Middle-Earth Roleplaying Project (MERP)

A Total Conversion for Skyrim

http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod - http://merp.straygenius.com/forum/


MERP might have been one of the biggest mod teams for TES4: Oblivion, with the goal to create a total conversion based on the magnificent world of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings. However, like everybody here we are excited about the upcoming release of Skyrim and we decided to attempt a move of our project to Skyrim. We are planning to create all of Middle-Earth in it's entirety, obviously including such places as the Shire, Rohan, Rhovanion, Gondor, Mordor, Harad and many other locations! Our goal as a team is to realize the world of J.R.R. Tolkien as closely as we can to his vision and we want to make our work look as though professional game developers have created this, an open-world Middle-Earth RPG like no other! If you don't know our project just visit our http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod for the all latest news updates, pictures, videos or music pieces.


Current State of Affairs - Attempting a Move to Skyrim

MERP is an old project which dates back to the times of TES3: Morrowind and moved on to Oblivion a bit later. But we have come a long way since then: the team has grown a lot and most importantly completed a lot of work for Oblivion. A lot of people here at MERP consider this project as a very important part of their lives. Some have seen this mod grow and flower into what it is today, and even new members experience and can see the obvious dedication our team put into it. Oblivion has been a large stepping stone in this process, and we've really pushed the best selling game of 2006 to it's limits, in regards to the heightmap and also to the awesome scripting work that goes on here at MERP.

Here are a few examples of our previous work (of course realised within TES4: Oblivion)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tzCuSssDps

http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod/images/merp142#imagebox
http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod/images/wip-fangorn#imagebox
http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod/images/fangorn7#imagebox
http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod/images/barrowdowns#imagebox

http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod/images/amon-sul2#imagebox
http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod/images/evening-in-minas-tirith#imagebox
http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod/images/fellbeast2#imagebox
http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod/images/sting1#imagebox
http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod/images/nazgul#imagebox
http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod/images/gondor-armor#imagebox

Now we're preparing to attempt a port to Skyrim! If you're are wondering the reasons behind this, let us elaborate with this short list that notes all the technical features of Skyrim that Oblivion lacks:

1) Havok Behaviour (advanced animation platform)
2) Actual flowing water
3) Textures of a quality that matches our custom models
4) Better tree system
5) Actual falling snow
6) Integrated AI support for flying creatures
7) Improved Radiance AI
8) Realtime conversations with NPC's
9) More realistic horses
10) Completely redone scripting language
11) Shadows for static objects
12) More efficient graphics rendering
13) Most likely more stable engine overall
15) A fresh modding community from which we can recruit new developers
14) Hopefully a more accessible and user friendly modding resource
16) Probably more efficient developing tools which overall might even save us time in the long run

The step up is truly significant (It's been so many years in the works, you'd hope it was).

Now, we do say attempt because truth be told we don't know if Skyrim will be 100% suitable for a mod like ours, in which case we will revert be to O'l Faithful - Oblivion. A successful port will mean better graphics, technology and all around gameplay, so you can enjoy the mod you love even more with all new features. However, it is impossible to carry over some of the progress we made here on Oblivion, and while we are able to keep all the models, some things can't be transferred. Don't let this dishearten you though, the results will definitely be worth the extra work, and our team will be more motivated than ever before.

If the port is successful, we can all say a very fond farewell to the game that has ultimately helped us immensely in envisioning Tolkien's world - and a more than warm welcome to Skyrim, where we will now be focusing our progress.

We will still be bringing out another release of MERP for Oblivion soon, however if people want to play MERP in the future they'll have to get Skyrim.


Do you want to contribute?

We are always looking for skilled modders from all areas, so if you want to help just visit to our http://merp.straygenius.com/forum/.


More Information can be found on ...

our http://merp.straygenius.com/forum/ if you want to contact us, would like to contribute or if you need any help,
our http://www.moddb.com/mods/merp-middle-earth-roleplaying-mod for all the latest updates and media, and
our http://www.youtube.com/user/MiddleEarthRP.

~MERP Team~

I love lord of the rings

Yes please.

The fact is that Skyrim is so much more similiar to middle-earth will not only make you job easier but also look better, since bethesda know what they are doing.
there are only benefits, and i would definetly play your mod after ill finish Skyrim couple o' times.

Great to see some WIP threads getting started!

Wish you the best with this project, I'm sure it will be quite popular

So are you able to legally share the mod now or is it still "we are making this because we can and are hoping one day to able to share it"?

So are you finishing the OB mod, or just moving on to Skyrim?

We are already sharing it - you can download our betas from Tesnexus and ModDB and it always has been like that

man I wish you all the best of luck

I just svck at mods and computers in general

hope you finally realize the whole thing in skyrim

that way we have something to worship after we play skyrim to death :wink_smile:

Ah...but do you have permission from the Tolkien estate to do so. They have squashed the sharing of this project more than once. I don't agree with their decision to do so but they own exclusive rights to the IP and have a legal right to do so. It's been this projects biggest obstacle since day one. Given that another Tolkien IP based project is in the works(The Hobbit) they will likely be making the rounds and putting a stop to any unauthorized use of the IP. You and anyone joining the project should be aware of that. I still wish you luck and with any amount of good perhaps the Tolkien estate will just let it go and accept the fandom born unto the world J.R.R. created.

I've been following your work on mod db does this mean your focusing on skyrim and stopping the oblivion version of this mod?

Will never be able to play this, but looking forward to seeing how it looks in Skyrim. Should be amazing.

I think the important question you have to ask is: which resources that you are using are originally in part or full from oblivion? Bethesda has made it clear time and time again that you can't use their resources from their games in other games; even other BGS games. You will also probably have to completely redo the entire hightmap, all of your pathgrids and lighting, and then start on reformatting all of your meshes for Skyrim use. All of that happens after we get some decent mesh import/exporters and have a grasp of how to put our meshes together in Blender or 3dsmax.

I don't know if doing all of that work is worth it. You may end up like the recently released Duke Nukem Forever-only completed after that work is massively outdated.

I wish you the best of luck in realizing your modding dreams. You guys have have done some impressive work. I hope I get to play with it some day.

I may very well be in either a game design, 3D modeling/animation, or computer science (scripting) program in college this coming fall. I have spent days on end in the CS for Oblivion, and love the LotR world (plan on finally reading the books this summer). I know it's far off, but this thread got me really excited. Just imagining how you could re-purpose dragons to work as fell beasts is so invigorating! It gets my heart pumping!

I'd love to be a part of this, and wish the team all the best in bringing all the amazing work you've done in Oblivion over into Skyrim once it releases! :foodndrink:

EDIT: @Compulsion

Most heightmap editors for games have a raw image import/export functionality. If this is the case (which I'm sure it will be) they should be able to export their existing one and import it into Skyrim's, some resizing may have to be done, but I doubt it'd have to be re-made from scratch. And it has been confirmed that Nifskope will again be used for Skyrim, so its likely that prepping all their models for use in the new engine won't be too much of a headache. Also, most of their original meshes seem to be just that, original meshes. If they currently use Oblivion textures on some of them, I'm sure that Skyrim has some that will be suitable replacements, or they can just whip up some new ones, really not too hard if you've already got the texture maps laid out.

I've been keeping an eye on this project for quite some time now, and can't wait to give it a try.

Switching the project over to Skyrim is a bold move considering how far you've come with the Oblivion TC, but I do think it'll benefit the project a lot and allow for a much more impressive end result.

Best of luck!

Pardon my ignorance, but I think your project would get finished if you stopped changing the project to the next TES that comes out.

YES! I was extremely disappointed when LOTR the http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/rpg/lotrwhitecouncil/index.html?tag=result%3Btitle%3B0 was canceled, so thanks for putting so much time and effort into this. This idea is a masterpiece.

Awesome! Just hope you aren't relying too much on preexisting Oblivion resources, since you won't be allowed to use them in Skyrim.

@Xarnac & owain: if Skyrim is suited for a huge total conversion like MERP, we will only make one last release based on Oblivion which should include everything that we've created so far.

@worm: there was a Middle-Earth related mod for Morrowind (unrelated to MERP) that got closed down, but it wasn't the Tolkien Estates: if you want to read up the whole story you should have a look here: http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/forum/42-general-memod-discussion/ If you follow the modding scene of other games a bit you'll see that there have been a lot of Middle-Earth related mods for other games. The most popular is Third Age - Total War which got far more attention than MERP and already has released a version 1.0 a long time ago. They even included original cutscenes from the from the LOTR without having any problems.

In contrast to the Third Age - Total War mod we are very strict about copyrighted material: we never would think of including cutscenes from the films and we never would use the LOTR soundtrack in our mod. Of course we take our inspiration from the LOTR books and films, but we produce everything ourselves and because of that we should be relatively safe. Once again: we never had any problems like that since the Grey Wizard has started MERP for Morrowind.

@Compulsion: most of our resources are our own creations so we should be able to port them over to Skyrim without any problems. Some other things will need to get retextured or redone, but we are aware of the problem. Concerning the heightmap we are quite sure that we will be able to port our old one, but actually we are trying to get another, better and more lore accurate heightmap finished until Skyrim gets released. But I shouldn't go into details with that already

@Phinius: do you have any modding experience? We are always looking for talented people

This looks like a great project. Can't wait to see how things pan out with Skyrim.

I can only apologise for my lack of skill in any modding areas

As my love for the Elder scrolls is only matched by my love for LotR. So, at the very least you know you have my appreciation and gratitude for some truly amazing work.

You, my friends, bow to no man.

Sounds very interesting. I wish you the best of luck!

I never had the chance to try out any previous versions of MERP, and if I did it was a few years ago in Oblivion so it was an even earlier version. I hope to someday try this out, on Skyrim would be great considering all the new tech that you've mentioned as well as any other new things you didn't mention that have been added to Skyrim. I've always wanted to play an open-world RPG set in Middle-Earth but there were hardly any to the magnitude of a TES game, if any at all, and so I wish you're team good luck and hope I'll be able to play it in the not too distant future.

This^

I have been following this project for a while , keep up the good work and I will hopefully be able to help you guys when my modelings good enough :read: .

I really hope you will be able to port most of what you have already done to Skyrim. I really like what you have done so far and it would be sad if you couldnt work with that anymore.