[CURRENTLY THIS IS A PLAYABLE BETA VERSION, TO GET SUGGESTIONS AND TESTING. IT DOES NOT CONTAIN ANY SCRIPTING YET (for the sailing, etc). It DOES have a working bedroll on the 'camp ship' and the testing worldSpace is linked to Skyrim by a door LOCATED NEAR EAST EMPIRE COMPANY'S CAVE (and the door from the waterfront up to Solitude). You'll see a 'nordic house' right there on the waterfront, the door's inside.]

[SUMMARY]

ADDS an authentic, sailable Viking ship; as well as a place to sleep or store loot safely, and a few NPCs (some of which may join you as companions). ALTERS NOTHING VANILLA SKYRIM (but places NEW things in the Skyrim worldspace, without changing anything).

Player will (tentatively) have the option to build a new ship, or fix up a wreck, by commissioning a shipwright. Once finished, it'll cost money to maintain & repair, as well as to staff when in use; but provides a 'player home' as well as 'vital services,' and a stylish means of fast & protective coastal transportation.

The ship may also be upgraded in various ways, all of which have tangible, non-cosmetic benefits to the Player (apparati/etc). Additionally, following what I hope to be the success & popularity of this mod, I would foresee and encourage cosmetic improvement add-ons, such as different sail or shield textures, different dragonhead meshes or nameplates, etc... hopefully with some quests attached to their procurement in-game.

[FEATURES]

- Custom voice-over dialogue (written, acted, recorded, and mastered by SLuckyD)

- Custom meshes & animations (all created from scratch by SLuckyD)

- Skyrim-integrated lore & questline; some of which includes real-life details about the Gokstad, Viking culture & mythology/religion, and even aspects of modern current-events (all researched, compiled, incorporated, and/or written by SLuckyD)

- Ship is 'propelled' by thirty-two fully animated oars, which get stowed when the sail is unfurled... for faster means of travel.

- Scripted WIND, which actively affects the ship's speed, and SHIFTS constantly (as real wind would); as well as the means to discern its direction (ie: a 'tell-tale' flag atop the mast)

- Ship's sails are animated to flow in the wind; and will change position (depending on the ship's heading, relative to the current wind's direction)

- Both of two types of 'encampments' will have facilities, all sold at the shipwright separately, for 'vital services:' alchemy, enchantment, whetstone, tanning rack, and workbench. While camped on land, Player may partake in smelting, smithing, woodcutting, and cooking (as well as the others).

- Simple, easy to use interface would almost be like riding a horse (WASD, spacebar, etc - basic controls PLUS a couple non-nilla hotkeys for special actions/features (which I don't wanna give away)

- Scripting for a 'pillage command.' Once encamped... some crew members armed to the teeth will follow Player wherever they're led (dungeons, wilderness, OR towns) - slaying/stopping on command (hotkey), and will only attack civilian friendlies when provoked or player does first. [* NO RAPING, and I DO NOT condone/give permission for adding it to my mod or to use any of my work in a mod which does *]

- Script to send crew members ashore to sell loot, obtain resources, hunt, or forage (very convenient for the ruler of all Skyrim, nice eh?). The pawn-loot script will use the Player's stats for buying/selling as well as enhance those stats by usage (if this is at all possible... to use an NPC as a full proxy for the Player, guess we'll find out soon enough)

- my Gokstad ship is modeled full-sized (EXACT 1:1 scale) after one of the oldest intact Viking long-boats (its namesake, the Gokstadskipet in Norway). Some details had to be inferred as I mainly used technical drawings made by the on-site archaeologist in the 1880s, which were incomplete due to parts of the ship being destroyed over the previous 1000+ years (eg: the bow's dragonhead, mast), or the location/usage of something particular being ambiguous or completely unknown (eg: the rigging, storage of oars). When possible, I used footage of modern sailing vessels and replicas of this exact ship to formulate a realistically working model which functions as a sailing vessel would/should (in my opinion). (as well as the actual Gokstad in Norway's Viking Ship Museum) http://www.khm.uio.no/utstilling/faste/vikingskipene/gokstad_eng.html

- Custom 'loading screens' (related to this mod only... not changing Vanilla Sky's, such as only when Player enters camp)

- Engineered to be performance-oriented; scripts, meshes, etc are all tested and found not to affect fps at all (testing done on an i5core 2.27ghz, 4gig ddr3 RAM, NVidia 350m w 1gig VRam, Win7x64.... a decent laptop when purchased in Spring 2010).

- HOPEFULLY, and this is VERY tentative, I'll be able to include a CUSTOM SOUNDTRACK, using music from various recording artists (of whom I'll be asking for permission to use their work)... all of whom are extremely talented, mesmerizing, and every other blurb-phrase imaginable. In the very least, I'll be able to include my custom sounds (recorded and mastered by me), as well as some music/recordings/videos I obtained from YouTube/etc (about which I can't say more without giving away the surprises!!). The YouTube/etc media will all have links set up to the hosted pages (only non-copyrighted/'free' videos will be used); any copyrighted materials/resources used will be fully cited and credited with near-top billing.

Recording Artists I'll be petitioning: Hel (the Swedish band, now called Origin of Tales), Ranarim, Hedningarna, Garmarna, Faun, Corvus Corax, & Helium Vola. Any other suggestions will be taken into consideration... especially if permission has already been obtained! A sudden boost in activity for these EXCELLENT ARTISTS through Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Facebook/MySpace, etc may help convince them (or their rights-holders) to grant permission for use in this mod and Stone Unhenged... FREE PUBLICITY. They are deserving of our attention and patronage REGARDLESS. (I have SPECIFIC tracks in mind for specific times/actions/etc... I'm not seeking unlimited rights to their entire catalogues.)

- Another tentative aspect to this (and the Stone Unhenged mod) would be cut-scene animated movies... about which many people requested more of for Obliv, but Skyrim seemingly fell short of delivering (although Bethesda made a noticeably effective effort to put those 'cut-scenes' directly into the gameplay, using scripted dialog and actions, etc). These, if I get around to completing any of them, would be used as EasterEggs... depicting real-life footage of a certain boat, photos from an archaeological excavation at Stonehenge (or wherever), or fictional animations depicting an in-game scene which, to bring it to the level of Bethesda integration, would require a lot of time and skill (scripting, scripting, fiery-hoop-jumping, scripting, etc)... and I/we are doing this for FREE.

Again, these EasterEggs would be meant to give the Player an idea of what the place they just ransacked/slept inside of/ran past looks like in REAL-LIFE, as well as any history or interesting stuff pertinent to whatever location they are found in. I intend to include these anyway, initially as books/tomes one can read (with stillshots, diagrams, etc) and/or little 'tourist plaques' which the Player could walk up to and activate (such as in real-life at American National Monuments, you know the inclined granite slab at waist level with writing etched into it explaining what native culture was ruthlessly slaughtered there or how deep the Grand Canyon is). I'd love to incorporate little, seemingly random, reality checks throughout the semi-real world I've created.

[TECHNICAL DETAILS]

- EVERYTHING IS CUSTOM, as to prevent conflict with ANY other mod and/or Vanilla Sky (objects, global & script variables, NPCs, worldspaces, etc). Nothing in SkyNilla is moved or altered.

- Scripts are optimized for speed, effectiveness, and simplicity; and are designed and used so as to run only when absolutely needed (then STOP RUNNING). Too many Obliv mods used certain commands in their scripting to keep creating 1000s of new items which never get erased, scripts which keep running and never end, or several other ways which poor design may lead to savegame bloat, reduced performance during gameplay, and even crashing the game outright.

- Custom meshes (non-Vanilla) are optimized for tri-count expediency, while trying to maintain maximum detail whenever possible. I've created all these nifs from scratch (in 3DSMax 2010 and Revit 2012) and used absolutely ZERO cut & pasting from Obliv meshes. [That last statement may need to be revised, unless the NifSkope people have gotten NIFs to work without ANY copy/paste.. eg: shader flags. I haven't checked into this since I put out the Bullseye mod.]

- Adds several new objects (statics, activators), and makes copies of existing objects (unique reference id's, etc) if they are to be altered for the mod's purposes (to avoid conflicts with other mods which may do the same thing.. a notorious problem with Obliv mods)

- Adds an internal cell (for the encampments) in which Player may safely sleep/store loot. This is actually a single cell, that uses some of the ship's meshes, which if Player is on land, are scripted to 'drop' below ground level... thus creating the illusion of one tent on a ship, and the same tent on a piece of land (which is more than likely to be the actual case back in Viking times).

Player may drop/store something on ship and it'll still be there if camping on shore, WITHOUT requiring the use of extensive scripting to jockey containers and items and what-have-you (every line of code in the script potentially causing some fatal crash or permanent loss of that oh-so-sentimental Hide Armor you've had since almost getting beheaded in the beginning).

It's no palace, but is intended for what it is; a small place for sleeping/eating/healing, dumping loot from a nearby dungeon (instead of leaving it or having to make 40000 trips across Skyrim), and the vital services (as I call them).

- Adds several scripted NPCs (custom dialogue, some are future companions). These NPCs are not nearly as intense as Bethesda's, in fact they are pretty much hollow people... with dialogue enough to be pertinent to the questline (without overly increasing the mod's download size), and prevent the huge vacuum so many Obliv mods would leave as Player encountered well-written, silent-movie captioning. It used to make my day when a modder had voice-overs... my whole week if they were actually done well.

- Setting up land-camp will require a generally flat area (scripted to test for it), and takes your crew a couple hours of time-lapsed gametime to set up/break down... for seamless immersion/realism. (in other words, you give the command and you'll instantly be in the camp, but time will have passed... or maybe something similar to the wait command)

- Inside the encampments there'll be something (item, book, or whatever) the Player can activate in order to change the mods variables: such as the ship's max speed, toggle the wind on or off, how frequently the wind changes direction or 'gusts' (yes there are gusts of wind I'v scripted to happen randomly at certain timed intervals), how far the wind can change at a given time/gust, no tent or sail while out sailing (for visibility reasons), etc etc... Basically, any variable which the scripts call upon, and is stored as a global, may be customized for each gamer's personal delight, a mod-trait which many will agree with me is of the utmost desirability. [Who DOESN'T like to tweak?? Nobody reading THIS I'd be willing to wager!]

- Script for 'pillaging' will include heavy AI packages for the actual looting - the NPCs will really scour the area for everything (if not in danger or on the move).

- While encamped, unseen crew members are 'out doing chores,' like getting wood, mining, foraging, hunting, etc (but may not actually exist, much less perform these actions in Tamriel worldspace). They then 'return' with their findings either at spaced intervals or when the ship is boarded again. (this accounts for their not actually being in camp.. saving on fps/performance; may be scripted so some crew actually DOES go around the countryside) Perhaps the longer you stay in camp, the more they bring back?

- The oar animations, which currently have no actual rowers/oarsmen, were originally meant to be explained away as being the Einherjar (spirits/ghosts of slain warriors who are commanded by Odin) who are invisible (only for this aspect of my mod, other aspects in Stone Unhenged they'll be real NPCs).

This doesn't really fly with Skyrim (Player not having been subjected to the SU storyline yet, thus no contact with the Einherjar). So I find myself compelled to create some kind of way to 'hide' the oarsmen while they row (thus saving the # of tri's and moving meshes it would take to have THIRTY TWO NPCs all rowing like Oxford crew), such as a SEMI-authentic tent enclosure. [There really were such things employed on Viking ships, but what they looked like and how they were erected/fastened to the ship remains a mystery (though a good picture from the late 19th century of a Gokstad replica sailing in Chicago has a good depiction I think).]

So I'll make a tent-like thingy, but that'll cut visibility from the stern (the original place for Player to be located during sailing) so as to necessitate the Player taking the role of 'navigator' in the bow (as opposed to 'helmsman' at the stern operating the rutter). I thought of having extremely reduced-poly oarsmen for authenticity (actually they'd be 1 or 2 animated statics, then copied, not full-blown NPCs); having their backs to Player (now located in the Bow) makes it easier to pull off such a digital illusion (no need for facial geometry, hands, etc)... maybe eventually, but the tent for now.

- [POSSIBLE addition] Bar-wench/stable-hand promiscuity in encampments (during pillaging and/or based on amount of recent loot?). The actual animations would be done by someone other than me if any are included, that's more time than I want to invest in this aspect... Though now having mentioned it - I suspect fierce public outcry should it not be incorporated. Player/crew goes into local pubs to pick them up - they come along WILLINGLY to camp.