FAQ: Design Philosophy | Tamriel Rebuilt

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Tamriel Rebuilt has a fundamental choice to make in its design philosophy: do we want to design things to be better than vanilla , or do we want TR to feel like a seamless extension of vanilla design ? Many players would likely prefer the former, should they be asked. Historically, TR has often gone with the former, too, but it has seldom turned out well. As a rule, Tamriel Rebuilt now opts to follow vanilla design sensibilities as much as reasonable .<br>The main issue is that what people consider "better than vanilla" is a rapidly moving target. If we develop the mod to adhere to the tastes of today, it may very well appear “moddy” and outdated in just a couple years, or it may bite us in the rear in terms of technical or organizational issues. Many of the recent trends in the Morrowind community make for cool mods that are certainly worth playing. But if such mods depart too much from vanilla sensibilities, they are unlikely to be something that most people would want to install for their every playthrough – at least not in ten years time. Whereas that is exactly what we strive to achieve with TR.<br>In contrast to these ever-changing modding trends, vanilla has stayed the same across the two decades of MW modding history, yet still attracts tons of new enthusiasts all the time. So, it's become clear to us that if we want to build something that lasts, we should strive to adhere closely to its design philosophy (of course, we don't take this to the absolute; vanilla has a lot of inconsistencies and laziness that we try to avoid).<br>To illustrate the point, some examples from each of our development departments follow.<br>Assets<br>Back in 2003 or so, the Morrowind modding community held nearly universally that the vanilla head and body models were awful (they do have a lot of technical issues) and that everyone should be using Better Heads and/or Better Bodies instead. So much so that the earliest alpha builds of TR that we have from that time literally bundle those mods – if you start the game in Seyda Neen with those versions loaded, you instantly get jump scared by Jiub with a Better Heads mesh. Likewise, older clothing assets made for Project Tamriel were made to fit with Better Bodies, instead of vanilla.<br>Of course, these days, most people vocal in the Morrowind modding community – and TR in particular – don’t prefer Better Heads/Bodies. Why would anyone replace the wonderfully expressive and iconic vanilla faces with something as transformative as Better Heads? Nor are the Better Bodies meshes considered much of an improvement over vanilla design anymore. So, obviously, we no longer bundle Better Heads and instead bash our heads against the wall trying to de-Better-Bodies-ify our old Imperial and Nord clothing meshes.<br>Exteriors<br>In the late 2000s and 2010s, making really great exteriors meant stacking a ton of rock meshes together in dense formations to create the kinds of elevation changes and visuals that vanilla didn't do. Likewise, cities were to be dense and vertical and had to get "creative" in how they use existing meshes to pull that off. A good example of this design trend is the mod Stonewood Pass, but this was also the governing design philosophy in TR for a while: places like the Mephalan Vales, Roth Roryn, and much of the TR_Preview Redoran lands that we've now stopped bundling with the mod. This approach can make quite impressive visuals, but is murder for performance (see Old Ebonheart and Roa Dyr), makes navigation difficult (especially if you have to escort NPCs) and instantly stands out as moddy to modern eyes – you can tell that the vanilla meshes were not meant to be used in the way they are in these exteriors.<br>Essentially all TR lands made in such fashion are slated to be heavily reworked in order to fix said issues. Instead, we now try to replicate vanilla design philosophy, using the terrain mesh to do most of the heavy lifting, and rely on static meshes much more sparingly (with some targeted exceptions, like the Shipal-Shin region that is built around bespoke cliff meshes). You can read more on our modern exterior design principles on the wiki.<br>Interiors<br>At roughly the same time, many interior designers opted to make what we call “all-rockers” – dungeons made not from the tiling caverns and passages that vanilla uses, but by piling together separate rock assets. This allows for much more liberty and variety in dungeon design and is used to great effect in dungeon mods like those by the great seelof. For TR, however, all-rockers come with several issues:<br>Making dungeons this way is much more time-consuming. This is an issue in a mod where we have to fill out literally thousands of interiors, all hopefully within our lifetimes. We could reduce the number of interiors we include, but that's a disappointing compromise to have to make and would constitute a noticeable...