I’m swearing against the toolkit, can you hear me?

I passed a few hours toying with Morrowind. The goal is to build a “definitive” version, taking the very best from the mods out there and merge them uniformly for the best experience that the game allows. And I passed those hours ranting against the tools. Like it always happen.

Every time you start working with the mod tools in a game the comment is always the same: “Why the hell it doesn’t let me do this?” There are some really basic and practical functionalities that would make the work WAY less painful and faster. So you pass a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to do something, because you think it’s indispensable and makes absolutely sense… Only to discover that it’s just not there.

For example: The Morrowind editor is rather simple to use, you can start toying with it without reading tutorials. The world editor is a WYSIWYG and reacts as you expect, then you have a bunch of tabs with the entities of the world: monsters, NPCs, armor and so on. Straightforward. Now, all the graphic programs I know support the use “layers”. This is a very fundamental tool. An image can be made of different layers and you can toggle the visibility of each, so you can work only on one, or toggle two to coordinate them, and so on. In MW the whole game is build by master files (the game out of the box) and some plugins. The plugins contain only “offset” informations to override the master file. So, for example, you could load a master file, select an NPC, edit one line of dialogue and then save that line in the plugin. The plugin will only have that character/line within it, with the override informations.

With this type of structure it’s INDISPENSABLE to have a layered scheme. I want to load a plugins and toggle their visibility dynamically in the editor. For example I’d like to only toggle the visibility of the layer of the plugin where there’s the difference in that dialogue. It would allow me to quickly compare between the master file and the plugin to see clearly what’s the difference. And toggle different plugins to see clearly if there are conflicts and what are exactly the conflicting values so that I can merge/adjust them.

Well, it seems that MW toolset doesn’t allow this. Every time you load a plugin, you also have to load all its dependencies. This means that to load that plugin that changes one line of text for one NPC, I have to load the WHOLE base game, plus the plugin. At that point it becomes extremely hard to figure out the changes between the two because you can only see all the informations merged together. And it’s HARD to go find what exactly the plugin did if there’s no way to point out its values from the values of the master file. They are merged with no way to make them apart.

This very basic operation (figure out the detail of one change in a plugin compared to the master file) is only possible through a complex, time intensive procedure: delve the informations of the plugin to have a list of the entries it changes (but without being able to view the changes, it would be too easy, heh) – load the master file and track that entry – write down ALL the fields in the entry – load the plugin – track down the same entry – check all the fields and compare them with the one you wrote down to finally see if you can notice something different. It’s so fucking clunkly and user unfriendly.

That’s really craptastic design. Then I’m not surprised when these game take so long to come out. It’s obvious: the tools suck.

The terrain editor is really powerful but it’s another perfect example of horrible interface that makes the work exponentially harder and slower. A LOT slower. You can raise and lower the terrain and then drag and drop an object to position it in the world (but you cannot manipulate their “z” axis with the mouse, it would have made too much sense), use different textures, “shade” them and so on. Really simple and powerful. The problem is about the controls. You can set the strength and radius of these effects so that you can raise a large zone all at once instead of spend weeks to raise all the vertex. But all these options need to be typed in the UI as numeric values in two different panels that cannot even be up at the same time instead of working smoothly through sliders or practical buttons and switches. The real problem is that to raise the terrain (for example) you need to left click and move up the mouse, like drag&drop. It sounds like something that makes sense, but it’s not. You keep hitting the top of the screen while trying to raise the terrain, so this means that you have to keep drag&dropping indefinitely to only make very little changes to the landscape. It’s ENDLESS MOUSE MOVEMENT. You have to move the mouse for miles and miles to even be able to rise a small isle. Click and drag up, hit the top of the screen, move down the mouse, reclick and drag up, hit the top of the screen. And so on. It’s RETARDED. The camera controls are even worst than that.

Now you can easily imagine how long it takes even to build a very small zone. You have to keep dragging the mouse around for HOURS. Dish washing is more fun than that. I’m really not surprised that the game took so long to be released. Was it too hard to replace the endless drag&drop with just a mouse click? Target the zone and left click in the point you want to rise. Keep the button down and the terrain will continue to raise till you release the button. The same with the right one, with the differece that it would lower the terrain instead of rising it. WAS THIS TOO HARD TO DESIGN/IMPLEMENT?

And the same for many other minor details that make everything so absurdly PAINFUL. For example you wish that if you select an object in the 3D wiew the toolset would also select the proper object in the object window, so that you could locate it easily. But no. You have the list and the 3D view but it’s damn hard to see which entry in the list corresponds to the object you just selected in the 3D view.

Now I go back at working on this… And swear against the toolkit. The thread discussing the mods is here.

The goal, as I wrote at the top, is to take the best of the mods out there, pack them together in one file and host it here. So that you could go with it without spending an indefinite amount of time to review the millions of mods out there one by one.