I for one am looking forward to exploring the dark places of Middle-Earth...Vast, detailed dungeons and such. I'm hoping that there is the possibility of getting lost in catacombs and forests, and that scale is as large as possible! I'd like it to take a long time to walk across a mountain range, rather than a few minutes, as in Morrowind.
Also, I hope the darker places are actually pitch dark...I want to HAVE to use a torch to go through the paths of the Dead, Moria etc.
Although because of the earlier timeframe, Moria may still be inhabited. Still, I'd love to lose myself in the abandoned lower corridors and see the team's interpretation of the place where gandalf eventually comes to fight the Balrog!

Creepy sounds help a lot as well to make the most freaky and convincing environment (System Shock 2)

You are going to be really happy cuz if you want to have to walk for a long time across a mountain range so on and so forth. youll love the fact that mirkwood is five yes FIVE times the size of varden fell

Vvardenfell is the size of Mirkwood in MEmod

-val

bah, forget system shock 2 for atmosphere, go for something like AvP2, incredible atmosphere, especially the first level, there aint a single alien, just heaps of sounds and scary stuff, not to mention a very dark level.

dont hate the player... what is mirkwood ?

I don't know eiter. I read the Dutch version of LotR... Please, this is the second time I ask this... What is Mirkwood??

EDIT: Wait, off course I know. What forest could be as big as Vvardenfel in Middle Earth. DOH! The BIG forest! Where spiders are! Where Bilbo and the dwarves saw light, got themself captured and escaped in barrels. Am I right?

Holy cow! As big as Vvardenfel!? Awesome!

Mirkwood is called Demsterwold in Dutch, it is indeed the big forest left of The Lonely mountain and west of the Misty Mountains (Nevelbergen). God thank the big English map/poster in my room. You can also get the info out of the first movie, just check the difference betweem spoken text and the subtitles.

Ëlwe

Edit:It is right/East of Misty mountains, srry

OMG!!! I'm not the only one who speaks Dutch!
*faints*

Edit: Eqlaerinion-> Good idea... If I knew were to find the English version

Memod will be about twenty times bigger then morrowind so yes you can discover an enormous amount of land and get lost very easily. And in the deep places of the earth were no light shines I'm sure it will be pitch dark.

Actually, kasper, there are more dutch speaking people on this forum then you might think. But try reading the english version, I haven't read the dutch one fully, only a few chapters and it's just not the same.

I'm glad to see some rendering options tweaked. My other big concern is that since the scale is greatly increased, I hope view distance is increased as well. If you can see things a bajillion miles away in the book, I wanna be able to do it in the game! Of course, that may require many graphical compromises... for example, subjective view distances and real-time terrain LOD changes so that things get more complex as you get closer. My main gripe about morrowind is that you can't ever see more than maybe 50 meters away. However, if you could, there isn't a lot of LOD scaling, so if you COULD see farther, it'd run horribly slow.
Also, I'm worried about high-polygon environments, like forests and such.

Man, I'm realizing the magnitude of this project...I hope constant pressure from the eager community doesn't make Daerk and Co. rush production. As much as I want to start playing, I can wait as long as it takes to experience a masterpiece

Mirkwood and Demsterwold... Big difference there... Demsterwold sounds a bit German and dark. Mirkwood sounds... um.. I dunno... swampy...

In response to exploring the dark places of the world. Would it be possible to enter the Paths of the Dead at all? Hmm I should rephrase that, would it be possible to do it without getting killed very quickly? I don't think so personally. If you aren't the heir of Isildur you get killed. I would have loved to see how they would do this, but I don't think it will be possible.

Speaking of dark places I can't wait to see how they do the Barrow Downs.

As fas as the paths of the dead goes...
Maybe you can't enter the gate... but it doesn't say anything in the book about having to use a key
I wonder how powerful your character can get... in Morrowind, you start out as an utter wimp who has trouble killing what is basically a worm (kwama) but by the time you max out your primary/secondary skills like a game year later, you are essentially invincible... 600 hit points, ability to jump 30 feet in the air, not to mention ability to beat down a dremora lord with your bare hands.
I wonder if you can develop a character of such immense power in MEMod, or if a well-placed slash of an orcish blade can still take you out.

Hmm, sounds grim for view distance on the other forum. It looks like max viewing distance is sort of hard-coded into the game engine, and cell size can't be altered. So perhaps we won't be able to see mountains and forests from far off. The only way to make such a limitation look halfway convincing that I can think of is to shroud the edges of the visible world with fog. Nothing exists more than 50 meters from the player, or more than 1 cell away. Mighty shame.

ALTHOUGH I hope Daerk reads this... he may be able to tell me whether it's possible to be selective with what is displayed (for example terrain?) beyond that view distance...although I'm not sure if it's legal to make that big a modification to the engine (or practical to spend the time).

Any Star Wars Galaxies players out there? In SWG terrain is displayed like a mile away in minimal detail, and as you get closer, it becomes more detailed and high-poly. I'm hoping it's possible to do something similar with this engine. Probably not

About the poly's on distance, I have heard Daerk (or some dev) talking about making 3 models of same things, 1 for near, 1 for medium range, 1 for far away. Though I doubt that you can see as far as a mile (In MW you can see 60 metre or so, you can assume I gues the ME-Mod team will increase that range but like I said before I don't think it'll be a mile.

Ëlwe

No matter how many polys any given model have, the devs WON'T be able to increase the view distance beyond the maximum of the Morrowind engine. Although it might have another effect..


pharzon..

If MEMod is becoming as big as said, it'll be huge and there will be an incredible amount of details because all the open spaces should be filled up. And about the darkness in underground areas, when I created a cave in the tes: construction set and tested it without light added to it, I still could still see most of it.

If the MEMod team can make underground caves completely dark it would be awesome.

OT: There are more people coming from Holland than I thought (me too).

It's too bad you can't see for a long distance. Since Memod is going to be so huge it would be nice if you could see a few miles ahead so you could see where you were going. And just imagine running across the Rohan planes and seeing Edoras (sp?) silhouetted against the evening sky miles distant... Ah well it will still kick ass, but a huge view distance would be cool.

Suzerain, I didn't say it meant swampy, I said it sounded (the word 'Mirkwood') swampy. Well to me anyway. I wonder why the translater didn't called it myrkewoud or myrkbos etc. (bos, woud = forest, wood). I'll ask what 'Demster' means to my mum or dad. What language is 'myrke'? Elven?

myrke is old english for mirk. cmon you could have figured that out from suzerains post.

im not dutch but demster seems to be related to the german word dämmer. (actually its not a word but it forms the base of an array of german words such as dämmerung etc which is dawn or twilight or just dim and gloomy

Will the pixel shaded grass be everywhere? Hopefully, there will be cycling moon(s). Are you changing the water script?


So many questions to ask...

lucky for you, this forum has a search option!

Note it is illegal for us to modify the Morrowind engine.

Many things that are controlled BY the engine are modifiable, but things controlled IN the engine are not.

You will likely enjoy MEMod for Morrowind, as it does use more realistic colour layouts as well as terrain and design features.

As an example, DiseasedPunk (one of the MEMod Senior Devs) rendered a portion of a mountain heightmap I made. Here are two examples of the mountain heightmap as rendered according to slight edits in the heightmap:



As you can see, a very slight edit to the heightmap can cause massive terrain changes in a realistic natural method. Note that these two heightmap examples were thrown together in less than five minutes just to show an example, and the mountains do not follow scientific laws of nature. The heightmap of a mountain was made to show an example to the members of my team in how we are making the landmass of Middle-Earth by using a flat greyscale terrain image.

So the landforms in MEMod will be realistic, and not the large bumps you see in Morrowind.

-- D

That looks really neat Daerk! Oh and welcome back

That's a great example, thanks for showing it. Are you guys hand drawing the heightmap or using something like Terragen?

I like that with joy that overflows.

Can't wait for the beta.

First place I'm gonna head is Rivendell, even if I have to have 10 million monsters running after me the whole way there.

I want to head to all the nice places before I have to hit the dark places.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those goth freaks who's all into the dead and stuff, but I really really want to see the use of atmosphere (sound, colors) to see if the team can create an environment that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. As a rule, games look bubbly and cartoonish in comparison to a scary movie, but there are some classics that convey the creators' imaginings. Looking Glass did this extremely well with the Thief series and System Shock 2, as did Rebellion with the aforementioned Alien versus Predator games.

I hope to be freaked out by nasty slimy things suddenly leaping out into the light of my torch five feet away as I explore. That's all I'm saying. Snarling dead guys, urging me to hand them some flesh. Here ya go! I won't be needing that leg.

I hope the devs put in another one of those groovy screenshots of a dungeon or heightmap! Gawd, I see now why it's called a TOTAL conversion...not even the same game now! Hooray.

Actually, view distance can be increased... with Morrowind Optimizer

Well, actually the view distance isn't increased with Morrowind Optimizer. However it does remove the fog of war..


pharzon..

You and your team aren't exactly following the scientific laws of nature either, creating this gigantic TC for fun, free, gratis and for nothing.

We are not worthy, and btw those hills didn't look Shire-like, and that's saying a lot!

Off hand, I would guess those to be either the Ephel Duath, the Ered Lithui, or the Hithaeglir...

one cell is one mile by one mile
you cannot load more than one cell at a time that is hard coded
fps optimizer is only able to get you to see the full cell
and dccmw chages lighting so in the dark it reaallly dark...
and this and a huge amount of other answers are at you beck and call with the combined use of the faq daerk on..., memod guide and the search feature

dccmw??? Do you mean RCC4MW? Also a cell isnt 1 mile x 1 mile... each cell is like 500x500 feet... A mile is like 5580 feet.

1 cell is 385 feet by 385 feet.

You can only load one cell-space at any given time.

View distance cannot be increased beyond the boundries of that cell-space, even when using FPS Optimizer.

FPS Optimizer will allow you (if configured properly) to remove the layers of fog that obscure your vision range. It has many other uses as well... but none of them load extra cells to extend view-distance.

-- D

Ooops i msut have missed a zero somewhere and Daerk im sorry i miss spelled your great creation of RCC4MW it really is my favorite mod because it makes it really dark at night the only problem is that lights are wastes of space and money now (not a complaint just a comment) umm... and thanks for pointing out all my faulty info so that peeps dont get misinformation...

Isn't how far PC can see limited! what if you are in example moria and there is thus big piles and great halls etc. Isn't it stupid when those are like there is a lot of mist in there? Or maybe its just so dark there that it wont matter! I dont know! tell me!


Answer the question only if you can understand my english!!!

This question has been answered so many times by myself and even by regular forum members and other members on my team... so i'm locking this thread.

Try searching for "view" "distance" or "view distance" or similar.

If any of my moderators for MEMod get a chance, please merge this with an appropriate thread.

-- D

'Sight' thread merged into this topic as view distance has been discussed here.


I presume it's ok to leave the existing topic open for discussion?

view distance can't be changed, granted, but I was using this kender mod once and everything was giant, a hill was a mountain. couldn't this be used to make the apearance of farther view distance, just make everything smaller and slower? or would that limmit detail?

PEACE

Yes, if you can scale down the player character and other entities in size, as you say the kender mod does, apparent cell size would increase, though the terrain and static object texture detail would suffer since everything's bigger. I'm sure this can be remedied by increasing texture resolution AND increasing terrain mesh complexity to avoid Morrowindian bulbous hills. If you create a mod or plugin in this manner, you'd have 'bigger' cells and therefore be able to see for a longer distance.

Naturally though, this means that cells would have a lot more content, so game performance and load times would suffer accordingly.

Strangely though, it seems that you can see terrain and static objects for quite some distance in adjacent cells, both in the editor and in-game (fog removed).

Not so very strange, since the CS doens't have to load/run the scripts. No motion and no scripts lowers the loading time you know.

but every script in memod is linked and there is alot of scripting in this gem of a game...