We're open to hosting more mods, no problem. Just sign on to http://darkcreations.arthmoor.com/forums/ and send me a PM.

- Xae (Sys admin at Dark Creations)

It's not really lag, in my experience, but rather "shaking" of objects and the player. We won't know if it's present in Skyrim until we test it. My guess is yes, but whether we run into it depends on the exact location of it and the total size of the map. The only place I ever ran into it was the very south-west of Mesogea, and that map was many times larger than Oblivion.

Not so much an alternatively as an "also." Like I said earlier, I think it would be best if the wiki/forum is not associated with any other projects or sites.

I've not traveled all over mesogea but have been there (so huge) and have not had serious lag.

I've been all over Tamriel Heightmaps and using Side777's sailing ships have sailed beyond them without any lag whatsoever.

I thought that issue was with Morrowind based games provinces.

I've been all over my 14x13 quad heightmap in Oblivion, and never experienced such bugs.

That is reassuring, if it holds across different systems to yours. It is by far the biggest objection I have to this idea.


That offer was, I think, more to do with other worldspace projects which currently lack hosting.

Could you be a bit more specific about this "shaking" effect you mentioned?

Several members of the MERP team travelled across the map as well, and didn't encounter issues either. Also, for Oblivion we had a public beta (or rather alpha) release of our "old" 11x9 heightmap, where none ever reported such shake issues to us.

Can I get some idea of the scale compared to Cyrodiil we're talking about here?

http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/1350/comparisonv.png

The far left is Oblivion's vanilla worldspace, the far right is my 14x13 heightmap of Middle Earth. (Note that this is an "old" picture, when my new map was largely unfinished)

Thankyou, that's very helpful. So correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the one for Skyrim even bigger than the one you made for Oblivion? Won't that mean a lot more work? Or is your team so enormous that won't matter?

It's more work, but we think we can handle it, since we're not going to increase the scale of our towns. So the extra space is 95% generated terrain, which is mostly a matter of waiting a few hours more for every region to finish generating... The team is also quite big, and we expect a growth once the CK is released and we get this heightmap in the game, together with our new high quality tilesets that have been in development in "secret" for many months already. (huray for NIF file usage in Skyrim)

I also did calculations on RAM usage and we are safe concerning RAM limits, at least with the LAA patch and x64 systems. Our prognosis is that it'll takes us around 4-6 years to finish the full map, so by then everyone will have x64 systems anyway. We're going to have region-by-region releases now, so for example we'll first finish Eriador completely (landscapes, towns, quests, voice acting), release it to the public, and then move on to the next area (though department tasks overlap ofcourse, the landscapers can start with the next area while quest designers and such are still working on the previous one).

Btw, I didn't create our Oblivion Middle Earth heightmap, that was lumpypat. I took a very different approach to the map, as you can see it's a lot more accurate and the mountains are faaar smaller, though still big enough. For example, Throat of the World is around 550 meters high, while my highest mountain peaks are almost 900 meters (lumpy's mountains were several kilometers high IIRC). Average mountain range heights are around 400-500 meters, which is still a fair bit higher than Skyrim's average mountains.

Sorry, i dont really mean "lags",

I just remember of some topic in Oblivion Mods section, regard an issue caused by "point zero": if you travel too far from point zero, the game engine become like crazy.

I guess the issue is the "shaking" effect reported from Lady Nerevar

EDIT: BTW, i played much time with Onra's Tamriel Worldspace, travelling to Summerset: no issue crossed (my direct experience).

Well, all I can say is good luck! Presumably you have a lot of assets which were made for the previous incarnation?

Thank you, and yes, we're going to port all our high quality models. I edited my previous post btw.

Yes, I read it. I do wonder if the slightly larger scale might have an impact, but I suppose we must just wait and see for that one.

it wasn't lag, btw. just animated models began to shake (although with a body replacer it was barely noticable on the character) in morrowind when you made a landmass to far out from 0,0.
although, that was only way out. and barely mattered seeing as no one's working on a province for morrowind that far away from 0,0 atm.

if these guys say they've never seen it in OB i doubt it'll be in skyrim.

Like I said, it was actually in Oblivion too. I remember it affecting flowers, so it wasn't just animated meshes that time around. It displayed as the meshes moving a bit side to side and up/down. It happened fairly often, so it appeared as a sort of shaking.

Hmm. Could it perhaps be hardware-dependent rather than a limitation on the software?

i hope skyrim doesn't have it, or if it does it's so noticeable/irritating.

I can see how this might work. The only shared resource would be the heightmap.
Any modder(or Team of modders) could jump in and claim an area.
I'm kinda thinking like how the Unique Landscapes series worked.
Any modder could make a dungeon, UL or a city.
I am... actually excited for this.

Edit: Nevermind... if, whatever the aforementioned problem was called, was in skyrim as well then same world space would be out of the question.

Depends on how far out the landscape goes. I encountered it on the furthest corner of Mesogea, which was a really, really, really big map. It is very possible that Tamriel won't extend that far away (apparently Onra's Oblivion map had no such issue on its furthest reaches).

Isn't skyrim's scale a bit bigger than oblivion's, though? So the same amount of land (lore wise) would actually be larger (game wise), no?

Approximately 1.3 times bigger. Very roughly, a full map of Tamriel would be about 8x bigger. However, I believe that Mesogea was even larger than that.

Onra's heightmap wasn't scaled the same as Cyrodiil. It was probably doubled in scale over all, so we do have leeway if the engine still has the same restrictions.

Really? I did not know that. Why was it made like that?

Guess its all wait and see now(for the CK).
What's the word on the website/wiki?