New Screenshots, These aren't on W4O yet... Options

[Curly_G_]

GameStar.de New Screenshots (or copy "http://www.gamestar.de/aktuell/screenshots/PlayerPicList.jsp?galleryId=954P" in your browser)

They look awesome.

If they are already on W4O... Sorry. lol.

[RobRendell]

I'm not so sure... with procedurally-generated faces, how easy will it be to add beards? It's not like Morrowind, where each head is just another model, and modders can add new ones at will. The face models are generated in-game by the (tweaked) facegen middleware, so to change them you'll need to change the binary code (unless they've cleverly got it driven by user-modifyable data).

Also, you've also got to wonder: if it's easy to add full beards, why hasn't Bethesda done it themselves...

This post has been edited by RobRendell: Nov 30 2005, 09:37 PM

[ShogunSniper]

I'm not so sure... with procedurally-generated faces, how easy will it be to add beards?  It's not like Morrowind, where each head is just another model, and modders can add new ones at will.  The face models are generated in-game by the (tweaked) facegen middleware, so to change them you'll need to change the binary code (unless they've cleverly got it driven by user-modifyable data).

Also, you've also got to wonder: if it's easy to add full beards, why hasn't Bethesda done it themselves...

ok no clue what you just said, i'm no modder, that last opinion of mine was from the viewpoint of a strict TES player.

perhaps i should reword it, there will be a mod for beards at some point in time.

[RobRendell]

ok no clue what you just said, i'm no modder, that last opinion of mine was from the viewpoint of a strict TES player.

By "procedurally generated faces", what I mean is the the model for each head/face is generated by code, rather than loaded from a model file.

In Morrowind, a 3d artist would go into their modelling software and create each face manually, creating polygons, moving verticies around and playing with the texture that is wrapped around the face to try to get a pleasing effect, and when they were done, they'd save it and put it where Morrowind can find it. MW is set up to have lots of hand-created face models to choose from, so dropping in new ones (or modifying/replacing the existing ones) is simple.

In Oblivion, the face is ultimately a texture wrapped around a bunch of polygons, the same as in Morrowind. However, the vertex positions and texture image isn't loaded from a model file. Instead, there's some code in the engine, based on "facegen", which the game can "load" a model from. It says "give me the 3d model for a face with parameters A,B,C..." and it gets back a 3d model.

Once it gets to the rendering scenes, there's no difference between the loaded-from-model-files models and the generated-by-code models. However, there's (probably) no opportunity for a modder to get at the face model to tweak it (or add a beard) between when it's generated by the facegen software and where it starts getting rendered, since that's all internal.

And when I said "unless they've cleverly got it driven by user-modifyable data", what I meant was speculation about how the facegen software (or Bethesda's changes to it) is driven. It might be all hard-coded... a face for a given race has X verticies, there are Y sliders, a given slider changes the position of this vertex from this position to that position as it goes from 0 to 100%, etc. Or, it could be all data-driven, with all those factors loaded from a data file, even the number of slider controls etc, allowing dedicated modders to get in and play with the inputs to try to achieve particular outcomes. Or it could be some combination of hard-coded and data-driven (the most likely), with certain things locked and other things nominated in data files.

So, really, I don't know anything concrete It might be possible to add full beards after the game is released as a mod, it might not. Just speculating wildly. And trying despearately not to scratch these red itchy spots that are all over my body, which is why I'm home from work today

This post has been edited by RobRendell: Dec 2 2005, 12:32 AM