Tamriel Rebuilt

In the vanilla game items like hound meat appear on plates throughout the game as if they are ready to be eaten. In Tamriel Rebuilt, however, I noticed that there's much more cooked meat on plates. Is this distinction intentional, or are the hound and other meats that appear in Vvardenfell on various plates meant to be cooked?

It seems inconsistent to me, and I thought I'd bring it up. Sorry if this is a stupid question.

Well, now that you mention it, Vvardenfell's denizens being uncultured brutes that eat raw meat could work as an idea, but the disparity was indeed unintentional. While we've toned it down, we've had rashes of interiors with baths and washbasins and sload soap (which, as a side note, is not supposed to be used as soap by sane people) before, which made the people of Vvardenfell seem unwashed in comparison. Similarly, TR prisons often have buckets which I assume are supposed to fill in for chamber pots, making random prisoners the only people in Morrowind to have anything resembling toilets, strangely.

I frankly doubt we'll do much about it, unless the disparity becomes too obvious, as with the baths and washbasins above. People can and have eaten raw meat, so that can always be tossed aside as local preference or something.

Gnomey wrote:Well, now that you mention it, Vvardenfell's denizens being uncultured brutes that eat raw meat could work as an idea, but the disparity was indeed unintentional. While we've toned it down, we've had rashes of interiors with baths and washbasins and sload soap (which, as a side note, is not supposed to be used as soap by sane people) before, which made the people of Vvardenfell seem unwashed in comparison. Similarly, TR prisons often have buckets which I assume are supposed to fill in for chamber pots, making random prisoners the only people in Morrowind to have anything resembling toilets, strangely.

I frankly doubt we'll do much about it, unless the disparity becomes too obvious, as with the baths and washbasins above. People can and have eaten raw meat, so that can always be tossed aside as local preference or something.

Still, on Vvardenfell I've encountered rather wealthy merchant houses with raw meat sitting on plates. I can understand a shack on the bitter coast where somebody's eating meat raw, but I don't think anybody living in the more civilized cities of Vvardenfell would eat it raw if they could avoid it. There's also really no lack of fire or ovens on Vvardenfell, so I don't think people eating uncooked meat would be common.

Cooked meat? How barbaric. Only silly outlanders would fancy such a thing. Or the misguided sympathisers of the Septim Empire. Any mer with slightest idea of refined standards knows that the dry-cured meat produced in the proximity of the Red Mountain is the most appetizing type of foodstuff in whole of Tamriel. Well-known exceptions are of course meat products gathered from the Kwama and the Ornada, as muscle fibers in those animals might retain a slight consciousness after cutting of the meat, and try to form a rather unpleasant symbiotic relationship with your intestines.

In France it is not uncommon to eat raw meat, such as tartar which can be either fish or beef.

(The meat in the vanilla game isn't explicitly stated as being raw though. It's just "Hound Meat" or "Rat Meat" etc etc. Depending on the context one should be able to figure out whether the meat is meant to be raw or prepared or rotten. Sure, when you loot the meat you can expect for it to be raw, but the meat sitting on plates might very well be considered cooked.)

Rats wrote:(The meat in the vanilla game isn't explicitly stated as being raw though. It's just "Hound Meat" or "Rat Meat" etc etc. Depending on the context one should be able to figure out whether the meat is meant to be raw or prepared or rotten. Sure, when you loot the meat you can expect for it to be raw, but the meat sitting on plates might very well be considered cooked.)

If that's the case why does TR distinguish between the two?

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I have no other explanation of having "Cooked" versions of Hound Meat, Rat Meat, and Durzog Meat other than that their stripey grilled look adds variety. I think this has been purely an aesthetical choice, and when the "Cooked" meats were added by TR we didn't think about what ramifications it might have as to creating disparity between mainland Morrowind and Vvardenfell.

I don't feel strongly about the "Cooked" meats, but I understand how the inconsistency can be irksome. We can of course rename them by removing the "Cooked" part, that's not at all a difficult thing to do.

I would argue in favour of replacing all meats with the vanilla variants. Apart from the inconsistency, there is no evidence in TES3 that I can recall of anything that would provide such a grill-pattern. To me, it looks like a bit awkwardly slapped on for its familiarity, not because it fits in.

At the same time, I'm kind of sure there are a few instances of meats on fires in vanilla MW, so the devs probably just didn't think it was worthwhile to make new textures for the meats and just left it up to player imagination. Nearly every house has a fireplace in it so it's not hard to imagine it's mainly used for cooking since Vvardenfell isn't really a cold place.

The grill effect does look pretty out of place, it's also another unique texture that TR adds to the game which complicates things with the graphics mods that a large portion of the player-base use. I'm just a lowly lurker, but I'd much prefer that TR relied on context the way Vanilla does to determine if meat is raw/cooked/spoiled. From a mechanical perspective it makes no difference to the player, anyway.

I'd also like to see the Deshaan Bread retextured into something more interesting than a French loaf (the current high-contrast texture really pops out of its environment, too. [It's also missing a bottom!])

i'd say deshaan bread should be more exotic, sharing characteristics with chapati:http://www.nandyala.org/mahanandi/images/nimona/nimonaimagecopyrihgted3.jpg

I wouldn't mind distinguishing between raw and cooked meats if it was consistent throughout the entire game, but realistically I think it best that we keep it the way it was in the vanilla game. If we do want cooked meats something that looks like it's been roasted over a fire would be better than the current barbecued look.