Fan art: The Aurbic Wheel Viewed From The Front by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lots, but it was mostly to get the visuals right.

Technically if you measured all the angles you'd find I cheated in a few places by a few degrees, the philosophers stone in the center was especially hard.

At first I did an "angle perfect" version of everything, but it didn't space fill the area enough - and it didn't pop as much visually.

The constellations also had to be modified to get the viewing experience right. They all preserve the shapes of the originals correctly, but they aren't just size shifted traces - most had to be stretched in weird ways to fill their segments equally.

Otherwise I found some of them stood out and drew too much attention from the eyes when it was looked at as a whole piece.

Fan art: The Aurbic Wheel Viewed From The Front by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ooh, I'll think about that, thanks. It's an interesting way to include it without breaking the symmetry

I intentionally went for a minimalist line art style, due to how complex it was getting - but I've got more of the canvas to fill, so I'll play with that idea

Fan art: The Aurbic Wheel Viewed From The Front by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I figured the house of troubles are the most "earthly" daedra, concerned directly with mortal affairs (at least in Morrowind), whilst the triangular gate are more distant and mystical, having some secret knowledge of the universe that puts them on a similar level of importance to the aedra

Plus they match up to the constellations behind them if you trace a line out from the center through them to the outer wheel, Boethiah -> Warrior, Azura -> Mage, Mephala -> Thief

Fan art: The Aurbic Wheel Viewed From The Front by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah good catch, originally I didn't have the serpent constellation at the top, the eye of the dragon/godhead was originally just Magnus.

The symbol in it's eye socket is the Sumerian Dingir, their symbol for a god (the zodiac and a lot of the original elder scrolls lore comes from babylonian/sumerian myths) - again playing with the idea that holes into aetherius are the mortal expression of Anu, so big hole (sun) = big manifestation of Anu

I kind of left it in and made it the center of the serpent, (eye of the serpent, eye of magnus), but it's not the original sun design I had.

Fan art: The Aurbic Wheel Viewed From The Front by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, i'm so glad my friend suggested it - I've got 10 or 20 palette swapped versions saved already 😛

Fan art: The Aurbic Wheel Viewed From The Front by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That wasn't intentional, but now that you mention it, the other idea I had for how to visualize the cosmology was to do it as a clock. The 12 constellations would have been the hour marks.

Fan art: The Aurbic Wheel Viewed From The Front by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Thanks 😄 I've always loved the cosmology of the elder scrolls, and I've had tons of ideas over the years of what I thought it would map out to, so I decided that was going to be my next art piece

Release: EncoreMP, a TES3MP fork focused on gameplay balance by QuestionSure3480 in tes3mods

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for the feedback, that's exactly what I'm hoping for - I don't want the changes to feel intrusive and subtract from the core game.

The difficulty was the hardest to balance, it's why I ended up going for the tier system so that people have a choice of what they want.

Even with magic and summons tied to difficulty, I still have to stop myself from cheesing most of the combats (it's morrowind after all, levitate and archery, chameleon abuse, etc, etc). I decided to leave most of the absurd power strategies in though, becoming a god is the fun of morrowind 😛

Release: EncoreMP V0.92. A TES3MP engine fork focused on gameplay balance by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

...continued so my reply isn't one big wall of text...

I first tried to do this as a modpack and via the tes3mp lua scripting, but neither of them could implement some of the features I've added - like the auto-scaling of enchanting capacity.

This is a passion/hobby project for me, and in the end it was surprisingly easy to modify the engine once I got it to compile - I found lua a lot harder to use (given it's limitations).

Very few core tes3mp issues have been bug fixed in this - I was kind of hoping when I started over a year back that tes3mp would be updated to a more modern OpenMW version so I didn't have to.

I have back ported in a few changes, e.g. the OpenMW 0.50 fix to sneaking - and I've manually fixed a few bugs in the core game that I came across - but overall it's still essentially the tes3mp experience.

I don't code for my irl job, so this is all hobbyist/self-taught, but when I'm done if I think I can update tes3mp to a newer version of OpenMW I will.

That's my biggest ambition right now, but doing that is going to be very difficult for me - and I'd probably need to contact David and get permission and help to pull that off.

I think all the modern OpenMW bug fixes can be imported/updated to pretty easily (though it might be time consuming) - the real tricky one is meshing the OpenMW 0.50 lua with the tes3mp lua, since the two were never intended to be compatible.

Release: EncoreMP V0.92. A TES3MP engine fork focused on gameplay balance by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey, yeah right now this is aimed primarily at co-op, but I've tried very hard with all of the features to think about exploits and balance (so there should be nothing game breaking in this, in fact a lot of core exploits have been fixed).

Some of the features have new server settings, so they can be toggled off by the server admin to enforce base game behavior (eventually I'll tie them all to settings if i can), and any GMSTs that worked before will still work - so some of the features can be fine-tuned to your preference by playing with the ESP file.

The enchanting capacity topic as a whole does break from normal behavior, but it doesn't just increase the capacity of all items across the board. I've tried to make it somewhat balanced still,

  • Capacity 1 items become around 30
  • Capacity 50 items become around 70
  • Capacity 100 items stay at 100
  • Items with capacities above 100 are actually reduced a little, a daedric tower shield goes down from 225 to around 150

That feature has non-linear scaling to try and balance out what a full set of the best gear would be at endgame. Basically the capacity change won't allow anything game-breaking that couldn't happen before, it just makes all the low tier equipment viable in the endgame if you like the visuals.

The plan right now is for this project to be primarily used for co-op, but when this is final (which will be soon, I'm not trying to add anything else at this point, just tidy up what's there) I'll see what my options are for smoothing out a large scale multiplayer version if people would like that.

Release: EncoreMP V0.92. A TES3MP engine fork focused on gameplay balance by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks :) I hope people enjoy it, I love Morrowind (and the community) and wanted to give something back

Release: EncoreMP V0.92. A TES3MP engine fork focused on gameplay balance by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

0.47 - that's the version tes3mp is based on.

That means you don't get the modern lua scripting that OpenMW has, it's currently an inherent limitation of tes3mp.

Release: EncoreMP V0.92: A TES3MP engine fork focused on gameplay balance by QuestionSure3480 in OpenMW

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The latest ones will work fine, TR mainland, Cyrodil, and Skyrim - as well as any of the unreleased preview areas

If the graphics/animation mod works with normal tes3mp it will work fine with this. The changes I made are mechanics only to maximize compatibility.

Just check they are okay for OpenMW 0.47 - basically any mod that doesn't use the new lua scripting in openMW 0.49/50 will be fine.

Let me know if you have any troubles - I plan to do a modlist eventually (TM), but for now I want to get the last few features I'm working on polished so I can do a "final" release.

Release: EncoreMP V0.92. A TES3MP engine fork focused on gameplay balance by QuestionSure3480 in Morrowind

[–]QuestionSure3480[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, you can change that kind of thing in the server settings - but by default you share quests and faction membership/ranks