Morrowind Online is possiple

[brashendeavors]

As far as I know, the only justification for saying this mod is illegal, is that people have been running around for two years convincing each other it would be illegal. Much as the "proof" that it would be impossible, was the same cycle of people quoting each other for two and a half years about how it would be impossible.

 

Shanjaq is a respected modder. He has done some impressive work here. Bethesda has good attorneys if they think anything is amiss -- otherwise the dimestore lawyer act gets a little old in the public forums after a spell.

 

I personally have no interest in PvP or competitive type play, but I am very interested in where this goes for family-and-friends style mods or even TCs. I'd be very interested in incorporating it into Morrowind4kids, myself.

 

The two-player "deathmatch" is not the ultimate goal here -- heck it is too easy to cheat if nothing else.

[Dark0ne]

I too believe the focus should be on whether this IS actually a viable asset for modding, or simply an add-on to shun all of us by saying "haha it was possible" despite the fact it's in an unusable form.

[brashendeavors]

I'll agree the original poster was being a bit of a jerk. If you are annoyed with him, flame him and not Shanjaq's work.

 

Anyway, this has been running on the official Bethesda forums now and the moderators there are VERY quick to lock threads on issues that Bethesda feels has legal implications. And I am pretty sure they've checked with Bethesda directly on this one.

 

This has a lot of fascinating roleplaying potential beyond (imo, stupid) Bnet-style deathmatches. We now have sailing ships, riding horses, in-game writing, and many other vistas opening up that people once thought impossible.

 

To me, expanding these horizons is great news. This is a great milestone for the modding community.

[Dark0ne]

This is a great milestone for the modding community.

 

Not yet.

 

It'll be a great milestone when Morrowind is ACTUALLY online. Deathmatch isn't Morrowind...NPCs, Quests and Character Development most noteably are what make Morrowind what it is. Get THAT into an online version and it'll be a milestone.

[hyperk3]

Well they made halo 1 and many other xbox games become multiplayer online but thats because they allread yhad a system link feature. Morrowind had no lan play at all so multiplayre codes and such wern't there, It most likely will bring up legal issues, but that IMO.

[brashendeavors]

It'll be a great milestone when Morrowind is ACTUALLY online. Deathmatch isn't Morrowind...NPCs, Quests and Character Development most noteably are what make Morrowind what it is. Get THAT into an online version and it'll be a milestone.

I don't expect Shanjaq's work to accomplish all of that. In fact I consider it much more of a modder's resource than a player's resource -- as it stands now yes you only have a two-person, pre-beta deathmatch. And I certainly wouldn't recommend any players to download it yet -- it wasn't even intended to be announced until someone leaked the beta files without Shanjaq's permission.

 

The possibilities down the road by other modders are what excite me -- alternate worlds perhaps not even set in the Morrowind lore setting. Shanjaq isn't going to do that with his mod -- but now we can.

 

So yes -- I DO consider this a milestone for modders, even now in its early stages. Else you can argue the Wright Brothers did nothing significant since they failed to intoduce a single working jumbojet.

 

And yes, we might well be on the heels of Oblivion's release before we've even got much progress on it's potential. I certainly wouldn't expect anything polished in 2004, and probably not till well into 2005. But the door is opening.

 

I think the biggest issue is that "multiplayer" has come to be a dirty word among the more intellectual players of the game, precisely because they are sick and tired of the constant spamming for multiplayer by some of the more obnoxious of players, some of whom can barely write a literate sentence. But if you can look past that prejudice, you've got some really exciting potential here.

[Slaiv]

...alternate worlds perhaps not even set in the Morrowind lore setting.

 

You can do that anyway. It has been done.

 

The fact that that Daerk lied about the MEMod doesn't make him a liar in all aspects - he simply "bit off more than he could chew," should we say. And I fully believe him when he says:

 

I've done more decompiling work and "reverse-engineering" coding work for major industries (including military) than likely anyone on this forum or the official ES forums. I have done extensive research into the Morrowind vanilla binary, as well as the patched Tribunal binary and the patched Bloodmoon binary.

 

It is impossible for the engine to handle two "player" data streams, and even if one were to utilize some form of hacked frontend that loaded a player's stream and then created an NPC version of them for display in your own stream, the streams are not able to be refreshed unless a full forced save is performed and then a force load is parsed. This means that it'd only be possible if you literally saved, exited to the menu, and then loaded again... once every second of ingame time.

 

This would be the ONLY way for the Morrowind engine to parse multiplayer capabilities.

 

The main reason is, although Bethesda Softworks purchased a license to use the NDL NetImmerse Engine, they received the engine as source code and then edited it for their needs. They completely removed the tcp/ip hooks and then compiled their own customized version of the NetImmerse source. That means that although the NetImmerse engine supports multiplayer on other games, it is IMPOSSIBLE on the Morrowind game unless Bethsoft recompiles the binary, or someone creates their own Morrowind binary from scratch, which is illegal.

 

As such, it is impossible for Morrowind to be multiplayer.

 

And, even if he were to be lying, Peregrine has also said:

For the (apparently) 10 billionth time, MULTIPLAYER MORROWIND IS NOT POSSIBLE. To add multiplayer ability to Morrowind would require completely rewriting the game engine. Which is completely illegal, even if it is somehow possible.

 

Yes, programmers can do almost anything. But not when they don't have access to the source code, and they have a threat of lawsuit if they modify the wrong things.

 

Multiplayer Morrowind is never going to happen, and anyone who claims otherwise is a liar or an idiot (if not both). End of discussion.

 

I'll agree, it does have a lot of potential, but I also believe that it has about a zero percent chance of that potential being realised.

[Luxar]

Daerk's comment may very well be false, simply because Shanjaq is making a working multiplayer morrowind add-on, and it appears to be legit(everybody who's used it says it is, and they've had hands-on experience).

 

And also, Shanjaq is not tampering with the net-immerse source code, his ScriptExtender functions in basically the same way as FPS Optimizer or Combat Advanced. So his program is no more illegal than those two.

 

Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.

[brashendeavors]

Slaiv -- your only "proof" is quoting other players who are neither expert on what is possible nor on what is legal. They have opinions, and they have given you good reason to respect their opinion. Just as Shanjaq (author of Overunity) has given us reason to respect his expertise. But repeating what they once said umpteen times does not make it MORE true each time you parrot it. The real proof is not what you SAY can be done or not done, but what you SHOW can be done or not done. A person who says they can jump six feet, and then proceeds to do so, is going to carry a lot more weight with me than the fellow who gives a long winded analysis of why humans cannot ever jump six feet.

 

If you want to quote "experts", here is what Morrowind scripting guru GhanBuriGhan has to say:

 

"I freely admit that I was one of those who also thought this was impossible, although when I saw what Aerlorns mods could do I started thinking that at least a chat mode might be possible. That you can apparently actually synchronize PC's and make a working co-op mode and that this has cmoe as far as it apparently is, shows that some guys have hacked far deeper into Morrowind than I thought was the case. Congratulations Shanjaq and co.!"

 

Want something one better? How about an actual Bethesda dev (Pete Hines):

 

"I think that's great. However, the difference between doing this unofficially and doing this as an official thing that is part of a product that people pay for and has to work no matter what are wholly and vastly different. ... We never thought it couldn't be done, it just something we couldn't have done as an official thing. That's all."

 

 

As far as impossible, people I know are testing it now. They are NOT "exiting to the menu" every frame to save as your source claims would be REQUIRED. They are not liars and they are not idiots.

 

And Bethesda shuts down any thread on their forums that touches on "legality" issues -- they won't even allow people on the official forums to say "no-CD" even though that is not illegal. They certainly would not allow a thread gathering over 350+ replies (across two threads) to be continuing on THEIR own official site, if they felt they had a legality issue to protect. Let alone be saying that "I think it's great".

 

As Dark0ne notes, the real issue is no longer whether it is possible, or legal -- but simply whether it is yet useful. Today? No. It is not very useful today. Right now a main limitation is communication between different players. It is not very useful to have another player there in the room with you, move around and even give you items, but unable to talk to you.

 

Certainly I am aware that alternate worlds can be done anyway -- it is what I spend most of my modding time on. But truly indepth roleplaying is certainly going to benefit once players can roleplay with at least one or two other intelligent live beings instead of an army of look-alike NPCs, who all parrot the same prerecorded lines, over and over again.

[Slaiv]

I'm very interested in the possibilites of MW Online, as I said earlier. I have always thought that LAN play [not online] would be amazing, simply due to the fact that communication would be much easier, you know the person right next to you [usually, if at home], etc....

 

Shanjaq may very well change my mind and opinions about MW possibly being online, but, as Dark0ne has said:

 

It'll be a great milestone when Morrowind is ACTUALLY online. Deathmatch isn't Morrowind...NPCs, Quests and Character Development most noteably are what make Morrowind what it is. Get THAT into an online version and it'll be a milestone.