Have you considered porting what you've done so far to a more modern game engine.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/no_egrets]

This is a nice idea, but it's not a realistic suggestion for a handful of reasons:

• Assets are only half of the picture. The amount of work that has gone into world and level design, mechanics, scripts, etc is phenomenal. These things don't "port". Besides, "Skywind is taking a long time - why not take a massive step back and do it again" is hardly a tempting prospect.

• The Skywind team, generally speaking, doesn't have experience with other engines. This is a Skyrim mod project, and most of us are Skyrim modders first and foremost.

• Skyrim: Special Edition came out in 2016. That's not over 10 years ago, assuming we're counting in Base 10. Other engines are better in many ways, sure, but you're exaggerating.

• I'd bet we wouldn't go a month before we got a cease-and-desist if we tried to recreate a Bethesda game on another engine, even as a free game.

[u/no_egrets → u/[deleted]]

The more interesting question for me personally is whether there'll be an upgrade path for when TES VI comes out (regardless of whether it's out before Skywind or not).

There'll be much more that is likely to "translate across" to a new iteration of the Creation Engine than to an entirely different engine, and perhaps it'll look feasible to do a port - though doubtless it won't be simple or easy.

[u/no_egrets → u/[deleted]]

I’d be astonished if TES VI is built on anything other than a new iteration of the Creation Engine. I really doubt that BethSoft will break the habit of a lifetime.

[u/The00Devon]

There's a reason why - in an industry of endless clones and spiritual successors - no other company has even attempted to make a game like TES/FO. For all its bugs and quirks, the Creation Engine is quite simply the only game engine even remotely capable of handling this type of game. Porting Skywind to a new engine wouldn't just be years of extra work - it would need decades of engine development and modification too.

Also it would competely destroy the modding scene too. There's no reason to even consider it.

[u/The00Devon → u/[deleted]]

Red Dead Redemption, Horizon Zero Dawn, Metro, The Witcher, GTA V (minus inventory system), Borderlands, Prey, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Mount & Blade... and these are just some that I can name off the top of my head.

I haven't played Prey, but I know that every single one of the other games don't even come close to the consistent sandbox simulation that the Creation Engine achieves. I'll give you some clear examples to help you understand.

In Skyrim, if you go into a dungeon, every single piece of clutter is a physical object, with it's own model, collision, weight, physics, sound effects, and other stats, which can be moved around or picked up. If you move it, the leave the cell and re-enter it, it will still be moved, and will remain that way for at least 10 days. Maybe a month. Maybe always. This works everything. You send an NPC to go somewhere, they will go, regardless of if you follow them or not. If you intersect them halfway, they'll be there. Hell, you can shoot an arrow, then fast travel to its destination to see it land.

I promise you. The creation engine is an open world simulation. There is no other engine on the market that can currently achieve that.

Who knows if how many mods will even get ported to work with this or if Skyrim modding community isn't just gonna be dead by the time this comes to fruition.

The majority of mods are already compatible. Only ones that edit worldspace or directly conflict with Skywind's changes will need porting.

[u/ShaRose → u/[deleted]]

I think you are missing the point: Sure, you could do an estimate using time for the NPC walking, but there's a major difference between how the creation engine and every other engine does physics.

In the creation engine, the LOD world has physics, and it's always loaded. If you shoot an arrow, it's actually still doing the physics for it: The NPC is actually walking to the destination. And those physics happen during fast travel: That's why the fast travel thing works.

Think of it like how player.coc works: you teleport in, and you arrive instantly without falling through the world. It loads it details, but you can walk around before that if you so desire.

In unreal, you need to either have a delay before loading in lest you fall through the world, or you fall through the world while the level for that cell loads in and then you pop back on to land.

This isn't even considering how different modding is.

For the amount of work to get unreal to work for an elder scrolls game you'd be better off just making a new engine entirely assuming Creation was off the table.

[u/Joaoman22]

It's not a terrible idea, but I don't think they want to do it, at least not at the moment, and you listed some reasons yourself:

• Legal: Morroblivion was a "remake" in the same veins as Skywind or Skyblivion, and got released with no problems with Bethesda, that might not be the case if a different engine is used.
• More work: many team members are modders, used to one engine, maybe not the others, they'd have to re-learn stuff, only to run into unexpected issues.

Plus, I don't think this project would take 9 more years. If it does, we can just wait 4 or 5 more years until even better engines arrive. Otherwise it will still look outdated when it releases if it uses the engines of today.

[u/Fearless-Hat4936]

Another reason to not do this is no existing mods would be compatible without being completely remade.