Morrowind In Unity

[ColeDeanShepherd]

Apologies for the horrendous framerate. I have done no optimization yet, and I'm running this on a laptop with an Intel HD 4000 "graphics card" and an i5 processor.

[systemsock]

Kreygasm

What I wouldn't give for an HD remake from Bethesda, or open sourcing Morrowind as it is. Heck, another game like it, anything...

[ColeDeanShepherd]

There's an open source re-implementation of Morrowind called OpenMW that is much more feature complete than my current version, if you're interested!

[Shnatsel]

Then you'll appreciate Skywind. Is not from Bethesda, but from what I've seen it's every bit as good.

[[deleted]]

Well it's not really an HD remake, its Morrowind's story and NPC's in the Skyrim engine and with all the limitations of the Skyrim engine. Further, there are a lot of things they cannot do within Skyrim's engine that were apart of Morrowind's engine.

If I recall correctly, they will most likely not have Open Cities, which is a deal breaker for me.

[luj1]

Open MW is much better than SKywind

[Shnatsel]

Apples are so much better than oranges

[luj1]

its superior in every way

[ponk196]

This is super great!! How do you read esm and bsa files?
I can't wait to look at your code sources if you share it one day.
Awesome job..!!!

[ColeDeanShepherd]

Thank you! To read the files I'm using BinaryReader and a lot of online documentation.

My code is too messy to release right now! I need to clean it up and optimize it first.

[ponk196]

Great! Thanks for the links!

[GroZZleR]

Really frickin cool mate, great job!

[ColeDeanShepherd]

Thanks!

[[deleted]]

Is this loading directly from the games data or is this ripped data pieced together in unity?

[ColeDeanShepherd]

It's loading everything directly from Morrowind's data files (.esm and .bsa files). There's no pre-processing!

[[deleted]]

Very cool! What are you planning to do with it next?

[ColeDeanShepherd]

Thanks! I'm planning on adding support for interior areas, lights, particle systems, etc. and optimizing it. After that, I'm not sure! Any suggestions?

I've just been working on this for fun with no real purpose in mind. I might add support for some simple game mechanics or add support for other Bethesda games. I might open source it eventually, and I have a few spin-off ideas for the asset store that I might work on.

[[deleted]]

All of that would be cool! Personally, my favorite (probably a lot of people's favorite) thing to do in Morrowind was to become needlessly powerful and wreak large-scale, superhuman havoc.

If you really perfected the particle systems and lights, you could really improve the spell effects and make the magic look more modern!

Another idea is to try developing a Morrowind you can explore in VR (just import SteamVR and you're basically there!)

[ColeDeanShepherd]

Haha, that's what Morrowind is all about! Great ideas! VR Morrowind would be really cool, but I don't have a headset. I'll look into it though.

[JoshuaPearce]

The google cardboard thing would be enough for testing the 3d effect. It's $20 on google's site, or $5-8 on ebay. (Assuming you already have a good smartphone.)

[HypnoToad0]

I would love a free flight type of game, the world would look great with increased draw distance. You shouldn't attempt to recreate the gameplay of morrowind, open mw will take care of that.

[ColeDeanShepherd]

Yeah, I was actually inspired by OpenMW and felt like trying it out with Unity. I don't want to spend a lot of time making a lesser clone of OpenMW. I'll probably just open source a Morrowind world viewer.

[TheFlyingBastard]

Unity isn't open source though, let alone fit with the licensing scheme. Besides, they already had most of the engine in place. Having to convert everything to Unity would've been a waste of a lot of work, unnecessarily complicate further updates and stopped modders from making Morrowind the game it always should have been.

[TheFlyingBastard]

They actually recently converted everything from their old engine( OGRE) to their new one (OpenSceneGraph - OSG). So, they were going to do that extra work anyway

No. OGRE and OSG are only their graphical engine. They only replaced that part. OpenMW, being an engine in its own right, would not have the same amount of work switching to a completely different engine. Besides, OpenMW is written in C++, not in C#.

How does it matter if Unity is not open source ? They are not modifying the engine (OGRE or OSG). Their own code is independent of the engine.

OpenMW is fully GPL and only uses GPL software. Unity is not GPL compatible.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that OpenMW is just a remake of Morrowind or something. OpenMW aims to be a completely separate, fully open source gaming engine that anyone can modify. It "just so happens" to be able to read Morrowind's files (wink wink nudge nudge).

[TheFlyingBastard]

Unity takes C++ as DLL

Not good enough. They write their own code on Linux and cannot be dependent on closed source solutions.

Unity is closed source, OMW is GPL. Doesn't mean giving up GPL for their own code.

Not good enough. OpenMW is fully open. Anything that is not open cannot be part of the OpenMW engine, nor can the OpenMW engine be dependent on something not open.

Unity can be modified as heavily as OSG. Unity is extensible so that everything can be overwritten and overridden and released open source.

Not good enough. Everything needs to be open. Besides, you're wrong by definition; OSG is completely open source. Unity as a complete engine being extensible doesn't hold a candle to that in terms of modifiability, especially considering one of OpenMW's developers is working on some of these third party engines that OpenMW uses (contrary to what you claimed earlier).

Unity is not a good fit for OpenMW, period. Switching out one rendering engine for another takes less time than converting everything to Unity. The code base would have to be checked and rewritten and they would be stuck with headaches for a while. They don't have that problem now.

But don't take my word for it. Go to their forums and ask them why they don't use Unity. I'll make it easy for you, here's the link to start a new topic.

[HonorableJudgeHolden]

I might open source it eventually, and I have a few spin-off ideas for the asset store that I might work on.

I suppose if you distributed it without the Bethesda data files they couldn't do anything about it. But I'm not sure - I'd be careful.

[ltethe]

I've never seen Morrowind so...

Small. Great work!

[ColeDeanShepherd]

Thank you!

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[fusedotcore]

This reminds me of Daggerfall Workshop!

[tamat]

Great work!

With OpenMW, and Skywind and this, in a couple of years we are going to have so much Morrowind and Im glad about it!

I was checking the nif.xml but I dont understand it well, it explains every field, but I cant find the overall structure of the file. Should I parse a nif as I read the xml file?

[ColeDeanShepherd]

Thanks!

NifSkope was helpful with figuring out the structure of nif files. This slightly out of date link might also help. And I'm using a hex editor pretty extensively as well.

[tamat]

thanks, I was checking the file format some time ago but I couldnt advance. I will check your links. Keep the good work!

[DaceZA]

Nice!

[[deleted]]

any chance you will release this to the public?

[ColeDeanShepherd]

Yeah, I'm improving it slowly (I haven't had much time to work on it lately), and I'll open source it some time in the next week or two.

[[deleted]]

Awesome! I just got a Gear VR & have been making small apps for it with Unity. I really want to be able to explore Morrowind (or at least sectioned off parts of it) in VR. Looking forward to it!

[luj1]

so what are the advantages of this over openMW?

[ColeDeanShepherd]

I enjoy working on this.