he Redoran Arena is an exciting location we're planning to build near Soluthis. Many of you are familiar with Dunmer arenas, through the canton in Vived dedicated to that purpose in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind which played an important role in the story of that game. But the arena in Vivec was, like the rest of the city, built in Velothi style. For those unfamiliar with the style, Velothi is the architecture Dunmer built in ancient times and is not unlike Egyptian pyramid style in our own world.

Soluthis however is not in Velothi style but rather in Redoran style. The Redorans prefer soft curves and rounded shapes, and often draw inspiration from insects and other creatures in their designs - which of course is totally unlike the blocky, archaic Velothi style. There is no precedence for this in the old game, so our Arena will be unlike anything you saw in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - but still with a familiar feel to it, since the Redoran design was prevalent in the game. But how would such a design look? Luckily we had the fortune of recieving concept art from idera13 to guide the Arena's modeller.

Arena front	The gladiator ring	Spectator tower	Guarhide sun cover

1. Main entrance 2. The gladiator ring 3. Animal pen 4. Spectator towers 5. V.I.P. spectator tower 7. Dining room and sleeping quarters 8. Leads to dungeon, which has armory and training rooms. (floorplan)

One of the more original aspects of the idea for the arena is that it will open to player participation - on both sides! You can play our mod and fight battles in the Arena, once it's modelled and built. But you can also send in your savegames to us, from which we will extract your character's data, appearance and gear and then turn into a gladiator other players can do battle against in the next release :D

Naturally there'll be certain rules to adhere to, to keep it fair for everyone. For instance we couldn't allow unique weapons like Mehrunes Razor since there's only meant to exist one of them in the whole world of Elder Scrolls. Enchanted weapons are ok, and even weapons from other mods (assuming we are allowed to use them through the inclusion of your character). We can't feature NPCs who have attained levels through cheating, and so on. But it's perfectly fine if your character has a hundred restore health potions or things along those lines. The golden rule is that NPCs' power are measured fairly.

Before we reach that point however we need aid from a modeller to create the arena idera13 sketched.

The arena should be about the same size as an exterior cell, though for technical reasons definitely not larger than a cell. The facecount should be between 100,000 and 150,000. You can choose to make both an exterior and an interior model, or a singular model. Having a singular model, and thus having the fights take place right in our main worldspace, would be pretty cool. You could even design it so that the player can walk up on top of the building and peek in on battles taking place below. The downside of having a singular model is that 150,000 faces is as good as it can get, whereas if you make both an exterior and interior model you can spend vastly more faces on making the interior as cool as it possibly can be, and thanks to the way Oblivion works the player would never really know he wasn't in the main worldspace but instead in an interior cell. The choice is yours.

If you're interested in taking up the job, please go ahead and post a new thread on our Visual Development board to let us know you're working on it.

ilgrad Tower's backup server, located at silgradtower.net, went officially online today. For those who haven't followed the forum thread "More space vs. losing old attachments", a summary of the events is that some time ago we were running out of space on this, the silgrad.com server. More than anything the data storage space shortage was due to forum attachments, which took up a staggering 750mb of space (give or take). To alleviate the problem we deleted a dozen websites we used to host that had seemingly gone static for a long time, like a year or longer, but compared to the volume of attachments the freed-up space didn't do much.

As luck would have it, I (Razorwing) came in contact with an anonymous benefactor in our community whom offered to economically support a backup server. I've been setting things up for the past month or so, because it took awhile to handle the ~7000 attachments we were dealing with. I checked all of them to find illegal ones to delete or sensitive ones to protect, and produced galleries for the images and linklists for the attachments. It was a lot of work, but I had fun too because I could take a stroll down memory lane every so often as I followed the history of our team in file form.

It's all finished now, so there's no need for me to sit on the link anymore. Please add it to your bookmarks as I'm sure you'll want to access it someday.

Here's how to do it. Hover your cursor over the broken attachment and the url will display in the result bar at the bottom of your browser window. The interesting part is the attachmentid of the url.
http://www.silgrad.com/wbb2/attachment.php?attachmentid=8038

Replace the zeroes in the template's 'img' and 'url' with that attachmentid, as many times as there were attachments to the post. Replace the word Poster with the name of the person who made the post. Then open the attachment pop-up window and optionally paste the filenames and filesizes into the template's last line. Then delete the attachments and paste the filled-out template at the bottom of the page. Readers will probably not even notice it's been altered.

NOTE. No matter what extension your attachment used to have, all attachments are now .7z archives. Partly to save bandwidth but mostly to keep the urls consistent.

The attachment link is always:
http://www.silgradtower.net/PublicForumAttachments/Forum2/7z/attachment-####.7z
where #### is the attachmentid.

(The website copies have their own subdomains at [.silgradtower.net] although the subdomains just forwards the surfer to the appropriate backup folder, their owners can't log in and update them.)

donny.silgradtower.net
elite.silgradtower.net
esmn.silgradtower.net
lichcraft.silgradtower.net
magicschool.silgradtower.net
morrowindwarehouse.silgradtower.net
rotd.silgradtower.net
rydrenia.silgradtower.net
scimuse.silgradtower.net
smight.silgradtower.net
starcon5.silgradtower.net
vagara.silgradtower.net
xchaosdragon666x.silgradtower.net

e've had the good fortune of seeing several new and highly talented modellers join the team over these last few months, and I'd like to take this opportunity to highlight their respective modelling project and at the same time show off the cool stuff you'll get to see in "Silgrad Tower v3.0".

      I've spoken a bit about the Morag Tong assassin armor previously, in the news item further down where we were looking for a modder to spearhead the guild's development. Luckily that matter resolved itself as Seniosh stepped up and took charge of it, and I have every reason to believe you'll get to see at least one Morag Tong quest in the next version of our mod (slated for a late June -07 release). VABG's development on the armor continues at a steady pace and it's looking more and more fantastic with every subsequent dev shot. :D

     Paholainen started development on a Chitin Scimitar on April 3rd, which soon grew into a larger job that encompassed more Chitin weapons. He also teamed up with VinnieMC, the author of the tutorial on how to get collision to work with the 0.2.10 scripts and 3D Studio Max v9, who assisted with texture work and turning Paholainen's models into useable Oblivion weapons. The Chitin job is mainly geared towards the TES4: Vvardenfell mod team, but fortunately the Silgrad Tower team can use their models as can they use ours. Both teams share the same goal of seeing Morrowind for Oblivion and members on both sides have known each other since way back in 2005.

     fwp_coder, a.k.a. Felix, is erstwhile known as a talented concept artist who's maritime art is featured in two other news items here on silgrad.com. His work on the boiled netch leather armor is progressing nicely, and is sure to become a common sight on the thieves and rogues of the Silgrad Tower mod. A "netch" is a huge, bulbous creature filled with gas which you saw a lot in Morrowind. These gentle giants floated at a serene pace over Vvardenfell, and added yet another dimension of aura and mystique over the greatest computer game ever made. I don't know if we'll get to see them again in this mod, seeing as Oblivion doesn't support flying creatures, but one can always hope. In the meantime there's fwp_coder's fantastic armor, made from the hide of these creatures. While they're not strictly limited to evil characters, you do have to kill one of these beautiful creatures in order to get their hide, which is a pretty evil act.

NOTE! Click the link to see all the images.

e're still looking for modellers interested in taking on one of the designs for Dunmer ships and harbors posted further down. There's no denying the jobs are challenging, but I know some modellers thrive in challenge and getting to model hipoly, intricate models free of the usual facecount constraints. A model like this could easily go up to 20k faces or why not 35k to 40k if necessary - cells in dock areas usually only have so many other objects that cut into the facecount budget. These jobs also have something going for them that few of our other modelling jobs have -- quality concept art, straight from the minds and pencils of our visionaries. Speaking of which, here is a new concept from my colleague ( and fellow Swede :D ) fwp_coder:

Now hoist that sail and set course for 3D Studio Max! Arrr! :D