Creatures Revisited | Morroblivion

Alright so I will try my best to push out Citadel Dagoth Ur tomorrow.

From then onwards I am beginning work on redoing the creatures ... might even convince eloth to join again ... if he is free :p

ETA for Creatures Revisited is about a month from now.

Here is the list of things that I will be working on:

- Animations in General This still needs more testing but I believe that the creatures in morroblivion act a bit too ... hyper. I think that the animations need to be slowed down a bit so they look smoother and organic etc.

- Idle Animations In the creatures that I did and also in the tutorial I suggested that one could use any of the supplied morrowind idles as Oblivion idles ... I was wrong. The base idle animation should be one that shows extremely little to no motion whatsoever ... otherwise you get strange and undesireable behaviours such as Ash Zombies who look behind their shoulders before landing every punch ... and kwama workers who keep noding their heads. The remaining morrowind Idle anims should be added as special idles.

- Animation Errors: A lot of the creature animations spawn errors like "Forward has been exported with "Animate in Place" from max" ... or "Animation note problem" etc. Its unclear as to what extend these errors effect the actual game ... but anyways these will all be fixed to rule out any stability issues. Animation note prolems specially are something that probably must be fixed ... I can see several reasons why the game would want to crash on these.

- Vanishing Creatures Some creatures in Morrowind were supposed to vanish on death ... partially or wholly ... these include the bonelord, ascended sleeper, ancient ghost and Dwarven Spectre. Currently the Ascended Sleepers and bonelords do not vanish at all, and Dwarven Spectres are handled by scripts and are unlootable ... the ancient ghost hasn't been convrted. I've recently figured out how to make things disappear from within the nif {like the heart of Lorkhan ... see my citadel dagoth Video) ... and will be applying that to these creatures.

- Replaced Creatures This one is probably the oldest request I have, one from Daemonnn. Currently Dremora, Clanfears, daedroths, Scamps, Atroanchs and the ancient ghost are replaced by Oblivion Equivalents. Whereas I feel that Clanfears and Fire atroanchs are too close to the morrowind art style to be restored ... I will be restoring the morrowind style Daedroth, Ancient Ghost, Frost Atroanch and Storm Atroanch.

- Meshes Morrowind Meshes are blocky and low poly ... some of them are designed cleverly enough to hide that fact ... but some are not. I will be smoothing out the meshes for a majority of the creatures.

- Textures I originally used the 512x512 version of Darknut's creatures for my creatures ... these will get replaced by 1024x1024 versions ... and in some instances I will now favour Connary over Darknut {only when he remains close enough to the originals to be nearly indistinguishable}

- Havok There is a problem with a handful of the creatures ... where even though they have Havok and are lootable ... they still reset to standing pose when cells are unloaded. I've found that working up skeletons from vanilla meshes rather than copying Havok from 3dsmax usually solves this issue. This should also take a closer look into some speculation that dead creatures cause CTDs.

Last edited by Hashmi1 on 3 Apr 2011 - 00:58.

Thank You Hashmi

My suspicion now, is that many of the random crashes users have been reporting are caused by some missing animation in one of the living creatures, rather than havok on dead ones, but still have not been able to pin it down. Redoing the animations should fix that once and for all. And, this is simply Great by itself! P.S. I think Eloth will be occupied for a while yet with his Visual Upgrade, and clothing, and AI, and cutting a hole in the Ghostfence... :)

This is just a theory, but my

This is just a theory, but my guess is that the culprit is just a resource hog. So relatively low end systems can't handle it at all and crash ... whereas relatively high end systems get away with it.

Also its part of a levelled list ... most of the times the creatures I've found near some of the "repeatedly reported" regions are levelled.

My System is Very High End

I had installed Qarl's Textures, and it totally Whacked everything! So I significantly upgraded my computer in an attempt to solve it (which it didn't, BTW, I ended up completely uninstalling). Unfortunately, Oblivion is too old to take advantage of offloading physics to extra graphics cards, etc. But, 12 cores, 16GB memory, etc. It's not a low end computer. But, that is not to say your theory is not correct, because despite the memory, I still stutter when moving quickly from region to region, so there is definitely memory swap going on, and Oblivion isn't terribly good at handling memory.

High end system here too

Yeah, I was getting the random crashes near Caldera etc. (v022 anyway, haven't played with v023 much).

I am running a core i7 950 / 3.0Ghz, 24 GB ram and a GTX 470.

Creatures

I have never had a crash anywhere near Caldera, but then again, I have not been able to reliably duplicate the problem anywhere. I've trapped a crash a couple of times, but whenever I think I've pineed down the problem, it crops up again. It is elusive, and very frustrating. However, I don't want to get too far off the subject and tromple Hashmi's thread. Great work on the Citadel! It looks like that will be the centerpiece for v024. However, if possible, I think the creatures will be even more eagerly anticipated. Thank you.

Ok ... so now we know its not

Ok ... so now we know its not a system problem ;)

Theory 2 is SkinInstances ... but thats not something to discuss ... I'll try what can be done and we will see if it helps.

Hell yeah

I have also noticed that the creatures are way too hyper active, i.e. the kagouti's and alit's are constantly running when attacking.

Other than that, I think you guys have done a great job on the creatures, save the ancestral ghost which is the same as Oblivion, but when we get that, I'll totally forget that I'm even playing Oblivion. ;)

I wish I could help you guys. I've done some CS work in making dungeons. But unfortunately school consumes most of my time. Hopefully in the summer I can contribute to the project.

Anyways, I think these are great goals that we need to accomplish. Hashmi definitely nailed the head on that one. Great job on what you guys have done so far, and I can't wait to see what you guys do next.