Back to the drawing board

So, I am a man possessed. I am finally feeling highly motivated by the Odyssey project once again and have strapped on my proverbial riot helmet and am charging in head long and not going to take any prisoners. Behold the fruits of today’s labor: Balfiera Isles (yes plural) V2.0

This crazy image may be a bit hard to decipher at first so let me first explain that I have decided to rebuild Balfiera from the ground up (literally) by starting a new worldspace and utilizing the Creation Kit’s Heightmap tool. The decision came about when I had been talking to a member of Beyond Skyrim’s Iliac Bay project team and was looking at a map of Tamriel again and realized that not only is Solstheim MUCH bigger than Balfiera, but our island ultimately was even bigger than Solsthiem itself! Couple that with the fact that I have always felt overwhelmed by the original version due to not having built it myself and having worked through various generations of attempts to finalizing things, it seemed more logical and ultimately more fruitful to return to scratch and start applying our existing assets to a new worldspace.

Instead of one single island (the main one), we will have the entire archipelago of islands in the Iliac bay along with the surrounding coastlines of Hammerfell and Highrock in the distance. This layout is almost perfectly accurate when compared to the Daggerfall map for the region and it reflects a much more scale and true experience for the Balfiera isles. Working with a more condensed area will also mean a lot less work for us and a much tighter package with clear areas we can assign without interfering with one another.

This map above reflects a gridded screen shot of the heightmap work in progress. The blue areas are land, the lighter of which is higher elevation. The purple is water, the brighter of which is deeper. Then there are a number of towns, settlements, ruined forts and palaces from ages past, dungeons and other landmarks across the areas. I tried to utilize most of the Daggerfall locations, merging some similar sites into a single location or making slight renames to prevent some of the redundancy that the old ES games had (man that Gaerhart guy sure gets around). There will be ferryman at each island that will take you to the various islands much like a carriage driver does or you can feel free to attempt to swim it, and could also potentially take the airship to various sites.

All in all I am much happier with the prospect of this than the original. The original is amazing, and awesome and the collective work on it will not go to waste, but I think being able to once again work in phases to build the landscape, touch up and texture, do cliff and rock placement (with LOD completed prior), tree and foliage and decoration placement and then construction of sites, we will ultimately be much better off for it.