openmw.org

Hello everyone!

I hope you spent these celebrations really fun and happy!

Today I would like to discuss the history / roots of the Morrowind engine.
Is it true that Bethesda used Daggerfall's XnGine before switching to NetImmerse in 1999?
But as we all know, NetImmerse is / was just a rendering engine, not a full-fletched game engine.
So, my guess is that some parts of the Daggerfall / XnGine code (e.g gameplay / game code / "TESForm") still exist in the modern codebase...

What are your thoughts?

I didn't play Daggerfall enough to notice similarities, but hey look like pretty different mechanics IMHO.

MichaelD wrote: ↑11 Jan 2023, 17:56Is it true that Bethesda used Daggerfall's XnGine before switching to NetImmerse in 1999?

As far as I've heard, it was only very early prototype work they did with the Xngine. When they started actually working on Morrowind in earnest, it was with NetImmerse.

I think these old screenshots may in fact show the NetImmerse prototype.

• https://en.uesp.net/wiki/File:MW-Screenshot40.jpg
• https://en.uesp.net/wiki/File:MW-Screenshot39.jpg

Hrnchamd suspects that the software audio rendering Morrowind has is based on salvaged Daggerfall code, but there's nothing concrete to back it up with.

It's not at all unlikely that everything else was written from scratch.

I was hired in January 2000, so this was all before I arrived. THIS IS ALL STUFF I HEARD, INTERPRETED VIA TWENTY YEARS OF LOST MEMORY. I.e. this might not be true.

Morrowind started development after Daggerfall was released using Xngine. For reasons unknown to me, they decided to pause Morrowind development and do the two ES-related games, Battlespire and Redguard, instead.

Battlespire was finished on a very tight budget and schedule. When it was released, some of the Battlespire team restarted Morrowind development. They originally planned on using Xngine (Redguard-updated-with-more-3D-version) again but soon realized this would involve a great deal of engine re-work. So they started shopping for an engine. NetImmerse was chosen partly because it handled large numbers of rendered objects better, and some of the devs wanted players to interact with lots of objects. This turned out to be a good choice as there still aren't many 3D games, even today, that let you do that.

It wouldn't surprise me if a little bit of Xngine code made it into Morrowind. The most likely are data structures, helper functions, etc. Are the BSA formats of Daggerfall and Morrowind radically different? If not, that was probably reworked instead of written from scratch. I don't know about audio processing.

AFAIK, those particular screenshots were not in-engine.

Thank you very much for sharing that. That is pretty darn interesting!