Skyblivion Reborn

First thank you so much for working on it ;) The screenshots looks so great that I can't believe it won't be finished. There will probably be plenty of people to work on it, even if we don't have everything form the original game...

Supreme Epicness looks like he/she is doing a really good job with 4E Cyrodiil and I believe that it's best to work from that master. I think it's worth it. Oblivion has far less content to port over than Skywind.

Though the screenshots do look great. As TES games become shorter and arguably less content heavy, it will be easier to convert them over ;)

I say we should go with yours for the simple fact that there aren't large numbers of errors like the original.  Skyblivion may never be finished, but there is no reason to not do at least a portion of it before TESVI and end of Skywind.

I'd personally be happy with just a single good questline or two converted over.

And I could always port over the remaining storylines like I am doing with Morroblivion. ;)

First, this looks awesome !! :) So awesome that yeah, like anthelius, can't believe it won't be finished ;)

For me, I think the main quest plus maybe the guilds (if it's possible,I don't know what this represents) would be just amazing. And the landscape too, because in skyrim every piece of land is hostile, not like Oblivion. :)

There is on thing I don't understand; you have to delete the extra layers or it's just because of CK's errors ? Without deleting these, how the landscapes were like ?

Thanks :)

I'd be happy with just the thieves guild or the dark brotherhood, or maybe SI.  Point is, just because it won't be complete doesn't mean it won't be worth something.

We're already actually pretty far in Skywind, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was perfectly playable in a year.  Most of the magic is now done, and we're getting a good way along with dialogue conditions.  Plus we have many creatures that we can add to the game.

Soon the only things really holding us back will be scripting and armor.

Something many people don't realize is that Morroblivion was completely playable less than a year after work started on it (excluding the original conversion which just sat gathering dust for several years).

Edit:  Oh, and something I just thought I'd mention.  Because Oblivion has voice acting, I'm fairly certain it actually has fewer dialogue lines than Morrowind.

And I have to say I've seen so many things that were supposed to be impossible in the modding community that I'm not worried very much, especially for a very expected mod like this ;)

edit: @shadow: a bit off topic but, are you using the original sounds for skywind magic? (I'd really like to hear the restoration sound again^^).

Also, it was impossible to generate distant LOD with Oscape and the old master.  This one might bring better luck.

Edit:  Hmm, I hadn't actually thought about it.  Perhaps that should be brought up with Sammael?  He is the one working on spells/ingredients/armor and weapon enchantments.

Edit2:  Oh, and I apologize to everyone for not having a release recently, but I assure you the next one will be most excellent. :)

Exactly, Oblivion has far less content to port over than Morrowind. It is worth it.

Only things to worry about are the creatures and clothing/armor to work with the Skyrim bodies.

And navmesh

Navmesh looks like a tedious job (judging from the thread) but Oblivion has less stuff so it's hardly a problem.

I could do the above mentioned stuff myself but I have my hands full atm with Morroblivion (I promised to myself that I'd fix up Bloodmoon and Tribunal before Skyblivion) and some other mod projects that I'm doing. But I am a complete newb in 3D modelling stuff so armor and clothing are completely out of my realm of knowledge.

awesome !

How can you ask if it worth it? x)

why not using the original textures? (or the ones from qtp). We could use a single texture for the whole landscape until we find a solution to convert it.

If there are really no other solution then, I guess i can take one or two regions... 

I like the guy scream "Guards ! Trespasser !" while idling around, naked. :D

Why can't we simply take the landscape data from the old Skyblivion master and somehow merge it in?

it would be nice if u were abel to make it that u got a good working almost perfect original oblivion in skyrim and improve it from that piont so u can choose to play it original ore skyblivion style just saying because it seems whit a bit work u can confert almost every thing wel exsept afcourse the npc looks magic crafting and stuf  

I'm not an expert in the Skyrim modding department but I think that since there is a Youtube video online which shows the land textures being left intact, maybe strip away all the data from the old master file excluding the landscape records and then merge the two together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1q5s_vnKXQ

There's the video. The majority of the lanscape textures are there (except for the purple textures).

My opinion is to take all the interiors from your master, (using original lighting which looks AMAZING), and merge it with only the parts that work from the other master.

Your work is pure AWESOMENESS!

Edit: As you can see in the video above (EnvyDeveloper), the lighting in interiors looks terrible.

Yeah, I know. The lighting in these interiors look terrible, compared to the OP's master. But yeah, maybe merge the good stuff from both masters and leave out the cons?

Really? Things were much simpler in Morrowind - you just load up two plugins and with a click of a button, you can merge them together.

Are you sure there is no simple utility which can merge plugins together?

zilav

It is impossible to merge anything since FormIDs do not match.

So, you used the originals formids when you converted the cells and the world, right ? Or it's the other master that doesn't use the originals formIDs ?

Tesedit's convert = Oblivion's form ids(Skyblivion reborn)

Andoran converter = completely new form ids(old Skyblivion master)

I'll go ahead and start navmashing some of the interiors when I get the chance (when zilav releases it) 

About landtextures, is there a way to simply just remove  all the texturing and replace it with a single grass texture or something?  Anything that would get rid of the black and purple?

Heh, looks like Skyblivion has the same landscape issues as Skywind. It still needs to be manually repainted in places judging by the screen shots, but it's a lot easier than dealing with everything landscape being purple.

For the black spots, who ever plans to re-paint, I'm sure you already know this, but just in case you don't.

"In Skyrim, each exterior cell is made up of four quadrants and each quadrant can have no more than six unique texture types painted in it. If you try to add a seventh, the texture will simply paint as a matte black color; it will turn black in game as well. Not to fear, this isn’t like the black texture bug of Oblivion infamy, this black paint can be undone, or painted over, just like every other landscape texture. If this happens you’ll need to consolidate your textures."

oh yes! zilav you're a god ; )

Sweet!!!!  This is looking really good. About dialogue, maybe you could convert it and just make it a .esp?  So if/when someone wants to work on dialogue they will have it right there?  

Yeah Mehh, same issues, but Skyblivion just looks a little bit worse. :)

Edit:  Oh, I can't believe I completely neglected to ask this.  You just converted base Oblivion and Shivering Isles?  No other DLC right?

Well, I do like the idea of playing all three games with the same character. I think it's worth it.

And there's a lot of people who would love to try Oblivion but couldn't in the current engine due to the graphics (huh?) and general flaws of the engine.

Also, I would love to play the quests in a better engine and so would other people. Look at the video I posted above and the comments. People want it.

Edit: You could say the same about Skywind, considering your argument. Morrowind with MGE XE and soon OpenMW would be much better than Skywind guaranteed. But Skywind and Skyblivion still bring this "play all three games in one" novelty which Morrowind mods can't do. I want to play all three games with the Dragonborn. Don't forget that this is not a replacement for Oblivion and Morrowind. It's a way to enhance the experience by playing it on a better engine. It is worth it and I would love to see Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim in the TES6 engine too.

Perfectly agree with EnvyDeveloper, I know a lot of people here prefer skywind and that's your right but that's not a reason to deprive us of skyblivion :/

And even for supreme it would be much easier to work from that master (it seems we can't even have LOD with the other)...

I clearly want to play Skyblivion :D (and I guess work on it) I haven't finished Oblivion (300h+).

At the same time, I totally respect SupremeEpicness's job. I'll totally try it ;)

Too bad it is not an optional esp based on Skyblivion reborn...

insides houses and  city's look brilliantand dont need to be alterd

the great big outside needs a bit of work  but the basic things are there is see

but for the rest i would say just confert everthing armors creatures and so its basicly oblivion whit skyrim engine it isnt like the graphics are so bad it needs changing very bad

also i think when u got a good working oblivion in skyrim u dont need to adjust any more till skywind is done      

also like the say u cant just make skywind and do like oblivion was never made some like oblivion a lot only reason i like morrowind is because what u guy's are doing whit it

@ zilav: I have permission to convert a couple mods from Oblivion (mainly modder resources) I never converted them because... I really didn't need to, most of the stuff I just remade anyway good mods like unique landscapes and better cities I have remade. mods like better dungeons. I have permission from the author as well as the authors of other most of the modder resources it uses to convert. Although I do believe Skyblivion won't be done before TES6 I also believe that we can finish some of the quests before TES6. (that is IF most people don't lose interest in it)

I agree with EnvyDeveloper on this one. I would much rather play all the games in one then just openMW or something, even openMW might end up better then skywind I still would rather play skywind.

I can point to to a list of several crash prone meshes and workarounds for them if you want?

Perhaps Happychappy or someone wouldn't mind taking a day off of Skywind to reconvert some bad offenders?

Remember though, we found a lot of broken Skywind meshes through Navmeshing...... Basically run a quick region navmesh, then if a cell crashes after a few attempts, use process of elimination to find bad meshes.  It's not extremely easy.

about grass: please don't change original data :/ I've converted the original grass for the old master and I will do the same for this one if it's released (much better and more diversified than skyrim grass). I can also remake my tree replacer plugin, but it would be even more cool to use SB converted trees if he release them ; )

Yes, just make sure the converted Oblivion grass is less thick. :P

It might be awhile before those trees get sorted out though.  For the moment it would be better to use Skyrim ones I think.

Hmmm, me and Eloth were able to make Exteriors stable in Skywind because I ran a region wide automatic navmesh. Once it crashed, I would check the navmesh log, and see the last cell it ran on, then I would go to that cell, run a havok navmesh, if it crashed again, that means a broken mesh is on the cell. Then through process of elimination, and lots of CK crashes later, I would find out which mesh was broken by deleting forms and re-trying a havok navmesh until no crash, and Eloth would fix what ever caused the ck crash.

It is quite easy now to convert any plugins: DLCs, ULs, Immersive Interiors, Better Cities, you name it. There are only 2 problems: permissions which you won't get (except dlcs) and amount of content itself. As I said already, Skyblivion won't be finished before TES6 is out. Skyblivion includes SI and the amount of work needed to fix both of them is just too much for a small team even without any additional plugins.

Besides several screenshots above look 99,9% the same as in Oblivion, so this raises a question - is Skyblivion needed at all? If there is not much difference especially in interiors (buildings, caves, ruins, etc) where player spends the majority of time, no significant improvements in visual quality (not talking about enb here), then why do we need Skyblivion?

I think this is a serious question...why/what exactly do you want out of Skyblivion? There is a difference between nice to have and getting a team of people to put thousands of man hours into getting a serious conversion. Is one generation of gaming engine worth it? Skywind is two generations, and Morroblivion had a large number of years in between releases.

For me the Elder Scrolls has always been about the mods that people create for the game. I personally I would not want to give up the flexibility of choosing to install mods for Oblivion if I wanted to play the game. Skyblivion in its current plan is most likely going to prevent any real traction in this department.

So for my mind I think this sort of project would be much better served with a conversion tool( s ) that would allow full conversion of mods, not only for Skyrim but all future gaming engines (Bethesda). The Project Andoran Plugin Converter was never finished and from what I have read, it had enough problems that a rewrite would be easier than trying to learn it and fix it.

I'm talking about a serious set of tools that allows for quest conversion, nif conversion, scripting conversion, everything...maybe even nav-meshing macros, who knows! Take values of Oblivion character faces and generate a Skyrim equivalent. When I'm talking comprehensive I mean it!

I've spent a lot of my working life converting data, there is a lot to be said about getting the right tools, making your solution scalable, flexible and robust.

You spend a lot of time gathering the requirements, finding out exactly what is needed and really sorting out the mapping and transformations between games.

I'm thinking as a kind of extension to TESEdit series, where there is some middleware to transform the data and create scripts (papyrus) or anything else that is required to complete a full process of conversion. As I said if this means adding macros for the CK then so be it. You spend a year on this tool, but its created in such a way that all future ports are done through the tool. Including Skyrim and ALL of its mods into the next release of gaming engine. As TES6Edit is being worked on, so will the next set of transformations. The tool already has the benchmarks for error handling, subtle data manipulation and extra file generation.

Its one of these hard things to wrap your head around now, but in 2 years time, if this type of forward planning is not discussed, its one of those things that will really end up being a loss for the modding community. I'd like to think in terms of modders being able to say "remember when I created a mod for Oblivion", and then actually be able to port it into the latest game - TES8 maybe?!

How can Bethesda deny people the right for sharing their legacies for future generations? -we should use that for PR stuff - lol

Sure some people can beaver away at a Skyblivion, but its probably important to remember that the team that worked Morroblivion is different (for the most part), from who is doing Skywind, and it will probably be the same for Skyblivion. You will get the occasional pop in from an old team members to help, but its re-learn the wheel type stuff. I think a tool that is designed for all future ports is something that will have core members that will stick with it for many years to come.

If old team members are coming back for the Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim to TES6 port, and we don't plan for this, you will hear the inevitable groans of "I wish we had the proper tools for converting" :-P I for one will be like "I told you so!".

happychappyI'm talking about a serious set of tools that allows for quest conversion, nif conversion, scripting conversion, everything...maybe even nav-meshing macros, who knows!

I've been kicking around concepts for tokenizing Oblivion's scripts to be converted into Papyrus for months now, but it's been years since I've done any "serious" coding (and even that wasn't too serious--I'm sure I'm way behind in my programming concepts by now).

I can't find any reason why script conversion couldn't be possible. There are certain functions that would have to be skipped over, with a warning kicked to the converter--any actor value calls to old attributes, for instance, or the actor clone function. And OBSE has functionality that we aren't anywhere near duplicating with SKSE, so it would only be able to handle basic Oblivion scripts. But some of this could be covered by a standard Skyrim function library, perhaps (for instance, always do function X when you hit a call to modav Strength), and other fringe cases done by hand.

Because Papyrus is so big on typecasting and so heavily OO, I think we'd need the converter to iterate through every object in the source mod several times, but that's a one-time loop and shouldn't pose a problem to the end user. (Iterating through the objects to determine what scripts are attached to what, what objects are referenced in scripts, etc.; once we determine that, those objects can be defined as properties as needed on a script-by-script basis.) I'm not so sure about the details of script calls in journal entries and dialogue, but I'd be surprised if that's too great a challenge.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Based on my small amount of knowledge, I think this can be done. I doubt I have the technical proficiency to actually do it, though, so... I guess I'm just wasting words? =P

[Edit]Refining the idea a bit...

The process starts by running through every form in the source mod. During this pass, you do two things:

1. Log every object that has a script attached and set up the script name. (Probably something like OBCV_original_script_name or somesuch.)

2. Build a namespace for every object that can be called in a script. If it's a basic object with no scripts attached, we can just record what it was (for instance, say NPC BenduOlo has no script. We'd record him as Actor BenduOlo). If the object does have scripts, we'd record it with the name of the script created in step 1 (so NPC UrielSeptim might be OBCV_UrielSeptimScript UrielSeptim). This will be important later on, when we add objects as properties of scripts so they can reference 'em.

I don't have a workflow for the tokenizer yet. Partially because I haven't made a tokenizer in something like 8 years, and it was a really basic one. But I have been thinking about Oblivion scripting quirks like fUpdateInterval (or whatever that one variable was) and how it could be converted for use in Papyrus. SO...there's that.

Okay. I'm done for now. I hope I've helped make things muddier and more confusing. =P

Thanks for the tech ideas. Mark my words, somebody is going to reverse engineer the next TES6 game, regardless of whether they go with a completely different gaming engine or not. If there is going to be a Creation Kit released with it, then the community is going to create an editor.

Morrowind has the ultimate in "editors" with OpenMW. So the legacy of Morrowind mods will hopefully be kept going, along with Skywind.  I doubt you would see a OpenOblivion or OpenSkyrim for another decade. So I feel it comes upon our shoulders to potentially carry on the legacy for Oblivion and Skyrim mods, with creating the tools necessary. I really think we are doing Bethesda a huge favor and that they should be endorsing us!!..but before I get bitter...

It will never be 100%, but with your examples above as long as the tools are robust and can give  detailed logs of what/why something doesn't convert and clear instructions for fixes or more work then that is fine.

I guess what I'm saying is that having these tools in a year or having them in 10 years is just as important. I think we have proved that the games themselves are timeless, graphics get a little old, combat seems a little awkward, but content and the high fantasy worlds and lore, will always be great. So even if this was a 3 year project it doesn't miss the boat at all.

Does Elder Scrolls Online make new TES games redundant? No, for a few reasons but the most important fact that it doesn't have the richness that people modding the game have brought to it, or the fun that people have with creating something for the game.