There are many community projects out there these days, everything ranging from the naively overambitious to the well organized, planned and focused ones. While Skywind, a recreation of Morrowind in the Skyrim engine, certainly has some divine ambitions it is also one of the most well run and community friendly projects I've seen in a long time.

I'm mentioning it now because the developers recently showcased their progress through the fourth in a series of official developer videos, this time around focusing on the graphics, modeling, voice acting and a few more topics. Have a look, it might surprise you how much better they've made some parts of Skyrim look:

If after watching the video you found yourself itching to give it a try I'm afraid that won't be happening any time soon as Skywind is currently in a closed alpha. The reason behind this decision is the fact that Skywind is under heavily development and as such its constantly being worked on, tinkered with and broken in many areas at the same time by different teams, so it would be next to impossible for a new player to realize what a is a bug, what's missing or even what the features are supposed to be.

While I'm piling down the bad news allow me to also mention that even though Skywind is chugging along nicely across is development track there is no current release date set.

On the positive side, if you have some free time and a passion for modding, the folks over at the Skywind Website are looking for volunteers to help speed up Skywind's progress and to ensure that the end product is a quality one. They are currently searching for artists, modelers, programmers, voice actors and even people to help edit out the various sound files already recorded, so no matter what your skill set is there will be plenty of things for you to do, if that's something you might find enjoyable.