I've been working on a partial conversion of Oblivion into one of our big, ridiculously-impressive game ideas. The plan was just to make a demo to throw in my portfolio with one fully mapped area featuring a new weapon, a new enemy type, npcs, quests, scripting, sound and music.
Here's the downside: When Bethesda made the Elder Scrolls games, they didn't make their own engine. They licensed one called Gamebryo and just thinking about it makes my sphincter clench up. Instead of just using textures and walls, Oblivion uses prefab models to represent everything (and the files are in a weird format called nif that no one's ever heard of). This means mappers can't just use a mapping program like Worldcraft to make a building. You've actually got to use modeling software to make these prefabricated chunks and then snap them together in the construction set editor. 3ds Max needs a bunch of plugins to actually make this work, and even then it's kind of like trying to kill a fly by swinging an anvil around. This combined with all the weird, little issues with wall textures (i.e. more silly file formats, mandatory normal maps, etc) leads to about ten different pieces of software to get one idea from my brain to the game.
It's taken probably two weeks just to figure all this out and another two weeks to accomplish what I could have done in any first-person shooter in two days. Porting this to Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 would be easy, but it would defeat the point. I love the idea that the Oblivion guy gets sucked through this weird oblivion gate and spat out in this old train station on another planet, but adding acid-bullets and dna-changing mutants to a sword-and-shield game is what made the idea impressive. Anybody can add guns to a game that's already full of guns. At this rate I might not actually get that far, though. We'll see. Next time I mention modding and Elder Scrolls in the same sentence, scrub my face vigorously with sand-paper first to remind me why I shouldn't.
- Zach
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