Luftahraan Architecture Guide

[Doublefelix]

This issue is dedicated to store all information about city's architectural design. Basically below are my plans of the city and their justification. Anyone got a suggestion or find my planning to be wrong in any area please write it here, after all my interpretation of Luft might accidentally differ from writer's original intent. As of now this is not yet complete and I will write more as I will start working on certain areas.

Plan of 1st island areas:

[Blue] Lower city:

The bulk of the city, they are the middle class areas and so will look very similiar. As the first two discussed here are first areas of the city player will visit (sans Fortifications) this is where we first establish the theme. Luftahraan is suppoused to be past it's prime due to incompetent rulers and conflicts which is why all the buldings here are actually in state of ruin. Still this is no Windhelm, its gonna be subtle. In every house cluster you will be able to see a stone wall on bottom floor. It's suppoused to be all that's left of stone brick building that once was there, now destroyed with newer buildings build literally on top of old fundaments. On higher elevations you may notice a lot of sections extruding from buildings. As we are on an island, space is the most valuable commodity here. Lower class citizens cannot afford to build wide houses so they try to gain any living space they can by protruding their homes wherever they can above the street level, and of course trying to build as high as possible. The designs here resemble nordic ones, but are more "modern", decorated by Whiterun and Windhelm's wooden ornamentation. Textures employed:

This district is finished sans fixing some gaps and such, here's the board of buidlings:

[Red] Marketplace Area:

This area is meant to have better upkeep as it houses most of city's commerce. Since Bretons were holding power over Luft for a millenia at least, this fact needs to be adressed in it's architecture and this place is perfect for that. Arkaash said that Bretons are merchants after all. Building here will be "cleaner" and inspired by Breton architecture as it is seen in ESO. I dont own the game ao I can't inspect Daggerfall first-hand, and the web strangely isnt flooded with screenies either, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. At least I wont be overwhelmed by references. Speaking of which, here's one:

Started working on the district, so far four buildings emerged, one finished, other WIP: http://i.imgur.com/NnsTeLn.png http://i.imgur.com/Icqv0fk.png http://i.imgur.com/Xugck5Q.png http://i.imgur.com/JRNxgMN.png

Here is the rough layout sketch for the whole district:

Since it's in a separate worldspace (optimization) we can afford to make it bigger on the inside. The layout is segmented into three parts, the orange is market itself, with most of the shop buidlings surrounding it. The middle part is for the Temple and Arkngzul, with a plaza between them. Finally the blue part is the guards barracks area with a smith workshop. The guards are what stands between people from 1st island and nobles from the second in case of a revolt (which the city experienced many times before).

[Purple] Docks:

Roughly marked on the map since we don't know exactly what will be the extend of the docks yet. Buildings there will be exclusively wooden, with very sharp roofs, super nordic. According to official lore Nords are fighters as well as renowned sailors.

There are 5 buildings done for this district, more to come if they will be needed.

[Green] Solrin Tower

[Yellow] Bear Chef Tavern

2nd Island: Is Yurtex domain now : D

[Arkaash]

This all sounds great, Felix - I don't have any issues with any of the things that you've planned for.

Although, to clarify a few things I'm attributed to - I didn't quite mean that Bretons are merchants, just that it is more likely that a rich merchant would be Breton than Nord, at least in this region.

Also for the second isle, I'm fully happy to have a variety of styles for the different nobles, I was just saying that some of them would try and copy the style of Sovereign Hall if they didn't have any better ideas; that style should be spread around the city to varying extents just by virtue of it being the style of their leaders.

[Yurtex]

Pre-planning great! I want to note that second island may need some sort of terraforming/change in landscape, for example climb from the docks to keep looks awful and needs to be remade.

[Arkaash]

You should probably check the meeting minutes from last week, Yurtex :) We're going to completely remove the second island docks and instead extend the first island docks around the base of Arkngzul and then add a bridge and a large road that winds up the cliff behind Sovereign Hall and comes up between the Keep and the Arena, Then we're going to get rid of the whole part of the second island near the docks and re-do it to make it a lot more noble looking.

[Arkaash]

On the subject of the Dwemer inventor, Felix, we have two NPCs in the city - Davyn Llervi, who is a Dwemer scholar, and a Breton engineer (I can't actually remember his name... Taryn, I think). They both currently live on the second island, but yeah, having projects of the engineer around the city to help mining and industrial operations would certainly make sense. There's already a blast furnace that he'd probably have built.

[Wheeze201]

Yep, I'd approve of all of this, nice job felix :) More documentation is always better.