The Serpent Isle Remake: Where Things Sit…
Some of you may recall that Thepal’s The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion-based remake of Serpent Isle suffered a bit of a setback at the end of March: he lost a hard drive to a crash, and subsequently lost quite a lot of valuable mod-related data.
Well, now he’s had a chance to take stock of what was lost:
It was a little worse than I had hoped, but not as bad as it could have been. I’ve basically lost everything after making half of Moonshade. The automatons are done, but the secret passage part isn’t. If you look at the screenshots from May last year, basically everything up to the secret passage part is still there. So, some buildings are done (all the ones I did after the secret passage are gone however). Which means I’ve also lost everything I made after Moonshade: Monk Isle, Sleeping Bull, Great Northern Forest (buildings), Shamino’s Castle, a variety of stuff in the northern wastelands. I think the Sleeping Bull hurts the most. I had to make all sorts of new meshes/textures for that. And the secret passage…My last backup was the day before I made it…
As such, he has re-thought his development plans for the mod a little bit:
…my new plan of attack is to make the game finishable. Meshes, textures, faces, furniture etc can wait. I’m just throwing in placeholder NPCs, empty buildings, etc so I can get the dialogue/quests done. Once the game is playable, I’ll go and upgrade everything to be as it should be.
That’s an unfortunate — and substantial — setback that the project has suffered, but his plan to recover from it is commendable. Given the nature of his mod, which is a straight-up port of the original Serpent Isle, he should be able to backfill missing content fairly rapidly once everything has been built and put in place. Hopefully, he will be able to replicate much of what was lost in terms of art and models, although that’s now going to be a bit further down the road.
Believe me I know how this feels, between a lost laptop and a couple really bad Exult Studio hiccups, TFL has had to hit the reset button on large segments a couple times too. Keep on pulling though dude, looking forward to the project, and we know you’ll pull through 🙂
Don’t worry. This project won’t die. Doing it solo means I don’t have anyone I feel pressured to deliver for, which removes the stress a lot of these projects tend to cause. It has taken longer than I had hoped, but it doesn’t matter. It will be done.
Speaking as someone that’s been working with just a couple other people mostly on TFL since 2006 (!) I know exactly what you mean. Looking forward to seeing it!
Internet source repositories, what are they
Actually that raises a good point, Thepal if you’d like a git repo I can set up a repo on the same box I have my TFL one on if you’d like.
Nah, I’m good. I’m just backing up more regularly now locally.
It’s amazing the random stuff you learn when making a remake that you didn’t know beforehand. Like Teldrono the mage in the Mountains of Freedom, which I’m currently remaking. If you’re carrying bloodspawn he attacks you saying “Die, Thief!”, whereas if you aren’t, he runs away saying you won’t steal his reagents. I had seen both before, but had never made a connection.
That’s interesting…I too had never made that connection.
I have programmed in the past and was hit by the catastrophic loss of data bug a few times. I got past it by vowing not just to remake it, but remake it better. Most of what is lost comes back pretty quick to memory and then I throw in an improvement or two for good measure. The result was always just that mmore satisfying when done.
The issue here is time. I’m a full time teacher (slightly more than full time actually). I’m working on my own game project. I’m married (which also tends to be rather time-consuming). I’ve taken up reading again (am halfway through the Wheel of Time novels). Having a life is good too… I’ve been trying to see friends and such more often lately. And, on top of that, I’m creating a Total Conversion project of massive proportions. (and that’s not mentioning all my other projects I’ve currently put on hold). Losing a few months work is painful. I’ve gamed maybe 50 or so hours since the start of the year. So… maybe an average of 2 hours a week (which is more playing a game for a day or two, then not playing again for months… The last game I played was a day of the Witcher 2 about two months ago). And I am what would in the past have been called a gamer. Basically, I have practically no “Paul Time” these days.
I’m one of those people that always sees time slipping away from them. There’s too much I want to do and not enough time to do everything in. Add in the fact some of it needs to be done by a certain date to have the desired effect, and it starts to get slightly insane.
Not that that is all bad… I’m happiest when I’m being productive. And I think the time pressure is part of what makes me able to make such huge amounts of progress in such a small amount of time. In a few hours I created the Mountains of Freedom, the Moonshade catacombs and started on Furnace. Working at that rate it would only take me a couple of weeks to make Serpent Isle completable (lacking some polish, of course).
Finding a couple of weeks of time is the hard part.