I've never done any real modding for Morrowind, though lately I've kind of been wanting to make a Castle house-mod and turn Mournhold into something that isn't an abortion to look at by todays Morrowind standards. There's obviously the eventual need to add a bunch of stuff inside (similar to Mournhold Overhaul - grass, trees, NPCs etc., but... well better). But then the biggest gripe I have with it is the draw distance. You can't see anything outside (which Mournhold Overhaul solves pretty cleverly, I would imagine anyway haven't actually tried it) the walls, the plaza's are huge so unless you have the draw distance cranked up it looks bad since you have fog, and MGE doesn't support Distant Lands in interiors (afaik).

So my question is, the Morrowind CS seems pretty primitive at a cursory glance and doesn't have a hugely complex reference system, could I more or less copy and paste everything into an exterior and just have to change several various things (like doors), or would I end up having to go through and manually re-reference everything related to everything?

Or is there some other way with MGE I could crank the draw distance up somehow within just Mournhold (or something) and bypass having to do all that and just add stuff?

From what I gather placing all of the statics will be the easy part, while transferring over all of the scripts/quests over will be very difficult.

Edit: Doesn't MGE's Distant Land work in interiors behaving like exteriors, which is what Mournhold is?

Yes MGE work very well in Mournhold

I'm afraid I don't know much about MGE since my crappy little laptop barely runs morrowind..

However for making Mournhold external the run time on it would be a hard on a slower system, and some what laggy on a faster system... since it would be such a large area, and it should be noted that almost every single compartment is its own interior cell. And I'm not talking about the inside of buildings, but Royal Palace Courtyard is its own cell, Godreach, the plaza etc...its all connected by compartments like the vanilla Imperial city of Oblivion.
So if you took out the gates, which you would have to if you wanted it to be a fully exterior city, and used TESFaith to copy much of it then its possible, but you would have such a hard time getting the quests scripts etc and such to work...and any cells that had scripts when copied *could* come up with errors. And its a pain, at least it has been for me, to get copied cells to work without script reference if they previously had scripting. (I used TESFaith for some private house mod shtuff.)

If you *just* want to replicate the phsyical Mournhold without npcs quests whatever, you'd be better off (in my opinion) building it from scratch, you'd wouldn't have to worry about bleaching all the references out of it. And if you are set on duplicating all of it then pick up GENmod, program in the mournhold tile set and get to work making some of your interiors that way. It will be much faster and you can get some of your more simple interior cells out of the way for manors and such.

Or you can make an exterior facade for your/player benefit that makes it "look like" its all exterior, enter through the gates and you are taken to the interior cells of your mournhold remake. So you would need to set your outer walls, place some buildings and trees within the walls, maybe a few lamps for at night but you won't have npcs or extra vegetation to worry about loading, the temple of course (if this is again an entire remake) so that long distance land makes it look like the city from a ways off but the trade off is you wouldn't have as much a the strenuous load time... Which is how bethesda did it for the Imperial City. Just no flying though or it gives away the secret. This also goes for interior, you can have images or some models outside of the windows to make it look like you were looking at the exterior city view. If you aren't looking to use all of Mournhold you can still have the exterior facade and have the main gates enter into the Plaza. Keep all the interiors as they are and place a few trees, hills, whatever, outside the walls of the interior cell making it look exterior from the inside and the outside. Then you wouldn't have to worry about messing with scripting, questing, or any of that fun migraine fuel. There is a mod that partially did this, yours (if you did it) could complete the outside view as the other helps complete the inside view.

Anways hope that was readable but thats what I would do if I were trying to make an exterior, or exterior *looking* mournhold.
If you need Genmod you can find it on elricm.com or TESFaith at Planet Elderscrolls.

But as has been mentioned, MGE does support distant land in interiors, or at least it does in "behave as exterior" interiors, which Mournhold is. Did you check the box for that?

Apparently not... Good new for me! Gonna have to check this out.

Is this supposed to be in the creation wizard or the distant land tab? Cause I don't see it in the tab...

And yes I am using 3.8.2 178

I always imagined someone would eventually decide to do this after TR released Almalexia.

This is probably going to sound like a silly question but:

When building Mournhold as an actual exterior city, just like Ebonheart, Balmora, or Vivec, where exactly are you going to put it?

Well assuming I can figure out how to make it work with MGE (installing a bunch of mods I had on back-order to install so it's taking a while to try MGE out), I'm not.

Otherwise I was just going to plop it down somewhere way the hell off to the S/SW.

Rather lore-breaking, not that I object to it. Perhaps one day the Tamriel Rebuilt people will get far enough south to have a place to set Mournhold down...

Very very very very old screen and I'm using a texture pack, but just to give you an idea: http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/817/mgescreenshot70.jpg
The Mournhold you see there is a dummy cell like the cities in Oblivion. Any "Mournhold-to-exterior' mod would want to place itself right there.

Also that pick above is quite nice, to bad we can't use it yet



Not exactly sure how else you expect to do it??? It would be far enough that you can't see it on the map. Since TR isn't out it's kind of pointless to try and get it sync'd with it.

So apparently I've had the "interiors like exteriors" box checked off but it doesn't actually seem to work? Anyone have any guesses?

Set in in TES Construction set and maybe it will work even with MGE ^_^

That's a perfectly reasonable question. Just putting it "somewhere" won't make any sense, and I am asking myself what your reasoning is for remaking Mournhold in an exterior cell Maybe you should try to make it as an addon to Tamriel Rebuilt when we release the Almalexia area that contains the outer city.

Yea I've spent several hours screwing around with MGE and can't get it to work, what gives? Yall don't mean MGE XE do you?

the most difficult part will be getting all the dialog to work, since it's specific to cells. with it all exterior, it's all going to mesh together and become a big mess for filtering.

The problem is that the parts that make up Mournhold aren't actually circular. You'd need to stretch them or something to make them fit together.

I don't imagine you have any kind of time-table on that, do you? I'm very interested in exploring the rest of the city.

Since I missed it and people keep talking about it...



Again, how would it be any different? If you can't realistically access it by foot then there is literally no difference where it is. I could put it miles to the North and not tell anybody and you would be none the wiser. I would love to add it to the TR area since they appear to have fixed the meshes/textures on the outside of the buildings and I could make it so you could jump over the walls with crazy acrobatics etc. instead of restricting movement severely like you'd have to (continue) to do now. The problem is it could be released in 4 years for all I know, so why wait?

The reasoning I've said before. It looks awful in my game and is the only place that continuously bothers me, and there are practically no mods for it. There's one that horribly breaks lore and I just don't really like the look of regardless and then there's another that's decent but I'd rather have the Distant Land view distances in it.

Which leads to the last major point, for me anyway, that unfortunately no-ones responded to; MGE supposedly works inside Mournhold but I can't get it to. Would someone who has it working mind posting a screen of you by the naked nord in the corner and trying to see all the way across the Plaza (I can't with the in-game render cranked all the way up, which is the only thing I think is actually happening with people saying MGE works in there)? And/or show the water? Then post your .ini file I guess? I would much appreciate it, because MGE just flat out doesn't work for me in Mournhold and I don't understand why. (Yes, again I've got the check boxes tic'd; unless there's some bug where it needs to be not tic'd or something I don't know).

If I can get MGE working inside then I don't need to re-make it outside which is a load off my back.

Well actually they are very close to releasing the next chunk of map, as in like detailing a couple quests and thats it sort of thing.(I have also heard that it was like a single interior cell that needs doing, but Im more inclined to think the couple quests)(although, it has been like 2.5 years since the last release...)