Genuine question: Would you use morrowind.esm?

[Lightwave]

Forgive me, I'm new to this forum and only started looking at importing TES3 to TES4 3 weeks ago - I went travelling for 5 months just after Oblivion was released and didn't bother looking at it until I came back. Here's my question(s):

If you could import significant portions of the original morrowind.esm to TES4 format, would you use it (was this not considered), or is this "TES4: Vvardenfell" project only devoted to total re-creation?

The reason I ask is that I finished knocking up a landmass importer a few nights ago (bitch to write) which is about 99% accurate, based partly on the TESfaith code I wrote 3 years ago. So it imports any TES3 landscape to a new TES4 worldspace. I've just been walking my horse from textureless Balmora up to Ghostgate, apart from the very occasional height join of a few cm it seems pretty OK. I've had no response on whether my TESPort program is like the heightmap generator some people have been talking about here, whether it conflicts with this project or whether people are even interested in it.

The thing is it could take just a few more hours (or days if I'm pessimistic) to import the STAT records (which look relatively simple for both TES3 and TES4), convert the FRMR in each cell to REFR records, and after pointing Oblivion at the morrowind.bsa, have most components of Vvardenfell's cities appear on the landmass and be visitable from within Oblivion pretty quickly. Many other objects, such as TREEs are equally easy (but obviously aren't as nice as Oblivion's). I'm assuming of course that Oblivion can display nifs created for Morrowind with no extra conversion ... I could be talking out my rear if they need unpacking and modifying (though this should still be plausible).

From Bethesda's point of view it seems any form of Vvardenfell running in Oblivion is damned from a copyright perspective, almost like re-creation is akin to redistribution of the original source. So an alternative method that at least doesn't involve public redistribution of Morrowind names, landmasses etc. is for people who already have a copy of Morrowind to run a one-off utility that'll import much of the material directly on their own computer. Using this base import of TES4 Vvardenfell, further modernizations and improvements could still be carried out and distributed as a separate esp which don't obviously infringe on the original (e.g. if the imported cells already have the city names, NPCs have the imported names, DIALogue entries, BOOKs etc are imported you can delete the placed objects, put in your own models, remodel parts of the land and the file you're distributing doesn't actually have any copyright issues).

It's likely I'll go ahead and make these changes to TESPort anyway just to see how far and how quickly it goes, so it can recreate a landscape with cities and NPCs from any TES3 master/plugin - it's real ultimate goal is to help importing the main parts of Morrowind mods to Oblivion but since I'm supposed to have a life too(!) how far I go depends on how interested people are in it. If it's to create Oblivion versions of NPCs for example, I'll need a conversion list of Morrowind->Oblivion objects (e.g. like the names or IDs of glass armour).
Getting it to work at converting Vvardenfell is just an obvious by-product and most useful test of this process, not really the object of my intended goal.

Anyway, I've temporarily put up a working landmass of Vvardenfell (with a few slight but annoying join errors) called tesported.esp
which is available as an example. You can load it directly in to Oblivion and in the console type something like:

player.positionworld -35000, -35000, 0, 0, "TESPort"

which'll put your character somewhere up near the Odai Plateau (downstream from Balmora).

But I'd like to know whether anyone is even interested in this here, or whether I'll just go off and continue a bit more myself. It just seems like a conflict of effort if I end up being able to create a soulless but mostly visitable basic world of Vvardenfell (with cities) up in a few days of work by importing, especially when compared to the project on this website which'll take months, if not a year or more to recreate the vast material that's already there. If Bethesda weren't stroppy about the issue I'd agree that total recreation was wisest, but under the circumstances not actually distributing any Morrowind data might be.

hrug: Opinions, anyone? ?(

Lightwave

[Lightwave]

I'm assuming of course that Oblivion can display nifs created for Morrowind with no extra conversion ... I could be talking out my rear if they need unpacking and modifying (though this should still be plausible).

But of course you all already knew that wouldn't work, didn't you? The NIFs aren't compatible, shame because I got all the STATic entries loaded in to Oblivion OK, I just couldn't display them. And automatic conversion isn't readily available atm ... ah well ...

Anyway, the landmass join problems in TESPort are 99.9% fixed, The copy of the Vvardenfell landmass I put up is now seamless, almost .. the only slightly misaligned cell I found in my travels was in the wilderness at (-5,-11).

If you load the esp in to Oblivion and do, say:

player.positionworld -9798, -72523, 216, 0, TESPort

You'll be in the same position that the custom house guard stands at, just as you exit the ship at the beginning of Morrowind. Or

player.positionworld -12295, 60226, 3117, 0, TESPort

is where the great Redoran council hall was in Ald'Ruhn. Vvardenfell feels so much smaller on a horse, though no flippin' cliffracers and negligible loading times between cells probably helps ...

The other plugins I've tried convert their landmasses perfectly too. I'm going to go ahead and try importing basic NPCs (they might have to be re-clothed and equipped with Oblivion's items), dialogue, global settings, books, script text (one'll have to Oblivionize and recompile them oneself) and journal entries. This work is mainly directed at plugins, but should work just as well with masters.

Anyway, great feedback in this thread folks. Seriously though, is the TES4: Vvardenfell project all about creating everything from scratch? In which case I probably shouldn't be mentioning this alternative.

Lightwave

[Axen]

If we were going to be using Morrowind.esm, we would've done our mod for TES3 instead.

[KuKulzA]

Originally posted by Axen
If we were going to be using Morrowind.esm, we would've done our mod for TES3 instead.

I dunno what you are talking about... if you were here in the very very beginning you'd know my plan was to have a mod for TES4 of somehwere in Morrowind, either Velothi Mts. or Dres lands, and then after lots of thinking I decided that I would start a mod devoted to making a mod of the island we know and love for TES4... 'we' has nothing to do with it when it comes to the origin of this mod and the initial plans, it has always been planned for TES3 and weren't ever going to use Morrowin.esm

by the way Axen, the way you reply to people is sometimes like a shut-down... I think you should work on that. I'm sure when you talk you aren't like that but on forums when its all words you have to be careful... writing is dangerous, easy to misinterpret since no body language and tone is directly involved

you're all concerned for the mod and part of the team so we've gotta work together
Lightwave, I appreciate what you have researched for us, Axen I appreciate you looking out for the mod as well...

[raggidman]

Lightwave, I suspect that there are several differences between TES3 and TES4 that you have to take into account:

What do you think about this:
The size of a TES4 area is far larger than a TES3 area, and that leads to greater detail ... therefore the models that you place - not simply books, but buildings etc have to be considered in the light of that. So that Vivec for example will get lost in a TES4 scale environment. And the our planning is that Vivec gets redone to include a multiple (2, 3 whatever suits) of doorways for each one that existed previously, or the market have more stalls. Some might be open that were previously enclosed, etc ... This is based on the assumption that it would all have been there in TES3, but the detail and complexity of the environment creation was not achievable with the tools available.

Consider how that landscape will appear with 4 times the area and detail ... so that mountain you know and love will acquire loads of area that has to be filled in = new ups and downs, trees, flowers, animals, etc ...

If you are a pure TES3 fan then visit the ST TES3 Forum where there is some fine stuff developing.

But I suspect that you are a 'techmonkey of a relatively high order, and if you want to apply that here, what lots of the Beyonsd Cyrodiil Mods are doing is looking for ways to climb, fly, and make new kinds of Trees for Speedtree.

The fly thing is not so simple, because atm with the Ob system if you go up your view gets wiped back to the simplest graphics = looks cra.

We need some way to make things work in TES4 that were part of things in TES3, and more ...

Anyhows, hope you find stuff here that interests, challenges or downright fascinates, and also hope you are not put off by the pithy nature of some of our regulars - they're the exceptions that we accept because like us they believe. And sometimes we really enjoy disagreeing with them!

:wave: and welcome to Vvardenfell and Beyond Cyrodiil.

hmmm, where are your manners people?

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by raggidman
What do you think about this:
The size of a TES4 area is far larger than a TES3 area, and that leads to greater detail ...

Hi Raggidman,

I think I undersand. Btw, don't worry - I'm really not put off by unconstructive remarks - my current focus is about helping port all TES3 masters/mods; I just thought applying it to morrowind.esm would create very useful portions for any Vvardenfell projects. I'm sure some individuals have their own issues/stresses and maybe I don't help by suddenly jumping in with what one might interpret as a 'look you didn't need to bother, I can just import the original!' type remarks especially after the work that has and is still going in to this project could wind someone up. (You are making good progress though, right?) :goodjob:

When you say TES4 is far larger than TES3 I assume you're referring to Tamriel being about 2.6x bigger than Vvardenfell, but according to the official Elderscrolls map, http://elderscrolls.com/codex/races_map.htm, that's about right. Ironically the TES3 standard is capable of even more radically varying landscapes than TES4 (owing to the fact that each TES4 cell is 4x smaller than TES3 and can only contain half as many opposing height offsets). I guess Bethesda just didn't have the time to do more or wanted to retain the playability for less commited player (few players would have the patience to walk up a real sized mountain to get to Dagoth Ur. ) I do of course fully understand wanting to update Vvardenfell when moving it to the TES4 standard - making it graphically more stunning is obvious (though even loading the original in to the Oblivion engine would improve things a lot). But I just honestly don't know how far ready this project team's new version of a Vvardenfell landmass is or how authentic to the original the team wants it to be ...

I think my main point was whether the team here might want to use the original Vvardenfell landmass as a base, which is available if you want it. I'm not Darth Sidious and trying to trick anyone down the easy path to the Dark Side. But everything is in the correct original positions, correct proportions etc. If each modder in the project releases ESPs on top of this base (or merging the changes in to one plugin) then many of the modifications could still be achieved - e.g. Red Mountain can still be made a real mountain etc.
The beauty of the original 2D propertions of the landmass is that all script positions and NPC positions are also exactly correct (I'm much of the way to getting TESPort to import these items anyway).

However if you want to spread out Vvardenfell further than before then a straight copy of the original landmass is obviously of no use to this project, nor is having an import of all the original NPCs in their original positions (though having the original NPCs already available for re-placing might still be). The downside is the workload of having to manually recreate an entire landmass that is similar in shape to the original but enlarged, duplicating each NPC's name and characteristics from the original and placing each one by hand.

Since Oblivion is set shortly after the Morrowind game (e.g. comments about the Neravine having just gone missing) I just assumed that this project would be mainly about creating a graphically improved Vvardenfell with whatever enhancements individual team members wanted to make but which was overall faithful in size, shape and towns to the original game.
The time difference between Morrowind and Oblivion should mean there's hardly time for many new settlements ...

Otherwise is the TES4: Vvardenfell project about another landmass with a volcanic mountain just north of the centre and some towns that just happen to have the same name as another island called Vvardenfell.
Btw, that last comment isn't meant to wind anyone up at all, I'm just questioning how much authenticity is intended in this project. I do understand that to keep people interested one has to let them be creative ... Balmora in thine own image sort of thing.

But I also feel that on a project of this scale it'd be really sad if several modders create these wonderful versions of the Vvardenfell towns in a TES4 worldspace which remain isolated for a long time if there remains no global landmass to join them to.

Thanks for the welcome btw.

Lightwave

[KuKulzA]

we plan to change the geography a bit and to expand to better fit original plans of the DEVs of TES3 and also to fit lore... and of course make Red Mt. a big volcano . And Axen is working on the heightmap which may be a reason why he gets all cranky at any suggestion of alternative :lol: but thanks for bearing with us, I don't think we;ve been as welcoming as we should be. But what you see here is only a fraction of the team, or a bit of whats left. Many gradually disappeared maybe 6 months ago, notably three or four key members. Since then we;ve been hanging on and trying to get things running again.

Thank you for looking out for us Lightwave and I hope you stick around a lil and maybe visit on occasion... maybe even help out hrug: it's up to you, but know this, you are welcome to come and help and join the team if you'd like

[Lightwave]

Hi, thanks for the welcome.

I'm plodding on with my mod converter at the moment, but there may be some things that come out of it that could be of help and swiftly cut down on portions of the work required, so long as there are no copyright issues and you need them of course.

For example, there are 2675 NPCs in the original Vvardenfell and 3044 references to them placed in various external cells, but TESPORT manages to import them all and place all those external references on the imported landmass in their original positions. Each imported NPC has the original race, gender, vital stats, skills, basic AI (fight, flee, hello, alarm) and class as the Morrowind original. Where the master class doesn't exist in Oblivion, some similar ones have been chosen (e.g. smuggler is a thief) but for about 6 less important categories they'll just default to commoner. Each race-gender combination has a generic face at the moment - e.g. all male Imperials look the same as one another; honestly I'd need help to recreate the vast number of similar ones to the original MW combinations ...
Also each NPC is naked, which is OK for dreamers, but not many others. I'll probably come up with a conversion list of common weapons, armour and clothing that is similar to both games, so at least most NPCs will be clothed and armed something like they were in TES3, but creating this list will also be a chore. Also no faction info is imported atm, so they are factionless.

There are a handful of duplicated NPCs in Oblivion that were in Morrowind (e.g. the NPC Umbra is available in both games), so if you find them, the Oblivion version will end up being placed: TESCS changes

Each NPC has been automatically placed in their original location on the original Vvardenfell landmass, though if any category of this is useful to the TES4: Vvardenfell project I can generate a specific export (e.g. Just the NPCs, or both the NPCs and their cell placement positions, without landmass etc).
I don't know if the original NPC names are copyrighted, but if so and you still wanted them I could easily tell TESPORT to recognizably mangle them (e.g. 'ey' to 'ay', 'ia' to 'ea') etc.

Anyway, as an example of what TESPORT is doing, you can roam around the old Vvardenfell landmass with all the 'naked' NPCs hanging around if you want - just download Vn.zip The ESP is about 17Mb. The worldspace is still the default name - TESPORT.

I haven't updated the utility on my website for doing the NPCs yet (I do my development on Linux and have to port it to Win32), but will soon.

Thanks and have fun,

Lightwave

[IAMTHEEMPEROR]

raggidman: you're wrong there. Morrowind and Oblivion's sizes are exactly alike. I created an imported velothi canton as an experiment, and it was still the same size as compared to other objects. The only main noticeable difference is that Morrowind cells are actually 4x bigger than an oblivion cell.

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by IAMTHEEMPEROR
raggidman: you're wrong there. Morrowind and Oblivion's sizes are exactly alike. I created an imported velothi canton as an experiment, and it was still the same size as compared to other objects. The only main noticeable difference is that Morrowind cells are actually 4x bigger than an oblivion cell.

My interpretation was that Raggidman was referring to creating a more detailed TES4 version of Vvardenfell (i.e. on a grander scale with more detailed models), not that he could have thought game units in TES4 were actually a different scale to TES3 since both TES3 and TES4 are the same. What I've managed to import is the original Vvardenfell, no more, no less (well, OK, minus textures, models, scripts etc ... , but the size is correct.)

Currently Bethesda's Tamriel and Vvardenfell landmasses are of approximately the correct relative size to one another - according to the official maps a ratio of about 1:2.6. So in creating a new but enlarged Vvardenfell - something I can understand the desire for (even though it creates even more work for the team than Bethesda put in for the original TES3 game!) - it technically breaks proportionality with Bethesda's vision; another team should create a new enlarged version of Tamriel for authenticity (before TES5 comes out!).

Fair is fair though - Bethesda's interpretation of Cyrodiil in TES4 created an overly exuberant village - its size couldn't be called a town, let alone a city It's almost got that "Oh not you again, I've bumped in to you and all your family 5 times today already" small village feeling - everyone knows what you're doing, you know what everyone else is up to. AFAIR in the UK city status requires something like 40,000+ inhabitants and/or a Cathedral (so I guess Tamriel's villages meet that last requirement).

IAMTHEEMPEROR; if you've already got any more Morrowind-ish statics converted to TES4 and time, it'd be neat to see a screenshot of them placed in one of the original town locations on the combined MW NPC/Landmass I imported in the above link - just for kicks at least.
It's easy for me to import the original Static objects and placement positions too and have an esp created; the problem was just having compatible NIFs that TES4 could render.

Lightwave