Ask Your Questions Here!

[Beorn]

No idea what happened to Maglor, but he won't make an appearance.

Damn, I hoped for a cameo

[Thangaror]

Were Losoth people still present in the early Fourth Age? If yes, will they make an appearance in the mod (traits, mercenaries etc)? How numerous were they and were there more tribes than the one that helped Arvedui? They were quite closed society and I could compare them with Druédain regarding some characteristic, but were they more numerous and on better terms with other people than Druédain were so they could be present in the mod?

I again get few ancillaries/heirlooms ideas:

- Some of the Gifts of Galadriel could survived in the Fourth Age; most notably Galadriel’s hair which was incorporated in gem. Legolas’s bow could be also heirloom for Wood-Elves (also Bard’s bow for Dale). I didn’t mentioned heirlooms for Hobbits because they will be unplayable so maybe you will not do it such extensively; also, there is really bunch of items hobbits had taken with them when they returned home.

- Lesser rings that Gandalf mentioned in the FotR. Were they also bound to the One Ring and lost their power as the Rings of Power have after it was destroyed?

- Some of the most prominent Elves that didn’t sail West and weren't politically active anymore could be made into ancillaries (Cirdan, Cleborn- well, he maybe did sail West later; by the way what really happened with Maglor later?)...

Ah, I should better stop bother you with ideas for ancillaries because you have certainly think over them enough and know what should make in the mod. I just wanted to see Gem of Galadriel’s hair (or how is it called?) in it.

Tolkien General Discussion II

Legolas' bow wasn't all this special. And yes, Bard's bow probably would not have survived a bath in the Long Lake.
What might be a nice idea though, is to have a "Black Arrow" for Dale. Of course the real one was destroyed, but an item of such great symbolic value might have been re-made (thought without the same properties ofc) to serve as a regalia of Dale.

[Beorn]

Bardings could do it the Christian way; Put a random bow, soaked into water for some time and exhibit it as a relic. It worked for Abbeys and Cathedrals for centuries

[Éorl]

If we handle it like the christians did the relics, we'd have approximately 357 bows - all of which were used by Bard to slay the dragon.

[Basileos Predator]

And eventually all of them would not have been swelled from the lake wather due to the worshiping at candle light.

[Garbarsardar]

Are you going GrrMartin on us? MoN has a book, Aradan has an MSc, Eorl probably has a life. Where is the respect for your fans? Especially the ones who have one month of holidays because of the Chinese new year?

[MasterOfNone]

Rest assured that Eorl is doing a splendid and thorough (and I mean thorough!) job with 3D (environments, vegetation, climates, units, etc.), and Count with text (very professional), and Aradan with design and coding. Aradan even has me filling out spreadsheets again

Oh, and they "bow" to no man

[Éorl]

Are you going GrrMartin on us?

Definitely not.

If we'd do it that way, we'd take 5 years to complete one half of the mod, say, the coding, and release it to the fans, and tell them when they complain that the second part of the mod (the visual stuff) will be out in another 5 years, and that you then can put the two together by yourself to get what you wanted. Yes, that'd be the GRR Martin approach to modding.

[Thangaror]

I found RTW Elves are sneezing pre-battle. Elves can't get sick. So, before I demand someone to remove the sneeze animation, can Elves still sneeze?

[putoconcarne]

Well I don't think you have to be sick to sneeze. As I remember, it's more of the body's reaction to stuff entering your nose or something. (I'm sure there are plenty of sites out there that can explain it better than I can.) So it could be that the Elves you see sneezing just got some dust stuck in their noses. Anyway, shame on me for butting in and making a semi-serious reply to an obviously non-serious question. XD

[MasterOfNone]

Hmm... good point. We'll look into it. It's certainly not something to sneeze at...

[Aradan]

Are you kidding? If we find that sneezing Elves are s not accurate, we have to remove the animation and sound for them.



And here is a small and somewhat random update on what's going on (among other things). Just a little insight into what I'm doing at the moment in the ancs/traits department, and the kind of trouble we're going into for things players will never see:


Each faction in DoM has 3-6 subcultures (which have houses/tribes associated with them, but nevermind that atm). Dwarves have Longbeards, Broadbeams and Firebeards, RK and Adunabar have Dunedain, Gondorians, Arnorians, Breefolk, Men of the Mountains and Men of Nurn, etc. These subcultures determine the chances of getting other traits, from physical attributes to likes/dislikes etc.

Now, characters that are sons of other characters obviously 'inherit' their father's subculture. But what about those who are adopted/married/promoted into the 'family tree'? How is a subculture chosen for them?

One way to do it would be a random 'equal chances' way, like eg Europa Barbarorum does. That means that if a faction has 5 subcultures, a character has a 20% chance to get subculture A, 20% for subculture B and so on. That's the easy way out, but it's also inaccurate.

RK characters from Lamedon would have a high chance of belonging to the Men of the Mountains subculture and small chance of being Men of Nurn. Elves from Greenwood have 0 chance of being Noldor, but high chance of being Silvan. Rhun characters from Lamedon would again be different from RK characters of the same province (they don't ahve the same subcultures). And so on and so forth.

In other words, each faction has different chances of getting each subculture for each province. That's 17 (factions) x 150-ish (provinces) x 4 (average subcultures per faction) x 3 (adoption, marriage, promotion) trait triggers just to assign subculture based on character origin. And that's without counting the (very many) traits and triggers required to determine a character's origin (the settlement/province he's supposed to be from). As you can see, we spare ourselves no trouble in the pursuit of perfection.


And now that I bored everyone to the death, back to coding...

[Jagmodo]

Boring? That kind of information is really interesting to me. Subcultures will add much more depth to the mod and will certainly add to immersion.
I can't wait to read the descriptions of each.

[MasterOfNone]

^ That's nothing to sneeze at, either

[Éorl]

Since we're discussing the issue of sneezing elves, I'll up the ante by asking: Do elves scratch their bum?

Getting rid of these animations globally is easy, getting rid of them for certain factions only is way more demanding, since this requires a new animation.

[MasterOfNone]

I've done a thorough search of the works of Tolkien and his son, Christopher, and can find no reference to an Elf scratching his own (or anyone else's) backside.

[Aikanár]

Are you kidding? If we find that sneezing Elves are s not accurate, we have to remove the animation and sound for them.



And here is a small and somewhat random update on what's going on (among other things). Just a little insight into what I'm doing at the moment in the ancs/traits department, and the kind of trouble we're going into for things players will never see:


Each faction in DoM has 3-6 subcultures (which have houses/tribes associated with them, but nevermind that atm). Dwarves have Longbeards, Broadbeams and Firebeards, RK and Adunabar have Dunedain, Gondorians, Arnorians, Breefolk, Men of the Mountains and Men of Nurn, etc. These subcultures determine the chances of getting other traits, from physical attributes to likes/dislikes etc.

Now, characters that are sons of other characters obviously 'inherit' their father's subculture. But what about those who are adopted/married/promoted into the 'family tree'? How is a subculture chosen for them?

One way to do it would be a random 'equal chances' way, like eg Europa Barbarorum does. That means that if a faction has 5 subcultures, a character has a 20% chance to get subculture A, 20% for subculture B and so on. That's the easy way out, but it's also inaccurate.

RK characters from Lamedon would have a high chance of belonging to the Men of the Mountains subculture and small chance of being Men of Nurn. Elves from Greenwood have 0 chance of being Noldor, but high chance of being Silvan. Rhun characters from Lamedon would again be different from RK characters of the same province (they don't ahve the same subcultures). And so on and so forth.

In other words, each faction has different chances of getting each subculture for each province. That's 17 (factions) x 150-ish (provinces) x 4 (average subcultures per faction) x 3 (adoption, marriage, promotion) trait triggers just to assign subculture based on character origin. And that's without counting the (very many) traits and triggers required to determine a character's origin (the settlement/province he's supposed to be from). As you can see, we spare ourselves no trouble in the pursuit of perfection.


And now that I bored everyone to the death, back to coding...

It took you a wall of text just to say: release X-mas 2013?

[ExtremeBG]

They can't be that far away from a release ....can they ?

[Aradan]

It took you a wall of text just to say: release X-mas 2013?

I didn't want to make it that obvious.

They can't be that far away from a release ....can they ?

No, we aren't.

[Blatta Optima Maxima]

They've been not far from release for the better part of a decade now.