The Most Complex Mod Ever Created

本站添加: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]This video is dedicated to that one guy that commented that this project was not going to come out, that it was going to take like 10 years and I was crazy. To you, my man. Enjoy.

[00:00:14]So, yeah, it's been some months since the last update, and we have made tremendous progress on the mod. Many things that I thought would be impossible have taken shape, and the game has entered a fairly playable state. It's still got a ways to go before it's done, but what we have built here is actually really quite interesting. And you know, I'm going to show instead of tell. So, here we are in Sedanine, fresh out of the tutorial.

[00:00:38]First thing to do is to head over to a reals trade house and get some starting gear. I also going to take a quick look at the spells, but I decided to stick with melee for this demo. I then walked around town and talked to a few people, and Elder gave me a tip. There was a group of smugglers hiding out in a cave nearby, so I decided to give that a shot. Now, just as a quick aside here, almost everything in the mod is currently using default values and direct stat conversion. I have not done any actual game design or balancing yet.

[00:01:08]The combat is functional in that enemies fight back and deal damage, but right now all the equipment just looks the same and all the stats are really uneven. But anyways, we fight our way through the cave and things are going pretty well until I get jumped by a second NPC and dead. But it's fine. Just come right back and finish the job.

[00:01:30]After dealing with all the smugglers, I went around the cave and just looted everything I saw. Most of it was garbage that I could sell to a shop later. But I did find a cool enchanted ring and I definitely put that on. I also ran into some slaves that were in a little makeshift prison. And I decided to free them because I got the key out the smugglers and why not. After that, I decided to take a silt strider over to Balmora. When I arrived, it was raining and gross, so I just went right into the lucky lockup and rented a bed for the night. Beds of this mod act basically like bonfires, and it's how you rest and level up. I put a few points into Vigor, rested for the night, and then headed right over to the Fighter Guild to sign myself up and get a proper quest. That quest, of course, being the infamous rat quest. Derrain Felis has a rat problem in her house and she wants us to take care of it. Funnily enough, while she was telling me about this rat problem, the rat actually came out of the room and started trying to bite my ankles.

[00:02:25]Normally, there's an interior door here, but I have those disabled for testing right now, and it just wandered right in. After dealing with the first rat, I headed up to her store room and got jumped by two more rats as soon as the loading screen ended. Thankfully, they're rats and it wasn't a big deal. I grabbed my payment from terrain, turned the quest in, and got myself another one. The local Quamama egg mine has a problem with some smugglers, and it's my job to delete them. Remember kids, stealing eggs in Varnfell is a crime punishable by death. I head south out of town and find my way to the egg mine.

[00:02:59]And I meet a couple of the miners outside. And yes, that is minor with an E. I know I'm a YouTuber, but I'm not about that. They let me know the names of the two poachers I'm looking for, and they tell me they're hiding deep inside the mine. I then wander around inside for a while until I find them. And a battle ensues where I get absolutely dunked on by these two guys. Clearly, I need to gear up a bit better for this.

[00:03:22]So, I do some shopping in town. I buy some potions, a better bow, and I level up a bit by selling loot that I had from the smuggler's cave. This time, things go a lot better and I'm able to finish them both off. And also, I say hi to the Quamama Queen before I leave. I turn in my quest with Idis Fire Eye and then decide to pick up one more quest. Some Talvani agents are causing trouble for the Calera mining company, and they want me to reduce all of their health bars to a number that is less than or equal to zero. So, we take a little jaunt on up to Caldera, which goes pretty well until a cliff racer appears. And yes, I am using the Warhawks as the base enemy for the cliffracer. I am fully aware that I will be going to hell for this. Anyways, though, we reach the mine and I spy a dude just loitering around. I ask him if he's seen any spies hanging around and he just well he gets kind of mad about that.

[00:04:10]>> He then proceeds to call me a slur and parry me at the same time.

[00:04:15]>> Sure.

[00:04:16]>> Welcome to Borrow It. It's totally fine though. I uh definitely wasn't salty about that at all. We come back, return the favor to this guy, and head on into the cave, which he seemed to be guarding. Immediately after going into this cave, I regret it because two more guys appear, and I panic. I run around the corner and another guy appears. And then I run up some stairs trying to make some distance and things go very badly for me.

[00:04:43]Oh no. And I think that's a good place to stop. So unfortunately for John Morowind, this is where his story ends.

[00:04:51]I think this short little demo here hopefully illustrates just how far this project has come. The vast majority of quests and game systems are now functional, but still very rough around the edges. We've got a lot of work left to do, but the world is starting to feel more alive. So, for the rest of this video, I want to showcase a bunch more features that I haven't already shown and talk about how utterly cursed the development for them has been. But before I talk about code, have you considered maybe learning how to code?

[00:05:19]Well, today's sponsor, Boot.dev, is back again to fund my ridiculous projects and teach you guys how to write nice, clean code. My entire channel is basically built on making computers do the funny.

[00:05:31]So, it's no surprise that this is one of my favorite sponsors to have. Software engineering is such an interesting field of work with tons of career opportunities. And Boot's approach to teaching this discipline is, in my opinion, one of the best. By having you write real code and build actual projects. And while that may seem daunting at first, there's nothing to fear because they have a personalized AI tutor named Boots who is trained on all of their courses. So, if you get stuck on a particularly nasty problem, there's always someone there to give you a nudge in the right direction. And if you aren't a fan of talking to Clankers, you can always join the Boot.dev community Discord instead. And hey, if you're still on the fence about it, you can actually go to boot.dev right now and check out tons of their videos and lesson content for free. It's the best way to see if their hands-on no fluff style actually clicks with your brain before you make a commitment. And if you give it a shot and it turns out it's not for you, then no worries. Boot.dev has a 30-day no questions asked refund policy.

[00:06:22]So, if you've ever wondered what it would be like to review one of my godforsaken poll requests, sign up for boot.dev today with the promo code inferno plus at checkout to get 25% off your first year. Links in the description and add over. So, I managed to cover a lot of the content in that demo, but there are some random tidbits that I didn't get to, so let's go over those here as well. Recently, I finished a basic framework for the alchemy system in the mod. Harvesting your own ingredients works the same as it does in Elden Ring, and the alchemy system replaces the crafting menu. The recipes for this are not autogenerated, though, and need to be filled out in JSON files like this. I've written out the recipes for health potions as a test, but I still need a data boy to come through and design actual balanced recipes for every potion in the game. And on the subject of alchemy, NPC services are now generated based on stats and profession.

[00:07:13]And here's a short list of what they can do. Characters that have the smith profession or armor or training can upgrade weapons for you. Characters with the tailor profession can now tailor and modify your armor. Characters with the alchemist profession or alchemy training can now sell you recipe books that teach you how to make your own potions.

[00:07:31]Characters that offer training in the different magic schools can now help you memorize spells. Characters that offer enchanting services or train enchanting now sell ashes of war and can help you enchant your weapons with Ashes of War.

[00:07:44]And lastly, characters that offer travel services now, of course, let you travel to locations for a small fee. I've also added the basic structure of persuasion and pickpocketing into the mod, but I still haven't fully built it out.

[00:07:57]>> These systems are functional, but use a 50/50 coin flip to decide if you succeed or fail. Actual stabbed formulas will be designed later on.

[00:08:06]>> Another thing that is mostly functional now is crime and punishment. If you just so happen to commit a crime and there are guards in the general area, they will come and arrest you. And I must warn you, if you resist arrest in this mod, you will probably end up in this image. I would not recommend it.

[00:08:24]However, in some areas, there are of course no guards around, and in those cases, the locals will just beat the [ __ ] out of you instead. This behavior differs a little bit from actual Morwind, but it comes close enough and it gets the job done. And I actually just want to point out how insane this feature is. It could be difficult to convey coding accomplishments to non-coders, but like for those of you who've played Elden Ring, you know there's absolutely no concept of crime or guards or anything like that. So emulating the entirety of Borma's NPZ behavior in this game engine, it's like teaching a dog calculus. It was not designed to do this, but we have accomplished it.

[00:09:08]And something else I'd like to point out and make a note about here is the current TTS voice we are using.

[00:09:13]>> Or says, "I cannot think with all these interruptions. Please leave me alone."

[00:09:18]>> This is a placeholder in case anyone was wondering. I am not planning to release the mod with these goofy ass voices. We are currently still planning to have volunteers voice act for this mod, and I'll have some more information about that at the end of the video. This particular voice generation is just here to test and debug the massive systems needed to support custom voice characters in this engine and it has helped me get that whole thing under control and working as expected. It also may end up being the default voice for dialogue added by mods which brings me to that point. JP pub already supports mods for the most part. Not every mod is going to work perfectly when run through our program, but I've already tested a few of them out personally, and I've even loaded the DLC's in, and it mostly works as expected. And as a last little thing, Morwood uses [ __ ] video files for all of its cutscenes, and Elder Ring also uses that same tool set for its videos as well. So, I added some code that lets me do this.

[00:10:22]And here's that mod in Morowind as proof of parody.

[00:10:27]And yes, in theory, I could import the entire B movie into Elden Ring as an unskippable cut scene. But the question is whether or not I would do that. And yeah, that should wrap up the minor feature overview. Now it's time for the big stuff. my showcase of the most cursed development we've done over the past few months. But here's the thing.

[00:10:48]I've got like a dozen different horror stories I could tell you guys. But where do I start? We could of course just dive straight into the Eldrich Abyss with the script cross compiler, but no, we should start with something small. How about the map builder, which my friend Alfie contributed to the project? Currently, we using a copy of the USB wiki map, but as we get closer to release, we're planning to have a custom one drawn to replace it. This map works exactly as you would expect with area markers being revealed when you discover important locations. Towns, dungeons, caves, or whatever, it's all pretty straightforward, right? Well, behind the scenes, it's not quite as simple. The data for the Elden Ring world map is not just one big image that we can easily replace. It is actually composed of hundreds of individual image files named after the grid coordinate, zoom level, and mask state that they represent. It's kind of like a giant jigsaw puzzle, but with a lot of extra dimensions to account for. So, in order to build a fully custom map, we had to reverse engineer how this puzzle was put together and then create a function that can accurately replicate the process while preserving the coordinate system that Elder Ring uses. A bit of a nightmare, but maybe only a four out of 10 on the official From Software coding horror scale. So, how about something a little bit more devious then, like the audio system? Elder Ring uses WIS for almost all of its sound, which is actually a pretty well doumented and well-known API. In order to build custom dialogue, sound effects, and music for this project, we are using a cool tool built by VSwart that decompiles WI sound banks into JSON files, which we can easily manipulate with our code. The downside is the JSON files in question here are about 300,000 lines long each.

[00:12:33]And trust me when I tell you, any JSON file that goes over 100 megabytes is a threat to human life. And I'm sure you guys are thinking right now, it's JSON.

[00:12:42]It's a human readable format. It shouldn't be that bad, right? Yeah. From software does not reference their events in their sound banks by a direct ID or a string or anything reasonable like that.

[00:12:53]They use an FNV hash of a generated string that looks like this to ID their call events. And FNV hashes are not reversible. So there is literally no elegant solution here. I am just brute forcing this as much as I have to to get it to work. I even created a program to scan through all of the banks and just make a record of every ID that's used so that when I'm generating new IDs for this project, I don't run into any collisions. It's really dumb. But here's the thing, it works. And you know what?

[00:13:22]That's good enough. All right, it's time to turn up the heat. Let's talk about nav meshes. A nav mesh is an abstract representation of the 3D space in a scene that a game character can pathfind. It generally takes the shape of just the open floor space in an area, but it can have more complexities added to it depending on the game. These particular nav mesh files are built using proprietary Havoc SDK tooling that we uh don't have and also aren't allowed to have. But you know who does have the Havoc tool SDK? From software. And you know what game they made? Elden Ring.

[00:14:00]And it just so happens that the parts of the Havoc SDK that we need to generate nav meshes are statically linked inside of the Elen Ring executable, like the one that you can download from Steam.

[00:14:11]Now, I don't know how they managed to do it, but 12th Avenger and Nord were able to hook onto the functions inside of the compiled executable and create a working DL that we can use for nav mesh generation. It is honestly mind-boggling the work that they managed to do here.

[00:14:27]If there was any one thing in this video that I wanted to emphasize the sheer insanity of, it is this. These guys are absolute legends.

[00:14:39]Enough beating around the bush, though.

[00:14:41]Let's talk about the absolute horror of dialogue and script compiling. This has been my entire existence for the past few months, and I have become way more familiar with these scripting languages than I ever would have liked or expected. Now, I originally wrote like three pages about this subject, but decided it was a bit much for a main channel video. So, I'm going to move that deep dive over to the second channel. And on this one, I'm going to just do the short version. So, in order to make all of this work, I quite literally had to replicate the entire Morwin NPC behavior system inside of Elder. To achieve this, we actually have JRPO procedurally generate code in two different programming languages that is then compiled into binaries that are wrapped in binder files for the game engine to load on demand. Now, while that sentence may have only taken 15 seconds to say, it unfortunately took 3 months to actually do. And that's not even the end of it. After getting basic NPC functionality working, I then had to intertwine the script cross-co compiling throughout it. Morowind's Papyrus scripting language is what programmers would call a side effect hell. Papyrus script calls propagate themselves through every single aspect of the game engine. It just can't help itself and it has to touch everything. I mean, just look at this parameter list. C just add a new keyword for [ __ ] everything.

[00:16:02]Just I just want all of it. All right.

[00:16:04]And this stupid class is utterly massive as well. Part of this is my fault as I desperately need to break this down and refactor it. But we are kind of already past the point of that being reasonable.

[00:16:15]So I'm kind of just rolling with it at this point. But anyways, all of that yapping is just a leadin to this last little bit right here. This right here is a regular old script from Morwin that's attached to the VC mask shrine in Niss. And I'm just going to walk you guys through its broad strokes real quick. So when the player interacts with this shrine, we set this variable to one. We then continue. And if the question state variable is zero, we simply exit early. After that, we instead check if the question state is currently one and check if the player is carrying a potion of cure common disease in their inventory. If not, then we display this message box and set the question state back to zero and exit early. If the player is carrying that potion though, we instead display this message here with a yes or no prompt and set the question state to two. Now, in this last section of the script here, we check if we are currently in question state 2, and we look at which button the player ended up pressing. If the player hits yes, we remove the potion from their inventory and cast a spell on them, then display this message box, update their journal, and finally set the question state back to zero. And if they say no, the only thing we do is set the question state back to zero. And that is how this particular shrine works in Morowind. Pretty easy to follow, right? like not too crazy. Even if you're not a programmer, I'm sure you could understand that, right? And now this is the same script we just went through compiled into Elden Ring.

[00:17:42]No, I am not joking. Elden Ring's EMVD scripting is certainly one of the languages of all time. We don't have variable names or comments or types. We simply address an offset in the save game memory and write bits. No, I did not misspeak. I mean bits, not bytes.

[00:18:04]And for those of you who wish to try and decipher this, here is a color-coded version of the scripts that pairs the cross-co compiled code to the original with appropriate music in the background.

[00:18:18]So, yeah, that is what has occupied all of my thoughts for the past few months.

[00:18:22]It's why I've not been streaming and why there's been no content on the second channel. My entire existence has been consumed with interpreting gibberish code to make this project actually happen. It's honestly been maybe not the best for my health to be entirely honest. I swear my beard wasn't gray when I started this mod, but I guess it's almost done at least. But stress related aging aside, let's talk about what's left to do before an actual release of this project. As it currently stands right now in the development branch, the game is mostly playable. But playable does not mean fun. A large share of the remaining work is game balancing and design. For example, the potions you make with alchemy right now are not scaled to Elder Ring stats. So, a sujama can give you 50 strength for 60 seconds, which is an absurd amount. And a healing potion only heals you for like 100 health, which is nothing. Before we go to any actual release, I need to go through and convert a lot of data and create scaling and formulas to make the game play nicely. There is also a lot of work on the horizon where I'm going to need to go through and hand place enemies and items in the world. As it currently stands, enemies just use the spawn positions of the original game, but I feel that is a bit lazy. Elder Ring's combat benefits a lot from smart and oftent times devious enemy placements. So, I absolutely need to go through and add some spice to areas to make them feel more alive. And that's going to take a lot of time. Not to mention the fact that for bosses, I'm going to have to create custom boss rooms in a lot of areas, as Morowind's base game interiors are often a little too cramped for a proper boss fight. In addition to that, there's also still a lot of data that just needs to be filled out. Like right now, as an example, we have the enchanting tutors, which have a system in place to sell you enchantments to put on your weapons, but we haven't filled out the entire list of every enchantment in the game and their values. So, that's something that needs to get done. Beyond the game design and balance stuff though, there is also still a lot of work just to fix bucks. A recent and somewhat entertaining one that I came across and fixed was that hostile NPCs with a high alarm value would report deaths as murder to local guards. This means that occasionally a bandit would snitch on you to the guards if you killed their friends. Fixing this only took like three lines of code, but identifying these issues and figuring out why they happen can take a lot of time. And of course, the last thing on the list here is that there are still a few features that I just haven't gotten to. Lockpicking is literally not even in the game yet just because I haven't had time to design a system for it. So, the overall takeaway here is that the project is coming along and progressing quite well. But, we do still need some volunteers. So, let's go ahead and do the roll call. We are now finally looking for voice actors. If you're interested in maybe doing some voices for this project, feel free to hit us up in the Discord. There's a link in the description. And if there are any 3D artists out there who are willing to dedicate some time to this project, we certainly do need your help. Uh monster designs, clothing, and armor are main concerns. And one last thing, we actually need some people who are willing to do face creation for this project. If you happen to be good with the Elden Ring character creator and want to make like a 100 faces for us, then uh hit me up on Discord cuz we we certainly need your help. And that should be a wrap for this video. But before I go, I want to thank all of my patrons who support the channel. Things have been kind of tough lately and to put it simply, it is your support that has made this project possible. Without you guys, I'd be selling feed pickics on Only Fans to pay my rent. So, I appreciate it a lot. I also want to thank all the volunteers who are helping to develop this project. There's a ton of people, so I apologize if I miss a few, but be sure to thank them if you see them in Discord. And that is all I really had to say. Have a wonderful day, everyone, and remember to enjoy your Schuma responsibly.