No, what she was actually talking about was a recent hike we took on the eastern slope of Mount Hood. Upon reaching the summit she grabbed my arm and cried, "Look, Pseron! In the distance! The white Gold Tower!" The poor girl experiences sudden and inexplicable bouts of hallucination from time to time.

Aw man, that svcks.
But understandable.


And this svcks too.

Well, only because it sounds great and I returned my copy of Skyrim. Then again a project of that scale is going to take quite a very long time, so I guess I won't really miss out on it when I decide to give Skyrim another try.

My only concern is that so many really awesome massive mod projects start, the help gets spread too thin (because everyone wants their own big project instead of collaborating), the modders lose interest/lives change, and then the project stalls or fades away. So sad but it always seems to happen.

Do you think this increases the likelihood of Beth making an official mod that takes place outside of Skyrim?

Why would you return your copy of skyrim o.O

But yeah, from what i've heard, some of the projects people are planning sound amazing but also sound doomed to fail due to the amount of people wanting to do their own thing. Whilst a nice big project sounds like a fun thing to do solo, eventually most people stall and abandon it or release a half arsed version

It is indeed LOD.



I wouldn't say that, it is actually very useful for two reasons.

1) It gives us a glimpse of of the official hieght map of Tamriel.

2) You can extend the land and form it to match the existing LOD.

The enormous LOD present in the game is a good indication that they have increased the possible size of a single world space significantly. If the LOD size is any indication then we've gone from an engine that could do 4 quads to one that can do 16+.

Is it just me or is Vvardenfell strangely small and Northward? Like the bottom of Vvardenfell is half-way up the Skyrim map, I thought it was a little lower. And it doens't look at all the same shape. Is it supposed to be different due to the explosion? Even then it doesn't seem right. Compare these images. http://images.uesp.net/thumb/c/c3/TamrielMap.jpg/400px-TamrielMap.jpg http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/649871336308043465/AE7EFD3995901C9B7BDDB10F1206B4F3487AC2E3/ http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/649871336308044631/1BD793276E9547B5C2135577213E17978D41CF4E/ Doesn't look right at all.

Arthmoor-

In the other Heightmap thread I posted about scouting out the edges of the LOD land meshes. They are just LOD meshes with a water plane. The entire rendered area is around 190x190 cells.

Not sure what the point of this thread is - as all the info is in the other thread.

The actual game like playable landscape ends pretty quickly and I would imagine in the case of the mountains that it ends very soon after going over the other side. Sooner than it would in oblivion.

As I also posted over there - I don't think that if more provinces are added that these LOD are even desirable ... they aren't quality enough. new ones would have to be made. My hopes is that a lot of what Onra did is portable.

Dragonbone-

Yeah it does not really align right either. Mostly it seemed they wanted to approximate the white-gold tower region and red mountain. Sketchy versions.

Remember that if seen while in Skyrim there would likely be snowy weather and ambient space shading to blur things more from the highest peaks. That would help with the illusion of the previous game worlds being there.

Maybe we could see a Hammerfell / High Rock Elder Scrolls?

(it's a joke people)

Not really. The heightmap used in Oblivion only superficially resembled an actual map of Tamriel. LOD is designed to look pretty, not be accurate.

Me? Personally, I felt it was the worst game I've ever played, and I had more headaches than fun moments. I might try it again in a year. That and it was making me physically ill; nauseous.


Guessing that for the most part we weren't really supposed to see it in any detail. Switching back and forth between your screenies and the map, I can kind of see the approximate look. Have to use my imagination a bit, but it's kind of there. I'm thinking most people won't be able to see it (or even know to look), so it's a treat for any that do. Until I started watching this and the other heightmap thread, I never would've known that stuff was there either, nor would I have ever guessed to look for it. You guys are the ones that Bethesda needs to hire to beta test their games. You just get into *everything*!

I don't see how any of these conclusions could be reached.

The official map doesn't match up to where the alignment of the various things are at. Unless the Red Mountain explosion shifted the entire island northward.

LOD meshes can exist for land cells that don't. The fact that they do does not mean the engine can now support 4x the number of quads. Even if it does, there's enough here to easily say that this would need far more than another 16 quads to represent it. I also don't see how you'd form proper landscape based on extremely crude looking LOD mesh forms that were never meant to be viewed this way.

Well, this is very exciting.

Interesting to say the least. I can imagine we'll get a DLC which has the player visiting White Gold Tower, much like like Mournhold for Morrowind.

I need to go check this out myself. I know a road leading out from South Eastern Skyrim. There's a gate at the other end of the road but you can't reach it, because it says "You cannot go that way". Ima tweak my ini now.

You can see Solstheim too.

Yes this is a big problem for large mods. Often its difficult to get people to share the same vision but a big project needs to accept sometimes that people will drop in and out continuously but as long as progress is being made the mod can make it and grow quite well in the windows of greatest opportunity.

I'm glad there is a heightmap of such size as it bodes well for my mesogea mod, if I am to port across a heightmap many times larger than the Skyrim/Oblivion lands combined. The first construction kit version for Oblivion wouldnt allow heightmaps of much more than double the size of the Oblivion map. Hopefully the Skyrim CK will allow the same as the second construction set, expanding the visible LOD land etc.

There will be a massive release of lots of mods initially with a whole host of people modding their own stuff but thats useful. It adds a lot of diversity and allows for troubleshooting and snagging on a massive scale. As some people move over to the larger projects they will have cut their teeth on modding already, so I would say dont expect a great exodus to the major mods for a while, that will probably happen gradually.

I've been working on Mesogea since Oblivions early days with a break of 1 year for work reasons. Skyrim wont be half as difficult because the lions share of the work, the hundreds of custom textures and models are already done.

They could do localized areas... like perhaps a DLC where you're helping piece the Empire back together in the Imperial City, or one where you infiltrate the Thalmor capital, etc.
Something like that could be about the size of Morrowind's first expansion.

o_O Worst game ever? Technical issues or slow PC? On my mid-end PC it runs on ultra (plus mods) quite fast without ANY problems. Skyrim is 1000 times better than Oblivion and on par with Morrowind, and of course surpass it in many parts.

Meh. Lots of reasons, but I don't want to derail the OP's thread discussing them here (plus it would inevitably start a troll fest or flame war).

The last sentence of yours though is complete opinion. I disagree with it, and obviously you would disagree with my assessment. But that's fine to disagree on opinions. I have played, still own, and still play all older titles of TES (except Arena because my old 386 died). I'm a really devoted fan. It says a lot for a really devoted fan to get a refund for a game that is part of a series he loves so much.

Cyrodil, Hammerfell, Highrock, and maybe morrowind should be modder's priority right now. It seems all over the forum everyone is requesting districts that are all the way across Tamriel with at least 1 or 2 districts in-between (Elsywer, Valenwood.) I want to be able to walk to the regions, so please modders, focus on whats just outside skyrim's borders' first.

What I think the priority order should be:

1. High Rock (why not open up the rest of the north first while we are at it.)
2. Hammerfell (Always wanted to see the homeland of the Redguards.)
3. Cyrodil (Its there, and we already have A LOT of resources that could be imported from Oblivion, even going as far as copy/pasting the citys buildings and layouts. [From the Better Citys Mod of course])
4. Morrowind (Really only the mainland needs the most attention, Since Vvanderfell is destroyed all that really needs to be done there is just make a charred island covered in pools and streams of magma.)

Why is that an outlandish speculation? Because you doubt it?

Look at the facts:

Skyrim uses 1gb LESS memory than both OB and FO3.

The size of the world space OB could handle was very close to the size of the existing lod(bigger actually) in that game and logically it would have to be. The land itself would have to have been loaded in order to generate the LOD in the first place. We'll see what's what when the CK hits.

Well..please can we keep the thread on topic . I'm interested in seeing what people have observed. But as said in the past Oblivion contained alot of 'extra' land and only a tiny few mods even used it. To bad beth doesn't allow content to be exchanged betweeen the games..it'd make ports easier.

Oblivion extra land was just a primitive generator job. In case of Skyrim, it's a pretty rough landscape lod, but very close to original and made by Bethesda - main heightmaps shape is already made, official shape btw. Plus there's lot of work made by modders already, which can be easily ported to Skyrim.

I removed the off-topic crap. Take it to PM, kids. The moderator is cranky and just wants to go play Skyrim. There is a Wisp-mother who is owed a serious beat-down.

What? Why?

edit: To each his own, I guess.................

anyone calculated the average VRAM usage yet?