Skywind Graphics: Performance Vs Quality

There are obviously a few camps of people who want slightly different things out of Skywind graphics.

There is the purist; who wants to see the Morrowind game much as it was way back in 2004, with enhancements that come with a new engine. There is also the person that wants to see a game world worthy of a 2013-2014 new release. One which will knock your socks off and commands your attention. I am personally in this category.

Performance Vs Quality; this in a nut-shell is where we can push the boundaries with Skywind. Knowing those boundaries is important. We need to look at who the users of Skywind might be. Are they a mix of low to high end users? Do we cater for a mixed group of users or do we simple state the minimum requirements of what a persons rig needs to be?

I have what I’d consider to be a mid range pc, with a low end graphics card. Do I expect Skwind to cater for me? No I don’t. Morroblivion is already waiting for lower end users. Have fun and enjoy it already!

What are the limits then? A hard question to answer! But I believe at least with some guidelines from the vanilla Skyrim game could help with knowing what a base-line is, and moving forward with that.

I intended to do some analysis on the Skyrim world, using model counts and their subsequent triangle counts, and any other information that might be relevant, on a cell by cell basis.

I also intended to get standard deviations of model statistics for each category; architecture, furniture, clutter and landscapes. This will help to know where limits are and guidelines for each.

Is this like comparing apples to oranges? Maybe, but it still gives indications of what are reasonable limits.

You might ask the question of whether this is really necessary, surely it’s just up to people to make the best possible models they can within acceptable limits and submit them or for us to find and ask for permission to use them.

Yes of course, it’s going to come down more to who is actually willing to work on the project. But also there is a goal that we push things as far as thresholds will allow. Well in my opinion at least.

Two things are a certainty; computers get faster and Bethesda will release another TES. The need to build upon models will always be wanted and encouraged. This is the sort of project that will continue to get better and better overtime.

Does that mean that we should have several sets of meshes, a standard pack and high-end pack? I guess this is up for debate. It’s certainly a possibility. It’s much harder to maintain several different threads of models however. People are working pretty hard on this project already and only so much can be expected of them. But also it might come to a point where a “standard” pack is set and that further work on it is limited. This could be perfect for the purist. The high-end pack could then be free to be more elaborate, pushing fantasy further. This is where I would like to see things head towards.

I'd say we don't hold things

I'd say we don't hold things back. Those with low end rigs should not be playing Skyrim really, and Morroblivion is perfect for them.

What I'm thinking is a quality slightly higher than that of vanilla Skyrim in general. This is a PC mod after all, and we don't have the same console limitations Bethesda had when developing Skyrim.

I think we should always make

I think we should always make sure the mod work on mid range gaming pc's. That way if some with a low end pc comes along they will only get minor lag. I mean are we try to make hi res morrowind or morrowind in skyrim's engine. If it's is equivalent to skyrim then it will appeal to more people, and it make it easy to control quality.

I'm kind of thinking a bit

I'm kind of thinking a bit into the future really. Its not something that is so important at the moment, but I believe in a years time we are going to want to squeeze as much as we can out of the gamebro engine.

I installed the Morrowind Graphics Sound Overhaul 3.0 the other day for TES3, and the installer has a very comprehensive set of options depending on your pc specifications. I don't think we need to get carried away on Skywind but it maybe that we could do something similar? Mid-High-Ultra.

We have a few coders who could work on such a thing. Skywind is such a big mod and there are quite a few different way to configure a system that something like this could be really beneficial. The other thing is having a really tight way of installing updates for users. It maybe that installer checks files and can recommend what is required for the latest version. Remember that this is probably the biggest mod...ummm...ever to date! I think once it goes to release candidate that there will still be weekly updates.

I think texture optimizer

I think texture optimizer could help here:

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/13529

Btw Beth's way is probably the best: standard content and then HD dlc pack.

What if you guys put out a

What if you guys put out a purist version that looked just like the original but had all the movements of mechanics of skyrim. No graphics, textures, meshes overhaul- just leave as is and enhance the gameplay. We all loved the original for the most part. Except the plastic enchantment appearance. Not only that the look they went with went closer to the concept art. Looks are nice, but IF you don't have a great time you don't feel all of what's there.

Don't get me wrong I want to see an awesome updated version with enhanced graphics. I think we the fans keep asking for a Morrowind-remake. We have it and play it at the right time, you know?! I visualize it all the time and ask for it. I'm talking about the game that has graphics better than Mass Effect and beautiful clean gameplay. Where Vivec is busy and vibrant, Where the Red Mountain howls, where merchants from the mainland are going back and forth between Mournhold and Balmora on Silt Strider. It's out there we are making it and enjoy it. It take's time for those dragging in and out of the past and looking ahead like there is a future. Do it now folks! It's here! Live in the now! It's how everything works in this reality, and our loved and successful works show this.

For now though I'm happy with outdated graphics and always have been. I'm in love with the story and gameplay the most. Gameplay with a good story will always sell. Graphics are always optional and a third primary option whether anyone chooses to agree or not.

Morrowind is the FFVII of the elderscrolls in the sense that a great game was made in a series during a huge graphics jump and story building. We the fans loved it and of course are willing ourselves into carrying it along with us. We are immortalizing it. It wont be a forgotten game overall by western RPG gamers and a lot of eastern too.

Personally I want to see the story told well, ridable Guar, mini games(fishing, target practice, cards, betting, songs, etc...), a lot of SKyrim features, realistic combat, and immersive graphics(threads of hair, realistic movements, footprints, wear and tearing, fun engaging dialogue, proffesional voice acting, etc..) however graphics are always optional. STORY GAMEPLAY.

You guys don't have to worry about story on this project. More so gameplay, and for many of you graphics. Make that awesome game guys.

Keep up the good work!

re:

i see this very simple you make a top grafix version becuase most o the resources you have at your disposal and most of what u already are making are at least 2k to 4k. Ofc after u manage to make the mode u can make a low end version with 1k to 2k grafix or lower.

A lot of the textures are

A lot of the textures are already 2k. A major overhaul of textures has been done. There is a wealth of resources out there and its a case of making sure that we get the balance between the Morrowind feel and detailed textures. I can see that once people can start playing the full version of the game that you will start to see people create their own packs for it. Oblivion moddlers already did this with some of the Morrowind in Oblivion mods. So hopefully some of the Skyrim fans will do the same as well.

Vibrant Morrowind. Dark Morrowind. 4k Hlaalu Retexture. That sort of thing. Of course we will always try to seek out the best of the best. I think we will just baseline it at the 2k, as this is what we have for the most part already. There can be a 4k pack in the future, if possible.

The main focus for this thread was for meshes. Its not often that users are offered several different options for models for a mod, but it might be the case with Skywind, such is the scale.

As @Inwah1408 shows there are various things that people want out of the game. I think that is probably what will happen, there will be a standard pack which is essentially Morrowind ported into Skyrim. I'm wanting to push things as far as they can go graphics wise, so another pack which is the high-end fantasy pack. Meaning that architecture could be remodeled for variation as well. It might even be that you see multiple versions of usually the same models. I've seen at least 4 different packs of the Emperor Parasols (giant mushroom trees, of which there are 3 versions in each pack). It maybe that they don't all mix well, but with a bit of work having this type of variety as an option is pretty enticing. An optional plugin for Skywind model varieties could be made. Getting ahead of myself here, but anything is possible.

Hmmm, I think a better buy a new graphics card, mine is 5 years old and not sure if its going to be able to handle this vision.

Quests first, then landscape

A quick solution to this problem is creating the quests first once the npcs are done, then having the HD stuff in a plugin installer that will either overwrite the low rez stuff in an esp or will contain an updated ESM for the HD version.

Personally I want the HD morrowind not the low rez, same goes for skyblivion HOWEVER I dont want to play it in the 4th era until Ive played it atleast once or twice in 3rd era in the skyrim engine so I can have a sense of progression for my time travelling dovakin/thrice renamed neravene,

Speaking of which, supreme, any chance your 4th era skyblivion could be make into a seperate worldspace so those of us playing the 3rd era skyblivon can then jump into your 4th era version?

But yeah, an installer plugin or replacer once the mod is finished would be good. We wouldnt have to worry about waiting until the last minuite if people made seperate versions on their HD. Still this is up to the skywind team and not us forumites, really in the end, whatever gets the mod out in the end and doesn't bog it down I am for.

I say we should just stick to

I say we should just stick to one set for now to save the Skywind team the work of updating multiple sets. And when the game is more complete then think about doing more than 1 set.

I think two sets is about the maximum we would want to do though. Anything more is just asking for problems.

Gregthegen wrote: Speaking of

Gregthegen
Speaking of which, supreme, any chance your 4th era skyblivion could be make into a seperate worldspace so those of us playing the 3rd era skyblivon can then jump into your 4th era version?

That's what I was planning. Toward the beginning of the of the 4E mod you will be contracted by a divine (like talos or akatosh... most likey akatosh). and he(or they) will give you a new power or shout or spell or something that you can travel through time with.

Back on topic:

I say we make everything 2k for now,( and later make insane resolution packs) that's a good quality and it can't make or brake the mod. simply put no one can complain, like if we had it at 512 the only thing we would here is " make it higher res." and "I don't like it, it should be 32k textures" After wards we can make 4k texture or an installer that tests your graphics capability and installs the texture accordingly. (you know how you can click "set quality to default" on the skyrim launcher and it checks your computers graphics and sets it to what you can handle, something like that).

When we install Skyrim for

When we install Skyrim for the first time it tests the system specs,and sets the mode that should run the smoothest on that PC,low medium,hegh or ultra.

So if skywind uses or needs slightly higher specs then lag will be seen ingame and users could just lower thier graphics setting by one notch assuming it is not at low setting already,in that case lowering the grass distance etc can be done.

But as we already do that depending on mods loaded etc,imo just leaving the setting up part to the user,might be better.?

Some systems are also setup better than other,for example a system 4 years old might perform better than the latest rig,it depends a lot on the skill of the user or builder.

The graphics card on one of my older systems is only an HD 4600 card,but skyrim gives it an ultra setting mode,but the same system with a modern card might give lower settings.

is it too much to hope for

is it too much to hope for vanilla skyrim-size assets? that way those who can run the game well will run skywind properly, and those that can use HD will get upped textures. Meshes should be optimized, however.

Darker morrowind sounds awesome however.

Shouldn't the choice be the

Shouldn't the choice be the same like in Morroblivion?

The "regular" version which requires just slightly more power than vanilla Skyrim and the "visual overhaul" version which will push more advanced gaming rigs to their very limit?

Right some preliminary

Right some preliminary results are in! I have got some statistics on vanilla Skyrim and Skywind to do with mesh numbers. None of this is an exact science, but helps to know where we stand with what the gamebryo engine is capable of.

For this first analysis I've concentrated on Architecture. This includes exterior and interior.

The values that I have totaled are number of vertices, number of triangles, radius and number of textures. These are the averages per model.

	Number Vertices	Number Triangles	Num Textures	Radius
Skyrim	2021.173369	1602.083839	4.593323217	367.1594773
Skywind	840.7100353	777.3671205	7.262733232	311.6669623
Difference	1180.463334	824.7167185	-2.669410015	55.492515

I used the radius to give an indication that the models are fairly close to being the same things. The reason is the "architecture" does not necessarily mean a building. It could be bits that make a building, or even clutter. So I used this stat just to make sure that we are close to comparing same things.

Its clear that Skyrim architecture models have over double the number of vertices and triangles that our current Skywind is running. However the Skywind meshes use more textures on average than Skyrim ones do. I think this is just an indication of how they got smarter over the years with mapping textures more efficiently.

So although I'd like to say that we can simply afford to double our poly count for architecture, there needs to be some research into the impact of having almost an extra 3 textures per model. Not sure how to go about that!?

The other thing that needs to be done is to actually compare game worlds. I am getting the numbers for each cell in both Skyrim and Sywind. So I'll essentially have these numbers but for a given cell. What does that mean? Well it will allow us to see an average and maximum range that Bethesda was happy with for the game. Its pretty hard to compare cells between these games, but still allows us to know where limits are. My gut feeling is that Morrowind is much lower than Skyrim in terms of actual models placed in cells, plus their poly counts. Its all to do with trees i think. The dominate thing in Skyrim is trees, and although there are a number of busy places in Ascadian Isles and Bitter Coast, the far more desolate landscapes of Morrowind leaves much room for improvement with models themselves. This is one of the advantages of porting Morrowind into Skyrim, as its game world was designed to be far more complex. We get to think about how we can push Skywind graphics further - well imo.

Here are some results for

Here are some results for clutter. I was more interested in seeing if we needed to optimize clutter, as we have had some erroneous models with far too many polys that were crashing the game. However the results between Skyrim and Skywind are pretty similar.

	Number Vertices	Number Triangles	Num Textures	Radius
Skyrim	985.1913652	1036.578763	2.148774796	82.56908677
Skywind	592.0154083	817.4021572	2.653312789	38.92210596
Difference	393.1759569	219.1766058	-0.504537993	43.64698081

The thing that is quite different is the sizes. Models for clutter on average are over twice the size. What does this mean? Well either everything was made for giants, or in fact what is constituted as clutter has gotten larger in Skyrim. A quick look through the 1700 items of clutter reveals that there are some large items indeed. The eye of magus (you know the one that fills a room) is clutter. Other things like some walls and rubble are under the clutter category, so its a hard category to define. Doesn't really matter. The best thing to do here is to eliminate any problem meshes, which I can see there are still a few that need to be optimized. Eloth has already sorted out a number of them, so his work continues to get us where we want.

so the meshes are less

so the meshes are less performance-intensive but the textures are higher? with a SD resolution pack it would be brilliant!

Well the thing is there are

Well the thing is there are more textures per model, but there is probably going to be less textures per cell (i.e less meshes per cell). Probably.

There has been a SD pack for as long as Morroblivion has been around. It won't be supported going forward.

Well I managed to do some

Well I managed to do some mass converting of the Morrowind Graphics and Sound Overhaul, and too be honest it was a very disappointing on how many custom models there are :( 284 models available and not sure what benefits we actually get from them.

What I have is a spreadsheet with model stats of Skywind as it currently stands, MGSO and also the original Morrowind meshes.

They way it looks is that we need to focus on optimizing some of our clutter as they run way over any recommended standards, still causing fps drops and crashes. I'm also a bit wary of some of the MGSO models as it has clutter that poly counts are too high for what you get back.

Although these are fairly arbitrary numbers, I have some statistics on vanilla Skyrim and also Skywind. I picked a block ( 0,-2 ) which covers Riverwood with 64 cells total. It gives an indication that triangle counts average about 40,000 each cell, with Riverwood04 having the highest at 130,000. Skywind currently stands at 10,000 avg, with Wolverinehall/Sadrith Mora being the highest in the block I scanned ( 4,0 ) with 70,000.

Rather than focusing on just on "hi-res" of models, we also the need to do level design and this includes adding more objects into the world. This is to make it more seemless and realistic. I'm going to try and get a team brainstorming on how we can achieve better results with our landscape. Much of this is going to be derived from techniques that can be observed through Skyrim, or any other game for that matter.

Maybe i shouldn't even post

Maybe i shouldn't even post anything in here as i don't know much in that matter, but one thing that i thought of concerning textures.

When i was checking out dwemer warhammer (the one imported from Morrowind) in NifSkope, it was divided into 10 objects, each had a texture assigned. Probably the same texture but it was assigned few times. I think that is where the difference come from. Probably when we implement more of our custom models it will change (more polies but whole model assigned to one texture - though bigger). Or maybe i totally don't get the data that happy was showing here. Or maybe i should just shut up. I'm sorry.

/leaves in a hurry

The thing is, I don't have a

The thing is, I don't have a 'low end' PC, a GTX 560 is not bad and therefor I should be able to get at least 50-60 fps in most places but unfortunately, Skywind's performance reminds me of the area around Morthol in Skyrim - very choppy. I think it might be an idea to make all textures above 1k to 1k and provide a second link with unresized textures. Because right now, I get better performance with Skyrim running HD 2k than I do with Skywind.

LASentry wrote:

LASentry
The thing is, I don't have a 'low end' PC, a GTX 560 is not bad and therefor I should be able to get at least 50-60 fps in most places but unfortunately, Skywind's performance reminds me of the area around Morthol in Skyrim - very choppy. I think it might be an idea to make all textures above 1k to 1k and provide a second link with unresized textures. Because right now, I get better performance with Skyrim running HD 2k than I do with Skywind.

Mhm. It seems like a lot of people here are assuming everyone has GTX 760s or whatever and that even GTX 560ti is low-end. It's a pretty ridiculous assumption.

Vivec wrote:

Vivec
Mhm. It seems like a lot of people here are assuming everyone has GTX 760s or whatever and that even GTX 560ti is low-end. It's a pretty ridiculous assumption.

Nah, a gtx 560ti is more mid ranged than low end with current games like skyrim...However with new games coming out its starting to show its age. Source: I had a 560 ti [External image]

Hey Happy, I think that it's

Hey Happy, I think that it's good you brought this up because Skyrim has a limiter on how much memory the game can use. It will crash if pressed anything beyond that point so we have to make sure that things we include in the game bridge the gap between looking good and being efficient. This needs to be given a lot of visibility to make sure that each department builds a mod that can be run smoothly.

Skyrim's graphics were

Skyrim's graphics were heavily restricted during development for the consoles, and the game was optimized to run best on the Xbox 360 (the least-powerful system). The PC version is almost a port of the 360 version; if you really get into the meat and potatoes of Skyrim and take a look at the fine details, you'll notice that a lot of textures and meshes are very low-quality, even with the updated texture pack for the PC. It doesn't take much to run, and I guess you could say it's a low-end game in a high-end game's clothing.

The people who will be most interested in Skywind are going to be PC players who have likely already modded Skyrim to improve its graphical capabilities through ENBs, texture packs, mesh replacers, etc. Those obviously won't be the only people who dig the mod, but I'm willing to wager they'll make up a large chunk of the playerbase.

One thing about Morrowind is that graphically, it's incredibly dated. Directly importing the original meshes and textures is fine for development purposes, but I think there's a lot that can be done to improve them and make them more appealing to the demographic that's going to be playing the mod. If you look at things like the Morrowind overhaul or the various graphical ENBs available for TES games you can see that the engines can be pushed well beyond the limitations of their vanilla release and still run smoothly on a range of machines. I think it would be best for the project, and a great opportunity, to improve the quality of the game's visuals as much as we can within reason. I think the players would really appreciate it, and Skywind could look leagues better than Skyrim if we can pull it off.

Just my two cents.

The thing is, graphically,

The thing is, graphically, Skywind doesn't look that great in all places yet it is extremely demanding compared to Skyrim so it just needs to be optimized and it should run a lot better.

Can I just say, anyone who

Can I just say, anyone who says Morrowblivion is there for the low end PC owners: No. It's not the same.

Any system that can run the

Any system that can run the official high-res texture pack with no FPS issues should be able to handle Skywind. We can definitely go a bit higher res than the official high-res pack but going between 2k and 4k for everything is ridiculous.

You need to get Skywind to as

You need to get Skywind to as much of an audience as possible so I think you should go for performance. Couldn't you have a optional pack to improve the textures for people with better PCs?

Optimizing meshes are a must

Optimizing meshes are a must as already stated, and I think 2k textures should be the HD option also. Make everything in 2k, back it all up, then scale them down to 1k so that people with mid to low end computers can at least play it. I seriously don't think we should go for 4K at all because of the 3.1 GB limit for RAM and VRAM each. 4K just isn't feasible with the engine we have, at least not if we want to cover all the landscape/buildings and armors/weapons with it.

Someone mentioned SMCO for optimizing meshes/textures. Don't use it. If you optimize a bunch of meshes with it, your game is almost certain to crash, as it's an experimental feature of SMCO. And where texture optimizing is concerned, http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/12801/? is MUCH better for it.