How does morrowind construction set work

Forgot your password? Are you looking for something shiny for your load order? We have many exclusive mods and resources you won't find anywhere else. Start your search now Ready to try your hand at making your own mod creations? By DarkRider. Before we dive in, if you are a beginner, make sure you have read the Introduction to the tutorial series before proceeding. This lesson covers the very basics of working in the Render Window of the Construction Set.

Begin by familiarizing yourself with the list of controls provided here. Let's get started! Now that you've gotten familiar with where your tools are and what they're for let's start making our first mod.

If you are starting this class right from the Introduction you already have the Oblivion. Smarty Says: When you load a mod you will see all the mods in your data folder in the list. Beginners are sometimes tempted to load their favorite mods as well and add things they like from them to their own mods, this is called mod sniping. The trouble is the new mod will only work if you have both mods installed and this is not a technique you want to use when creating mods for release.

So, resist temptation! With the Oblivion. You'll note that the default worldspace is Interiors, that's exactly what we want. Left Click on the first cell in the list of interiors Abandoned Mine and select Edit. A smaller window will open asking you to assign an ID name to the new cell. In modding there are naming conventions when creating new IDs and they are as varied as the modders who use them.

Sometimes beginners think these names need to be uber technical, "Cause if it's not hard it's not modding" This is false. Your naming convention should have a purpose, be simple, and whatever you start with you should maintain for the entire mod. This makes it easier to track parts of your mod when they are mixed in a load order with dozens of others. In this case I chose "aa" to take my custom adds to the top of every list.

Once the cell has been named it should be first in the list. Click on our new cell in the list, then to the right, click on the Lighting tab. On the lighting tab we want to add a bit of ambient light to reduce the number of light objects we'll need later.

For houses I like to use a nice matte gray which doesn't alter colors in the room, but you may choose whatever color you'd like by selecting the number values for your Red Green and Blue hues. For matte gray choose 70 R 70 G 70 B as seen in this image then click "Apply".

Then click on the Interior Data Tab. On this tab we can set the name of the interior and the ownership of the house interior.

Select a name for the interior that will appear in game, and then set the owner as Player. Click Apply, then Okay to close the cell window. Smarty Says: If you like to use companions, don't set the Owner as Player, instead, set the Owner Faction as Player Faction so your companions can live with you!

You will see you new cell has appeared in the cell view window at the top of the list if you started your name with "aa" as recommended.

Double click on it in the cell window to load your cell in the Render Window! Now because this is a new cell what you will see is a sad empty grey void.

We're going to change that right now! Scripting and quests should be saved for last. Maybe place a creature or an item somewhere as a reminder to come back and create some scripts for objects in the area. I'd say by this point in time to almost overdo landscape detail. Morrowind is quite a few years old now, and most people should have the computers to keep up with demanding landscape. However, you should always test and see for yourself, especially with a weather effect like the blizzards from Bloodmoon.

Reward the player frequently, but don't overdo it. Keep them interested. A well placed scripted event or even a simple reading of a journal entry or a well-done quest can help a lot.

It's nice to have some originality, but you don't have to be completely different. That doesn't mean you have to go retexture some items though it is fun or create some new animations or models. It simply means you could make a quest with a new approach or perhaps baby 0.

Don't get too clogged down with other mods. Some people recommend it. If you must, try to get the model or item or whatever, and integrate it into your own mod, so it doesn't require the parent mod, and then give credit where it's due if you do release. Of course, you should contact the original modder to ask permission before doing this. You may think creating an unavoidable encounter with your mighty Khajiit of Doom will be great since you know his secret weakness.

This goes for things like dialogue in quests. Where's this cave? Your NPC says northwest of here Gee thanks for the vague directions! You might know where everything is, but the player knows nothing. Hey, that's part of the whole excitement for them, right? Don't mistake frustration for challenge. You might want to make something challenging, but there can be an extremely fine line between challenging and frustrating.

I must stress planning! It's soooooo important! Don't flail helplessly in the dark. The results usually aren't good. If you want to test something, make a separate plug-in. Don't expect everyone to like your mod. That's the simple fact. Very wise advice. Create mods to please yourself, not because you want to be showered with compliments. Expanding on the point above, see what's "on the market" already. There are plenty of "my first house" type of mods out there.

If that's what you want to do, great, but don't expect everyone to choose your mod over theirs. Very true! Folks with flat rate, always on connections could really care not at all what you compress with or how many MB you squoze out of the download, and if your download is that big to begin with, folks on pay per minute dialup are not going to download it anyway. Yes, it is really GeekBadge to use 7Zip or some other esoteric program and if that is the route you are planning to go, then pack it with a self extractor because most folks will not have 7Zip or WinAce.

But they will have built in free Zip extraction courtesy of their operating system. Dialogue: Do not place your dialogue at the top of the dialog lists in any of the nine Greetings sections. Do not place your dialogue at the very bottom of the dialogue lists of any Greetings section either. Insert it somewhere in-between existing lines in the Greetings section you decide to modify. Any global variable in any loaded mod can be accessed by any other loaded mod.

With a little planning, mods can be written to be aware of and use other mods if they are present and to make their own presence known should any other modder want to interface with them. The editor is not consistent in how it handles rotations about the various axes. In some functions it uses degrees, in others it appears to use some fraction of radians or thousandths of a degree. Over in the TES Forums, DinkumThinkum has some excellent advice about this, but until you get a chance to read it, here's my brief take on the issue: 1.

If a player has already interacted with the existing object you are modifying, the information in their save game could supercede your changes in the mod.

From things you might expect, like the contents of a chest the player opened, to others as unexpected as the types of weather in a region. Since save games are loaded after any mods, that stored info will take precedence over anything in your mod. The result is that the player won't see the changes your mod may be depending on.

You might accidentally break an existing quest, script, or dialogue that depends on the object or NPC. Somebody else may change the same object in the mod they make, leading to conflicts between the two versions. For example, before Tribunal was released, a number of people edited the Main startup script to establish conditions needed by their mod. This caused trouble if another mod was loaded after theirs and it also modified the Main script, since that was the version of the script which was used.

The first mod was toast since its version of the Main script never ran. Tribunal introduced the ability to have multiple startup scripts, so fortunately this particular practice is no longer needed. It is much safer to add new objects to Morrowind rather than to modify existing ones.

For example, rather than modifying an existing merchant directly by adding new items to his inventory, put the items in a new unique crate, drop that crate into the cell and assign ownership to the NPC.

Then, plan some more. Draw maps, characterize your NPCs, think about the scripts you will require to do the things you want and how you will implement them. Draw dialogue trees, think about how you will be introducing topics to the player. Think about NPC motivations, their back-story, why they are there, why they are asking you to do things, what are their hopes, their fears, their concerns.

Write out a quick storyboard that you intend to follow. The first thing I always do in the Construction Set is write the journal entries for the various quests, which I take from the storyboard I've written earlier.

I have always viewed quest mods as guiding the player from journal entry A to journal entry B, and then onto C and so on.

The journal is the most powerful tool at the disposal of the quest modder. Speaking personally, I then build the mod in quest order, although I leave the details furniture, trees and the like until last, placing NPCs, creatures, quest-related objects and scripted events as I go along through the story. If I get stuck on a script then I move on and come back to it later. Test everything, in every way you can think of.

When testing, think not 'what will the player do here', instead think 'what are the possible things that the player can do', and account for them accordingly. Test dialogue under every condition you can think of. I have three test characters: a mage, a warrior, and a thief. I make sure that all of these can get through. Lastly, uber items. No-one wants them. Keep them out of your quest mod. It is better to under-reward the player than over-reward them.

It is very, very easy to unbalance the game. Far too many otherwise perfectly good mods are ruined by giving the player the uber Sword of Kill-All at the end. Also be careful not to place any unique main quest items in your mod. I've seen Guards equipped with Trueflame before As Patrograd mentions, quests are largely controlled through dialogue and journal entries.

And when it starts using that much memory, it starts getting buggy. Landscapes get holes in them for no good reason, and bad things start happening.

Restarting the Editor or rebooting should clear this up. Odds are, it's been answered at least once by someone, at some point, so if you do a search that answer will come up and you'll have your solution immediately without taking anyone else's time.

However, if you can't find an answer after searching, by all means, post your problem. Not only will it get an answer for you from all the great minds gathered together there, it will also provide something for other people with the same problem to come upon when they search. Secondly, and this is related to modding; clutter, path grids, creative dialogue, and lighting! I can not over-emphasize how much better it will make your mod if you add those four things.

Without them it will be dull and lifeless. Clutter covers all the small things in life, which much of the time people fail to add to interiors and exteriors. Bottles, plates, silverware, candles, you name it. Path grids, those are the paths that NPCs will walk if they are left to idle, give your mod so much more life.

Perhaps the innkeeper goes and checks the cellar occasionally, instead of just standing behind the counter looking dull. Just be careful to test your pathing time and time again, as NPCs have the habit of mucking up even the simplest of paths. Specifically, avoid corners, static objects, or other things with collision.

Creative dialogue. Do you know how annoying it is to load up a mod, and have the first modded NPC you meet say some recycled greeting? For goodness sake, if you can take the time to make a mod, then you can take the time to make greetings and dialogue for your NPCs. Unless of course there is a specific reason for the NPC to be just like everyone else.

And last but not least, lighting. If you simply leave the light sliders at their defaults, more often then not it will result in a boring flood-filled interior with no life. Mess with the settings, make it darker, and add some candles yourself. Makes for loads of character in an otherwise boring interior. Some of these can be worked around with scripting, others appear so far to be untouchable.

The Editor and the Game engine are string variable "challenged". Dialog can access specific preset string variables in a very limited way, but the scripting engine does not understand nor parse user-created string variables. Many of the most useful game variables are not accessible by the scripting engine. BarterGold is only the most infamous of the inaccessible variables. The game does keep track of it, but does not let the modder near.

While you can make your own unique copies of existing objects in the Editor, perhaps with modified attributes or properties, it is more difficult to make them look different. You need to use additional programs to do this. This will require a paint program to edit the texture and a free utility such as NIFTexture to actually apply it to the object.

Changing the actual shape of an object, not just its texture, is another step up the complexity ladder. A popular, inexpensive, option these days is a program called Milkshape combined with a plug-in for it that can export NIF files.

Again, the TES Forums have much more information about this. Many, many excellent plug-ins have been created with nothing more than the Construction Set. Ingenious modders have found ways of combining existing objects to produce novel effects. Often lights will not fall, and sometimes NPCs are stubborn too. No object will fall unless there is something underneath it to land on. Press it again to turn them back on.

So if you do a move, it will be the original objects that will end up in the new location, not the duplicates. Srikandi has compiled a terrific Item Index, categorizing objects so they are easier to find. The Editor itself has a practically hidden function that is good for finding objects. You can click on the column headers to sort the results, e.

Another interesting search option is handy when you want to find out where a particular object or NPC appears in the game. Pretty slick. Many people have problems getting these to line up. Either there are some small gaps, or the pieces overlap and the surfaces flicker in the game. To avoid this, it's important to line up the sections precisely. It's possible to manually enter the X,Y,Z coordinates of each piece, but that takes forever. First thing to do is to go into the Editor's Preferences and set the Grid Snap to a useful value.

What value? Well, notice that almost every one the main sections or tiles is units long by units wide. There are some half-length pieces and double-wide ones, but most of them are that size.

So to get one piece to line up with another, you could set the grid snap to units. You could do this, but you'll probably find it difficult to move pieces around the Render window.

Try something that divides evenly into This is the 'power of two' rule of thumb you'll probably hear about. For the large room and cave sections, I recommend a value of 64, which is the Editor's default setting.

It's small enough to see pieces moving as you drag them with the mouse, but large enough that you can be sure they're snapped together properly, even if you are zoomed quite far back. OK, the Grid Snap is set to Now make sure it's actually activated by clicking the little grid button on the toolbar. In addition, you must also turn on 'Angle Snap' by clicking the red pie-shaped button that is next to it.

Snapping room tiles together only works properly if you are building things 'square', that is, orthographically. I'll talk about building on an angle later. Finally you can now drop the first piece of your room or cave into the Render window. The download is available at NexusMods. This site does require a login for any download larger than 2mb, the English version is 7.

Nexusmods however is the epicenter of the Morrowind modding scene and they are still getting new Morrowind mods uploaded even today. My mod, will now works with the official Bloodmoon extension too. Now go modding! Thank you kindly. I was wondering where this was. Share to your Steam activity feed. You need to sign in or create an account to do that. Sign In Create an Account Cancel.

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