Level Design - Skywind #1

Veltoss was going to do Balmora and we want to convert the Morrowind mod Balmora Expanded before altering anything otherwise the work will be lost :(

Why are we having such a big push to "redesign" everything.  I'm all for a little updating, but it is far more important just to get the base game running correctly.  And even once that is done, such huge changes would be better reserved for mods.  Also, I wouldn't hold out for anything from Morrowind getting converted over.  It's quite simply, far too difficult.

Why convert Morrowind into the Skyrim engine in the first place? Well its about leveraging it capabilities. One of these is the fact Skyrim can process many more objects than could the original Morrowind engine and its obvious from the detailed world of Skyrim that Bethesda used this to paint a detailed world. Fact: Morrowind in the Skyrim engine just isn't up to par with what we are used to with games anymore, so its about getting talent to work on it now, rather than later, and not doubling up on work.

If you give the option for people between installing a "beautification mod" or not, what are they going to choose every single time? So why would you want to create two streams of work and support?

...and because its fun to redesign a world of Morrowind as envisioned by fans. Its what will separate this project from being a "port" to a true Elder Scroll community masterpiece.

I'm fairly persistent, I'll get what we need converted over.

Balmora and Suran have been expanded to suit the feel of places of trade. Eloth is going to work on Balmora :)

Great Mireneye!

Smerk10 is working on a few models starting with the Slave Market in Sadrith Mora.

Modders Resources:

Telvanni Mesh Improvement for Morrowind by Champion of Hircane. Smoothing to original models. Exteriors only.

Telvanni Tileset by Jon Satriani's for Oblivion. Has some exterior pieces, however not many match the original tileset. Could be used for extra variety or scale/remodeled with additional level design.

Finally there is the stuff from dragonborn.

It brings tears to my eyes...perfect Veltoss! When we talk about level design this is what we mean, Pelagiad will be our show case town for both gamers and would be editors...thats of course if you don't mind?

We will get some before and after pictures and show how adding detail really makes a place feel lived in and realistic, without taking anything away from how the original Morrowind was layed out.

Mireneye is working on the models of stone walls that you see around Pelagiad. Eloth is converting the Sheogorad models at the moment which will have some nice "common" house replacers. Leaf4d is going to do the interiors for Imperial structures, so the fort itself will be nicely remade. Ravanna has even made a nice new well for the village :)

Running around Pelagiad its empty, feels not used by actual occupants and doesn't hold any interest for would be wary travelers. The fort especially seems like its been built with no purpose. According to the wiki it was build as protection for the plantation owners who live there. But you walk into the fort its literally just walls, 2 stacks of crates, 2 rocks and some torches, hardly a place of interest. It would seem that if its truly a fort built for the people of the village that the continuity between occupants would be more like that you might see in the scenes of medieval castles, with villagers moving around the walls, selling their wares, talking to the guards or just generally loitering.

Oh yeah I think Pelagiad is as good as town as any to have a few farm animals keeping the residence suitable working and fed. Chickens, cows, goats, plus dogs and cats?

No worries about a market. Maybe I've been a watching too much Games of Thrones (if that is possible!) and i like the scenes in the castle walls where there is plenty of activity, with mud, pigs, sellers, everything that a fortress would bring with the idea of security for an area. Its not just a sleeping quarter for guards after all. But this is just one small town in Morrowind, the idea was for every town that would have this type of feel.

Yeah, I was actually meaning to mention that. There are some open areas between the stone walls that look like they're begging for both animals and a garden or two. The only garden-like thing anywhere around town is four corkbulbs and I don't think those are sustaining any villagers >.>'

Those four corkbulbs certainly are a prized possession for Pelagiad! Yeah a few gardens and animals, even some flower planters for those more proud residence :)

I've put this in the top post, but this is a map of Morrowind (specifically Skywind), so that people can see what areas are being worked on. The areas that are colored grey are our current edited ones.

Some of it is pretty general as I don't know exactly what cells have been altered, until I get the plugins from each person, but its a good indication. The light grayed ones are done by Anthelius so are specific because I have his plugin.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Alvwmz6hbHGPdGZib2ZTLXh1S195WWRSaE1XZUtfTGc#gid=0

Starting to get more people onboard with level design so I want to clear things as far as clutter and furniture or anything else the humanoids of Tamriel make.

We have to ask the question what makes something a Morrowind, Cryodiil or Skyrim piece of clutter?

If we simply use the set from Morrowind we run into a few problems. Mainly limitations of a small set of options. Also a would be editor will probably be horrified when dragging an item into the world, that it looks pretty bad...and you would be justified.

We quite obviously need replacements for a lot of these existing items. This will help to see an end result. I ask you to then think of Skyrim replacement or modders resource, that could be good. These can be from Morrowind and Oblivion as well.

Here is where it get tricky. Do we simply want to replace with one of these items? The argument against this is the we potentially lose the uniqueness that you would find in Morrowind. Of course you straight up get a high quality model. So the answer lies in between. If you think something transitions between the varying provinces then make that judgment call. Maybe it might need a re-texture, or a tweak of the model itself, but at the end of the day we need to deliver items that editors can use, that fit into the Morrowind world.

Ok so there are A LOT of resources out there. How do we pick and choose what to use? Well like many things in this project its going to be trial and error. What we are going to do is build up a Super Set of resources. We will have as many items available as we can get our hands on. Anything that seems inappropriate will be stripped out of course, but it will still be a large set. This seems a bit excessive, but without available options we can't build up a picture of what we will finally use. When we are nearing our final approach for a release we can do a review of items used. If we have unused or even limited use of items, then these can be removed/replaced by another item.

When is a piece of clutter just a piece of clutter? I think the number one rule is that if it doesn't look out of place then its perfect. Is there really a difference between a Morrowind bale of hay or a Skyrim one? Shovels, axes, blocks of wood, piles of anything, the list is pretty extensive that really translate without thinking that they look Nordic or Skyrim like.

Furniture, particular household wares; like bottles, urns, dining sets, lamps, lanterns, are all examples of Morrowind specific items that we would like to keep. They are in a unfinished state at the moment, so please bare with until we get replacements.

Ingredients can be used a lot, especially in interiors, food stuff, etc sitting on a table. They are pretty grim looking at the moment, so if you can see past the unrealistic look of them and hopefully with some modeler magic we will be able to get them looking like real bits of ingredients some time soon. Don't be shy using these as clutter population.

Don't be afraid of trying stuff, it somebody thinks that the item you have put into the world reminds them of Skyrim too much then it can always be replaced. Better to get the world populated, as its always easier to removes stuff or find something more appropriate.

These are things that I think we should create to help with clutter, especially the interiors.

Hanging ingredients and dead animals. Skyrim have these hanging from rafters in many interiors and I think it would be great to have Morrowind specific ones instead. So rather than rabbits and pheasants, things like Shalks and Slaughter fish? Yeah its slim picking for food in Morrowind :( Also create hanging bunches for all the vegetation ingredients.

It would be nice to have full hides of the creatures of Morrowind as well. There are some "hides" for ingredients, but they really are small and lack detail, already cut up to put into your bag type thing. These would be ornamental versions that can adorn walls, or hang up on fences, etc, with depth of fur, scales, etc

We need to have some open window shutters! It seems that every window in Morrowind is closed! Will give us a chance to start using some of the those nice beams of light...you know the ones with flecks of dust :)

Also with some open windows we can apply the effect of the indoor tapestry hangings moving, it really makes a difference, breaths life into a room.

A lot of the building interiors are dominated by red/yellow/brown items such as carpets, tapestry and general clutter. At the moment the ambient lighting is set to a dark brown/red hue. The result is an over saturation in the red spectrum and so the interiors come across with gaudy unnatural lighting, with many of the clutter almost psychedelic...like you might of tried one too many of the mushrooms growing outside, you know the magic kind.

I had some success with moving the ambient lighting to the blue range to neutralize this effect, but I'm not lighting expert, so I think if we have people experimenting and setting up new templates for specific architectural interiors we will be getting closer to what we want. Just experiment when you come to doing an interior and make sure you communicate any results and successes.

The stonewall looks great, cant wait to get it in game :)

It became "psychedelic" after the script to boost lights fading value was used. The problem is not with colors (the last thing you should alter is ambient lighting, I believe it comes directly from Morrowind), but with light sources themselves.

I removed light sources from a room, so I know what you mean about light radius and this has no bearing on the actual colour saturation on an area. Interiors were over saturated towards red spectrum even before the script was run to extend the light radius of sources.

It pretty clear that Morrowind ambient values do no look the same as Skyrim ones. They have a different effect, plus you have directional lighting in Skyrim which when both are in effect you get ranges of both colours. It just so happens that the ambient colour has been inserted into this value (same colour), and the effect seems to be a double dose of one end of the spectrum, so highlights this even more.

It would be a total surprise if the TES3 engine lighting were to translate exactly to the TES5 one!

We simply want to get back to the same tones of the original Morrowind interiors. Level designer will need to play with settings given the environment they are in. Hopefully once we get a few templates perfect then we can apply them to the appropriate places. One template is not going to work for all of them. There is probably going to be one for each architectural tileset and a template for the different cave types.

Repeated thread but want to make sure level designers are aware of possible push for more unique landscape models for Morrownin landscape rather than using just Skyrim assets:

I've spent a while adding a few more Skyrim landscape type models for level designers and it becoming clearer and clearer to me that we need to make our OWN meshes.

Sure the available set can get the job done, but in a fairly compromising way.

Here it is; Skyrim assets are broadly based around rocks. Morrowind has a lot of rocks, but most of the areas are subject to argument what the ground is made of. If its deemed that a hill is in fact a good proportion of solid rock then fine, these Skyrim assets do the job nicely.

But one problem at the moment is that we run the risk of adding too many rocks into the world.

Also Morrowind is made up of a lot of small hills. Of course it depends on what region you are in, but its almost 90% based around these small rolling hills and mounds.

You even need to notice the common shape and angle of these hills to start to get a feel for what type of landscape models would better suit the Morrowind environment.

After playing around with re-texturing Dirt Cliffs, Rocks, Tundra, Volcanic, Mountains and designing in the Creation Kit, in my opinion, unless you spend a lot of time trying to "merge" the pieces into the landscape they otherwise become too dominate. We are trying to keep the original feel, while making it seem like a more visually realistic environment.

My apologies to those that might have already come up with conclusion but until you actually try the models in the world its hard to know what works.

Ravannas models here are absolutely the type of things we need. The problem with the Skyrim dirt cliffs is that they were made for much higher faces and more or less used for level changes of one flat area to another. Morrowind is always a series of rolling hills, 30%-45% and continuous. Making the dirt cliffs work is doable, but also a real pain. The angles of the meshes don't fit well with the slopes and if you're good you will try and make them unrecognizable as Skyrim stuff. Its a lot of effort.

So the embankments are one area of models that would be nice to have people working on. The model that Ravanna did above was one very big one, but I think we need a series of small ones as well. Made to shapes that will be easier to apply to 20%-45% slopes. Again depending on area but rather than rocks we can have dirt rubble, just to keep the volume of rocky surfaces down. If you can imagine a series of models that have much the shape of hill side but with broken surfaces to show small erosion. Where the Skyrim dirt cliff are based on 90% angles, these ones will be designed for more like 30% and more concave than convex in shape.

All this explanation is a bit fuzzy, but I just want us to get talking about it again.

Most importantly we avoid making Morrowind look like Skyrim.

You mean everything I'm working on now is completely useless? oh god...

No, no, no...your stuff is ALL GOOD. You've picked ridges, mounds and mountains that scream that they should be rocky terrain :)

The Grazelands stuff looks brilliant, it reminds me of when I was traveling through the Serengeti and there were these small rocky mounds that had baboons and wild pigs surrounding them.

And the ridge that separates the Bitter Coast from the Ascadian Isles and West Gash is perfect.

The difference is that when you don't have your plugin installed these areas look naked...like our NPCs :-p

I'm more concerned about using too many Skyrim assets exclusively, especially at eye level around paths. So hopefully if we can get about a dozen embankment type models for around the paths and the base of hills, then we will be in great shape.

Can you tell me what you are working on now anthelius?

This also brings up the problem of deciding what areas are supposed to be rocky, and that we can use rock cliffs in, and what areas should be kept primarily rolling hills. While we're on the topic.. what should we do right now on the ones we're all currently working on? Like the cells Anthelius is working on and has worked on, Pelagiad for myself, and so on. Should we wait until there are more dirt models done, skip to rocky areas for now, or...?

Well everything that has been done so far is fine. To put it into perspective Skyrim uses the dirt cliffs about 1000 times. Even if we use them hundreds of times, the fact is that the meld into the environment because we are talking about a lot of real estate with Morrowind!! But we certainly didn't want to make this our only landscape assets for the non rock areas...

However help is already on the way :)

This is a sample of using a mesh that Ravanna made. This particular one is for the West Gash, so needs to be retextured for given areas. Unfortunately the textures are not tiled like Skyrim ones, so need to have a new UV mapped texture when we want a different one, but we will get onto that. It maybe that for the Ascadian Isles that its a tuft and dirt face instead of rocks or whatever.

I'll PM you guys a link, have a play around with them and start making notes of models that you would like to have. What you think might work in the areas you are doing and make a wish list. After all this is a process of figuring what will look good and also what would be easier to work with.

I personally would like to have some smaller models, with some bended shapes to fit around corners of smaller hills, that type of thing.

This also brings up the problem of deciding what areas are supposed to be rocky, and that we can use rock cliffs in, and what areas should be kept primarily rolling hills.

If you load up TES3 you will get a much better idea of exactly what things are supposed to be. An unusual statement, but they really tried to use the textures to show what is supposed to be rocks, dirt, grass, etc. So if you use TES3 as a guide its almost impossible to second guess what an area is supposed to be like.

The problem in Skywind is that the translation of textures from porting has not faired well. Its a combination of textures not mapping altogether, so you might might see "sand" (this was the default assigned to problem mapping) and also black areas. On top of this the texture replacements although nicely hi resolution, do not show up well what type a surface was truly supposed to be. Its a strange thing but a rock texture kind of gets lost in translation and everything looks like mounds or rolling hills, rather than the jagged rock surfaces that they are supposed to be.

Ascadian Isles is a mix between grass and dirt. I think we can benefit from breaking up the landscape with the embankment type meshes, and a few customs things. We'll have a bit of think on this area as it transitions from a few different things.

Azuras Coast/Mogar Amur/Grazelands - all small islands are basically rock.

Mogar Amur - all lava rock.

The ridge between Mogar Amur and the coast is rock, with the coast side transitioning between dirt and grass.

Red Mountain - all rock

Bitter Coast - all the high ridges are rock

Grazelands - i guess slightly up for debate on the nature on the mounds, but I think anthelius nailed it with the design used. [EDIT] No debate I loaded up the Construction Set and these are supposed to be rock mounds :)

West Gash  - un reviewed. Ravanna is looking and doing work on this area at the moment.

Ashlands - all rock

Sheogorad - un reviewed