Ashes of Apocalypse

[Amenophis]

Here
http://www.moddb.com/mods/desert-region ... l-frontier

[Okulo]

Thank you.

[psi29a]

However, there is a certain number of side quests with very minor characters which I would gladly license under CC-BY-SA because the characters belong to Travis and I have no use for those characters even if they were mine. Those could be put into AOA without a hitch. Some quests, though, need modifications to work with AOA. (but that could be a problem in the case that some people would play both under OpenMW...)

Thank you so much for this!

[Envy123]

However, there is a certain number of side quests with very minor characters which I would gladly license under CC-BY-SA because the characters belong to Travis and I have no use for those characters even if they were mine. Those could be put into AOA without a hitch. Some quests, though, need modifications to work with AOA. (but that could be a problem in the case that some people would play both under OpenMW...)

Thank you so much for this!

No worries

OK, looking through the CS, the following quests can be kept in AOA without changing anything:

EN_Armor
EN_Armor_Prison
EN_Hashy
UBA_Beacon

I grant those quests under the license of CC-BY-SA. There are some more side quests, but they require replacement assets before they can be CC-BY-SA.

There are faction missions which can be put in AOA, but they were written as part of a quest chain so they would feel disjointed.

[psi29a]

Nice, thank you very much! I'm wondering how to "import" those quests via the openmw-cs.


Anyway... we've gone from:
AoA v1.1 Out of 4498 files, found 139 bethesda files.

to

AoA v1.2 Out of 4500 files, found 85 bethesda files.

The reason for the jump in files is that OpenMW expected some files to be there, so I looked for replacements. I still have a 22 more textures to replace which should be easy.

The hard part is coming up next. We need replacements for 3 KFs and 62 NIFs

If we can't replace those, then AoA can't be Bethesda free. This also means that any chance of other games being released for OpenMW is also very slim since these we're talking about are core animation/meshes that others build on.

If someone would like help re-build them from scratch...

@Zini and @Scrawl: Do we support any other kind of animations/meshes?

[DestinedToDie]

The hard part is coming up next. We need replacements for 3 KFs and 62 NIFs

So I take it not ALL of the NIFs are super important, right? You could spend quite a few hours remaking them or you could simply replace them with a placeholder box, if that is satisfactory. Should anyone pick it up and start modding it again, they can do the modeling.

The hard part of course is the animation. But unfortunately I don't know enough about what we're dealing with here. When I play AoA, and I might grimly be mistaking it here, it seems like Better Bodies and Better Heads is used instead of Vanilla Morrowind models. This makes it free from Bethesda (not really, I'll explain in a moment), but not free from the makers of those mods. Do you have permission to use them?

Let's say that you do get permission. Those Nifs come with a skeleton, which I presume is copied from Morrowind's models (the reasons all the animations work fine without a .kf file in the mod), making them not actually free from Bethesda. But you can simply delete the skeleton and build a new one using the model.

Or do you have to make entirely new models? Then here's my idea for keeping it simple - make Minecraft style boxes for various body-parts. Way easier to make, easier to animate.

If we can't replace those, then AoA can't be Bethesda free. This also means that any chance of other games being released for OpenMW is also very slim since these we're talking about are core animation/meshes that others build on.

I think these would be only useful as placeholders until the game developers model and animate their own. If you're going to make a game, then you'll need to get good at modeling and animating anyway, since even if someone does the job of doing NPC bodyparts and animations for you, you still have to model and animate the 100 creatures that'll be in your original game. Also, even if we put all our effort into animating a funky walking style and swift sword swings, who's to say those will be the exact animations game devs want to use in their game? Maybe they instead want rapid gunfiring or spraying electricity Star Wars style from your hand. Or simply a different sword swinging animation. Our efforts here may be wasted.

[psi29a]

In the ReadMe.txt files in the AoA v1.1 update it talks about the content.

It talks about:
Psycho Dog Studios = Better Bodies

among other things of course.

I was under the impression when I talked with Travis, Clone Gaming Studios, asked permission to use everything. That doesn't mean that the 3rd-party assets are CC-BY-SA. So at the very best, we can contact the authors to release the work under that license or at the very worst we have a dual-license since we do have permission to use them for AoA.

I'll do more digging to see if they gave permission to be used in a commercial setting considering that AoA would go into Debian.

As for the rest, yes, we can make dummy/placeholder NIFs where required. I've been doing that with textures/icons already.

The _big_ question is, considering the amount of work, is this project worth it or are we better starting small with something and building it out?

[Envy123]

In the ReadMe.txt files in the AoA v1.1 update it talks about the content.

It talks about:
Psycho Dog Studios = Better Bodies

among other things of course.

I was under the impression when I talked with Travis, Clone Gaming Studios, asked permission to use everything. That doesn't mean that the 3rd-party assets are CC-BY-SA. So at the very best, we can contact the authors to release the work under that license or at the very worst we have a dual-license since we do have permission to use them for AoA.

I'll do more digging to see if they gave permission to be used in a commercial setting considering that AoA would go into Debian.

As for the rest, yes, we can make dummy/placeholder NIFs where required. I've been doing that with textures/icons already.

The _big_ question is, considering the amount of work, is this project worth it or are we better starting small with something and building it out?

In terms of the quests, all it needs is me going into Enchanted Editor and deleting all records except the dialogue and journal entries for those quests. That isn't a problem, but I would need it to be tested before it can go into AOA officially.

In terms of it being worth it, there are two sides to it. On one hand, I would love to see graphical improvements and better systems overall for AOA and DR2 of course. On another hand, with DR2 I fully milked the AOA ideas and concepts, at least those that could be done in the Morrowind engine. On the first hand, it meant that things like radiation and a battery powered map couldn't make it but with the rise of OpenMW, it should now be possible, surely?

Bear in mind that AOA and by extension DR2, are meant to be played differently to Morrowind. Travis and I just worked with the limitations, and it plays like Morrowind although it was not meant to be like that.

What I think is best, is that a group of modders make a new set of lands within the AOA universe and start from scratch. There are a lot more stories to be told and the lore I wrote says that there are more places out there, so why not use that? The disadvantage is that my storytelling abilities (they have improved a lot since DR2 come out) probably wouldn't be available unless it's an indie game.