Galadrielle's content converter

[Dave_91]

I'm using converted placeholder pieces in Ebonheart right now. Scales are a little off from Zarf's Imperial tileset, but it fills in the gaps pretty well. I mean I've already found an effective use for it, it works.

I still need to try it out. It sounds like it'll be excellent. :goodjob:

-Hidden

As far as I'm aware, if Vvardenfell uses the converter, the converted meshes would only be placeholders until we get other assets. Obviously, it'll probably take a while for all the Morrowind assets to be made manually, so (for early releases) it may be released with the converter until we have a lot of the assets made. If we don't get enough made, then fair enough, the mod might be dependent on the converter, I don't know.

[Ebonyknight]

Are we using this if so that is awesome, because last time i was in favor for it as kuk was not.

[Hidden]

Tried it, but it crashes when I try to enter Balmora.

I ran the ESP converter on the renamed "Morrowind.esp", entered the Construction Set, saved the file, then converted it to master using TESGecko. I also generated the distant landscape for it.

An incredible tool, but it needs to be more user-friendly since I really doubt the average n00b can figure it out. It also needs a lot more work to really look impressive. Not saying to add quests and text, but NPCs all have the same face, clothes and some even have zombie eyes, which is definitely not right. Not all items seem to be converted either. I walked in an armor store and couldn't find more than 2 pieces of armor on display.

[Dave_91]

I think the program is still in development, those features might be planned and implemented in a future release. hrug:

Ebonyknight

When I spoke to KuKulzA about it, he said if I asked him a few months earlier, he would have said no, but because of the current situation, he said that he agrees now. :yes:

[cire992]

Hidden has a really good point. It needs, more than all the other things needed in its development, a clean interface. "N00bs" are going to need to use this program to convert their morrowind meshes easily for any mods to work (which require the use of Morrowind meshes, of course). So yeah, I actually forgot where I was going with this.
Oh yeah, no problems with Ebonheart's placeholder meshes as of yet, I just need to finish building up the actual final meshes (that exist right now) and complete the town as it existed in TES3. Then it's expansion time.

[Hidden]

I'd wait a least a few more versions, it seems unstable to me. I get many warnings when I load it in the Construction Set, it crashes in Balmora and who knows where else it might crash.

I'm not even sure if it works well on Oblivion versions other than the French version. How many people even have it? I don't.

[Lightwave]

Hold on folks, we're not directly using Galadrielle's ESP Converter, as I tried to make clear in this post. We only desire the content converter.
This is for a whole bunch of reasons:

1. We're recreating Vvardenfell with many improvements not directly copying the original.

2. We're using a massively larger landscape, which is a world with TES4 detailed textures and 4x the surface area. All placed data (NPCs, statics etc) has to be remapped and modindex 00'ed for VWD purposes. The screenshots I posted in this thread are entirely from the TESAnnwyn made heightmaps using ESPs made separately from the TES4Scale scaled&placed content data.

3. To my knowledge we haven't yet asked Galadrielle if we can distribute his mesh converter as part of the TES4: Vvardenfell development suite. I guess we're still waiting on an overall leadership agreement that this is a great asset, not something to be feared as detrimental.

4. Galadrielle's converters will always be undergoing improvements and changes, whereas we just require a stable base of placed meshes to work from with an eye to replacing them all, with the bonus of being to fall back on some of them if the commitment or number of team resources flounders (it's a great Plan B).

If we agree on using (and asking for) Galadrielle's content converter we just need to look at writing a batch file to get Galadrielle's mesh converter to convert the meshes from the .bsa files. The other facets, such as do we want interiors, do we want them scaled etc need to be group decided, e.g. in a poll thread. If it looks like the leadership situation is taking much longer to resolve then I'll put up some poll threads sooner.

Lightwave

[Dave_91]

I forgot to mention, I asked Galadrielle for permission, and he said we can use it, but he'd prefer us to wait:

You can use it, but before distributing it, I prefer you wait for a final version because modding with the current beta version will produce mods incompatible with the final version of my program.

[Lightwave]

This shouldn't be a technical issue because we're not using anything other than the nif converter, we're not basing anything on the ESP Converter or Morrowind_ob.esm. The NIF Converter looks fairly straightforward to automate. It searches the hard drive for the NIF first, then searches the BSA file.

The ESP for the placed content is further up this thread, but when the leadership reshuffle is over we need to re-consolidate the various resource files (batch files and ESPs) I've made in to one place, decide what you want and what you don't need.

The NIF Converter appears to require the following files:

1. nif_conv.exe
2. bhktemp.nif
3. template_n.dds
4. nif_conv.ini

The latter file has the source path for Morrowind and Oblivion and the name of the bsa file, so it's that part we either have to automate (e.g. pull the paths from the registry) or tell people they have to edit themselves. It'll be simple for me to make a batch file which will keep calling nif_conv.exe on all the TES3 meshes so all anyone needs to do is double-click on the batch file.