Green Morrowind Readme
======================

Version:  1.0
Author:  Max

In Tribute To
=============

To my wonderful wife, without whom no game would be worth playing.  

What is Green Morrowind?
========================

Over half of Vardenfel is bleak, wasted ashland and lava flows, a depressing landscape if there ever was one.  The folks at Bethesda did such a good job of conveying the black despair of these dead lands that as a player I eventually ended up avoiding them whenever possible, venturing into these ruined areas only to complete quests.  I came to hate the landscape not because it was poorly done but rather because it was so well done I didn't want to spend a single minute longer trekking through it than I had to.

Green Morrowind changes all that by converting the landscape of the Ashlands, Molag Amur, and Red Mountain into verdant greenery teeming with life.  Okay, so the life still wants to kill you any chance it can get, but even so - green and teeming with life.  No longer does endless grey and black terrain, broken only by the occasional pool of molten lava, weigh heavily upon the psyche of the player.  Now there is grass, trees, nice unsooty rocks and even shrubbery that doesn't have to be purchased.  Heck, it's fit to build a house in now!

What Use Is This Mod?
=====================

I made the mod for three reasons:

- as explained above, the volcanic areas of the island are just plain depressing.  I'd like to raid all those bandit and vampire hideouts, sack every dwarven and daedric ruin, rampage through every isolated stronghold, but the mere thought of spending hours of real time in that wasteland is just too much to bear.  Like any sane person, I'd much rather hang out in the likes of Pelagiad or the Ascadian Isles - and now I can.  So can you!

- modders might find it of interest.  With the conversion the 'livable' area of Vardenfel just about doubles, meaning more room for towns, castles, and affordable brothels not overrun by the undead.  And really, who can argue with the logic of more affordable brothels?

- I plan to make a mod which takes place a thousand years after the Nerevarine faced off with Dagoth Ur.  One of the primary early events of the mod is a final climactic eruption of Red Mountain, after which the volcano goes dormant.  In a thousand years places like the Ashlands and Molag Amur would no longer exist, instead being replaced by grassland and forest.  Hence the need for this mod as a first step on my way to another mod.  I just thought I'd release this as is because it might be of use to someone else.  Rather than an eternal WIP (Work In Progress) which never bears fruit, I'll release the useful bits as they're completed.  I might never actually finish my mod, so it makes sense to distribute whatever comes of it along the way, instead of waiting for a final release which may never happen.

How Can You Justify All That Greenery on Red Mountain?
======================================================

If you can rationally justify silliness like magic, gods, and elves, I'll take a shot at doing the same for Green Morrowind.  Until then....

How Do I Install This Mod
=========================

Unzip the file you downloaded to your /morrowind/data directory.  *NOT* your /morrowind directory, but your morrowind/data directory.  Make sure you check the 'Green Morrowind' .esp file the next time you start your game and you're off to the races.

I Hate Your Mod!  How Do I Uninstall It?
========================================

Well, you ungrateful wretch, it's rather simple.  Aside from unchecking the .esp file the next time you start up Morrowind, you need to delete the followind .dds files from your /data/textures folder:

TX_ashlands_04.dds
TX_ashlands_06.dds
TX_ashlands_07.dds
TX_ashlands_08.dds
TX_MA_crackedearth.dds
TX_MA_lava.dds
TX_MA_lava02.dds
TX_MA_lava03.dds
TX_MA_lava04.dds
TX_MA_lava05.dds
TX_MA_lava06.dds
TX_MA_lava07.dds
TX_MA_lavacrust.dds
TX_MA_lavaflow.dds
TX_MA_lavarock.dds
TX_MA_rock04.dds
TX_MA_sulphur_rock01.dds
TX_MA_sulphur_rock02.dds
TX_MA_sulphur_rock03.dds
TX_MA_sulphur_rock05.dds
TX_MA_sulphur_rock06.dds
TX_MA_sulphur_rock07.dds
TX_MA_sulphur_rock08.dds
TX_MA_sulphur_rock09.dds
TX_MA_rock_02.dds


This will remove all of the changes I made and restore your nasty grey and black landscape.  At least it did for me and worked just fine; I make NO GUARANTEES it'll do the same for you.  If something gets screwed up don't go crying to me because I won't help you; you should've backed up your save beforehand and avoided the hand-wringing.

You did back up, didn't you?

What Does This Mod Conflict With?
================================

It shouldn't conflict with any other mod at all.  This mod doesn't actually add any objects to Morrowind, it just changes the way existing ones look.  Purely eye candy and nothing more.

The only kind of mod you'll have trouble with is a texture-replacing mod, like MW Visual Pack.  If you install MW Visual Pack after my mod then your Ashlands will be back in spades - only this time with trees, shrubs and grass, which'll look mighty odd.  If you install my mod after MW Visual Pack (or reinstall it) then it'll work as advertised.  Be warned, however, that the textures in MW Visual Pack are much sharper than the Morrowind originals, and that's what the Green Morrowind mod uses; the blending of the two may be visually unpleasing.

What Kind of Bugs Are in the Mod?
=================================

The only 'bugs' in the mod should be objects which don't quite sit right on the ground, or which are too close together.  I tried to catch as many of these as I could by going through each affected cell and taking a look at the individual objects, but the area we're talking about is *huge* - and the only way to properly scan the whole thing is to walk through it with a character.  I have neither the time nor the inclination to trek through every square foot of land, so no doubt there'll be things that aren't quite right here or there.  But then there were things like that in the original game as well.

Some texture breaks are clearly visible.  There are three reasons for this:

- the textures which replaced those in the Ashlands, Molag Amur, and Red Mountain did so over a texture set which was crafted to specifically blend together even with single-tile placements.  This is not true of the textures in other areas of the game, which require at least a 4 x 4 tile placement against a border of 2 tiles deep of any other texture.  That means that there are now 'patchy' areas where none existed before; nothing I can do about that unless I want to physically repaint the landscape, and I don't.

- a number of texture breaks were  present in the original game.  These still exist in this mod, but they're more noticeable against the lighter landscape.

- one of the things this mod did was remove several thousand rocks from the areas in question (it is, after all, 'Green Morrowind' and not 'Green Rocky Morrowind').  The designers at Bethsoft often used rock placements to cover up jagged tile edges; a smart move that saved design time, but when you remove the rocks you can see where the fudges are.

In order to make this mod 'Morrowind friendly' I used the trees from the game to replace the dead trees in the volcanic areas.  This isn't a problem in most of the Ashlands but there are areas in the Molag Amur which are now heavily forested.  If you have an older graphics card your game may slow to a crawl in these areas and become unplayable.

When I removed the various lava pools I discovered that some of the land underneath the pools is quite deep.  If your character falls into one of these holes and is too low-level to jump out or isn't capable of levitating out you can find yourself stuck.  This becomes especially exciting when you fall into a hole running away from something, and that something falls into the hole with you.

If this is just too much excitement all-around, you can get out of a hole by doing the following:

- open the console (hit the ~ key on the keyboard)
- in the console type:  tcl.  This enables no clipping mode, a la DOOM style.
- fly out of the hole and position your character a few feet above the ground.
- go back into the console and type:  tcl again.  This will disable no clipping mode.
- close the console by hitting the ~ key a second time.

This isn't cheating.  The hole didn't exist there in the original game, and is only present because I removed the lava that covered it.

The trauma root looked badly out of place in the new terrain.  It was clear that I need to replace it, but that I couldn't use an existing container of another plant type.  This limited my options to the flora I could find on the CS disk, and only the flora which had the same relative z axis of the shrub, or greater.  It turns out there was just one plant that fit the bill:  the standing mushroom plant.  What that means is that the 'trauma root' is now a tall, skinny mushroom and, for the budding alchemists, very easy to spot.  I would've used some other plant if I could, but I couldn't, so that's what you're stuck with.

Where Do I Send Bug Reports?
============================

Thanks, but I don't want any bug reports.  If something is just killing ya, fire up the editor and make the adjustment yourself.  It's very easy to do and I can't really see why I should do it when you can do it on your own.  If this offends you in some incomprehensible way, remember that you get what you pay for.

Where Do I Send Complaints?
===========================

Send all complaints to /dev/null.  Unfortunately this only works for Linux users; those of you enslaved to Microsoft will have to use Billy G's equivalent, the 'Recycle Bin'.

Seriously, if you want to complain don't bother me about it.  I am not your whipping boy, your employee, your serf, your personal tech support, or your slave.  I owe you *nothing*, and that includes my time.  If you ignore my wishes and send me email with a complaint, criticism, or a demand for aid I'll just delete it and add you to my banned list.

Anything a Modder Should Know?
==============================

Yes.  A number of terrain types were deleted outright (technically not, but modders will understand).  If you want to use elements of these terrain types you can do so without undeleting them and re-enabling them across Morrowind, which would make a real mess of things.

How so?  For every rock, tree, etc. that I deleted I made an identical copy of that rock, tree, whatever with the exact same file name followed by a capital 'G'.  If you're painting a landscape and you have Green Morrowind loaded you'll see what I mean right away; every terrain object in the game is still available to you and can be used without mucking up the mod or your endeavors.

The only thing you won't be able to do is paint using the Ashland, Molag Amur or Red Mountain textures.  Although these textures are still listed in your paint set they've actually been replaced with textures from the Grasslands and Ascadian Isles.  It'll *say* it's TX_MA_sulphur_rock04.tga, but it'll actually be a grass texture.

You can add the old textures back into the game by copying them from the CS into your textures file and renaming them so they don't conflict with the 'new' textures, e.g., TX_MA_sulphur_rock04_real.  Of course, you'll need to wrap the .tgas in the .dds format but you can download a converter off the internet in just a few minutes.

If you didn't understand a word of the above explanation then in all likelihood you aren't a modder and none of this will matter to you.

Did You Repaint All of This by Hand?  (Only of interest to modders)
====================================

Are you crazy???  Of course not.  The guy who originally did 'Green Morrowind' back in the Stone Age of mod building did just that, and vowed to never again do another mod so long as he lived.  As far as I can tell he's been true to his word.

I took the easy road.  First, I played with the existing texture files to find an appropriate replacement scheme for the three primary volcanic areas.  After I settled on the scheme I took the .tga files I was going to use and renamed them for the texture I was going to replace.  For example, Tx_AI_grass_dirt.tga was copied and renamed to Tx_ashlands_04.tga, and so on.  Since the kind folks at Bethesda already hand-painted the landscape all I had to do was to change *what* was painted on the landscape, not the painting itself.  With the .tga files chosen and renamed I converted them to .dds files with a neat, free utility I found after a few minutes of searching the web (nope, not the NWN utility - it doesn't convert the files to the appropriate .dds format).  Drop these files into the /data/textures directory and viola!  The volcanic landscape became green.

Of course, there were problems.  Like I said, the volcanic textures were specifically designed to fit together even if you dropped them as single tiles here and there across the landscape.  The tiles for the green areas of the game are not designed to do this, and must be dropped in groups to avoid breakage.  This meant that although there are 18 files for replacing the landscape in Molag Amur alone, there are only two textures in those 18 files.  That's right, just two textures.  And that's the way it had to be, because the original Molag Amur textures were often used in groups that were too small for proper replacement, or as 'singles' or strips of terrain.  The introduction of more variation in the landscape only ended up making a mess of the terrain and putting breaks all over Molag Amur.

After replacing the landscape it was necessary to also take care of all of those rocks.  The volcanic areas are defined by literally thousands of rocks of many different types; if Morrowind were to be truly 'green' it couldn't have black chunks of volcanic residue sticking out all over the place.  These rocks had to either be 'exchanged' for 'greener' rocks or deleted altogether.  And that's exactly what I did.

Most of the rocks were deleted outright, to keep the new green areas more in line with the old ones.  There are still many more rocks in the Ashlands and Molag Amur than in the Grasslands or Ascadian Isles, but most of the old rocks are gone.  The remainder were replaced by rocks of nearly the same size and shape from the Western Gash/Ascadian terrain set.  They have to be of the same size and shape; if too large they can occlude nearby objects (like NPCs, signposts, or doors).  The objects could have a smaller x/y crossection, but the z length had to be at least equal to the replaced object's z to keep the replacement rock from floating in the air or being buried beneath the ground.  This was the most time-consuming part of the project, and also where the biggest mistake was made (i.e., replacing a small rock type with ferns - nice idea, bad implementation).

After the rocks came replacing the trees, which proved considerably easier (probably due to practice).  Unfortunately none of the 'leafy' trees fit quite right with the dead trees from the volcanic terrain set, so in some cases trees get buried too deep or end up inside of nearby rocks.  I fixed many of these as well, but certainly not all of them.  Furthermore, very few 'leafy' trees were of the right size and shape to replace the markedly uniform dead trees, so the selection was extremely limited.

Following that came the general deletion/fixing part of the mod, where I had to track down volcanic terrain pieces and eliminate them (lava, vents, etc.).  And finally, I checked every piece of flora I changed by going to each cell and viewing them all in the editor to see how they were placed.  

How Long Did It Take?
=====================

Once I settled on a method, about a week, mostly late at night when the wife was sleeping and I was wondering why I was doing this when I could have been sleeping next to her.  :-)

Will You Do Anything Else With This Mod?
========================================

Yep.  This is phase one in the long, long process of doing my 'real' mod, which I call 'The Tale of Ten Houses', a series of adventures which take place some one thousand years after the events in the original game.  The project has been broken down into numerous phases, some of which are compatible with regular Morrowind and which will be released as completed to avoid the 'WIP is another name for vaporware' syndrome.

Files Changed
=============

Too many to list.  All you really need to know is that the files that were changed were either:  statics; activators; containers; or lights.  The changes were only replacements and no attributes were altered in any way, shape or form.

If you really want to know the exact files that were replaced you need to download TESAME and open this mod with the program.  Ignore the 'cell' category as that just lists every cell in the Ashlands, Molag Amur, and Red Mountain regions, which makes sense if you think about it.  Everything that isn't a cell listing is a file that was changed.

Or you can just fire up the CS and take a look under the four categories above.  Any file with a * next to it was altered.  In essence they amount to trees, rocks, bushes, plants and certain external lava terrains and lights.  The stuff that needed to be changed in order to make Morrowind 'green'.

Credits
=======

None.  I did this on my own, kimosabe.  I'd thank Bethesda, but I think they'd rather have cash, and I already gave them a nice bit of that.  Capitalism is a grand, grand thing.

Copyright
=========

There is none.  Since there's no original material of any kind in this mod, and all I did was rearrange what Bethesda already provided, there's nothing to copyright.  Well, perhaps there is, as Amazon.com has proven that you can copyright methods under the insane mess of American law in the 21st century, but I think they and the judges who upheld that inane ruling are a pack of bleeding idiots.  So - no copyright.  All of this goes into the public domain.

If you use the mod you don't have to give me any credit.  I don't really care one way or another.  If you claim the work as your own and I find out about it I might decide to make a fool out of you on a public forum, but other than that you have nothing to fear.

Finis.
 


