I have a few texture replacers and tree/land shadows enabled (no dll mods or other .ini tweaks besides running in ultra) and GPU-Z is reading a 900MB to 1.1GB VRAM usage.

Because there's no supporting evidence for it. But ok, you go right ahead and make it sound like I called it BS because I doubted it if you want.

Uses 1GB less *WHAT* that OB and FO3? I don't even get what this is referring to.

The land might have had to be loaded in Bethesda's development tools. We don't know yet if the game can handle that much landscape data or if the CK will generate stuff outside the existing border. They could easily have generated the other province LOD using separate master files and then tricked the engine into loading them by renaming the files.

The best you can get - the better.

Well a lot comes to mind. There was this special mod designed by Oblivion modders which allowed the complete Morrowind Vvardenfell landmass converted to Oblivion lands. It required you had the original Morrowind game and then after you run few executables, Morrowind was transported into Oblivion with most of the details. Well someone may do both Oblivion and Morrowind landmasses for Skyrim using similar techniques. But still, Bethesda banned the mod from the forums, so even if such mod gets released, it would never get the attention it deserves.

Not sure how you missed that or could think that it would mean anything other than RAM. Skyrim only uses 700mb of system RAM and the INI is set to the 32bit exec. limit of 1.7~gb.



You've got a point there but it doesn't definitively disprove my theory given the other data.

Just wanted to confirm and throw my two cents in that yes, the playable area ends extremely early. Oblivion had a decent chunk after the borders to 'explore', whereas Skyrim ends nearly immediately past the mountain summit.

If Onra's work is portable, and my god am I praying that it is, that would lighten a lot of the load on modding new provinces, wouldn't it?
With so many new faces on the forums and possible new modders, it seems that it would be far more likely of finishing a new province in Skyrim than it was in Oblivion if Onra's heightmaps were able to be ported over to Skyrim; It would be a matter of populating the area (Which may or may not be easier with the new CK), filling in the landscape, and making the areas feel alive, no?

Either way, very much looking forward to the CK and what will be possible with it.

This is exciting!

Ive just done a thread, hoping that Bethesda will have wind of it, that we need the CK to be able to allow modders to create workable land beyond the borders, not just ghost LOD etc. We need to keep our fingers crossed.

We could also do something along the lines of http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41480 in FO:NV. Its continued existence shows that Beth was willing to let users integrate the two games, the method in question requiring players to meet a burden showing that they did indeed possess the product and its assets.

While I cannot guess how it would work with Morrowind, some Oblivion mods have already been imported to Skyrim. After which it would just be a job of updating the textures and meshes; and ensuring that old NPCs conform to the new model scheme. This would make modding present day Cyrodiil far simpler than recreating from scratch.

Wasn't the Morroblivion project cancelled because it took something from another one of their games? I understand that Skyrim is based 200 years after (so everything will be different) but will Bethesda force other projects of the same kind to stop?

I'm new to all of this, so fill me in.

It was, but they seem to have changed their stance when a similar mod came around for Fallout. And Morroblivion has since moved to conform to the system entailed in the Requiem method. The original morroblivion had the assets downloadable from them, a user didn't need to have morrowind itself. Now you extract the morrowind assets and update with oblivion quality textures and model fixes. We would do the same thing for Oblivion and Skyrim; and the problem seems to have been exclusive to Morrowind and its textures if you read the Morroblivion site.

TL;DR
As long as you stick with the Requiem method for copying assets Beth seems cool with it. And the problem seemed to be exclusive to Morrowind and its textures

That project is still actively updating, iirc. As of a few months ago.
They had finished the entirety of all the quests in Vvardenfell and most on Solstheim.

hmm i was thinking the same thing

It's exciting yes! i think we all sorta saw this coming since Oblivion had the same outer lying LOD beyond borders. I guess Onra or Ethatron would be a good reference as to whether or not this LOD map space would prove useful towards creating actual world space. But like Psymon says.. (no phun intended) Hopefully people can team up rather than work on seperate worldspaces.

After reading up on what they have accomplished it seems that to have morrowind in our Skyrim we first have to put our morrowind in our oblivion then in our skyrim. Apparently Beth outsourced some texture development in morrowind to a 3rd party company and thats why they had a problem with the original morroblivion.

So its like mixing peanut butter and caramel together than pressing them in a smooth chocolate shell.

To make their mod they had to make an original version of each texture in Morrowind.

That's how I understand it. Converting the textures and meshes to Skryim from Morroblivion would be a trivial matter, most likely. However, it doesn't jive with the lore as Skyrim takes place 200 years after the Oblivion Crisis.

We could make the player start in Morrowind, play out the entire saga. Except for the other two... but who cares about them right?

That would be like turning TES up to 11!

This is cool news! I've just made a thread about this not having realized this thread is here (I've reported my thread so it can be deleted). There's a finnish blogger who blogged about this, giving more detail and screenshots (all in English). You can find it http://ppsh-41.tumblr.com/post/13145143504/entire-tamriel-landmass-built-into-skyrim.

I highly doubt they did this for modders.

Don't worry, even this thread was made although there already was central thread for heightmap discussion.

Isn't all of the extra area just LoD terrain? Is there actual (normal textured) ground/trees scattered around? If not, it's not really much of a benefit. When we generate new LoD for landmasses/mod, hopefully we won't have to regenerate all of this extra space as well.

I haven't actually viewed anything from the peaks though.

What mountains have you guys seen White Gold Tower from? Throat of the World?

Have you seen the vids yet? The textures are initially fine, but they gradually get worse.

OK I can confirm that the Morrowind LOD is easy to see in the normal bounds of the game.

Just do the joining the stormcloaks quest and or just head north out on the eastern ice sheets - it is visible throughout most of that area. With the snow it only looks like a dark outline which hides the low quality.

I've yet to find where in the normal bounds of the game the white gold tower is visible.

I tried looking for White Gold Tower through the mountain pass visible to the south of Throat of the World. No dice. You can however see a body of water in the extreme distance which might be Lake Rumare, and part of the Imperial Isle. The horizon weather was obscuring anything much higher up than that.