Wheel of Time computer game

[akaliel]

The westlands never looked so good.  I made a post on this board months ago about a small team making an Oblivion mod to create a Wheel of Time game.  We finally finished creating the wilderness for the Westlands.  We're now onto creating the cities themselves, and then the people that live in them.  But it is amazing, being a big WoT fan and looking up the slopes of dragonmount, then making a trip down to Kinslayer's Dagger and just imagining the Aiel pouring out of the Gap.  Then heading north to Shienar and looking up at the Mountains of Dhoom into Tarwin's Gap and the hordes that will soon live in there.  Finally, I journeyed down to the Mountains of Mist and picked the spot I'll lay down Emond's Field and the al'Thor farm.  Our months and months of hard work has at the very least produced the Westlands.  Although, a much much smaller version of it.  Our Westlands is 138 square miles, so it won't take you a month real-time to walk from Emond's Field to Caemlyn.  But anyway, just thought I'd share.

[Paradox]

Link(s)?

 

Nice to see some people putting in the effort to make something like that. Would be cool with an official WoT FPRPG (is that the right acronym?) though.

[akaliel]

Here's the link to our forums.

 

http://wotmod.eamped.com/

 

Inside it are links to everything else.  I'm attaching a couple randomly selected pics that we've taken so far.  I'll have to take one of Dragonmount tonight.  The only pics I have are before we textured it.

[Tyrell]

Sadpandas.

 

I'm one of those idiots who still play Morrowind ;)

[akaliel]

Ya, we wouldn't be able to do what we did with Morrowind.  Without a semi-functioning region editor we'd be at it for years.

[Tyrell]

mmm, this *may* convince me to reinstall Oblivion though.

[haack909]

Here is a link that I found on your forums for more pics

 

http://scbundy.spaces.live.com/

 

Thre are 6 albums there.

[akaliel]

Ya, a lot of those pictures show the terrain but without any textures, just default dirt.  The whole world is covered in plant life now, so it doesn't look so barren

[irondan]

I love Morrowind and hoped that a mod would be made like this for it, but I guess I'll just have to hope that one day I'll have a computer that can play Oblivion. Keep up the work. That will be a colusal project once it is finished.

[eflynn]

I'm new to the whole mod thing but this looks really cool.  I'd love to play this when it's done.  What do I need to do?  I don't have Oblivion for PC (I have it for PS3).  Do I need to buy it?  What else would I need?

[akaliel]

Ya, you'd need the PC version of Oblivion.  No need to rush though.  We still got a lot of work to do.  If you already have Oblivion for the PC, feel free to download the mod from the link we provide on our forums.  It's got no cities, or people.  Just the westlands, filled with plants and trees.  But it's still kinda neat.  By the way, I believe at cell coordinates 74,20 you get a really good view of dragonmount.

[SinisterDeath]

all I can do is wish you good luck, and possibly give you a link, look up 'wotmod.com' or wotmod.org' if its still up I don't know. We orginally planned a 'wot mod' for Morrowind, then moved to oblivion, but by the time oblivion came out the team died.

 

There isn't much hope that you guys will actually finish your wotmod, Most don't, and those that do, are half-assed attempts at a mod.

So Good luck and heres hoping yoru work pays off...

 

 

 

Also, you guys are adding your own custom architecture right? Cause using oblivions architecture would be completely out of place..

 

http://www.wheeloftimemod.com/

thats the site we had...

 

Btw, one of our ideas was to have the events in wot play as scripted events in 'real time', so if you could travel to the specific place at the specific time yo ucould witness dumanies wells, or rand blasting said trollocs to smitherines in book 1.

And that 'you' the player would be something akin to a minor player in the grand scheme of things.

:P

[akaliel]

Sinister, http://wotmod.eamped.com/ IS our mod, if that's the one you're talking about, and we're very up and running.  We've actually passed the biggest hurdle that kills 99% of the big Oblivion mods.  That being the hella buggy Region Editor.  We're finished what we need from it and now we're onto making the towns and cities, which is actually the enjoyable part of making a mod.

[SinisterDeath]

Sinister, http://wotmod.eamped.com/ IS our mod, if that's the one you're talking about, and we're very up and running.  We've actually passed the biggest hurdle that kills 99% of the big Oblivion mods.  That being the hella buggy Region Editor.  We're finished what we need from it and now we're onto making the towns and cities, which is actually the enjoyable part of making a mod.

 

You mis-understood me,

Few years ago me and about 10 other people were planning a Wot Mod for Morrowind/Oblivion, we had a website 'www.wotmod.com', Thats now down.

But we still have

http://www.wheeloftimemod.com/

Still up and running, Your free to use any info on that site for a resource if you want...

Also I editted my previous post if you care to read that. ;)

[akaliel]

I just thought there might be some confusion b/c we both have wotmod in our URL.  No worries.  I've had people on our team declare us dead and gone on the Oblivion forums without asking the team leads if we've in fact stopped working on it.  We never have.

 

I will say though that modding in Oblivion is considerable easier than Morrowind.  Our landmass is to scale about 12 miles wide and 12 miles long.  It's 138 square miles and all of it is textured with trees, rocks, foliage, mountains, beaches, rivers and plains.  We wouldn't have been able to do that in Morrowind.

[akaliel]

Also, you guys are adding your own custom architecture right? Cause using oblivions architecture would be completely out of place..

 

http://www.wheeloftimemod.com/

thats the site we had...

 

Btw, one of our ideas was to have the events in wot play as scripted events in 'real time', so if you could travel to the specific place at the specific time yo ucould witness dumanies wells, or rand blasting said trollocs to smitherines in book 1.

And that 'you' the player would be something akin to a minor player in the grand scheme of things.

:P

 

Yes, we're going to have our own architecture where it's required.  The Caemlyn Inner City, Tar Valon, Stone of Tear, etc, obviously will need custom art.  We're going to use Imperial City textures for now for Ogier built structures, and replace them when we have art to replace it with.  But many places like Fal Dara, Emond's Field, Baerlon, and lower Caemlyn can use arctitecture already in Oblivion.  We can't have custom art for everything.  That's just not practical and we do want to finish this before Oblivion is obsolete as well.

 

No we won't be using scripted events from the books.  Large scripted events with many NPC's in Oblivion are extremely difficult to get working properly.  Oblivion simply wasn't designed to handle a large number of NPC's at once.  So events like Dumai Wells, which would be wicked to see, simply isn't feasable with this engine.  Our story is taking place in a mirror world with the only major difference being Rand al'Thor isn't the Dragon Reborn.  Although you can be, if you so choose it.  There will be an optional quest that you can take to be the Dragon Reborn.  So if you wanted to do things differently than Rand, this is your chance.

[SinisterDeath]

I just thought there might be some confusion b/c we both have wotmod in our URL.  No worries.  I've had people on our team declare us dead and gone on the Oblivion forums without asking the team leads if we've in fact stopped working on it.  We never have.

 

I will say though that modding in Oblivion is considerable easier than Morrowind.  Our landmass is to scale about 12 miles wide and 12 miles long.  It's 138 square miles and all of it is textured with trees, rocks, foliage, mountains, beaches, rivers and plains.  We wouldn't have been able to do that in Morrowind.

 

I actually found morrowind easier to mod. For some other reasons I'll get to later..

But yes, land mass 'is' harder on morrowind then in oblivion, but there were some 3rd party, teragen type programs out there that worked with morrowind, so we were able to generate the landmass for morrowind... (we actually had 1 Masterfile and about 20 or so 'child' files... I forget the terminology)

 

AS for other stuff, I find 'placing' objects in morrowind easier then in oblivion, and, placing 3rd party 3d models/textures is ALOT easier then doing it in oblivion...  at least, thats IMO. If only Bethsada would release some official tools to add custom 3d models & textures to the game, with out having to rely on 3rd party software/mods/plugins.. Oblivin has potential but it just seemed far more complicated then morrowinds, in some parts.. Scripting on the other hand, was probably more polished then morrowinds.. which besides the 'general quality of visuals' was really the only improvment to there game engine...

[akaliel]

Valid points, but the quality of the visuals was a pretty substantial improvement.  The vegetation and LOD's alone really brings the wildlife, to, well, life.

[SinisterDeath]

Valid points, but the quality of the visuals was a pretty substantial improvement.  The vegetation and LOD's alone really brings the wildlife, to, well, life.

 

If you've seen some of the mods for morrowind out there, the upgrades in visual qualities were negligiable. Though LoDs and Speed Tree intergration adds a bunch of fun stuff....

 

However, I have to wonder.. Is it not possible, to create npcs under a similar premise of the speed tree system?

That is, the farther away the npc is away from you, the 'less' poly's it renders, and the less 'animations' it goes through, and the textures map size goes down? You know, the same concept behind speed tree, where it goes from full 3d to a billboard?

 

If Oblivion could do that speed tree system with NPC's and infact, any object.. You could do alot of stuff you normally could do, and that includes full scale wars. :P

[akaliel]

Well, I run Oblivion with graphical improvement mods that make vanilla Oblivion look pretty tame.  So I wouldn't say it's a negligable difference after that.

 

And ya there probably is a way to do what you're saying, other games probably do similar effects for far away NPC's.  But with Oblivion they just never needed the engine to handle it for their game, so it was never coded in.

 

But we've already got the westlands fully vegetated.  That's further than most big mods ever got.  And being 10x10 quads makes it one of the larger ones too.

[akaliel]

Here's a high satellight view of our westlands.  We have a higher resolution image on our forums but this forum only allows 128k attachments.  You'll see we forgot to sand under a few of the rivers :)

[SinisterDeath]

btw,

http://www.wheeloftimemod.com/ftp/Maps/WoTGrid2.gif

Was the size of the morrowind mod 'we' had planned.

So whatever size each 'morrowind cell' was, x11,025 cells was how large our mod was. ;)

(Btw, the program we used, was a grayscale land generator, and that was I belive the file we orginally used to generate the landscape, with the 'red dots' added later to represent the cities, which we were just in the process of building...)

Of course, that was in morrowind. :P

Getting grayscale to work on Oblivion is just painful. :(

[akaliel]

Ya, I just used the Oblivion Heightmap editor to create our landmass, it took some getting used to but by the end I was a pro.  Dealing with the bugs was a bit of a headache, but in the end we prevailed.  The trick was was knowing what noise settings to use so the mountain ranges and plains each have the appropriate amount of bumpiness.

 

I've never worked with Morrowind, but the other team lead has, I'll ask him about the comparitive cell sizes.  With Oblivion cells our westlands is a little over 94,000 cells.  Convert it to real life distances and we're about 11.8 miles long and 11.8 miles wide.  That was about as big as we could make it.  The mod is already over 600M, takes 15 minutes to load up in the construction set, and uses 1.5G of RAM when loaded.  I'm afraid that's our peak.  I was originally going to add the Aiel Waste into the same worldspace, but that's not feasable so it'll be in it's own.  People will have to put up with a loading screen there.

[Moiraine_Damodred]

and here I thought this thread would be aout the WoT PC game they already made

[SinisterDeath]

Ya, I just used the Oblivion Heightmap editor to create our landmass, it took some getting used to but by the end I was a pro.  Dealing with the bugs was a bit of a headache, but in the end we prevailed.  The trick was was knowing what noise settings to use so the mountain ranges and plains each have the appropriate amount of bumpiness.

 

I've never worked with Morrowind, but the other team lead has, I'll ask him about the comparitive cell sizes.  With Oblivion cells our westlands is a little over 94,000 cells.  Convert it to real life distances and we're about 11.8 miles long and 11.8 miles wide.  That was about as big as we could make it.  The mod is already over 600M, takes 15 minutes to load up in the construction set, and uses 1.5G of RAM when loaded.  I'm afraid that's our peak.  I was originally going to add the Aiel Waste into the same worldspace, but that's not feasable so it'll be in it's own.  People will have to put up with a loading screen there.

 

well, I know that the 'size' of each oblivion cell is smaller then morrowinds, but the actual but it can contain basically more data in each cell, if that makes any sense...