↧
Skyblivion v0.1 Released!
↧
Morroblivion v064 Released!
↧
↧
Welcome
Welcome to TESRenewal Project, a community about merging the amazing worlds of The Elder Scrolls video games into more modern game engines.
If you're looking to join the project, please check out our volunteer hub!
Use the links on the left side to navigate. Questions? Read the Skywind FAQ and Morroblivion FAQ!
↧
Skywind Development Video Series
Please watch our development video series to get the best idea about what Skywind, the development team and community behind the game is all about.
↧
Skywind on Social Media
Check out and follow TESRenewal through your favorite social media.
↧
↧
Blog post - September 2015
Monthly Blog Post
Recent models
While we can’t cover every model that makes it into Skywind, we try to give you a glimpse of those that are important or interesting. One of the most recent finished model sets is a collection of clutter objects for small fishing villages, ports, and coastal areas. This includes different types of boats, debris and filth, nets, and other items that will help fill out areas. Clutter, despite being less glamorous than a soaring architectural edifice or a vicious monster, is quite important. Though often taken for granted due to their status as background elements of the game world, I can guarantee that you would notice were they absent. A player might not stop to examine a barrel and think it a magnificent piece of modeling, but these seemingly insignificant objects help fill out the environment and create the impression that you are, in fact, in a small fishing village or port. The following album is dedicated to those smaller pieces that help create the big picture.
Voice acting
Some of you have been asking - through our social media platforms - for an update on voice acting. While there are likely many reasons for Morrowind’s limited use of voiceovers, one was probably the enormous amount of dialogue in the game.
For those of you who might be thinking, “They’ll be cutting out massive amount of content!” or, “It’ll be way less immersive because of the missing lines!”, rest assured that such fears are unfounded. Any lines cut were mostly mere repetitions, and reactions and responses to situations outside player interaction have been increased. These include, for example, reactions when finding corpses and npc conversations, neither of which existed in Morrowind. If you feel like reading more about the way we will be handling dialogue in Skywind, take a look at last month’s blog post: https://tesrenewal.com/blog/blog-post-9#comments
So where am I going with this? Contributors have been hard at work, revamping over 40.000 lines and generating scripts for each character, and we now have over 100 assigned voice actors. Some recordings have already been completed; here they are ingame for all of you to see:
Combat music
One of the less visible areas of Skywind is the music, simply because it is closer to completion than the rest of the project. The soundtrack for Skywind was composed some time ago, so there is little progress to report. We have been at somewhat of a standstill for quite a while, because we needed to work out the concept for the next step - combat music.
Now, however, the music department has resumed progress, and combat music is finally in the works. For every combat piece, there is a main track and a finale track. The first is initiated when the player engages in combat, and when combat ends the finale will play and then transition over to the atmospheric music, similar to how it worked when fighting dragons in Skyrim. So, while you are being savagely torn apart by 20 Cliff Racers, this music will be playing in the background.
That’s all we have for you this time, but be sure to check us out on social media; you might miss some progress if you don’t!
Until next time,
The Skywind Team
↧
Blog post - October 2015
Building the Dwemer Tileset
by Erik Christensen
Over the past couple of months I planned, designed, modeled and textured a large set of models to replace the existing Dwemer tileset from Morrowind. now I feel I should explain a ‘tileset’ before we get any further: a tileset is a set of models, that can be snapped together to create a variety of different models/environments. They are modular 3d models that are simple enough to not be ‘heavy’ on a person's computer and yet still look amazing when repeated many times.
When I started the Dwemer tileset in August my initial goal was to stick to the original Morrowind Dwemer sets like glue, basically only change it in small ways to make it more detailed like what I did with the Hlaalu tileset with a higher polygon count to smooth out areas. This obviously would not work with the Skywind Dwemer though, as it is very tough to get the simple walls and featureless rooms of the original sets to properly hold up to the detail of Skywind, So I went back to the drawing board.
I was lost, I had no real end goal and was just concepting in 3d. This does not really help when trying to make something so many people are passionate about. So I sat down for a few hours and wrote out this document:
I never type anything really and that just kind of happened. It is a good example of the amount of work that goes into creating a tileset for a game, and also the reason why many back out of tileset jobs after a while.
So I ended up with a (partially) complete design doc which outlined most of the tricky parts of this project and allowed me to get things like color palettes and asset lists outlined.
Building the Corridors
I started working on the corridors not long after I completed the design doc, it didn’t take very long to get something together considering how much concept art we have on the subject. So getting it all nailed down was simple. At this time I also started work on the textures, which ended up being quite easy to produce due to the fantastic color reference Smitehammer found me.
For the textures I used a program called dDo, although I used a lot of custom texture maps to get the look I wanted, and I was able to quickly produce the 7 2048x2048 texture maps in a few days since dDo allows you to save ‘Smart Materials’ which I could use over multiple textures.
The actual design for the corridors went fairly quickly, and what you see in the final images is pretty much what I built on the first day. Although we did go through some iterations of roof designs to see if we could fit the large centurions in them, however it would mean we wouldn’t be able to follow Morrowind's dungeon layouts so they were quickly scrapped.
Rough roof concepts for the Dwemer Centurion
Building the Hallways
Now the corridors were easy, they took just a few days to get fully concepted and produced, this is due to there being a complete set of assets from Morrowind for me to follow and base my set off of.
the corridors are ‘Replacers’ which means we can directly replace all instances of the Morrowind assets with the new Skywind versions.
Hallways are different, these are unique to Skywind. Morrowind did have some double high room sections however these were very limited in what you could do with them. and always up ended looking the same in-game, So i took inspiration from Skyrim in the layout of their Dwemer hallways and how they got them to snap together. sped up the modeling process and soon I had some basic ideas about what I wanted these pieces to look like. So i started modeling and came up with a number of concepts, none of which made it into the final piece.
Some of the early screenshots I linked to the dev team for critique
Once I got the basic shape down I started realising that I needed to have the top be a lot simpler than the bottom segment in terms of detail, however it needed to hold up since we were also having a door section that would go in this top half to give the dungeon designer a bit more creative freedom in the Y axis.
Top down view of the various pieces (excluding the door variants)
Now the ‘doorways’ were tricky because this is the point where the Hallways connect to the Corridor sections. Of course this means if we have a door section on the bottom, we still have 16 combinations for doors to go in. So we just went for the main ones, and the doors are easy enough to set up so that they can be done based on the designers request, rather than flooding the game files with assets which will never be used.
Example of a hallway section with a doorway
In the end the hallways came to light, with flat ceilings with a curved tubular pipe space, which looks grand.
I went with stone for the ground, because I felt that the metal flooring of Morrowind did not offer enough contrast to look good. However the stone texture is super generic so I made a metal plating texture which works in the place of the stone.
There is still a lot to do. We still have plans to make a ‘Caverns’ tileset which will be a mix of Dwemer and Cave, along with sets of Clutter assets which will slowly be made as the team gets the time.
Some of the clutter we have planned is living quarters items, Construction materials, Ventilation shafts and fans, Destroyed objects, Large murals depicting times gone by, Statues and of course, Animated machinery. Expect to see either a feature video or image gallery posted at some point in the future, however for now sit down and look at some wicked images and videos!
So that's about it for the Dwemer, We are busy working on the Clutter assets and exterior buildings. the doorways were also recently completed on a livestream which you can watch here:
↧
Blog post - March
Skywind Recap
by Rovan
Welcome back to our usual recap.It’s been some time since our last blog update, and a lot has been going on on and behind the scene (the forums). Some of you may have watched our latest video, but if you haven’t, be sure to go to our YouTube channel. We will not go into detail here, but fill you in on what we’ve been working on the past few months.
Landscaping
A tremendous amount of landscaping work has been done, with every region getting closer and closer to being finished. With areas like the Bitter Coast and Sheogorad being finished, recently focus has been shifting to areas like the West Gash, Ascadian Isles and Red Mountain.
A lot of work has also been done on Vvardenfell’s many cities and towns, with focus on coastal areas. Lately, significant progress has been made on the towns of Ald Velothi, Dagon Fel, Gnaar Mok, Gnisis, and Khuul. In addition to these the team has been working on the smaller settlements that dot the landscape of Vvardenfell such as Sterdecan's Farm and Gro-Bagrat's Plantation.
3D
The 3D department has recently gotten a large amount of new models implemented, with many more in the works. One big thing added recently is banners. The original banners of Morrowind were truly unique, and were amazing at enhancing the exotic and alien feel of the world. As such, artists Ravanna and Hart have been working together to create these stunning works of art which capture that feeling while bringing them up to date with more modern, hi-resolution textures.
Shrines have also been recently implemented. All the shrines you may encounter on your pilgrimage through Vvardenfell have been recreated with new HD models and textures.
Lots of miscellaneous models have been completed too, with new things such as bottles, shrines, or road markers to name a few. While some of them may seem more mundane, they are an essential part of the game process, and are necessary to making things feel realistic. In addition to those already implemented there are a number of models that are currently WIP and have not yet made it in-game. We look forward to telling you more about it another time.
Other news
Other departments have also made lots of progress with the SFX department working hard on spells, dust storms, and the environmental SFX for Dwemer ruins, Balmora, West Gash and Bitter Coast. The SFX department will be more extensively featured in our next post, so stay tuned!
Meanwhile, the writing team has been working on enhancing Morrowind’s more lackluster quests as well as creating quest content for future gameplay overhauls. There has been a stream of newcomers in that department, and they are working hard to make Vvardenfell more full of life and quests than ever.
Coding and animation have been busy figuring out the proper tech to implement new behaviours. This is no easy task due to the Skyrim engine being notoriously difficult to add animations to. Coders have also been working on game mechanics, and will continue to do so for some time, as it requires a tremendous amount of time and effort.
Work has also been put forward to ensure that Skywind is 100% legal, as we wish to respect Bethesda’s rules, and so that we can legally and properly release it when it is done.
That’s it for now. Stay tuned for some more special blog posts!
↧
SKYWIND PUBLIC CHAT ON DISCORD
Over the last several months Skywind developers have adopted Discord as our primary means for real-time development and department communications. We've noticed a drastic improvement in our workflow and have largely abandoned using the TESrenewal chat here on the website. TESrenewal will soon be downgrading chat support here but would like to invite anyone curious about the project to visit our Discord server for any questions regarding the project, joining the team, or catch sneak peaks into the development process. Come join us!
↧
↧
Blog post - July 2016
Making sound effects in Skywind
by Cesare, with the contributions of Corpus X, Del Chupenebray and Mike Vogler.
Hello, folks! It is blog o’clock, and it’s about time we told you about sound design.
As you know, Skywind is a complete recreation of Morrowind. But for it to be legal, we need to make everything anew. Assets, of course, but also music, and sounds. All those little (or big) noises that make a world believable. We thought you might enjoy learning a bit more about how those sounds are created, so the lead Corpus X (Michael Pewtress) agreed to shed some light on his SFX department.
SFX’s busy little bees have been working like crazy for the past year, and, sound after sound, Vvardenfell is taking shape. Their work goes from the folding of a piece of paper to ambient sound for a whole region that can mix more than 20 different sound effects
It’s not easy to create fitting sounds for assets that are being made. For that, our sound designers rely on their inventive ears, and draw inspiration from various sources. Morrowind is obviously one of the main ones, but also concept art, and in-game videos of Skywind itself (especially for environmental sounds). Sounds from the original game are used as a reference, but, like everything else, the team has to create most sounds from scratch, and it can get pretty challenging, especially when the sound needs to be synchronized with an animation. We wouldn’t want those cliff racers to have a weird out of sync wing flap, would we?
Some designers record their own sounds and use their personal sound libraries. Others will use available sound databases and work from stock sounds. Although tools may vary, the workflow stays mostly the same. Any member of the audio team can pick from any unclaimed project, ranging from creature sounds, interior/exterior environment sounds, item sounds, misc in-game sounds such as turning a crank or pulling a lever etc. from a list of unclaimed tasks. Once a member starts work on a task, they are allowed a month to ideally finish, or at the very least make some substantial progress. They are asked to frequently (twice a month) update a SFX admin with the progress they’re making on a task, or submit it for review in the hopes that the job can be considered completed.
Everything is carefully reviewed before it gets in game. There are three SFX team leads who oversee the review process – Corpus X, team leader and manager, Mike Vogler, who handles a lot of the technical aspect of sound design, and Del Chupenebray, who works more on the creative vision. When a task is put up for review, they each listen to the sound files provided, and each leave a comment with their opinion on what could be improved, what is working well, any technical issues that need to be addressed, or any creative tweaks that need to be looked at.
Mike Vogler: “My personal focus is on giving both creative and technical guidance to our sound designers who either feel ready to submit their sounds, or are adhering to an assigned deadline. I try to reign in audio that might sound uncharacteristic, unnatural, or over-the-top; help fine-tune frequency ranges and volumes to assure sounds don't clash, like lava and thunder for Red Mountain; or direct how much reverb (wetness) might be on sounds depending on where they will be in-game. Sometimes reverb that is part of the raw audio can make the sound appear out of place, or one element may have too low a rumble that conflicts with another lower frequency sound.”
Del Chupenebray “I like to think first about the lore of Morrowind while I listen to a sound. Does the sound feel convincing for what it is trying to achieve – if it is an outdoor environment sound for example, do I feel immersed in the land of Morrowind, hearing great reptilian beasts, or hear the calls of distant creatures with the wind and insects buzzing around me? If I’m reviewing a creature, the same principle applies – Does the creature sound as fat and heavy/thin and light or intimidating as it should? Do I feel these sounds suit the creature and stay lore friendly? In some special cases, does the creature stay true to the original game and still sound iconic? Once I feel the designer is on the right creative track and knows what sorts of sounds need to be achieved, I may offer feedback concerning frequency balance, compression, general volume etc.”
Once the sounds meet their expectations, they can be implemented into the game. Implementation required Mike Vogler to write up a file nomenclature similar to Bethesda's, which he makes sure everyone follows accurately.
Over the past year, the department has grown to its current state of 25 active members and has produced a tremendous amount of work, which adds greatly to the atmosphere of the game. Before Corpus X took charge, only six tasks had been completed. Seven months later, we have 57 tasks that are game ready, and many more still in the works. Here are a few peeks at what you will hear in Skywind.
SFX is also famous among the Skywind members for providing some much appreciated fun, as one of the goals of its leads is to make serious work in a positive environment. So the SFX team was the first to implement a system of rewards, among which is one that makes all the departments partake in their progress: each time a new sound is approved, the “story” of its making is told to everyone. Here are a few tasty examples, all written by mad genius Corpus X:
Knapsack SFX, created by AlexRAudio:
"I'm running away, mom." said AlexRAudio, "I'm running away and you can't stop me!" Alex turned away from his mother and started packing more things, but not his clothes. Alex wouldn't accept any advice from some monster who wouldn't make him Kraft Dinner for lunch. This was important! He then grabbed his Optimus Prime, his favorite Transformer and placed him alongside He-Man. He'll need the companionship and protection from his two warrior heroes. Alex then reached up on his shelf and grabbed one of his walkie talkies, "I'll leave the other one just in case you decide to make me Kraft Dinner." Alex then grabbed his knapsack and threw it over his shoulder”
Book SFX created by GeorgeK and note SFX created by Mike Vogler
"Quick, close the magazine, I hear someone coming!" exclaimed Mike Vogler. He knew what he was doing was going to be awesome but he just couldn't help himself. "What? I don't hear anything?" replied Georgek with an excited look on his face. "No, seriously," Mike said nervously, "I don't want to get caug..." The door to the garage swung open causing George and Mike to jump. "What are you little turds up to?!" spat Elizabeth, Mike's big sister. "Ugh, nothing LIZARD BREATH! Why don't you go back to your cold cave and hibernate for the year!" Mike looked over to George knowing he got his sister real good. George came in to Elizabeth's rescue, "Shut up, Mike," this was going to be his night, "Maybe we can include Elizabeth in the fun." Mike was instantly repulsed, "Fun? Ew!""What kind of fun are we talken about? Did you boyz find a few dollars and buy some candy or do you still think lego is cool?" Elizabeth laughed. George countered, "Well, my dear Liz, I think this might entice you more than both of those options combined!" George stood up with his usual shit eating grin. They indeed bought some chocolate bars earlier that day. The pages flipped open exposing the centerfold. Elizabeth scoffed, "Um, seriously? You want me to look at a national geographic with you turds?" George’s heart was broken and Mike just wanted to leave the garage as fast as possible.
Ashlands SFX, created by Kayla Perry
"Oh my god Corpus X is such an asshole!" Kayla Perry was not ready to get up. It was 11am which was practically her crack of dawn. "I need more types of wind, he said. That sounds like an alien fart, he said. I'll make you sound like an alien fart." Kayla opened up her foldgers crystals and shoved her spoon into the dry coffee crystals. "One for the road." She shoved a heaping spoonful into her mouth and took a swig from last night’s beer bottle. "Time to get back to work." Kayla grabbed her sound gear, pushed open the tent flap and took in the fresh air. "Fuck me." All she could smell was her camels diarrhea. Two Humps, Kayla's Camel, had been sick for 3 days. "I didn't realize Camels couldn't eat Mac'n cheese loaf, but I'll remember for the rest of my life." Kayla climbed the sand dune so she could scout the best location for recording wind. "Looks like I head east today." - Kayla finished the Ashlands SFX! Way to go!
Food pick and drop SFX, created by GeorgeK
GeorgeK finished blowing up his 200 003rd balloon. He knew that it would work this time. George had figured out that dropping food from a great height through his girlfriend’s window would create the best "food pick up and drop" sound effects ever created by humans. His girlfriend crouched in the corner too scared to move. She was thinking that her recommendation at joining Skywind might have been an error in judgment. "Don't worry Julie," exclaimed George, "It's going to work this time!" George grabbed his mother’s cooking and brought it to the window. "Do you want to count with me, Julie? 5...4...3...2...1!" George cut the rope anchoring the house and the helium did the work. His girlfriend’s house began to rise. "Ha, UP has been totally legitimized! I'm the best!" George screamed with a smug satisfaction. It was unclear if Julie was laughing or crying hysterically.
And on that note, we’re leaving too for this time. See you soon for some more exciting news about Skywind!
↧
Blog post - August 2016
Skywind Cavemen
by CyanideExpress and Oppenheimer
Hello Everyone, and welcome back! Over the past few months much of the landscaping team has been busy making caves for Skywind, and we have made a great amount of progress. As you may know, caves made up a large portion of interior dungeons in Morrowind, and we are working to recreate them while still maintaining the original designs and ideas of the caves, while also expanding upon them. As such, we have designed four different types of caves depending on the region of Morrowind which the cave is in. Those include Mold for the west coast caves, Volcanic for Molag Amur and the Ashlands, Shale for the Sheogorad region, and Basalt for the East Coast. Each type should feel different, and be appropriate for the climate and design of the exterior world.
With Skywind, we have had to recreate caves from scratch as Morrowind used many different and unique room meshes for its cave system. It was not really feasible for our 3D artists to recreate all of these unique pieces, so instead a flexible tileset was designed and built by TwentyEngineRunner. This tileset is the basis for all of our caves in Skywind, while the different variants use different textures and clutter. Our process begins with the original cave from Morrowind. We look at the design of these old caves, and it’s up to the particular landscaper on how they want to recreate the old layout using our new tileset system.
An Example of a layout from Morrowind
Sometimes parts of the original design have to be changed or tweaked slightly to work with our tileset, or to play better within Skyrim’s engine, but in this instance it did not need to be altered since it is a simple cave. Sometimes less interesting caves are also expanded on, or made a bit grander to really show the enhanced abilities of our tileset and cluttering assets. But we always try our best to stay true to Morrowind.
Example of a finished Skywind cave
This is generally how a cave will begin, it starts with a basic layout with “Rooms” and hallways that connect them. Most of the time spent on caves is working to make these rooms unique and interesting, while still matching the general shapes of the original morrowind rooms. We do this by using rocks, cliffs, rock piles, and rock walls, and the end product is designed to feel organic and natural. And of course, we need to make sure the loot and enemy placement is balanced and matches Morrowind. But gameplay is still a big work in progress, and things are subject to change.
Examples of Cave Types
These are some examples of the different types of caves that will be present in Skywind, some elements are subject to change, such as lighting, image spaces, and textures of the tileset and cave clutter. The Shale cave type is still early in development as well as Basalt. Kwama Caves and Sixth House caves are coming soon as well, so stay tuned! We hope you enjoyed this highlight on caves, and we’ll be back to talk about other exciting new things our team is working on next month!
Until then...
↧
Blog post - September 2016
Making music for Skywind
by Matt Hawken with additional contribution from Marius Schlichting
Jeremy Soule’s original soundtrack to Morrowind echoed the alien landscapes and creatures of Vvardenfell with a complex and mysterious score, combining the sonorities of a symphonic orchestra with the tonal complexities of early 20th-Century Impressionist music. Morrowind’s soundtrack has become a classic and for Skywind’s music team, this is a tough act to follow! However, we’ve assembled a crack team including several professional musicians and composers and we’re ready for the challenge.
For the full nostalgia experience, Skywind will also include the remasteredMorrowind explore music which is packaged with the DragonbornDLC for Skyrim (DragonbornDLC is necessary for the Skywind installation), allowing you to explore Vvardenfell with the original soundtrack accompanying your travels, alongside our new creations.
Here are a few of the ways we’re making the most of Skyrim’s Creation Engine to update, adapt and expand the music of Morrowind:
Longer
Sadly, due to technical restrictions of the time Morrowind’s score is not as broad and deep as its gameplay. As the entire game needed to fit on a single CD-ROM, the soundtrack was limited to 45 minutes in length. Fortunately, in Skywind we have no such restrictions! Although we are still a long way off finalising the length of the soundtrack, we hope to come close to, or even surpass, Skyrim’s 3-hour running time.
Localised music
We’re taking advantage of the Skyrim engine’s ability to play specific tracks in certain regions. Now the soundtrack will shift as you travel the varied landscapes of Vvardenfell, taking you from gentle strings in the Ascadian Isles to tribal drums in the Ashlands.
https://soundcloud.com/matthawken/grazelands?in=tesrskywindofficial/sets/skywindsubmissions
https://soundcloud.com/marius-schlichting/zafirbel-bay
https://soundcloud.com/trolldragomir-1/ashlander-warsong-1
https://soundcloud.com/tim-grabowski/northern-archipelago-skywind
Discovery stingers
Another musical feature introduced in Skyrim are short pieces of music which play when you arrive in certain areas for the first time. We are creating unique ‘discovery stingers’ to herald your arrival in many of Skywind’s locations.
Towns & Cities
It’s not just the landscapes that are varied in Morrowind - each town around the island has a distinct flavour and history. In Skywind, each of the larger settlements will have their own soundtrack for both day and night time.
https://soundcloud.com/matthawken/seyda-neen-wip
Dungeons, Caves & Tombs
Going underground, we’re writing some spooky and mysterious music for the hidden depths of Skywind.
https://soundcloud.com/matthawken/dungeon-1?in=tesrskywindofficial/sets/skywindsubmissions
https://soundcloud.com/marius-schlichting/a-lake-deep-down-cave-music
Combat
Of course, you’re not just going to be exploring peacefully. Although combat isn’t yet implemented in testing, we’re hoping to replicate Skyrim’s adaptive battle music so the music will rise as your enemies fall!
And more...
Alongside the main soundtrack there will be ambient music to accompany your adventures in Vvardenfell, just like the ‘Atmospheres’ from Skywind’s soundtrack. We’re also writing unique music for guilds, forts, taverns, temples and even Vivec cantons, as well as short songs for characters to sing in game.
Follow our progress!
You can listen to all the music submissions for the game as we create them at the project’s Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/tesrskywindofficial - however please bear in mind that all these tracks are subject to approval, edits and final mix/mastering. We hope you enjoy listening!
How is it done?
Matt H: I use a 2013 Mac Pro with 64 GB of RAM, which sounds like a lot but can quickly get eaten up when you're loading a symphony orchestra's worth of audio samples. I run the latest versions of OS X and Logic Pro because I like to feel like I'm on the cutting edge! And I listen on a pair of Focal CMS-65s which help me create mixes that translate well on other systems, which might be laptops or headphones for most people. I really enjoy my little studio set-up but it did take a while to accumulate everything. My first piece of advice for anyone who wants to work in music production is to get a decent paying job first because it's an expensive hobby, although it's getting cheaper all the time.
When creating realistic orchestral music from samples, there are two sides to the process. The old-school part is writing appropriately for the instruments and orchestrating effectively. I'm lucky to play several instruments and have a degree in composition and orchestration so I've had the chance to be trained by some great people, but it's a lifetime's work and I'm definitely still beginning! The new-school part is the production - making choices about reverb, EQ, panning, compression and much more.
Marius S: Well, there isn’t much to add to the description of proper music writing vs. technology that Matt wrote above.
I personally try hard to not succumb to the DAW when creating a composition. That simply means I try to keep and develop the fundaments of the music outside of the computer first (sometimes more than other times). Well, I also don’t have/use a modwheel or such so when I record midi I have to use my imagination for the important dynamics/expressions anyway. When you use a music program you do not have to bother with traditional efforts like writing down all the notes and can just create music purely by ear. That also means you can quickly make mistakes when it comes to proper good writing for the orchestra. After all, the best sounding synthetic orchestra is the one that is very close to what you would write for real musicians!
So I always start off with on the piano and end up with fundamental sketches or full ideas. However, sometimes it’s nice to have a computer that makes it possible to go beyond you own imagination that lets you test out new textures and such.
I’d like to show you a comparison of a piano idea turned into the intro of the final piece. In this case it is music for daedric interiors. To give you ideas what concerned me for this: fitting atmosphere, unique instrument textures, skyrim-esque synths, ambiguous tonalities... and so on.
It’s more of an ambient sound compared to mainland tracks, but maybe it’s still interesting to hear.
Matt Hawken is a full-time composer and musician living just outside London, UK.
www.matthawkenmusic.com / soundcloud.com/matthawken
Marius Schlichting is a full-time composer and musician from Germany.
https://soundcloud.com/marius-schlichting
↧
Blog post - December 2016
THE ANIMATION QUEST
By Aerisarn and CuteZergling
Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can't create it if you don't have one.
Brad Bird
As all of you can imagine, creating animations for skywind is a real challenging task. The modern Skyrim engine allows for much more than Morrowind’s one was intended to, and making real reinterpretations of the original creatures and game mechanics is both an artistic challenge, for what, if you follow our blog, we’re definitely well equipped, and a technical one, particularly so due to the fact that authoring new content for the skyrim engine was mainly intended for 3d assets and quests, not for animations and whole new creatures.
When I was assigned with the task of modifying the cliff racer behavior, at first I nearly fainted: there were no examples, no documentation, not a simple entry point: How am I supposed to do such a thing without any direction available? It reminded me of some ancient times when I was a kid playing EOB2 (a dungeon game without automapping), for the sole purpose of enjoying the game dynamic itself: try, fail, try harder. And so I did.
This blog post is about the skywind animation team’s journey into the skyrim engine: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new animations, to boldly go where no modder has gone before. As we were trying to bend the engine to our will using strange and complicated techniques, we technical artists were called wizards.
1. The Skeleton Mystery:
Any animated object, creature or placeable, has to be animated defining a set of moving bones which actually performs the movements, being coupled (skinned) to the related mesh. Sadly, no tool was available to us poor modders to do a new skeleton in a sane way: most modders just resort to skeleton morphs (just original bones scaled as less as possible due to animations going nuts). T’was our task to do such a thing, in order to make new creatures truly feasible: after a lot of headaches, a new NIF plugin was born that ensure rapid skeleton prototyping. Here’s a sample:
2. The Ragdoll Havo(k)c Horror:
Skeletal animation is nice, but skywind’s engine allows for much much more: a second skeleton, coupled with a simple version of the creature mesh, to calculate real time moving collisions and physics reaction. Ragdoll, for short, is a physical representation of rigid bodies interconnected by contraints: all that jazz, all that math. Sadly, once again NIF plugin wasn’t up to the task: while able to import collisions, it was never intended to represent the data needed to express, for example, how much the leg is able to rotate with respect to the hip. This time was not just about fixing the output from Max, but creating a whole new import/export routine to add this data to the bone skeleton, and then be able to export it both in the NIF and the HKX format; yes, to make things simpler, Beth decided to replicate this data in both its Gamebyro file format and Havok proprietary format. But Skywind won’t bend to difficulties, and once again, after a LOT of trial and error which made us feel like we were coding our way out of an old haunted house, we were successful. Behold the Cliff Racer ragdoll, in all its glory.
3. To Be is to Behave:
In our journey into the undocumented, we reached the point where the animations have to be glued together to the game logic to make the creature move, attack, ando so on. The skyrim engine use the Havok Behavior middleware to decouple game logic from animation logic, and these behaviors have posed quite the challenge to us wizards and to the community at large, testing our every drop of patience and resolve trying to understand how they are defined and how they work. Behaviors are, simply put, a collection finite machines that govern which animation will be played at a given time or event. Since no tools or documentation has been provided by Bethesda regarding how animations actually work in Skyrim, we had no other choice but to reverse engineer our way into the Havok project files, relying on trial and error and Hansel & Gretel tactics.
The problem with the behavior files was that they were compressed into an unreadable/ unintelligible Win32 binary format, so we were forced to convert those to XML, a format that is much more understandable in comparison. After conversion though, editing the behavior files manually posed a great risk of error ( a behavior XML file easily goes over 2K lines), that’s why Aerisarn, the master wizard, wrote a library in Java that was specifically designed to navigate, edit and view the tree in the XML file with ease and eliminated all worry of error … at least from editing the tree part. Working with behaviors, and coding in general for that matter is summed up quite well by the Gif below.
Why? Because when something goes wrong, you don’t really know what causes it and when you finally fix it, other problems arise where previously there were none … and the cycle continues.
But, creating behaviors for custom races, in essence, isn’t that complicated: we base our new creature on an existing Skyrim skeleton / behavior and then add or remove certain animations from the behavior file. That’s how our Guar was born; even if not perfect, we successfully edited an existing behavior to make the puppy behave (almost as intended).
That was not enough for our artists: some of the creatures we need require not only a custom skeleton, but a custom behavior as well; that’s why our research team went further and adapted the output of an old version of the Havok Behavior tool to Skyrim, to accommodate for completely new behaviors as well.
With such tool in our hands, we felt like our journey was complete, but…
4. Did we miss something?
If you’re an animator, or simply searched the depths of the net about new animations in skywind, you surely found out the problem: where is the movement data in skyrim’s animations? Using the famous hkx-cmd, the data is (almost) missing.
After much pain, we discovered that the data is… Elsweyr.
Bethesda surely rushed over the commercialization of the game enough to leave some things in disarray, animations particularly so. In the last months of 2016, we solved this mystery too, and we were able to test a creature from scratch, without the need of additional help like SKSE, FNIS or such.
...and what now?
2017 will be a very exciting year for our department; our wizards are working tirelessly to give animators a leaner workflow and to change the way the game itself is played, acting on the player behavior. We have now the means to innovate as much as possible the gaming experience and insert all kinds of contents, and we are very determined to do so.
We leave you with a little clip. Happy New Year, folks :)
↧
↧
