MOREL - MOdders' REsource Library Options

[Razorwing]

MOREL - MOdders' REsource Library

- a proposal from the Silgrad Tower team -


The benefits of MOREL


Goal: MOREL becomes an archive of graphical and other resources for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Maintained by a variety of mod groups as well and individual modders, MOREL combines important resources used by participating modders for their works.

1)
By gathering the resources in a single archive, an individual modder or mod group won't have to distribute a huge release -- they can simply explain that their plugin is dependant on MOREL, and so can distribute just the .esp file while still recieving all the benefits of using new stuff created by the community. A streamlined release will not only help modders who are concerned with data space and bandwidth limits, but will be a welcomed choice for players downloading through dial-up. Theoretically, a player wouldn't have to download five releases á 100mb -- he can download the 100mb MOREL and five 1-megabyte .esp plugins from the respective modders' sites.

2)
MOREL also establishes a standard, which solves a lot of compatibility problems for players wanting to play with as many plugins as possible. As everything is gathered in one archive, the components won't overwrite each other or have identical ID's. Standardized rules also ensures a clean and orderly structure of ID's and file names.

3)
By regularly downloading new releases of TES MOREL as they become available, a modder (whether he's part of the project or not) can keep up-to-date with the newest and hottest stuff produced by the Elder Scrolls community. The modder won't need to scoure the net for hours on end, looking for a particular resource -- the important new stuff will be "delivered" to him without a hassle by getting the next release.

4)
Modders and mod team who participate in MOREL will be listed on the site, with links and description of their work. That way the participators will share exposure for their particular work.

5)
By allowing material to be featured in MOREL, an artist can share his hard work with a significant portion of Oblivion players, as the archive project will hopefully attract a lot of participants. Artists can supply a description of their work and/or a link to their site, which will be listed in the credits at the TES MOREL site.

6)
Instead of ten modders each adding a dozen popular things to their mod, by collaborating on MOREL the same amount of work only has to be done once, freeing up time for everyone else to focus on matters important to their own work.

7)
Until Oblivion is released, the initial focus of MOREL will be to function as a gathering place for 3DSM modellers and texture artists. By creating and uploading 3DSM models we can get a lot of preliminary work done while waiting for The Elder Scrolls IV. Participants would model what they feel like creating for their future mod projects. The models would be shared freely among the participants, and other participants can tweak and adjust the models into their own variants if they want. Basing your work on someone else's model requires that you give due credit to the original modeller. All models and textures are hosted in a preliminary MOREL archive, which may or may not be continued after Oblivion's release.



Organizing MOREL's Leadership



1) Decisions regarding MOREL will be made by a core team, consisting of one (1) representative from each participant. In the case of individual mod projects, the modder would represent himself. One person, one vote, and a simple majority vote constitutes a decision.

2) If a participant hasn't logged into MOREL's forum for two weeks, he is considered inactive. All that means is that his vote doesn't count towards deciding if a majority vote has been achieved, if he doesn't log back in in time for the vote to be over.

3) The core is responsible for finding locations on the internet who are willing to host the MOREL archive. Pretty obvious.

4) If a participant wants something added to MOREL, it's added. There won't be any voting for each inclusion. However if a participant wants to question an addition made by another participant, he can arrange a vote on the matter. Valid complaints may be low quality (untextured meshes, etc), lore violation (like a machine gun), copyright violation, or extremely immoral things.

5) MOREL will have access to two boards on a forum (silgrad.com is willing to host the boards); one is internal, the other is public. In the internal board, the representatives will discuss and decide things that casual modders and players doesn't need to know. If a participant feels that a hypothetical Mike's "Fork of Death" weapon is horrible and total crap, he should be able to say that on an internal board, so as to not hurt Mike's feelings. The public board is a place to post information and answer questions from people interested in learning more about MOREL.


Organizing MOREL's Practical Matters


As members of the MOREL project, our .esp files (our mods) will have dependencies on .esp's as shown in this crude chart:

- VIEW DEPENDANCY CHART

- The main Oblivion world file is naturally at the top.

- The MOREL archive .esp is directly below it.

- The "temp resource packs" are .esp's maintained by you, and are separate from your personal mod .esp.

- At the bottom is your personal mod .esp, which recieves the benefit of the resources above it.

Explanation:
As the MOREL .esp will only contain resources -- and the resources' base ID that hold the references to their meshes, textures, etc -- a participant needs to maintain two .esp files. That's because the MOREL .esp isn't supposed to contain your personal mod data (homes, NPCs et cetera). Therefore your "temp resource pack" .esp must be 'clean' of all references to things in your mod, and only contain references to new resources you want added to the MOREL archive. By doing it this way, you can submit your "temp resource pack" (both the resource files and the .esp file) to MOREL with the minimum amount of problems.

Sidenote: If you want to use a cool sword or anything in your mod, but for any reason don't feel like submitting it to MOREL -- that is totally okay! Just add the reference in your personal .esp instead of in a "temp resource pack" .esp, and distribute the necessary meshes and things in your personal archive. No one should feel like a slave under the project, as free will is the base of any successful collaboration.

If and when Bethesda releases expansion packs for Oblivion, they will not be part of the MOREL .esp dependency chain. It's important to see the difference between your .esp and your temp resource .esp; you can choose to make your own .esp dependant on the expansion pack(s) if you so wish, while your temp resource .esp mustn't have that dependancy. If it does, the MOREL core will send it back to you to fix the dependancy. The point is to keep MOREL compatible with all mods below it, both those who depend on expansion packs and those that do not.

Turning the dependency chart upside down
Well, not quite, but where the dependency chart starts with MOREL, the workflow chart starts with you.

- VIEW WORKFLOW CHART

It's pretty self-explanatory, I think. Participants feed resources upwards, MOREL releases an new version, everyone downloads it, and all participants gain the benefits of each other's work.


The Rules of MOREL


1) Participants must follow the naming conventions when creating new ID entries in their "temp resource pack" .esp's. Whether they follow them in their personal .esp isn't important, as MOREL won't be affected by that. The naming convention is two sets of two characters that follow this template:
[team] [_] [modder's abbreviation] [_]
For example, I would personally use "st_rw_" as I'm part of Silgrad Tower (st) and as I call myself Razorwing I use (rw) as my abbreviation.
A hypothetical NikiKolaba, an individial modder working on his personal project, might ID his instances as "nk_nk_".

The characters you choose aren't important (for MOREL's administration), the important part is that it's logical and conforms to the template. This is so we know who has created what, and whom people should contact for questions regarding the instance. It also makes for a clean, orderly list of ID's. A suggestion is to follow your template with a suitable subcategory of the instance - like, "st_rw_sword_..." for example, with sword being a subcategory in the Weapon list. That makes it much easier for other participants to find an item you created if they are looking for a particular subcategory, and easier on you if others follow the same standard.

2) The participating mods should be compatible with each other, meaning a player can play all MOREL mods at the same time. An exception to the rule are total conversion mods, which are usually meant to be played without any other mods loaded. Ensuring this means that a player will never have to choose between two MOREL mods. Solving compatibility problems are the sole concern of the conflicting mods, and not something MOREL should concern itself with. But if team #1 is part of MOREL and team #2 comes along later -- and team #2's mod conflicts with team #1's mod -- solving the compatibility problem should be done by team #2 if they wish to enter into this collaborative effort.

3) If you, as a MOREL participant, use a resource created by someone else, it's your responsibility to obtain permission for it to be used in the MOREL archive.

4)

Now, "joe" uses the supercool_sword as an 'Ancient Dragonslayer Ebony Sword of Doom', an überweapon to end all überweapons That is fine with MOREL, we're not going to tell a participant what to do. But, that does NOT restrict other participants from making a duplicate reference to the supercool_sword in their personal mod and giving it whatever stats they feel is appropriate. Make duplicates of every instance you feel like changing, if you want -- it's not going to affect MOREL or affect any other MOREL mod.

5) MOREL should use a release system of public and internal release. The public release is a full and tidy, completely functional archive, whereas the internal release builds on the public release and doesn't have the same extremely high standards. The public release holds a large base of resources, whereas the internal release only contains resources added since the release of the last public MOREL archive. That is for pragmatic reasons, to keep the size of the often-updated internal release on a manageable scale. You wouldn't want to have to download 800 megabytes every week, now would you?

With that system, MOREL can release updates very frequently, as often as is needed and desired, while modders on the outside won't feel the need to update every week. So "joe" in the previous example would not have to wait four months for a version with his sword.


[b]Interested?


If you're interested in joining Silgrad Tower as co-founders of the MOREL archive -- or if you have comments, questions or opinions -- please take a moment to register on our forum and then post your remarks in this thread. This info is also reposted on the ST site for easy reference.

Sincerely,
Razorwing,
Silgrad Tower

NOTE to moderators: Silgrad Tower NO LONGER hosts unofficial scans!

[Razorwing]

MOREL - MOdders' REsource Library - now have a board hosted on forum.silgrad.com which is open for everyone who wants to upload 3D Studio Max models. Take a moment to register on the forum and you'll have access to the board, which can then be found here.

Then you can start uploading your 3D Studio Max models, which later will be exported to Oblivion's format and form the first version of the MOREL archive. Whether you're interested in the project, or you just want to share your models and get feedback from other modellers -- or just plainly want to have them backed-up somewhere -- don't hesitate to submit your work!

[jonajosa]

somthing id be interested in. But not just yet. Got to go buy some new animation work cds.

[smartkyle]

Hi im the conept artist from the http://www.oldhyrule.net/ mod team. This actually sounds a great idea. Our mod being a TC will obviously have lots of added content, which im sure if you speak to project lead, we can release for everyone as modding resource. Sounds great. Im gona read your post through properly now lol. So i kno exactly what to tell the team.

[Megil Tel-Zeke]

Wow, very nice idea. I'm not a modder, but from the person who downloads a ton of mods I can see how useful this can be.

Sweet and best of luck organizing it. I'll be looking forwards to it.