Project Idea: Morrowind Rebuilt

[jayhova]

What if Bethesda had built Morrowind using the same sort of mindset as Daggerfall? Could it be done? Could a small team create a game like Morrowind on a realistic 1:1 scale? Could this be done as a DFU expansion or total conversion? Could you have a procedurally built version of Morrowind? What would need to be added? Could you make the game I and so many others wanted but were denied?

[Werewolf]

I’d love to see Solstheim in particular with a realistic scale. I’d love to see it have an actual wilderness with wolves lurking about, as opposed to the insanely condensed and tiny representation in Morrowind. If someone would try something like this I think they could start with Solstheim as it would be significantly easier to make then the main island as it’s more simple in design. It’d make more sense to start off with an easier expansion before working up to the island of Vardenfell, and then afterwards the rest of Morrowind. I don’t know what the canon size of Solstheim is but looking at official Tamriel maps it would likely be the size of a medium-sized region in Daggerfall. Hundreds of square miles of snowy wilderness with wolves lurking about, that would be amazing.

[jayhova]

To clarify, I would like the see this done as a recreation of Morrowind but as if done instead. The major cities would be just as they were in Arena and not adjusted to deal with the small scope of just the isle of Vvardenfel. I would also like to see the ultimate mount. The flying insects of Morrowind. These are canon but not implemented for several reasons one of which is their power to reveal the 1:100 scale of the world.

Spoiler!

[MrFlibble]

Could this be done as a DFU expansion or total conversion? Could you have a procedurally built version of Morrowind?

I think this can be reduced to a few more concrete, technical questions which DFU developers/modders probably can answer:

• is there a terrain editor that would allow to alter the Iliac Bay map to that of Morrowind? (I believe that there are terrain mods so an editor likely exists)
• is it possible to place entire cities and dungeons on the game world map in any editor?

From how I understand this kind of project, the natural approach would be to create the terrain map and separately assemble villages, towns and cities from prefabricated structures, then place them on the map. It does not seem likely to me that Bethesda, when developing Daggerfall, had a random generation algorithm that created towns and cities directly on the world map, although I might be mistaken here. It looks that first, they created prefabricated clusters of buildings, much like dungeon blocks, then mixed them together to produce town and city layouts. Perhaps the world map had areas designated for towns and cities, which were then filled with these arrays of prefabricated blocks.

If the current world editors -- provided that these exist in the capacity which would allow to create mods on the proposed scale -- cannot place entire towns on the map, then you'd probably wait until they can, because this is not a task which can be accomplished manually in a reasonable time frame, obviously.

[Werewolf]

Could this be done as a DFU expansion or total conversion? Could you have a procedurally built version of Morrowind?

I think this can be reduced to a few more concrete, technical questions which DFU developers/modders probably can answer:

• is there a terrain editor that would allow to alter the Iliac Bay map to that of Morrowind? (I believe that there are terrain mods so an editor likely exists)
• is it possible to place entire cities and dungeons on the game world map in any editor?

From how I understand this kind of project, the natural approach would be to create the terrain map and separately assemble villages, towns and cities from prefabricated structures, then place them on the map. It does not seem likely to me that Bethesda, when developing Daggerfall, had a random generation algorithm that created towns and cities directly on the world map, although I might be mistaken here. It looks that first, they created prefabricated clusters of buildings, much like dungeon blocks, then mixed them together to produce town and city layouts. Perhaps the world map had areas designated for towns and cities, which were then filled with these arrays of prefabricated blocks.

If the current world editors -- provided that these exist in the capacity which would allow to create mods on the proposed scale -- cannot place entire towns on the map, then you'd probably wait until they can, because this is not a task which can be accomplished manually in a reasonable time frame, obviously.

Daggerfall needs a map generator/world editor. When someone makes one that will open up all-new possibilities for the game. Imagine someone makes a map generator mod and the game world can be different every time you play like in Minecraft. Or someone uses it to make entirely new lands to explore in addition to the main map. Daggerfall has graphics mods, wilderness mods, draw distance mods, etc. and they enhance the game tremendously. But we’ve yet to have any map generators/editors, even though I think that would open up new possibilities more then anything else

[jayhova]

Could this be done as a DFU expansion or total conversion? Could you have a procedurally built version of Morrowind?

I think this can be reduced to a few more concrete, technical questions which DFU developers/modders probably can answer:

• is there a terrain editor that would allow to alter the Iliac Bay map to that of Morrowind? (I believe that there are terrain mods so an editor likely exists)
• is it possible to place entire cities and dungeons on the game world map in any editor?

From how I understand this kind of project, the natural approach would be to create the terrain map and separately assemble villages, towns and cities from prefabricated structures, then place them on the map. It does not seem likely to me that Bethesda, when developing Daggerfall, had a random generation algorithm that created towns and cities directly on the world map, although I might be mistaken here. It looks that first, they created prefabricated clusters of buildings, much like dungeon blocks, then mixed them together to produce town and city layouts. Perhaps the world map had areas designated for towns and cities, which were then filled with these arrays of prefabricated blocks.

If the current world editors -- provided that these exist in the capacity which would allow to create mods on the proposed scale -- cannot place entire towns on the map, then you'd probably wait until they can, because this is not a task which can be accomplished manually in a reasonable time frame, obviously.

Daggerfall needs a map generator/world editor. When someone makes one that will open up all-new possibilities for the game. Imagine someone makes a map generator mod and the game world can be different every time you play like in Minecraft. Or someone uses it to make entirely new lands to explore in addition to the main map. Daggerfall has graphics mods, wilderness mods, draw distance mods, etc. and they enhance the game tremendously. But we’ve yet to have any map generators/editors, even though I think that would open up new possibilities more then anything else

To answer the question of altering the existing data to create a new map, I see no reason to assume this would be necessary. DFU lacks the limitations built into the original game. Neither DFU nor the data need to be able to fit on a CD-ROM. In addition, the DFU code is open and modifiable. This being the case, the terrain data for a Morrowind reboot could be as large as necessary. It occurs to me that you could in fact generate all of the terrain for Tamriel and then overlay the other data: towns, dungeons, temples, etc. onto the full-sized map. You could not fast travel to anywhere else in Tamriel because there would be no location to fast travel to. The newly generated terrain data need only be something that moderately modified DFU code could use.

As to the placing of locations, it's clear that this was done in the original by a small team with thousands of locations. Clearly, some locations were placed to match Arena and some were procedurally generated.

It's pretty clear the original material was not built using a dedicated editor. However, an editor such as that used in OpenMW would certainly benefit those attempting to do this sort of project.

My question is can DFU handle or be reasonably made to handle a terrain map 20 times the current size so that all of Tamriel could be generated and placed in said map.

As far as I can see what would need to be done is to take a current terrain generator and create the landmass and then convert that data so it is in a format that would be acceptable to use in DFU.

[jayhova]

Additionally, Morrowind rebuilt data could be in addition to the existing Daggerfall data making Morrowind rebuilt a true expansion. But again, as I suggested previously, you could just add everything and then start adding locations to the new, expanded world data. One of the difficulties I see would be the need to do lava flows, steam vents, etc.

[imsobadatnicknames]

• is there a terrain editor that would allow to alter the Iliac Bay map to that of Morrowind? (I believe that there are terrain mods so an editor likely exists)
• is it possible to place entire cities and dungeons on the game world map in any editor?

From how I understand this kind of project, the natural approach would be to create the terrain map and separately assemble villages, towns and cities from prefabricated structures, then place them on the map.

The way I understand it (tho someone correct me if I'm wrong):
It's currently completely possible to create new cities. You have to create a .json file containing the data for the city, including the city's name and what building blocks the city is made of. To place the city on the world map, all you have to do is assign it a pair of coordinates in the .json file. These files can then be packaged inside .dfmod, or simply put as loose files inside StreamingAssets/Worlddata.
This means the cities are already handled separately from the world terrain. Buildings aren't "baked in" into the environment, a city is defined as a series of building blocks and the coordinates where it's supposed to be loaded. My guess is that when Bethesda developed the game they hand-crafted and hand-placed all the important cities and dungeons and then wrote an algorithm that generated a lot of new ones and assigned them random map coordinates.

So, creating new cities is no problem. However, I think the only way to remove or move the cities from the original game would be by editing the original game's files, and as far as I know no tools exist for this yet.

Similarly, it's possible to change the shape of the map by providing the game with a new custom heightmap. However, I think it's not possible to change the actual map info (as in, the regions on the map screen) without editing the file from the original game they're defined in (which i think is MAPS.BSA but I'm not sure) and similarly, I don't think any tools currently exist for this.

[MrFlibble]

To answer the question of altering the existing data to create a new map, I see no reason to assume this would be necessary. DFU lacks the limitations built into the original game. Neither DFU nor the data need to be able to fit on a CD-ROM.

Data size is not my concern at all, I was more thinking along the lines of how moddable DFU is in its current state in this respect. While it obviously supports correctly reading the original game data and modifications thereof, it seems to me that DFU is still not at the stage when one could create a new game world map from scratch -- there are no proper tools to do that and no process in the engine itself to load this new game world (please correct me if I'm wrong on any of these points).

So unless you're willing to wait for DFU to arrive at this hypothetical stage where completely new custom content is fully supported and there are dev kits to create it -- which objectives I suppose at any rate should have secondary priority to the goal of perfectly recreating original Daggerfall, which is not yet achieved -- it seems reasonable to me to look at the possible Morrowind mod project from the perspective of editing and altering existing game data, in whole or in part. Since Daggerfall is a free game, there is no reason why editing the core data files for this project would not be possible, as opposed to new data injection methods employed by mods. With this, the only limitation would lie in the plane of available modding tools, which is why I asked about the extent to which the original game world and its constituents like towns and cities could be modified.

[BadLuckBurt]

I'm not interested in the project but I think it's easier to answer all this stuff by asking a different question:

Would it be possible to turn the DFU framework into a more general game engine that can load data other than Daggerfall?

My answer would be a resounding yes but it's a fucktonne of work.

By creating a separate fork of DFU and changing where certain information is read from, you can change the world completely. At the very least, this would be the terrain, climate, location and political data. If you were to create a new data set for each of those components you would get a 'new' world with an unusable travelmap since that is completely made out of bitmaps so that's another part that should be replaced.

So far you'd need:

8-bit heightmaps (one small version that depicts single map pixels (DFs is 1000x500 pixels) and another larger version that is 5 times larger to provide the noise detail within a map pixel).
1 climate map (which needs to be one pixel wider than the small heightmap so if the heightmap is 1000x500 pixels, the climate map would be 1001x500 pixels).
1 political map (this determines which faction controls what region)
A new data set for locations
A new or altered data set for political data
A new travelmap (either implemented in Daggerfall's fashion or something completely different, that doesn't matter)

You'd also have to remove all static references to Daggerfall's world size and make the size in code adhere to your map's size.

At this point you'd have a new world with custom terrain, political factions, locations, climates and a travelmap. The locations themselves would all feel very much like a carbon-copy of Daggerfall.

The location layouts are made with RMB blocks, those blocks would have to be remade or new ones would have to be added to get rid of the carbon copy feel layout-wise. This would be helped along greatly with new models, sprites and textures. The same goes for the dungeon exterior and interiors.

All the NPCs are still named like the Daggerfall NPCs so if that's a problem, that would have to be addressed too.

With that stuff out of the way, you'd still need new quests unless carbon-copy stopped being an issue at this point I'm not even going to touch on spells, game texts etc. but safe to say the gameplay rabbit hole is quite deep.