MorrowindModding
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Happy New Year! Channel News for January and December
🕑 Added 2017-01-02 13:36:19 +0000 UTC Happy New Year! I hope you all had a merry Christmas and happy holidays! Once again, I need to apologize for this late news post, things got a little hectic over the past couple of weeks and I've been trying my best to just keep with Morrowind Modding Madness and getting a few videos out each week while everything else is going on. Regardless, we have a lot to cover in today's news post, including a roundup on December, what's coming in January, some good news for a change on channel capabilities, patreon pilot episodes, and some information on the Morrowind Modding Madness competition.Overall, December was a pretty average month for the channel. We released 14 videos, which isn't that bad actually, though practically a majority of them were related to the Morrowind Modding Madness competition to some degree. Out of those 14 videos, 12 were for Morrowind mods, and 2 were for Oblivion mods. I do kind of want to even that out a bit more in the future, ideally we should be releasing 20 videos a month based on our current series, with 13 for Morrowind and 7 for Oblivion, but ah well, that's something I hope to improve on in the future.
Which brings me up to our plans for January, and this is where our good news comes in. Essentially, I now have two new hard-drives up and running with a combined 6TB storage capacity that's all open and ready to be used, bringing overall storage capacity to 11.5TB. This is a really good thing, as I've mentioned on many occasions, storage space is one of the biggest limiting factors holding back video production. A single episode of MMS is 250gb roughly of raw video footage, and for some of our longer videos like Morrowind Modding Textures, you're talking about 500~600gb of raw video. Basically, now that we have 6TB of extra storage to work with, this means I can record mods in bulk and knock out multiple episodes all at once, instead of having to record them separately each week in a mad dash to try and keep things on schedule.
In the long-term, this will mean a more routine video schedule with a pretty good queue going into the future, but in the short-term this may mean reduced video production until we can get enough footage stored up to get a good, solid queue of videos formed.
And this brings me back to our plans for January. Our priority for the first week of January is going to be our regular end of the year videos, such as the Year in Review Trailer which typically contains snippets of everything the modding community accomplished in the last year with clips from 40~60 different mods, the Top Ten Morrowind Mods of 2016 video, and the Top Ten Oblivion Mods of 2016 video. Now I know, top ten videos aren't exactly the most exciting thing on the planet, but there's no denying they're popular, and the previous two Top Ten videos for 2014 and 2015 combined have brought in nearly 20% of our total subscriber base, which is a little insane, but it is what it is. It grows the community and shows outsiders what amazing things the Morrowind modding community can accomplish, and that's always a good thing. I'm honestly not sure if we'll be able to get a top ten Oblivion mods video out though, since I'm less familiar with that community, but I'll try to get something out in a timely fashion, though the priority is still the Morrowind videos above all else.
Also in the first week of January, we'll have two of the last Morrowind Modding Madness videos, since our modding teams will be submitting their NPC mods tomorrow, we'll have a showcase of those mods probably on Thursday.
Looking ahead to the rest of the month, Patreon videos will be popping up, most likely in the second week of January, along with our long-delayed Silgrad Tower tour. Other than that though, the second week of January will be pretty light in video production, since I'll be using that week to try and record as much footage as possible to take advantage of the new 6TB of storage space we have. With any luck, my goal is to get enough footage in that week to make a couple of dozen videos that'll put us back on track to regular updates.
As for specifics, the following videos will probably be getting released in January:
Cities of Cyrodiil - Episode 3
Morrowind Modding Manors - Episode 9
Morrowind Modding Showcases - A Silgrad Tower Tour (originally delayed from December)
Top Ten Morrowind Mods of 2016 - (Already 25% recorded)
Oblivion Modding Showcases - Episode 6
Morrowind Mod Release Showcases (See down below for some information about these)
Morrowind Modding Madness - The NPC Mods Showcase
Morrowind Modding Madness - Final Tower Showdown (winner announcements)
Oblivion House Mod Hunters - Episodes 18-19 (we're taking two weeks off at the beginning of January, but this series will return towards the end of the month)
Morrowind Modding History - Sea of Destiny
Morrowind Modding Showcases - Episode 56
Morrowind Modding Showcases - Behind the Scenes (a recording of what goes into making a MMS episode with Episode 56)
Morrowind Mini-Mod Showcases - Pocket Pals (the famed creature companion mod)
Morrowind Mod of the Month - August 2016 (Already 33% recorded)
Morrowind Mod of the Month - September 2016 (we'll catch up eventually, really!)
Morrowind Mods 2016 - Year in Review Trailer
Top Ten Oblivion Mods of 2016 - (I'd lay 50% odds on this getting finished in time, no promises!)
Top Ten Morrowind Quest Mods - Revised Edition - (technically a video for Zhakaron's channel)
Anyway, that's a pretty ambitious list, so we'll see how much we can get done. A lot of these videos are already partially in production, hence why they're on the list here, but anything can happen and delays are probably likely with this many videos. Plus there's that other slight matter...
Which is that I'm getting back into releasing Morrowind mods! That's why we have those "Morrowind Mod Release Showcases" up on there, since I figure if I release any mods, I could just do a quick mini-showcase of them on the channel. Nothing too detailed really, and you all know I've been avoiding showing off my own mods for years now, hopefully this won't come off as favoritism. I've just had a really big modding itch lately and wanted to start releasing mods again, so the plan is currently to release two of my current WIP mods in January, and finally do that Modder's Challenge in February, while also working on some of my older projects to release later in the year. My hard-drive is full of old half-completed quest and dungeon mods, and really, it's high time I start getting this stuff released and out to the public. The first of these mod releases is actually this week! Assuming I can iron out a few bugs in time, you should see my first new quest mod of 2017 up on the Nexus, GHF, and The Assimilation Lab by Friday, possibly even before that.
So aye, that's a bit exciting, at least for me anyway. But going back to other news we need to cover, since we're coming up on the end of the Morrowind Modding Madness competition, I'm planning to conduct a few polls and surveys regarding the quality of this competition and what people would like to see in the future with regards to modding contests. Since Morrowind Modding Madness is a very different style of competition than anything we've tried before, the question remains whether or not we should make this a permanent annual competition like the Morrowind May Modathon Month. No doubt this has been a more stressful competition, releasing four mods in 30 days is difficult even for the most skilled teams, but on the other hand, the quality of these mod releases has been pretty fantastic, and I can't remember the last time we had so many high-quality mods released in the same month. All of the teams have done a fantastic job, and all of them will be receiving prizes for participating regardless of whether they win or not. But anyway, I'll be distributing two sets of surveys next week, one to the teams where they can give their feedback on the competition, and one to the public on what they'd like to see in the future. Based on that, we may continue doing Morrowind Modding Madness next year or go in a different direction with modding competitions.
Now I believe that about covers everything, as I said before, the Patreon pilot episodes will probably be out in the second week of January, and they'll include a Morrowind pilot (already largely planned out), a Skyrim pilot, and an Oblivion pilot. Not really sure what to do about the last one, I was kinda thinking about some sort of series looking into Oblivion gameplay mods, since that's where Oblivion is weakest if we're being honest, but I haven't made up my mind yet.
Anyway, I'll be back in about a week with another news post, so until then, have a Happy New Year everyone!
