And so, half a year later I am back with building Skyrim! I've done other things in the meantime and I feel like I've had a break and am ready to resume the Skyrim project. I've just reviewed the status, and, well, there's still lots and lots to do! So no, it won't be ready this year...

This time I won't be releasing it half-finished as I've done previously. I want the new Skyrim to feel complete, even if, of course, I shall continue development after the release. But I want all towns to have interiors and inhabitants, as well as local quests, and I want all existing quests to be imported and working, and also the biggest bugs ironed out... When the time comes, I am going to try to find people to help me test the mod, that is, to play-test it when it is ready to be played. I had several people helping me last time, and experience shows, that my own testing does not reveal all the bugs simply because I play it the way I made it, because this seems logical to me, and it takes someone else to try and play it differently to expose the bugs. So if anyone reading this, would be interested in testing the system, please contact me either on Chorrol or on Nexus.

So, to summarise, the plan for the first release of Skyrim Alive Lone Wolf is to have all new land and landscapes, no longer based on TWMP but as a stand-alone mod, with all the cities and villages to make Skyrim feel lived in, and with all the quests from the previous releases. It will come with a new release of the Tamriel Resource Pack where I place most of the resources for the mod in order to slim it down and provide some modularity, but besides that, there will be no futher dependencies. It will be a very large mod because Skyrim is a very large province, but it will be significantly smaller than the TWMP framework plus Skyrim Improved plus Hammerfell plus High Rock that we have to use today. At least, that's the plan...

I am now definitely back to building Skyrim, and naturally I ran into size issues. Everything is bigger in Skyrim! Everything!

Well, no, not those kind of size issues. The problem is that with all the new variants of everything, my resource library started to overflow, especially because it also contains many things that I don't use and many old versions of the same things for people with older mods. I am talking about the Tamriel Resource Pack (TamRes). It is a nice idea to put all common things into a separate library for everyone to use, but when this "everyone" is limited to yours truly, it stops making sense. I therefore decided to extract from the TamRes only what I actually use, and to integrate it in my Skyrim mod directly. Those are all free resources anyway, there is no obligation to use TamRes, it was only meant as a tool for convenience, and it no longer serves that purpose for me.

Thus the structure of my Skyrim mod changes: it will come as an ESM-ESP pair with a set of BSAs containing all the resources and voice files. No further mods will be required, not even my LenasCompanions.esm - I am integrating everything, while I'm at it... with all the companions to boot as well... and all the quests... because otherwise it is too difficult to work with and too heavy to run. Yes, too many overrides do eat away at performance, certainly during loading, and they consume memory as well. So when a mod is as large as the province of Skyrim, every little thing counts.

And obviously let us not forget that people don't just run one mod. They also put overhaul upon overhaul, texture replacers, HUD modifiers, NPC plastic surgeries, you name it, they do it... And in the end it looks nothing like the way it looks on my PC... but hey, such is the nature of modding.

And now I have a tour for you! Well, not I personally, but Magicka Addict - he posted a video of TWMP Skyrim Alive on YouTube with my interview over it (spoken in an AI voice). The footage is by PsymonPrime, and he does have quite some graphical overhauls in it, so this isn't vanilla. It looks stunning, but let me just say that those overhauls are not a part of my mod (because some people think that they are). It's just over half an hour, so get that popcorn out...

A grand tour! Very exciting to hear of your progress. The mountains are impressive. So, I ask is the castle sitting atop the peak at 16:30 in the early part of the Quest Design section included in your mod?

Thanks! Yes, this is the Sky Haven Temple, and being the home of the Blades, it is quite an important site... and yes, it still exists in the new version as well, although the mountain has a less extreme shape now because I did my waterways differently. Still impressive though, now with a majestic waterfall. I haven't got any screenshots of the new design yet because you need LOD to see this, and it isn't ready yet.

For the most part the mountains are the same in the new version because they come from Onra's heightmap. But when Haldar made rivers, he had to make some very deep incisions into them, and so he changed the landscape in places. I made the rivers differently and preserved more of the original Onra's mountains in order to be able to use Spunkmire's trees and rocks with that. Haldar made all his own trees and rocks, but I did a quick calculation... it would take my PC about half a year to generate... so no... I'm keen to use Spunkmire's. I've been doing flora literally for the last month, and I'm still not done. It isn't that easy to parametrise automatic generation correctly, so I end up redoing it a few times to get it right. It takes 36 to 48 hours per Hold to generate, and I have 10 Holds (9 Holds and a bit of land in Morrowind), doing each about 3 times... you do the maths! And while the PC does not need to sleep or eat, I do, and also work (the kind of work that puts the bread on the table), so I get distracted from modding... very inconsiderate, if you ask me, but there you go. So that's a month to do the flora... and now think that to generate a full landscape you also need rocks, trees and landscape textures... Nope, I'll use Spunkmire's and modify by script and by hand, thanks. That does not take half a year!