Game Skyrim Forum

Anybody know what this is about? This is the first time I've come across this Unity engine. Never heard of it myself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B4X2Gq5ZW4

The trees and shaders surpass MGE XE even.

I'm happy with those graphics in 2017!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_rhhx0qV9o

dark, but nice!

Unity is a https://unity3d.com, used for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games, so it should not be surprising that it is capable of better graphics effects than a graphics-enhancing hack for a 13 years old game (no matter how great it is). Since version 5 was released in early 2015, the engine has been completely free for personal use, before that there was a professional version and a free version which was missing some advanced features like real-time shadows and LOD. Looks like for the video the terrain was generated from a heightmap of the Morrowind game world, with a few possibly pre-made plants and rocks, and a number of Morrowind meshes that have been converted into a file format Unity can use. I have some experience with Unity, and I could make something similar in a short time myself, but it is really nothing more than some meshes having been put together. It may be possible with A LOT of work to make a game similar to Morrowind in Unity, but there is already OpenMW, and once that has reached 1.0, which means all features from the original Morrowind are implemented, there is no reason why it should not get effects like these or even better ones. What I'm trying to say is making OpenMW look like that will probably be a lot easier than making Unity play like Morrowind.

If you know a bit about the Unity engine, the first video is not very impressive. vtastek apparently managed to convert entire interior cells, which is much more interesting, but still not a game, unfortunately. Even if the entire game world could be ported over you could not do more than walk around and look at stuff.

However, there is a very promising project going on which aims to port http://www.dfworkshop.net/, and it looks like it makes a lot more progress than the DaggerXL engine, which is meant to be an open-source engine for Daggerfall and a number of other games, but this project has not been very active for a long time now.

Not my work.

https://github.com/demonixis/TESUnity/releases

It is apparently a VR world viewing app. Just for sightseeing. I like how interior shadows just work with minimal meddling.

Oh, I did not know that project! So far it's only meant to be a "world viewer" though, right? Or are there plans to port the actual game as well? And it uses the original .nif files in Unity? Or are they converted?

As far as I can tell, yeah. There is no conversion necessary, it work the same way OpenMW does. Just run the executable and it will load mods too(or at least loose textures). It is super easy to run it.

http://i.imgur.com/5CCQpQG.jpg

vs.

https://imgur.com/gallery/vfZfC

Apart from interiors having shadows, there is not a thing better than Morrowind + MGE XE combo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPwGXf8y6XA is the Unity video for Daggerfall.

Not even TESV had those types of tree animations and shaders. You really think OpenMW will be able to achieve better than that in a couple years? What about having puddles on the ground like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLy8f4jywm8 for Oblivion?

Those puddles shaders looks really nice and realistic.

Ok, you may be right about the trees, yes. Unity's built-in tree editor is pretty powerful indeed. But having a static game world to walk through and look at things is far, far from having a game, no matter how pretty it is. If someone makes this playable some day, great, I take, it. But just be aware that the things in the video you posted don't take much effort to do and have not really anything to do with Morrowind. It's not Morrowind with better graphics, its a simple Unity scene with some Morrowind meshes. And a crappy parallax wall texture. With some effort (e.g. good normal maps and parallax maps) this may end up looking quite nice, but it is still not Morrowind.

Even if OpenMW won't have these kinds of shaders and effects in a couple of years, it will be playable. It is also completely Open-Source. Unity is not, which means even if someone would really attempt to make a Unity port of Morrowind, it would be possible that there are limitations in the engine that would make it necessary to use "dirty" workarounds to make things work, and then we are kind of back at MCP and MGE. An engine is much, much more than just graphics. I am not a programmer, and I only know my way around the graphics part of Unity, but I understand OpenMW was made from the ground to work with Morrowind. Unity can certainly be used for all kinds of games and it an also be extended and customized if you know how, but I'd imagine there are so many things it would have to be made to work with (Morrowind meshes, master and plugin files, scripts, etc.) that it would possibly be almost like making a new engine.

About the puddles you would have to ask vtastek, as he made them for Oblivion (for Oblivion Reloaded, to be precise, which is a kind of MGE XE for Oblivion if you didn't know that). As far as I understand how these things work, I see no technical reason why something like this should not be possible in OpenMW.

Shaders and lazy devs.

With emmisive or vertex coloring of a tree, we can store separate sway information for leaves and trunk to make realistic animations. I can demonstrate something like that for Morrowind distand land. OpenMW obviously would be better when shader support is added.

MGE has 50.000 lines of code including 2500 or so lines of shader code. OpenMW has like, I dunno, half million or something? They are just 2500 lines short of shader code.

Seriously, OpenMW is indistinguishable from Morrowind right now, what a feat!

Shader code is very mobile, porting is easy. Puddle shader is only 200 lines of code.

Working on my water shader right now, I will port the puddle shader later:

http://i.imgur.com/4b7ty82.jpg

That said, I miss Hrnchamd.