Quest conversion and Skyblivion development organization

I also started with Oblivion so I'd love to see it in the Skyrim engine. Basically the current version of Skyblivion consists of vanilla Oblivion textures and most of the vanilla meshes. We really need to start fresh before we can redistribute files and things like that due to legal things. This isn't a bad thing because it means we know exactly what we want to put in the game and what or want to take out. For example, we can make higher definition textures and higher polygon meshes which really advances Cyrodiil so it's ready for this generation of games. There are a few threads with screenshots of what people have already done with Skyblivion and hopefully we can use what they have made to construct a 0.2 release.

The version numbering for Skywind and Morroblivion is different than that. It would be good to be somewhat consistent across projects for less confusion.

More likely, version .5 would be where there are almost no CTDs, chargen works, and you can basically explore and find every item. NPCs would likely come around here only in terms of face creation. AI packages? The ones in Morroblivion still aren't finished.

Version 1 would be something with every item (or a placeholder) in the game and landscaping all done.

And as for the main quest? Probably version 15-20.

Side quests? Version 50 or so.

I think it's kind of strange that some people ares still dedicated to Morroblivion, we need more help with Skywind and Skyblivion. Any idea how to convert voices from Oblivion to Skyrim? That's all we have to do... except we can't redistribute the actual voices only the program to do it in.

Here is the main problem.

You can't make quests until NPCs can move.

You can't make them move until they have AI packages.

AI packages won't work until navmeshes are done.

Navmeshes can't be done until meshes are fixed.

You can't fix meshes because there are no batch tools for that. You can fix them one by one using 3dmax which takes around 15 minutes for a single mesh (not sure on that). Considering there are 5000+ meshes to fix, so yeah...

Thats why Skyblivion is deadlocked.

If you really want to so something not involving meshes, you can create imagespaces/weathers/climates for Skyblivion. I mentioned the problems with current ones in other threads.

Damn, thats bad news!
I would have really liked to see skyblivion get off the planning stage and into production.
But perhaps we'll see it some day.
 

When Skywind quests and dialogues are done, I will help for the same in SKyblivion. One thing that would be interesting is to implement the dialogue conversion process that Zilav posted a few weeks back (I can try and find it again if necessary).

Also, since people are doing little here and there, it's important that this work is not lost. I have a tracker for skyblivion.

Could you please provide some noob-proof guide on how to manually fix a single mesh in 3ds max/nifskope/chunkmerge? I can't promise anything, but maybe I'll be able to do it in a slave labour monkey way :)

If someone is up to it we need to fix the animated meshes too (doors, traps, ayleid stairs, levers..), and we still don't have the oblivion planes meshes.

@Gothryd

That's the problem - noone knows except eloth who is the only one fixing them manually in Skywind, and even his meshes are crashing sometimes and he fixes them again (like those rocks recently). I can only assume that the process is quite complicated and time consuming. Not even talking about animated meshes, that stuff can kill...

@zilav Which is easier to complete:

 

• Collaboration between 10 people to create a batch tool that automatically fixes meshes (assuming such a tool is possible).

 

• Collaboration between 10 people to manually fix meshes.

 

I would be willing to help out with either given a few links to relevant tutorials :)

I we want to create a new tool it's won't help us to be 10 or 20, a single an very talented programmer is enough but the problem is how to find this guy...

Until then we can probably start to fix the most problematics exterior meshes if eloth tells us how to do it.

After checking out Skyblivion for real, I somehow want it more and more...

This may sound like a far-fetched idea, but hear me out:

Brand new voice-overs.

There are websites full of people with amazing talent who want to get into voice acting, and the entry point for a great deal of them is getting involved with projects like this. I've spoken with a few voice actors who have done some work on a mod I'm doing. So far it is going along great. Considering that Oblivion only had like 10-20 voice actors (at least that's what it felt like), we could easily find that many who would be willing to do this. Not to mention we could add more variety to the game by adding more voicetypes.

Another reason why this is a better alternative than converting them is because we have to do more than just convert them. Voice files are named based on their quest, form id, and I believe speaker. Said conversion tool would have to rename each individual voice file and create a new LIP file after converting, OR we would have to go into TESVnip and modify the file path for each voice file.

FormIDs are the same for everything (including quests and speakers).

I say we try and hire some professionals like Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean...wait..hang on a minute...

I guess the reality is that you need somebody constantly driving and organizing such a thing. We are struggling with getting Morroblivion/Skywind voice acting done and there has been a very long history with that, and actually no shortage of enthusiam by some. But the shear scale of the task is overwhelming.

How about you ask your voice actors to work on Skywind first? Especially any females.

I am beyond happy to become a driving force for Skyblivion (I'm mixed in with the lot who desire to see Skyblivion completed more than any Morrowind task). However, I want to make sure that their effort and mine will not be wasted. If I were to get a voice type fully done, would the people of Skyblivion actually use them?

My understanding is that Skyblivion is largely in a state of Anarchy; there's people doing things, but there's no central leadership (if there is, can someone point me in their direction?). Since that is the case, I'd assume there's no "team" of people who reject and accept parts of it, voices included.

If I were to compile all the voices and their respective quests into a plugin file, would people use it? (I know you can't place things all too well because of a lack of navmesh, but we can still create the Aliases and characters, then place them in later.

Honestly, it's a complete waste of time to redo all the voices :/ I know some people want to redo everything because they're affraid of bethesda secret police but in this case I'd much prefer a brand new project like beyond skyrim and their 4e cyrodiil. Plus oblivion is voiced in a lot of languages so non english speakers can still use their own voice packs.

There are much more useful tasks to do now...

^

This. Skyblivion is still a buggy mess without a team leader, and you guys are talking about voice acting for it?

There's not even any dialogue in the master.

Skyblivion is not a buggy mess, it is actually more complete and has less errors than Skywind conversion because I improved conversion scripts since Skywind.

However I agree that voice acting is out of question at this stage, if ever needed at all.

I'm pretty sure Mehh meant the project is a mess, not the master. Bugs are mainly meshes.

digitalparanoid

I'm pretty sure Mehh meant the project is a mess, not the master. Bugs are mainly meshes.

Yep, I meant mainly the meshes not being organized folder wise, meshes crashing due to bad collision and whatnot. I'm well aware that Skyblivion's master is quite stable.

The meshes already have a tes4 folder, only the textures are still messy (we'd need a scripter for this btw).

as for the voice acting, I would definitely leave it for now, maybe once original voice acting is implemented once quests ate done the maybe you can start replacing some voices but until the it's useless even if you did work not it you would have to have all the quests done to be able to put them in game, we're talking years probably as no one is working on it and nobody has even touched any conditions or anything of the sort, also I'm not sure you realize the scope of the voice acting, we're talking well over 30,000 unique lines, then you add all the general and shared lines plus the misc lines, times those by each race and the times that again for each gender and your looking at a more than ridiculous amount of voice acting to be done, then you have to worry about organizing assigning and keeping track of it all not to mention painstakingly listening to every line of dialogue making sure it's in the proper format and that it also has a lip file then renaming each line and lip to the proper name to coincide with the quest that activates it all by hand, plus while doing that make sure every line is said properly and matches up to what the subtitles will say, the you have to convert everything into fuz files and package properly, Bethesda had an entire team and professional voice actors working real hours for months even years to accomplish this, we have a handful of volunteers voice acting whenever they get the chance and one or two people making sure it gets in game, the voice acting is a project all on its own that rivals the scope of the entirety of the skywind project itself and will take much longer than the skywind project to complete. . . . . . . if ever, new voices may be nice but is it really worth it all if the work has already been done by professionals especially on a project that has barely taken off yet, just my 2 cents

Although as zilav posted above the form id's are apparently the same for skyblivion, which means it's possible to write a script and name all the voice files properly so we could put in the original stuff. . . All the original stuff in game in minutes, just convert all the mp3s into wavs then just use a tool to convert them to fuz by batch then place them and your done, that's easy, if you wanna redo all the voices then you have to have people record the voices and make their own lip files and name them properly then you should be able to just replace the old since the id's are the same, much easier than skywind but still a lot of unnecessary work

we need the original voices

 

I don't think its that simple! No one knows the file names, otherwise I got the Skywind voice files done already.

Yes voice files can be batch converted from Oblivion, except GREETINGS ones. They use a different system in Skyrim.