[RELz] Skywind Meshes and Textures

Just an update on the bottles/crashing issues.  I just remembered reading something about how the bottle meshes have WAY more polys than are necessary awhile ago, so that is probably the reason for the bad lagging.  Perhaps someone good with Nif skills could optimize them in the future?  Also, I have been getting several more crashes (compared to the almost 0 in vanilla skyrim), and I think, that at least some of them may not have to do with meshes, but with textures.  Skyrim always crashes with the HD DLC running (or any other large HD packs), and I believe Eloth's textures are higher quality than vanilla skyrim.  Unfortunately I have no way of knowing what reason is the culprit, so you might need to get some other opinions.

Hmm that is interesting. I could see if the poly count can be lowered. Also, is your computer specs good to run Skyrim with good textures? I haven't noticed any sort of lag with the high res textures on my computer. However it could be the textures which we could fix. I still haven't been able to play around with the meshes yet, I restored my Windows but after using it for about 5 minutes it bsod's. 

Oh ok you should run the hi-res textures easily then. For the morrowind_sk file in Skyrim, do we coc to a cell or has somebody made a plugin that will put you there? 

I'm not sure if a decision has been made or not, but should I start converting over some Oblivion meshes and get a link for that?

Actually, I think the crashes with the HD texture packs may be caused because you have only 2 gigs of ram, but that doesn't mean anything by itself. How many gigs of Vram do you have?

Winterdragon:

I have 896 mb vram, only 128 mb short of the 1 gig recommended for most hi-res texture packs.  By the way, my specs are posted in my account.  Just click on my user name if you want to know.

Unknown:

To my knowlegde, noone has made such a plugin, however I did make a simple .esp file for my version of the master that enables you to coc to Seyda Neen.  Just coc to WildernessAAA for that, and for any interior you don't need a file, just use chuvakincellduplicateXXX or chuveakincellduplicateXXXX (for those cells above 999).

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?itok711c4ixrku7

Also, I would go ahead and begin converting Oblivion Meshes.  Some are used in Morrowind, and it would be best to have everything.  That is assuming you want to of course.  :)

Will the DLC Dawnguard be a problem as far as Oblivion convertion is concerned.?

What I mean is that the hieghtmap and landmass of oblivion is being used in that DLC.

If they then do another DLC that uses Morrowind as a base,will that not make us obsolete.?

I think that Beth/Zenimax put those extra landmasses in the first Skyrim release for the reason [proberly] that they intend to use the whole of tamriel [over time] for thier DLC addons,proberly moving the times forward for oblivion and morrowind.

If that is the case [it looks that way] then only those who do not use DLC would use morro_oblivion in skyrim.

Ironman:  Parts of the DLC will take place in a realm of Oblivion, not Cyrodiil (where the game Oblivion is set) itself, so we should be just fine. :)

Though I admit, their naming was a bit confusing.

I think the crashes you have are caused because of the fact you have very little ram and not that much vram. I know a guy who had the exact same problem as you with almost the same specs (except he had a good graphics card with only 512 mb vram). The crashes stopped when he finally listened and put the graphic a bit lower. I think you should try to play without AA and perhaps put shadows a bit lower as well if you have those things enabled.

It definately stated on the dawnguard trailer site that Cyrodiil was going to be used,as it also stated that oblivion fans would be able to visit the towns etc that they visted in oblivion [the game].

Yeah I suppose.  But I finally tweaked my ini to set shadows to ultra-mega-exteme (hardly noticable jagged edges and 0 flickering), so that might be a last resort.  Though I'll definately try no anti-aliasing anyways.  That was never important to me, however right now it is only on 2x and I'm not sure about the improvements that would make.

Edit:

Ironman: Could you point me to a link?  I just watched the teaser trailer again to make sure, and there was no mention of Oblivion or Cyrodiil.  As far as I know, no other trailers have been released, and the only confirmed things are crossbows, vampire lords, a realm of oblivion, the Dawnguard, altering faces after game has begun, awesome dragons, and several other things related to the ones I have mentioned.  Could you be refering to elder scrolls online, which will include Cyrodiil?

It could have been refering to Elder Scrolls Online,I hope so.Not sure what URL link I was using,but will post the sentence here if I find it again.

But You are proberly right as I was reading real fast.:)

Alright sounds good, I'll start converting over Oblivion meshes. It shouldn't take that long and I'm looking for some stuff to do.

Ironman: No problem, it happens to everyone. :)

Unknownone:  Good luck on the meshes!  I just wish I had to look for stuff to do :(

Edit:

So I finally had some time to do some more serious testing in game, and I suppose that I should report the problems I am having in the mesh area.  This does not mean all of the problems are conversion issues.  Some might just be meshes that don't work correctly with the Skyrim body, and do not really need to be fixed until later in the project.

1) Some meshes have collision that should not have it.  Ex.  muck ponds, and some flora

http://i48.tinypic.com/2edo8dz.jpg

2) Some mesh shown here in chuvakincellduplicate001 has collision that extends far beyond the actual object, such as that I can't move forward.

http://i50.tinypic.com/54vkpj.jpg

3) This stair mesh has too high of steps.  My character can not climb to the top without jumping or tcl.  The cell is chuvakincellduplicate005

http://i48.tinypic.com/nbr6fm.jpg

This is everything I have found in the first 20 or so interior cells, otherwise everything works great except the crashing when staring at a shelf full of misc objects for too long...  The good news is that I think turning off anti-aliasing has helped at least a little bit.  I have finally been able to load cell 10, and it looks like the cause of my crash may be, you guessed it, a whole lot of misc objects.  I'm guessing it is the hi-res textures, so I will experiment with replacing those textures with lower res versions, and see what I come up with.

Edit:

I have been through many more cells, and no new problems, though apparantly the stair issue (number 3) extends to many more stair meshes. Most of the others are not as extreme, so they are not too big of a problem however.

Shadow thanks for testing them out! I think the stair problem could be fixed pretty easily maybe, as well as the flora. I completely forgot about taking the collision out of meshes that don't need it, I will fix that with another upload. As far as the meshes where the collision extends beyond the actual mesh, that is caused by the reference object during conversion, which will be really easy to fix - just a re-conversion which I will fix in the next upload. Again thanks for testing them out and if you find any others let me know. 

No, thank you.  You have made it possible for me to enjoy Morrowind in Skyrim :)

I'll continue testing, and hopefully everything else will work.

Would it be possible to convert directly the Morrowind (as opposed to Morroblivion) meshes to Skyrim? Maybe Macorn's converter won't result in as many polygon's as the original Morroblivion converter did.

Edit: Nevermind, looking at the Morrowind meshes, the file paths look totally different. So it's probably not worth messing with.

Edit 2: Also, while running around Morrowind, I'm bound in a few minutes to crash to the desktop. My computer definitely is not the best, but I can run Skyrim on Medium fine. This isn't even looking at miscellaneous objects, it's just walking outside. Could it be because of the high textures?

Probably maybe a computer and texture problem. Although I'm currently away from my desktop, and so I can't confirm this. When I get back I'll try it out on my desktop and see if I get crashes as well. Shouldn't hires textures just cause the game to be slow though and not crash to the desktop? This makes me think that it actually might be a game problem.

At least it is happening to someone else, although in Morrowind my game has never crashed outside, only in interiors, I just assumed it had to be a lot of misc objects, as those cells without them seem to work fine.  It has to be the textures as my game exhibits the same behavior with the HD DLC, though I tried turning the texture settings to medium, and the game crashed even more frequently.  Perhaps someone with the know how could downscale the textures to see if that helps?

Edit:

I forgot to mention this.  I could also be partially due to textures not working correctly.  I have come across several more pink meshes in various places.  Many others are still apparently missing normal maps as well (at least the Hlaalu architecture is, as that was very easy for me to identify).

If the textures don't have a normal map, I could make normal map textures for those if they are needed. I haven't had time to play around with it so I don't know what is causing it. 

The strange thing is that they do have normal maps, at least Morroblivion did, and I copied my textures straight from the complete installation, so they should be present.

Oh I didn't realize that. Maybe the mesh files themselves do not have the normal map included in its texture paths?

One quick problem update:

In chuvakincellduplicate048 one of the dwemer hall meshes is missing.  This one is very widely used, and as far as I know has no unique properties that would prevent a proper conversion, so it was probably just missed when you did the conversion.

http://i49.tinypic.com/avjwgj.jpg

I hope you don't feel overwhelmed by these problems, just keep up the great work!!! I have a feeling I have found most of the issues we are going to find anyways. :)

Besides, even if there are a few more problems you'll have almost a whole week of peace and quiet while I am away from home. :)

That missing dwemer mesh is supposed to be an 'activator', the hallway which has grates at the bottom allowing one to see lava flow beneath them.. It was missing in Morroblivion but was 'fixed' through an alternative method.. The same 'problem' could be seen here... Perhaps

On a side note, there are mods around nexus and steam which have Morrowind weapons ALL converted.. and the owner has just released a mod, adding ALL of these weapons.. In addition there are mods which adds new creatures, among them are Morrowind creatures..

Great work by the way everyone I only wish I had the time to still contribute, my studies have kept me extremely busy!

Huh I always assumed that was a static.  No activators are converted yet so that is probably why.

Yes no activators have been converted over yet, I could try to get them converted if they don't throw many errors. I'll convert them and then test them to see whether they are actually gonna work or not. Thanks for reporting all these problems, hopefully we can get the meshes all fixed by the time they start working out the land and other issues.

So I am 80% sure that the frequent crashes are not due to high-res textures.  I used this,

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12801

and i still get frequent crashes in Morrowind in the exact same spots, however I downloaded the .bsa files for the HD DLC created by the utility and I achieved much greater stability in Skyrim.  In fact I didn't crash once.  Though my test times were very short, so it could just be a fluke, or I could have messed up the creation of the optimized Morrowind textures.  So I'll do some more tests to make sure.

I took a look at the bottles and cups causing it to crash and I think the problem is that the converter uses a base object in Skyrim for the new objects collision, (in my case I used a rock) and it takes the mesh (bottle) and compresses the base object's collision to fit the new mesh (bottle). Basically, the bottle has a collision of a rock in the size of the bottle which makes the game behave weirdly because it has a higher collision count for a small object? Anyways I think to fix this I would just need to re-convert the bottles using Skyrims bottle mesh for a base object. Hopefully that will work but I haven't tried it yet. 

I don't know that much about the skyrim havok/collision engine, but having looked at a mod few forums it would seem that keeping things as simple as possible is probably a good idea for both performace and stability. So yeah, picking similar items for the colllision would seem like a good idea, even if you only use 3 different ones: such as a book for simple items, a rock for medium and a tree for complex ones. This is assuming that the converter stretches the collision meshes, rather than just scaling them. If it does scale them, someone will eventually have to re-do all the collision meshes eventually anyway.

all meshes is missing the SLSF1_specular shader flag, just so you know :)

and some meshes like the ald ruhn crab shell wont show up ingame

EDIT:

i also noticed that none of the meshes has tangent spaces, or binormals, that

is needed for bump/normal maps, and lighting to function correctly.

i found out that if i change NiTriShapeData->Num UV Sets value from 1 to 4097, and then update

tangent spaces, everything works.

Is it possible to do this in the nif converter?

Eloth:  So that is why normals do not work.  Thanks for pointing out the problems, and hopefully there are not many more. :)

Unkownone: I hope it would not be too much trouble for you to reconvert the meshes with those changes, or does the converter not even support them?  Thanks for all the work you have done so far, and hopefully this will be the last re-conversion.

Edit:  Is that why most plants and other objects that should have transparencies show a black or white background and do not work correctly?

Thanks for figuring this out! It's probably possible to do that in the converter, although we would need to change it to add/do that in the source code and then re-compile and run it. 

Eloth - I'll contact Macorn, the creator of the Nif Converter, and ask him if he can put that in his converter. Thank you for pointing this out! Again, great to see you, it's been a while!

We could maybe try to hack the source code ourselves? I don't know C++ but I'll look around. I got the source here. It would be great if he could add it though.

NiTriShapeData->Num UV Sets
I don't get this step. Why you create 4097 UV maps? It's bug or featur?

This is weird: I looked at both a Morrowind bottle and a Morroblivion bottle, the same thing, and they both had the same number of polygons. I did it for another pair of bottles, again, one from Morrowind and the equivalent from Morroblivion. They both have the same polygon count. Maybe I just got lucky on those two. But if this is really the case, "unoptimzed" misc objects are not what's screwing us up.

In any case, I'll keep looking.

I asked this, because when I change value in my program, it actualy create 4097 copies of original UV map.
So .nif file size was around 250 mb XD

macorn: your doing this with nifskope? because i havent had any problem like that

Clint:  That is not weird, the Morrowind bottles had a huge number of polys.  It may seem strange, but if I remember correctly, only the most detailed Oblivion models had polys approaching that number.  It is not that they are not optimized for Oblivion or Skyrim, it is that they are not optimized for Morrowind.

Eloth: Macorn is the creator of the NIF converter, so I assume that is the program he is using. :)

Actually, you can change every instance of an object and limit it to a specific worldspace. Creating a copy of the original ID would still be better practice though.

is there someone who could convert all the activator meshes? Just delete all particle fx/etc and

they should convert just fine.

I will add similar fx via nifskope.

EDIT: Since no clothes were converted we have to figure out how to tackle that problem aswell.