"Morrowind" in Quake, is it possible?

K

KnightoftheWind

New member
Jan 4, 2024
4
0
1
As a fan of both Quake and the Elder Scrolls, a particular thought came to mind. I wonder if the Quake engine (via modern source ports like Ironwail) could handle a game the size of Morrowind. Wouldn't it be an interesting experiment to try an approximate the game with a more action-oriented focus?. Some things probably couldn't be replicated very well, like the inventory system and dialogue trees with NPCs, but I'd imagine a small team of talented Quake mappers could get it done well enough with how far the scene has come. Even just a small playable area would be cool to see, like Balmora or Vivec. For one thing Ironwail runs a heck of a lot better than OpenMW on my PC, while handling many times more detail, and John Carmack's work is certainly leagues above Bethesda's by default.

I understand the Quake engine does work a lot differently than the stuff Bethesda used/uses, for instance there are no loading zones or cells, but I think it would be doubly interesting to see the entire map of Morrowind loaded in all at once and see how well it would all run. With portals being used to travel between cities instead of the stilt strider, and the many dungeons being home to weapon upgrades of some kind. In this scenario, wonder if the Nereverine would be depicted as a Dark Elf. Maybe an Argonian?, or an Isekai'd space marine?. Buying and selling items and equipment is likely not possible either, so the shops could instead serve as places to pick up ammunition for your crossbow or other such weapons. This version of the game would be melee focused of course, with a variety of blades and blunt tools that could each serve a purpose while in combat and be worth hunting down for. I would appreciate the thoughts of any experienced Quake mappers!.
 
I tried out some calculations. Morrowind's total playable area is estimated at around 16 square kilometres. Assuming a rough relationship of 64 Quake units = 1.7 metres, a Quake map using vanilla limits (8192x8192) can only give up to 0.047 square kilometres. Ter Shiboleth's biggest maps (which, coincidentally, I tried out a few days ago) are around 32768x32768 units, giving a playable area of up to 0.75 kilometres. The true playable area will be smaller than those figures, and Quake's maps tend to be increased in scale to allow for the player's rapid movement, making it smaller still.

Taking all of this into account, Morrowind's world could probably be split into around 30-50 large maps, but with vanilla limits it would probably require nearer 500 maps. Morrowind's distant vistas would have to be sacrificed. A relatively small city such as Ald'ruhn might be doable over a few maps, but a large city such as Vivec would probably have to be split into well in excess of 10 maps in order to be playable, even if the maps were +/- 32768. Mods such as Arcane Dimensions or Alkaline allow tracking changes across maps using mapvars and multiple player starts on each map, although this has its limitations, especially when there are numerous maps.

Probably the most feasible way to represent the whole world of Morrowind would be to divide Morrowind's world into several episodes that cover areas of the map, each containing a number of large maps, but it would be a massive undertaking. More practical would be a mapset based around an individual location IMO.
 
Last edited:
TerShibb8 is like 10kmX10km so certain areas are possible-but can use more than one map for such ideas
 
8 units in Wolfenstein = 1 foot and the same was used in Quake and Doom. 64 units = 8 feet or 2.4384 metres. Clearly nonsense when you look at Quake's actual scene rendering and how things "feel". There's no way that a 64 unit door feels 8 feet tall. Not that it matters for the subject at hand -- even with a bit more mileage per unit you'll still need hundreds of maps...
 
ENEMY!!! said:
I tried out some calculations. Morrowind's total playable area is estimated at around 16 square kilometres. Assuming a rough relationship of 64 Quake units = 1.7 metres, a Quake map using vanilla limits (8192x8192) can only give up to 0.047 square kilometres. Ter Shiboleth's biggest maps (which, coincidentally, I tried out a few days ago) are around 32768x32768 units, giving a playable area of up to 0.75 kilometres. The true playable area will be smaller than those figures, and Quake's maps tend to be increased in scale to allow for the player's rapid movement, making it smaller still.

Taking all of this into account, Morrowind's world could probably be split into around 30-50 large maps, but with vanilla limits it would probably require nearer 500 maps. Morrowind's distant vistas would have to be sacrificed. A relatively small city such as Ald'ruhn might be doable over a few maps, but a large city such as Vivec would probably have to be split into well in excess of 10 maps in order to be playable, even if the maps were +/- 32768. Mods such as Arcane Dimensions or Alkaline allow tracking changes across maps using mapvars and multiple player starts on each map, although this has its limitations, especially when there are numerous maps.

Probably the most feasible way to represent the whole world of Morrowind would be to divide Morrowind's world into several episodes that cover areas of the map, each containing a number of large maps, but it would be a massive undertaking. More practical would be a mapset based around an individual location IMO.
Click to expand...
A few maps?, for Ald'ruhn?. You must be joking. Ter Shiboleth's levels easily surpass a small town like Ald'ruhn in Morrowind, many times over in fact. You can fit three or four Morrowind towns in the sort of scale that level set depicts. The actual area of many Morrowind settlements is tiny, about the size of your average Arcane Dimensions level, maybe a little bit more than that. I am gauging this by the comparison of what it feels like to actually play both games, and the impressions I get.

When I am asking about the feasibility of such a project, I am also referring to Ironwail and similar ports, as that is the most "modern" Quake source port and offers the most flexibility for such an undertaking. I doubt this would be possible in vanilla Quake with it's limitations. I could also see this sort of thing being split into two or three large maps, the first being most of south Vvardenfell (Seyda Neen, Balmora, etc) , the second being Vivec alone, and the third being the Ashland parts and Red Mountain. Maybe even a fourth for Solstheim.
 
When I wrote my last post I had only come across the initial 2017 release of Ter Shiboleth which had just the first five maps, I hadn't realised that there was a 2020 update that added another three maps, and I see that shib7 and shib8 are double the size, 65536x65536. Maps of that size give a playable area of up to 3 square km instead of 0.75, and in Ironwail those uber maps run at near full speed on my PC. That said, I note that at in both maps, the actual playable area doesn't exceed about 1 square km, and the rest of it is decorative. It would be tough to optimise a 65536x65536 map even for Ironwail if most of the map area had gameplay and could be navigated by the player.

It does mean that my earlier assessments were too pessimistic. Indeed, Ald'ruhn could easily fit into a 65536x65536 map. As Morrowind's playable area is estimated as about 16 square km, I still seriously doubt that it would be possible to cram it into 2 or 3 Quake maps, at least not without making the maps so large and complex that they would be unplayably slow even on Ironwail with a high end system. But it might be feasible to cram it into around 10 maps instead of the >50 that I suggested previously.

Thus, I reckon that it is possible, but I think the main barrier is that it would be a massive undertaking and it is difficult to foresee enough people being interested in doing such a TC for Quake for long enough. It's the sort of project that tends to either rot in development hell after a while or get ported to an engine with fewer limitations such as Unreal 5 or Unity.
 
alexUnder Ros said:
So. You going to do that?
Click to expand...
If you didn't like the food you were given at a restaurant, is "cook it yourself!" a valid answer from the chef or the management?. No. I do not have the skills necessary to make this happen, but I know a lot of modders that do, and I am hoping a project like this happens one day. If only to flex their creative muscles.
 
Screenshot_1.jpg
 
  • Like
Reactions: PyroGXPilot and stickflip
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom