I've always been under the impression that menus are something hardcoded into Morrowind and unchangable, apart from minor texture changes. That is something that I heard mentioned off-handedly a long time ago and never really questioned.

I was browsing the Morrowind CD today, and I came across some .nifs that had completely slipped under my radar until now (not because they're 'hidden' or anything, just because I'm dozey). I imported them to find that they do indeed appear to be .nifs used in the construction of UI elements in Morrowind.

Now that we have a more functional importer by which to examine the menu .nifs than was available in 'the old days', I wonder if UI changes are quite so impossible as all that? If nothing else, it might be fun to mess around with these and see what can be broken.

I suppose the main purpose of my thread is to ask whether any 'old' forum members remember any old threads that may once have existed which explored the possibilities of menu changes and what the results of those explorations were?

There are also some textures used in some of the menu .nifs that I can neither find on my disk, nor in Morrowind.bsa:
Tx_menu_innerbevel_default.tga
Tx_menu_outerbevel_default.tga
Does anyone know where they might be?

Here's a few screens of the menu items, plus a few small notes for anyone interested:
menu_button_frame
menu_head_block
menu_book

menu_contents
menu_main
menu_help

Edit:
Oh. There are many more menu .nifs than those I've posted the names of here.

Anything on the UESP Wiki?

[bump]

I don't recall any discussion about the UI, but I think that's mostly because the UI is excellent for a PC game. The most discussion I can remember were requests for a keychain part of the inventory.

Just curious though, what could be done with the nif's besides resizing them? I don't think it would be possible to make a tabbed UI like Oblivion has.

Hmm, the possibilities here seem quite interesting. Perhaps, armed with the knowledge of these meshes, MGE's and MWSE's capabilities, something interesting could be worked out.

Yeh there isn't really much you can do with them, not that I can imagine anyway. Would be interesting to see what people can come up with.

What about changing the appearance? Would that be possible?

Maybe something to change the way the barter UI works, say allow ability to key in the barter amount rather than use those pesky +/- keys? .....

- Rougetet

You can change the textures easy enough, including scroll bars, cursors etc.

Are there any mods that already do this? Would be nice for the Crosshair and UI mod list I'm compiling.

arachnidblack.zip
BlueSkin.zip
iceblue.zip
ID2781-2-34-Pyro_5C_27s+Morrowind+Black+II-20040119.rar
- and a dozen more by Pyro in most other colours, all on Morrowind-Mods.org, I think
SkinPack_ayse.zip

There may be more.
Hope this helps.

morrowind-mods.org is dead though

Arachnid Black link.

PES might have a few more of the ones Ronin49 mentioned.

From what I remember a lot of the menu color options are changed by three color number system (0-255,0-255,0-255) .ini tweaks. I forget about the textures part though.

Ayse's site--scroll down past all the trees for the UI textures.

It would be great if somebody did manage to figure out a cool way of using these.

They change button texts to Japanese.

You don't have to use every texture that comes with a texture pack.

I also doubt that it'd be possible to actually change the functionality of the menus (without the use of MGE and MWSE anyway), but resizing the borders for instance might be possible, or adding opacity (or both).
Could maybe add a beveled effect or something of that sort, or perhaps non-functional components like menu labels.

I'm not really sure what might be achievable, and I'm inclined to presume rather limited possibilities. Thought it might be interesting to open a discussion on it though.

I know very little about 3D modelling, having only created static objects, but if I find time then I might do some research into bones and see if I can figure out just what the bones in the menu .nifs do. Got a few things I need to do before I can look at that though.


Any ideas?
I'm not familiar with what sort of functions MGE provides.

Got them now.

Unfortunately, Morrowind-Mods.org is dead.

I'm going to post a new thread, so I don't derail Earth_Wyrms thread.

I do not have the tools to preview them. My patience with Irfan View ended in the very moment it asked me to find the necessary plugins for dds and whatnot.

My copy of Irfanview includes the ability to view .dds files. The only files I cannot view are .nifs.

sieboldii

All Irfanview plugins in one handy download from here.

[Edit: typo]

Thankyou

it is sad that you can not modify the menu as you wish... the ob's menus had origanization...

It'd be nice to know where those missing .tga files are, although I suppose a replacer might provide appropriate template, at least. I'm thinking of doing some optional UI replacers for Hyrule Isle/Shamerath's Reach and/or Modernwind/Morrowind is DOOMed.

It's really not sad. Morrowind's UI is excellent for a PC game. There's very little clicking and you can see much more at once.

Not rly... excellent would be Oblivion style organization with Morrowind amount of visibility.

Uh, it kind of is Oblivion-style organization. (Or I should say, Oblivion is Morrowind-style organization, but worse.) There's a map menu, inventory, spells, and stats. The problem with Oblivion is that it takes too much clicking to get to what you want. Tabs within tabs is not PC-friendly. But if you like it, good for you.

Uhh... yeah... but in Ob, it took me around 5secs to find a potions... while in Morrowind like minute at least... You can't say I am wrong here... >.>

And Id say that it is acutually possible to reconfigure the menu... judging from what has been done so far...

Seriously? Wow. Yeah, I actually can say you're wrong. But like I said before, if you like it, then good for you.

Same here, tabs within tabs = not so good, and the grouping was horrible, very small icons, ect ect.

Morrowind's wins.

Weird I can always can never find anything... I mean, if there is 2 potions then yeah... but 50, you gotta look through all of them and it gets hard and tedous.

Just remember that they're grouped alphabetically, not very hard at all, actually.

Or use Erasmus' luvverly icons. An oldie but a goodie.

The "optimized for console" menus is one of the things I hated most in OB

maybe a high resolution menu? or a menu where you can enlarge the stat menu..

Well, I am just going to add here how I added the background to my UI in the Oblivion Style interface. This was possible only by editing the meshes.

As you might have known, the borders of almost everything stretch to either how large the character makes them, of how large, say, a button needs to be. The first thing I did was try to add a center piece to the meshes, so the background would be there, but it failed to resize itself. When ended up being the answer was to scale the top portion of the "menu_button_frame" (along with thick border, thin border, etc.) as far down as to connect with the bottom portion of the model.

I then I re-uv mapped it and created the textures I would use. I am going to skip all the random crap I did to convert it from the higher NIF version to the Morrowind NIF version.

one of my failed attempts was to make the menus thicker, but have them extrude outwards instead of inwards. The menu sizes for load/save/options etc are all hard coded, and I will just say, it wont work, so thicker borders would have to go inwards, which may conflict with writing on a menu.

I have no idea about anything having to do with the "menu_contents", "menu_main" or any of those files with the missing textures.

There you go.

~ SB