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Elder Scrolls Let's fix Morrowind

Rincewind

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any person with above average knowledge of games should be able to avoid that
How exactly if you're not auditing the code line by line?

Addiotionally, new mod managers such as Vortex (which I use) by default inform you of any conflict between mods, make your load order sorted out and allow to choose an option for each mod conflict.
...based on some database created by the same modders, yeah. No mod manager can programmatically flag you logic errors between mods that contain code; that would require an AI of some sorts...

Well, I guess ignorance is bliss. As a coder I know how many things can go wrong even with a simple script, let alone combining 220+ of them...
 

Jarmaro

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any person with above average knowledge of games should be able to avoid that
How exactly if you're not auditing the code line by line?

Addiotionally, new mod managers such as Vortex (which I use) by default inform you of any conflict between mods, make your load order sorted out and allow to choose an option for each mod conflict.
...based on some database created by the same modders, yeah. No mod manager can programmatically flag you logic errors between mods that contain code; that would require an AI of some sorts...

Well, I guess ignorance is bliss. As a coder I know how many things can go wrong even with a simple script, let alone combining 220+ of them...
This is an example how conflict mods are resolved. I understand that you may believe that mods are truly too complicated to use, but to any other person that sounds like saying computer cannot possibly work because they have a lot of little technical elements and it's very hard to make them all work together. It just doesn't work like this. The modding has never been easier, you must willingly choose to install mods that tackle the same aspect of the game to create conflicts, ignoring every warning, mod description and conflicts in mods managers. A child could mod without any problem. I'm not a proffesional programmer, but I did my IT Degree and I know how silly you misgivings are. Can you break the game with mods? Yes. Can you stuff the game with so many script heavy mods that the game slows down to 15 frames per second? Yes. But it requires one to be downright retarded to do that by accident. The most popular curated mod collection on Nexus has oer 400 mods required. And it's the most successful one to use. Modding really is that simple these days. Not to mention that Wabbajack makes these things almost foolproof.
TB9D2oN.png
 

Funposter

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did you step out of a time warp from 2005 or something?
What's that even supposed to mean? Are you implying that the skills of modders have been improving with time, just like fine wine? Or that mods written by completely different authors combined together will just work fine now (without proper extensive playtesting) because it's 2022?
The Morrowind modding community is very small, and most of the prolific/good mod authors speak to one another frequently in Discord. This results in patches being quickly released or mod authors even making sure that their mods work with other popular mods out of the box, often because the mod authors themselves use these mods too. There's a reason that BCOM, for instance, doesn't touch any of the towns that have been overhauled in OAAB - RandomPal uses those mods himself, and also uses an enormous amount of items from the OAAB repository. Many of the best mods have become de-facto standards in modlists, too, meaning that mod authors typically take them into account when developing things. As for the skills of modders improving with time, well, of course they have. A lot of these guys have been developing mods for a long time, and standards have risen drastically within the last decade across all of the TES games. Just take a look at the quality of material in Tamriel Rebuilt, pre-Old Ebonheart compared to the releases from the last 4-5 years. It's pretty immense.

I think you're also overestimating the extent to which mods affect things down the line, or outside of their scope. Pretty much all mods released will have someone checking whether or not there are wild edits which would affect other parts of the world, and compatibility is usually a pretty simple matter of looking at which cells a mod affects and...not installing something else that affects that same cell. This is quite possible even in large modlists. Read what the mods do and figure out if any other mods make edits to the same area, and if they do, you have three options; check if there's a patch, observe the area yourself for incompatibility and if it's minor just learn to live with it, or choose only mod to install. Wow, that was hard!
 

Jvegi

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If modding is so easy only a complete idiot could fuck it up, then how come I messed something up while installing a bunch of mods on OpenMW about a year ago when I've made a mistake of giving this crap one more chance?

You don't get a point for calling me a complete idiot, that was the joke. In all seriousness, I was able to fuck something up during the installation process despite following the instructions and being mostly sober.
 

passerby

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AI upscaling is theoretically exciting because it preserves the actual original art style rather than changing everything into a hideous mess like the above images but AI upscaled stuff always has a certain weird Google Deep Dream look to it which is distracting as hell. Honestly, I think the best bet for Morrowind, with the mods that are currently on offer, is to just play it with the original visuals. The game's visual distinctiveness is one of its strong points, when you start including fifty different flora mods from fifty different authors that all have competing styles (or just steal the textures and models from different games), the game starts to look like Disneyland on an acid trip.

Good AI upscalling at 2x ( sometimes 4x depending on texture ) is almost always incline overall, at that level it can interpret and add definition to details that are hinted on the original texture.
If you go higher it starts to generate uncanny shit that was never even hinted in the texture.
 

luj1

You're all shills
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Dr1f7

I would also suggest a few simple mods which are literally 1kb yet profoundly improve gameplay (like locking most smuggler hideouts and disabling resting in exteriors).

Some simple GMTS tweaks can do wonders as well.

Lastly you need a clean retroactive HP mod and static multipliers on level up, so you can focus on playing the game instead of min maxing. These two were the biggest core system issues in Morrowind since its inception in my opinion and are indefensible.
 

luj1

You're all shills
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AI upscaling is theoretically exciting because it preserves the actual original art style rather than changing everything into a hideous mess like the above images but AI upscaled stuff always has a certain weird Google Deep Dream look to it which is distracting as hell. Honestly, I think the best bet for Morrowind, with the mods that are currently on offer, is to just play it with the original visuals. The game's visual distinctiveness is one of its strong points, when you start including fifty different flora mods from fifty different authors that all have competing styles (or just steal the textures and models from different games), the game starts to look like Disneyland on an acid trip.

Good AI upscalling at 2x ( sometimes 4x depending on texture ) is almost always incline overall, at that level it can interpret and add definition to details that are hinted on the original texture.
If you go higher it starts to generate uncanny shit that was never even hinted in the texture.


Morrowind Optimization Patch and Intelligent Textures are both must-have mods.
 

Dr1f7

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Dr1f7

I would also suggest a few simple mods which are literally 1kb yet profoundly improve gameplay (like locking most smuggler hideouts and disabling resting in exteriors).

Some simple GMTS tweaks can do wonders as well.

Lastly you need a clean retroactive HP mod and static multipliers on level up, so you can focus on playing the game instead of min maxing. These two were the biggest core system issues in Morrowind since its inception in my opinion and are indefensible.

Which simple mods do you recommend?
Forgot about retroactive HP lol, need to add that!
For level up multipliers, I have MULE: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47452
 

Dr1f7

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1. Have more ambient noises and better sound effects.
2. Have a longer ost with better dynamic music implementation (Like how Daggerfall had special tracks for taverns and different times of day etc.) The games poor sound design and poor music implementation really hurts the games ambience and atmosphere and makes dungeon crawling much less immersive.
3. Let me kill Sotha Sil. I hate those Tribunal fucks and I find it very disappointing that I can only kill two.
4. Running doesn't consume stamina, it's already slow as fuck and it's stupid to have to rest constantly.
5. Let spells scale like they did in Arena and Daggerfall. 100 max damage? Come on that's pathetic.

These things always really bothered me about Morrowind. I imagine there's mods to fix most of them at this point.

Yes these are nice suggestions!
For noises, I found a newer mod:
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/49654


It seems mostly nice, and it's customizable so you should be able to disable things that are bad.

For #2, more music would be great but all of the music mods I've come across suck ass. If anyone has any recommendations it'd be nice, most sound really really awful and just blatantly don't fit the game. Another idea I've had is importing Jeremy Soule's other works into morrowind (such as the NWN ost, KOTOR ost, and so fourth), but I'm not sure if there's a mod that does this or how easy it would be to do manually.

Yes for #4, admittedly I usually open up the console and set my speed attribute to 50 or 60 every time I make a new character, but I think there are mods that make starting speed more reasonable.

Not sure about #3 and #5, but if anyone knows please share!
 

NeoKino

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Dr1f7

I would also suggest a few simple mods which are literally 1kb yet profoundly improve gameplay (like locking most smuggler hideouts and disabling resting in exteriors).

Some simple GMTS tweaks can do wonders as well.

Lastly you need a clean retroactive HP mod and static multipliers on level up, so you can focus on playing the game instead of min maxing. These two were the biggest core system issues in Morrowind since its inception in my opinion and are indefensible.

Which simple mods do you recommend?
Forgot about retroactive HP lol, need to add that!
For level up multipliers, I have MULE: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47452
If you want new mechanics theres a perk mod https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/51448?tab=files&file_id=1000031455 however you might want to raise difficulty.

This plus Ahead of the Class Mod and Power Fantasy are being tested by me for a new STEP like guide, Im trying to make one of those "that kid" mod-list that bombs the game with new mechanics while using tasteful dialogue mods to hide the shit to ok writing morrowind has.
 
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Jarmaro

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For #2, more music would be great but all of the music mods I've come across suck ass. If anyone has any recommendations it'd be nice, most sound really really awful and just blatantly don't fit the game.
Just the other day I've read something about mod that reimplements music according to situation and the place, i.e. dungeons have have their own music etc. Supposedly it's part of Tamriel Rebuilt, but I found this: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/46200

Grand update of MUSE - version 2
The system was fully rewritten and got couple of new features:
- Combat music - now MUSE supports combat music, it will play according to your character's and enemie's level preventing it from playing at weakest enemies.
It also allows to add custom combat music for certain enemies and regions.
- Air and underwater support - you can add custom music for swimming underwater and floating high above the ground.
- Improved detection - removed case sensitivity for name comparing so you don't have to worry about names.
- Regional music is now queued by default for smoother experience.


Morrowind always had only exploration music that played same in every place, also with combat system that would play every encounter, no matter the enemy's strength.
Soundtrack can get repetitive after hours of playing. Context specific music is non-existent.
With MUSE, it changes. Modders and players can now easily add context specific music adding much wider variety of the in game soundtrack.


This mod serves in two purposes:
- You can customize music in game with adding new tracks to specific regions, dungeons and places.
You can add new music very easily, just drop your mp3 files to certain folders and you already have new music in game.

- Allows to add custom music to mods such as province mods.
Easy configuration file system allows to extent the system and add even more music types without having to edit the mod's code.​
rzWTjTx.png

- Regional - automatically detects or binds regions to folder.
- Dungeon detection - automatically detects if the interior you are in is a dangerous place.
- Tileset detection - determines what place type you are in, is it a Dwemer ruin or cave, no additional plugins needed, works with every mod.
- For cells - you can add music playlists for cities and specific places.
- Air - when you fly high above the ground.
- Underwater - when you dive to depths.
- Combat - better combat music handling, where it doesn't play every mudcrab. Custom enemy music tracks.

I believe what I read pertained to this mod that adds Tamriel Rebuilt music: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/47254
I read very good opinions about music for Tarmiel rebuilt, and from what I've listened now it sounds pretty good. So basically those tracks would play in appropriate situations, like dungeons, specific biomes, or places.
 

Dr1f7

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Your opinions on modded content here are pretty much bunk, since you seem to have not even engaged with it at all.
I have, and I regret the day that foolish notion entered my mind... I hit weird issues after a while, and how do you exactly determine what conflicts with what exactly when more than a single gameplay/quest mod is installed? The Official Advice (TM) is to install one mod at a time, test it thoroughly, then when you're sure that it's working as intended, move on to the next... Um, hello, how do you exactly do that when any single mod can break the game 10-20-30 hours later? Unless you're willing to play through the game at least N times, where N is the number of gameplay changing mods installed, you can never be sure. And even doing that isn't a guarantee because you could take different paths during playthroughs, visit different places, thus trigger different issues.

It took me a while (and MANY ruined playthroughs) to learn how to mod morrowind, it can be tricky. You need to really pay attention to what each mod does, and try to anticipate possible conflicts. Like, if you're installing two mods that mess with the same cell, for example. Being careful with load order can help a lot.

Giant mods that make sweeping changes to the whole game (like morrowind rebirth) are risky because really anything installed on top of it might conflict

And, some mods are just really sloppy but typically if they're sloppy there's comments on the download page with warnings, and generally might be a good idea to avoid them or be prepared to face the consequences
 

luj1

You're all shills
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For #2, more music would be great but all of the music mods I've come across suck ass. If anyone has any recommendations it'd be nice

best way is to assign custom tracks to cells via MUSE based on your personal preference

i use drone ambient for ruins for example and soule-like stuff for exteriors
 

luj1

You're all shills
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It took me a while (and MANY ruined playthroughs) to learn how to mod morrowind, it can be tricky. You need to really pay attention to what each mod does, and try to anticipate possible conflicts.

the problem everyone has are the same

- people use too many mods
- people use big bloaty cumbersome mods. You would be surprised how many fantastic mods are just 1kb
- for graphics u need just 2-3 mods, focus on gameplay
- u need a utility like Wrye Mash or MO2 to oversee everything
- pick 1 mod for every segment. Like 1 mod for ecomomy, 1 mod for levelling, 1 mod for sound, 1 mod for birthsigns, 1 for animation etc. Not 10 mods for each but 1-2
- people arent aware of how many mods there are. its 20 years of modding. there are many old mods which I never play without and are compatible with everything. Check out MMH, wolflore, yacobys, tesall.ru, fullrest.ru, french sites, GHF, etc. that still host some obscure but great mods


its easy to get lost but stay moderate and ure good

its better to pick 30, 40 good mods and play, than a mix of 200 mods
 
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Funposter

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its better to pick 20, 30 good mods and play, than a mix of 200 mods
This is the key to it, really. I don't think Morrowind is a game like Skyrim where you can comfortably download 200+ mods and get them working together in a stable fashion, especially since there's less big modlists/wabbajack auto installers. I tried to limit myself to 50 active plugins on my last couple of playthroughs and I found it a lot more fun because it rarely meant that I was having to test compatibility or was finding that things went unexpectedly wrong. You're a lot more in control of what changes are occurring and where they are when you limit yourself to a smaller modlist, and it comes with the benefit of being more clear in what you're trying to achieve.

Another tip - don't try to fix the entire game. I'm the sort of person who usually plans my character in advance, i.e "I'm going to play an Orc Battlemage and do the Mages Guild and Main Quest", so if that's the case, I won't be downloading mods that fix House Redoran or the Thieves Guild. There's no point in downloading even high quality quest mods like Vvardenfell Brotherhood if I'm not going to play through them, because all they do is create potential conflicts that I won't be testing or don't want to deal with. I'd say that you should create a core list of approximately 20-30 mods which fix the most glaring issues with the game, and then tailor the last 20 or so to the specific playthrough that you want to do, adding or fixing content that you want to actually play. I've been too busy to play vidya lately, but I might put together a decent "core" list of mods to fix many of the game's big issues that acts as a base to then tailor for each individual playthrough. Sigourn has a pretty good guide, but you can trim a lot of the fat from it because it has a few small, fiddly mods that aren't strictly necessary especially in the grand scheme of things.
 

Sigourn

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not needed, these are engine level bugfixes that don't exist in openmw
MWSE and MGE XE
many of MGE XE's changes are part of openmw
90% of mods
this is just a lie
https://modding-openmw.com/compatibility/
Lua, which are the best mods ever made for Morrowind
It does, but it has its own API. Many mods support both.
e.g.,
https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/51514
"Requirements
MWSE-Lua or OpenMW-Lua"
The OpenMW API is much better as it didn't have the same limitations placed on it.
all grass mods
https://modding-openmw.com/search/?q=grass
?
99% of shaders
No idea where you even got this idea from.

There's tons of mods on nexusmods tagged with 'openmw': https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/?tags_yes[]=2076
many of them exclusively work with openmw and not the base game

of people who arent well informed
:lol:

Glad to see that faggot luj1 being put in his place.

That said, the truth is OpenMW depends on the goodwill of Morrowind modders actively developing with OpenMW in mind. And many, plain simple, won't bother. If it's a simple enough mod, they will. But stuff like Ashfall, for instance, would take so much work that Merlord just wouldn't bother with it.

OpenMW is pretty much the clean and simple alternative to get Morrowind to run. But there's no arguing against the fact the most important and prolific Morrowind modders, all of them, recommend the standard game with MGE XE + MWSE.

I also echo what Lemming42 said in the first page: the most insidious of Morrowind's issues haven't been fixed with mods to this day, because they would require a full rework of the game.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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^^ That does look good, and easily the best option available. Does it handle human/elf faces as well? In my experience AIs drop the ball on human faces, since they either turn into weird watercolour paintings or creepy photorealistic things where you can tell it's tried to use an actual photo of a real human.
Q01ZBLH.png


As I see it, the AI handles humanoid faces just as well, if not better. It's absolutely terrific. I don't see why anyone would not use it, aside of people who cannot handle the graphical requirements, it's just enhanced Vanilla. And all of that in one mod that upscalles every texture in the game, even the smallest rock. No bullshit 1000 mods for every object. if you see very closely, you can see that in some places it looks a bit like a watercolor, but it barely noticable even on a zoomed picture. Very unlikely anyone would be able to see it in game (i.e. the dragon symbol on the guard's helmet)
The human and elven faces in Morrowind were poorly done to begin with, not simply as a function of low polygon count or low-resolution textures; these were the one misstep in an otherwise visually-impressive game. Generating AI-enhanced versions of these faces simply results in more realistic ugly/goofy faces but does not resolve the underlying issues. Head replacers, by contrast, not only offer high-polygon meshes and high-resolution textures but also the possibility of aesthetic improvements --- though, of course, whether they actually are artistically-improved while remaining faithful to Morrowind's overall aesthetic is dependent on the talents and intent of the modellers.

The Argonian and Khajiit faces, by contrast, were much better in the original, unmodded game than the human and elven faces, and therefore much more amenable to AI enhancement. :M
 

Rincewind

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I think you're also overestimating the extent to which mods affect things down the line, or outside of their scope. Pretty much all mods released will have someone checking whether or not there are wild edits which would affect other parts of the world, and compatibility is usually a pretty simple matter of looking at which cells a mod affects and...not installing something else that affects that same cell. This is quite possible even in large modlists. Read what the mods do and figure out if any other mods make edits to the same area, and if they do, you have three options; check if there's a patch, observe the area yourself for incompatibility and if it's minor just learn to live with it, or choose only mod to install. Wow, that was hard!
My experience is unfixable savegame corruptions because some non-Lua mods save their state into the savegame, then the game engine is badly written so it doesn't handle "dangling" data well (or at all). Yes, went through MO3, Wyre Mash, various tool, all that shit... At which point I was spending more time on maintaining the modded game than playing it. Got it running in a semi-stable way in the end, but was still getting random crashes every few hours. Which is not my idea of having a good time when I want to relax, waiting when the next crash will happen...

"mods that contain code"

fucking lmao you are so retarded
Why's that so? There's plenty of mods that don't contain any code, e.g. texture and mesh mods, and those are perfectly safe. It's pretty easy to find bugs in *any* non-trivial code that's longer than a few lines, you would surely know that if you were a programmer. A single character typo somewhere can break the code or introduce subtle bugs, especially with dynamic languages that games use. In fact, I found weird issues with many of the newer Lua mods I tried that manifested under specific circumstances. Yeah, I was talking to the guy at some point on Discord who wrote it. But at that point my immersion was broken, I started fucking around with the mod for an hour or so, and guess what, I only had an hour or two to spare that day for playing games, which was wasted on becoming a playtester, effectively...

Overall, I had 50-100 crashes at the very minimum during my (half-)playthrough of Morrowind before I gave up. But like I said, I created the problems for myself and I learned my lesson; shouldn't have trusted those modding guides, should have just installed a few texture mods and called it a day.

At some point, it's your decision man whether you just want to install a game and play it (maybe applying some critical patches first), or you want to tinker around with mods in your spare time endlessly. I guess it can be a good hobby for people who have tons of spare time, but that's definitely not me.
 
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