I am writing this as the introduction to what hopefully becomes an awesome learning experience and something big in the Morrowind scene.
A few days ago, i woke up after having a peculiar dream, i dont remember the details, but in my dream for some reason i was playing Morrowind, this was not a normal version of Morrowind, it was one that looked heavily stylized with what we nowadays understand as retro aesthetics.
One might say "but morrowind already has retro graphics", and this is only partially true. Morrowind has *old* graphics, retro graphics can be understood differently, that is, the modern reinterpretation of old graphics to evoke nostalgia while still taking advantage of modern rendering techniques to achieve (hopefully) stunning visuals.
Morrowind may have looked "pretty" during its time, but nowadays , it looks like plain dogshit, sorry morrowboomers, but thats how it is, and a zoomer like me, has an incredibly hard time trying to get into it due to this being one of the reasons.I want to make what i saw in my dream, a modern yet retro inspired, version of morrowind that is pretty and stylized while achieving this only through shaders, without touching base game textures and models. This was literally revealed to me in a dream (in a very Elder Scrolls fashion), reminiscent of the dreams the Sharmat induced into the citizens of Vvardenfell during the game's storyline, hence the name.
Ive looked into how im going to achieve this not so simple task, and thankfully there is a tool that changed Morrowind forever already out there, product of many fans' love and devotion. This tool is OpenMW, a complete remake of the original Morrowind engine made to be open source.
This is a blessing from the divines, with OpenMW i can simply modify the engine shader files to achieve my goal. OpenMW even introduced support for post-processing effects, should i need those too.
OpenMW is a staple of modern Morrowind modding, and apart from that, i will also use VSCode for shader writing, DeepSeek for tech councel and guidance and GIMP for image editing, that is because this is a project for my Linux machine.
welp, time to start developing this. Actually, i have nothing done so far, only managed to clone OpenMW source code and get it working. But i decided ill set up the webpage for this project before going further, because i wanna document everything for posterity.
Before getting into the deep stuff, i wanna make some mockups on photoshop for what i want to achieve, so i will be making those.
Some effects i already have in mind are color quantization through defined color palettes alongside some sweet dithering. Perhaps some degree of cel shading too, but with ultra high contrast, to make it look like a gritty Mike Mignola comic, perhaps include some sort of cross hatching for the shade edges. I think about making the lighting dimmer and super defined.
Example from this lighting techinque in West of Dead.
However there is a problem, i need to format my Linux machine because of my wonky OS install, so before i actually get to work in this and set a repo and shit, i wanna get that done, so i will report back once that is dealt with.