in the civil war - it is a separate country to Skyrim and thus has little stake. However, due to historical ties it is more likely to support the Imperials than the Stormcloaks - not to mention the large number of Bretons in the city that would probably have trouble sympathising with the Stormcloak's cause.

Thanks, Ethan! :)

This will be released on the Nexus - it is already too large for the Steam Workshop. It will have custom weapons and armour, both for the player and for the various factions. There are also plans for the player to be able to attain some form of house, but we haven't finalised them yet or decided where/what the house would be.

YES! Someone got it!

Although apparently not the April Fool's joke part of it.

I lol'd.

We will of course ensure that it is kept as neat and tidy as is possible, except it will be an .esm, rather than an .esp.

Well at the minute the entire mod is 150ish Mb, but that doesn't include any of the voice acting, and I expect there'll be a fair few more meshes and textures before we're done, so 2 Gb is entirely possible.

There are currently not plans to release a beta test until we have finished creating the mod, and we actually need people to test what we have for bugs. As it stands, releasing the mod in its current form would probably do more harm than good - we have a large, well built and (mostly) populated city, with some fairly extensive countryside around it, but very little interactive content. Players would be able to download the mod and run around for a while, but would rapidly run out of things to do, and this might put them off downloading the full version of the mod.

If we do decide to release anything before the entire mod is complete, it will be a modular release rather than a beta test. We would allow people to download a dungeon, for example, or just the arena. That way they would be able to have a complete, polished experience in a subset of the entire mod, rather than an empty experience of the entire thing.

Thanks a lot for all of your interest, though, Irikedownroading (nice name). We'll keep you posted, of course, if anything does become available for your to download and try out.

Thanks, Drachau!

Not at present - we're not ready for a beta test just yet. However, there will be a beta test closer to the release date, and you will of course be welcome to apply to help us out with that :)

Well, I thought I'd do my best to mess up the formatting on the main Skyrim page ;)