OpenMW support for other games: Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout and more

[Kyosho]

Yeah but these days basically every kind of game asset can be bought online. With a bit of money (from an aforementioned kickstarter), it's doable.

[Pherim]

An OpenNehrim would be fantastic! But it really uses a lot of Assets from Oblivion, as far as I know. And I don't think just buying assets from some website would not do, they would have to be adjusted to work not only with the engine, but also with the existing game world, and it would most likely change the style of the game completely. Not to mention that using assets from a lot of different sources and creators would possibly end up in a very wild mix of styles and quality, and I don't know if that would be good. Anyway, getting Nehrim to work with an OpenMW-based engine would already be a huge undertaking, so this would have to be tackled first.

How hard would it be to convert 'morrowind' maps to 'regular' / 'standard' maps?

When using this mod:

I get results like this which are wrong:
http://imgur.com/a/U27bl ( viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3337&start=60#p38646 )

When i use morrowind rebirth i get results like this:
http://imgur.com/a/ofrJ0 ( viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3337&start=110#p38794 )

Now to my un-educated eye in these matters the main issue i can see is that some of the maps being applied are too 'bright', in the case of the rocks it looks like it's at it's maximum.

To me it looks like specular maps are too intense although the forum conversations linked to above mention it being an issue with normal maps. I know as much as specular maps can make thing's shiny, and normal maps help with shadows and details?

I have also gathered that morrowind did not support some type's of maps and these were made possible by graphic extenders and things and as a result?, morrowind did not use 'standard' normal mapping and instead had it's own, i'm not sure if this counts with specular maps too.

With the mods mentioned above, is there any way to extract the map's in question, process them in some kind of batchable way ( e.g to convert 'morrowind' normal maps to 'standard' normal maps), and then re-import those converted textures back into the mod files, and how easy would this be?

Or would it be a case that the formats are so different that the only way to do it is to manually re-create the maps from scratch?

Morrowind has NO normal mapping on it's own, so there is nothing wrong with OpenMW here. The problem is that these mods are made for a kind of "fake" normal mapping that was made possible by a fix from the Morrowind Code Patch (and not MGE). It uses environment maps for this, and the MCP fix makes it so that their brightness is adjusted to the current lighting, which reduces the glossiness you now experience in OpenMW and kind of allows normal mapping. Also, the method is very impractical, as it requires editing of every single mesh that you want to have these normal maps. As OpenMW natively supports normal maps this is no longer necessary, but all mods made for this MCP bump/normal mapping no longer work. And they shouldn't because the method was just a workaround to get something of similar appearance than what OpenMW supports natively.
But it should not be too hard do make these mods compatible. Since they include actual normal maps, these can most likely be used directly in OpenMW (though I am not familiar with the process of making them appear in OpenMW - yet), but in any case, the edited meshes should not be used with OpenMW. Maybe I'll try converting such a mod to work with OpenMW and provide information on how to do this some day soon. But there should be some way to tell people not to use Mods that need the MCP fix with OpenMW, because it is likely that more people will stumble upon this issue and believe it to be a bug in OpenMW, which it isn't.

[DestinedToDie]

With something like Awesomebump you could generate new normal maps pretty easily based on the diffuse texture. You don´t even need texturing/modeling/any skills for that. It all comes down to someone willing to go through the process of replacing the environment maps with normal maps.

[Pherim]

With something like Awesomebump you could generate new normal maps pretty easily based on the diffuse texture. You don´t even need texturing/modeling/any skills for that. It all comes down to someone willing to go through the process of replacing the environment maps with normal maps.

You don't need skills to do that, but that doesn't mean these normal maps are necessarily good. There is only so much information that can be retrieved from a diffuse texture, and without tweaking it there is a pretty good chance the program (no matter if it is called Awesomebump, Crazybump or whatever) guesses wrong which part of the texture is supposed to be which height/slope. And the result is probably not going to look very good. I see it all the time in mods for Oblivion and Skyrim. You really need to know what you are doing to make good normal maps.
Also, Awesomebump has a bug in the current version (at least for me) that results in the generated textures (height/normal/specular/etc. map) to be displaced by exactly three pixels, which makes them look blurry when used in a game. I have reported this bug and I hope they will fix it for the next release. Because it is a very good program. If you know what you are doing.

And I realize that many (most?) people probably won't recognize the difference between a good and a bad normal map in the game, but I don't believe that would be an excuse for not making them right.

That being said, there is no need to "replace environment maps" with normal maps in said mods - because these already include normal maps. The environment map is just what makes them visible in Morrowind, because basically the game reflects the environment map according to the bump/normal map specified in the mesh. For OpenMW these normal maps should just be usable on their own. As I said, the edited meshes are not to be used with OpenMW.

[SGMonkey]

Personally I didn't think Oblivion was so great. If modders are to recreate it better than Bethesda, then maybe they can do it here: http://project-tamriel.com/viewforum.php?f=5

Fuck yeah!

Ahem...

[cc9cii]

Hello all, it's been a while since my last post... Still very busy with RL but I hope to make some progress soon.

[TheInternet]

Hello everyone, I have some questions.

Given Nehrim uses the Oblivion engine as it's base, this project to import Oblivion maps into OpenMW-CS would also be useful for that? And how would art assets be handled? I'd have to replace every single one, what's the best strategy for listing all the models used in a map?

[cc9cii]

Finally got to do some work. A lots of things missing, especially land/terrain.

https://youtu.be/U58gC1EAtMI

[lysol]

Finally got to do some work. A lots of things missing, especially land/terrain.

https://youtu.be/U58gC1EAtMI

Wow. Nice work.

[Atahualpa]

Finally got to do some work. A lots of things missing, especially land/terrain.

https://youtu.be/U58gC1EAtMI

Cool.

What's the reason for the high loading times?