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Well, a Massively Multiplayer Offline Role Playing Game. Or, looking at it another way, a "Collective Mod Project" on steroids.
So, from the content creator's side of things: you log into a site, stake out a claim to a chunk of territory. You can then upload mods that affect or place things in that territory.
From the content consumer's side: you download a little app. It periodically queries the side and downloads new or updated mods from the site. Users can review/rate/report on locations that helps weed out bad mods.
On the technical side it isn't really a lot more than a mod manager. But the end result is a shared experience for everyone.

This is actually a cool idea, provided that all of the content creators are experienced and don't give out content that ruins people's games, since your app seems to download them on its own. But if we get responsible and experienced modders, this could be fun.

AeraDunmerMoon wrote:provided that all of the content creators are experienced and don't give out content that ruins people's games,

One guard against that is being able to enforce locality. I have to look at the mod formats more closely, but if we can prorammatically enforce that all MMORPG mods by a person are confined to the geography they "own". If we can do that, then if there is a bad or buggy mod the user can, at least, "walk away" from it.

jjaquinta wrote:Well, a Massively Multiplayer Offline Role Playing Game. Or, looking at it another way, a "Collective Mod Project" on steroids.
So, from the content creator's side of things: you log into a site, stake out a claim to a chunk of territory. You can then upload mods that affect or place things in that territory.
From the content consumer's side: you download a little app. It periodically queries the side and downloads new or updated mods from the site. Users can review/rate/report on locations that helps weed out bad mods.
On the technical side it isn't really a lot more than a mod manager. But the end result is a shared experience for everyone.

This is an excellent idea, granted it would be a ridiculous beast to program...

VirtualWeasel wrote:it would be a ridiculous beast to program...

I'm not quite sure what the hard part is. I've got a site with Relational Database and FTP storage. The content produce program (or web app) lets you register (adds/maintains record in RDB) and upload (to the FTP site). A back end process validates that what you uploaded meets the requirements (is a zip file with the right directory structure, bonus if we can validate mod only touches your locality). The user runs a program before they run skyrim. This compares what they have on disk with what's registered on the server and downloads the difference (via FTP).
You could make it even simpler if you wanted by requiring all mods to be uploaded to Skyrim Nexus or something, and the "shared world" is just a registry and downloader. That's probably a reasonable first pass.
It's all pretty straightforward programming (which I have no problem doing, it's my day job). The only questions I have is if we can programmatically enforce locality or not. I'm still scratching my head over the mod file format. Maybe doing a human validation phase first would be an easier first step.

Isn't Bethesda already going to have something like this? Granted it won't be just UESP content, but I thought they were going to use Steam to show new mods and have kind of a "download center".

Edit: It's called Steam Workshop

Skyrim, What We're Working On wrote: Steam Workshop (PC Only) – We’re excited to share news that we’ve been working closely with Valve to integrate Steam Workshop into the Creation Kit. Using the Workshop, you’ll have free user content with the push of a button. The Creation Kit will bundle your mod and upload it to the Workshop, where everyone can browse, rate, and flag mods for download. You’ll be able to do this from any web device, including your smartphone. Like a live Netflix queue, when you fire up Skyrim, mods you flagged will be automatically downloaded and installed. Everyone here is really excited about the opportunities and possibilities this opens up for our entire community.

jjaquinta wrote:

VirtualWeasel wrote:it would be a ridiculous beast to program...

I'm not quite sure what the hard part is. I've got a site with Relational Database and FTP storage. The content produce program (or web app) lets you register (adds/maintains record in RDB) and upload (to the FTP site). A back end process validates that what you uploaded meets the requirements (is a zip file with the right directory structure, bonus if we can validate mod only touches your locality). The user runs a program before they run skyrim. This compares what they have on disk with what's registered on the server and downloads the difference (via FTP).
You could make it even simpler if you wanted by requiring all mods to be uploaded to Skyrim Nexus or something, and the "shared world" is just a registry and downloader. That's probably a reasonable first pass.
It's all pretty straightforward programming (which I have no problem doing, it's my day job). The only questions I have is if we can programmatically enforce locality or not. I'm still scratching my head over the mod file format. Maybe doing a human validation phase first would be an easier first step.

Well, I'm just basically stating my hatred for programming...
If you'd enjoy doing the programming, I have no problem with that. I and a few others can set up the worldspace and such.
And again, awesome idea man, really.

@Musicman: Ah, but see, you would have to go in and manually flag mods.... And that would be a pain and clutter the Steam Workshop database with miniscule changes to the worldspace.

Musicman247 wrote:It's called Steam Workshop

That's not exactly where I was going, but it's pretty close. Since it is official, it would probably eclipse anything we would do.
The only thought left on this would be to do some sort of aggregate "shared world" mod. I.e. maintain a list of mods that were all just adding/extending places, and not doing any gameplay changes and that were mutually compatible. Mash them up and maintain them all in a single mod on Steam Workshop as a sort of value added "best of". No programming support really needed for that. But would that be of enough interest to people to be worth doing?

jjaquinta wrote:

Musicman247 wrote:It's called Steam Workshop

That's not exactly where I was going, but it's pretty close. Since it is official, it would probably eclipse anything we would do.
The only thought left on this would be to do some sort of aggregate "shared world" mod. I.e. maintain a list of mods that were all just adding/extending places, and not doing any gameplay changes and that were mutually compatible. Mash them up and maintain them all in a single mod on Steam Workshop as a sort of value added "best of". No programming support really needed for that. But would that be of enough interest to people to be worth doing?

*Raises hand*
I'd put the world file together... And we'll see how things go...