Unclear what you're saying here. What specialised software do you think is needed? Perhaps if you could explain this suggestion more clearly and state whether this is what you're working on now and how it will be of benefit, things could become clearer?
Are you talking about a program to detect various relatively small pockets of landscape (compared to the world as a whole and the usual size of an area in which new content gets automatically generated) needing reseeding with new objects following the downscaling of a house? A program which will automatically downscale all the houses and all the various additional objects scattered around that house, positioning them correctly once at this reduced scale (e.g. barrels, crates, carts, pavement meshes, accessories to the house itself not actually part of the house mesh such as roof overhangs, extra windows, ivy growth etc.)? Is that really doable? Handling automatic redirection of things like AI packages, scripts, quests etc. certainly I can see a program handling on its own, but I'm not so sure about the other things which would need doing before reaching that stage.

I don't know what you need, maybe you should explore your workflow and tell me what's wrong with it. I know what I need, like currently I need the possibility to speed-paint the Tamriel continent (because I want to, for no other reason), and that's not possible with a 2x2 cell editor like the CS that crashes every 2 minutes.


I suggest to start thinking about having your own tools to work acceptable. I suggest to stop thinking "oh this is okay like I do it, there couldn't possibly a better way". Fe. that in 6 years of Oblivion modding no modder asked to have a DDS-converter specifically programmed for Oblivion modding is a riddle to me. How one could accept to work with DDSs as storage-format is an even greater riddle to me.
How do you think a Bethesda-artists thinks? "Oh I need 500 hours to do this, that's okay." No! He runs to his team-collegue who programs and tells him he needs a XY. He does not accept that something bad is okay, and utilizes the network he's embedded in, to become more productive in an enjoyable way.


I'm programming productivity tools for Oblivion modders all the time. I do it because it has always a positive outcome for me, 50 hours sticked into a DDS-converter I easily sum up counting the stupid time to handle the nVidia save-as-dialog, 40 hours sticked into additional BSA-i/o I easily sum up counting the stupid time (and space) needed for a data-preparation, conversion, packaging and whatnot. I'm a beans counter, I count my hours of useless waste and exchange them for hours of usefull (enjoyable) programming.


Well, that's rather ... uncreative.
How about a tool where you select an area on the landscape and it generates you a town as a seed to refine it. Or a tool where you can divide the landcape in climatic zones and it generates you soil and foilage as a seed to refine it. That doesn't even need an interactive program with GUI.
I couldn't agree wanting to literally preserve what's handplaced in a specific space and place.

If you then come up with a list "but, but, but NOOOO because" ... remember one can think it through and find solutions (which in turn also causes a list "but, but, but NOOOO because" ... remember ...), right?

I want to encourage you (and others) not to think in terms of "how could it be done at all with what we got", but in terms of "in which way could we do it optimally and what do we need to create to do it that way". It's not that I say that it automatically becomes reality, but if there is so much talk about design-documents and what not, I ask: where is the section with the anolysis of the current and the optimal workflow?

Please keep in mind this is not a critic, it's just my little rant about what I think is the desirable liberation of the state-of-mind. Of course I think that way because I program whatever I need or interest me since 20 years whenever I had to.

You may consider it uncreative, but that's what would be needed for an enlargement of the entire existing worldspace; what is needed is filling in gaps created around existing content, but those gaps are also surrounded themselves by existing content, so filling the gaps needs doing without wiping out or overlapping with the existing content. So if you rescaled everything up by 2 and then downscaled the man-made objects (buildings and containers and walls etc.) then the space this creates around the downscaled object is what now needs filling in with new content. Then the existing quests, AI and scripts all need redirecting to the correct locations in an enlarged world, doors need relinking, and door teleport markers need relocating too of course.

Now, if a tool could be created to automate much of the manual work needed, then it would truly be worth considering 10x scaling.

Ethatron

I agree with your sentiments about thinking about tools to make a given job easier... Most modders are not programers, so they don't think about things like that. They are simply hobbyists working with whatever tools are there for them... and if a new shiny tool comes along that's useful, they use that.

That said, since you code, you obviously have interest in modding (or at least the modding community), here's a challenge/request for you... Create a utility that will locate, replace, and resize non landscape objects to x1 size - reading the original skyrim.esm for non landscape coordinates and place the x1 resized objects in the appropriate coordinates in the x2 worldspace. So when lightwave (coding willing! ) gets his x2 sized world in, the x2 world can be run through your program and the bulk of the 're-converting objects to x1' is completed.

There, the request/challenge has been made sir!


I like the idea of selecting a 'region' of worldspace and having a utility that I tell is 'desert' and it randomnly generating terrain, but there's some issues that would have to be worked out for proper implementation. The biggest that comes to mind is textures, as in what textures are allowed to be used in said 'random seeding'.. I've got a few ideas off the top of my head on how to work that out, but I need to mull it over a bit more to be able to clearly define a means that isn't overly complicated (not that modders aren't used to complicated tools, I'd just like life to be easy for once! lol).

Same thing applies to dropping 'seed cities' in place... I can think of numerous ways to do it, just need to process it to try and make it simpler.

\

@ Ethatron: I think Lightwave might be the one to talk to about all this.

No question I would love doubling world size!

where can i find the 2x mod for oblivion, ive searched everywhere pleeease help me

If this gets up and running id be glad to help with the grunt work of resizing or whatever.

Although 2x would be alot of work it seems rather straight forward to me as far as implementation goes, barring the tools needed for initial resizing (which i know nothing about) team creation and work load would be simple.

EXAMPLE

1:Compiled list of all resized world object/structures/locations (assuming things like trees could be left alone {tbd})
1a: Teams assigned specific Objects/Areas,
1b: WIP list for the ROL (Resized Objects List) to prevent redundancy if/when overflow occurs between teams.
1c:Central pre-RELZ database, checked and verified by team leads.
2: Testers

Of course this is very basic and doesnt go into team creation or hierarchy but the fundementals seem easy enough.
Break teams up by color, assign teams Objects/Areas, color code the ROL by team ect..

Ive dabbled with previous CS's and am in no way an expert but i have nothing but free time, and am willing to learn whatever is needed.
please PM me if i can help

I wish this could change, instead of taking the passive consumer stance, I wish a hobby modder could express what he would need and ask around for help to have it done. The only piece of code I wrote on demand ever was some OBSE-functions for OBGE ... I'd love to be part of a bigger project regarding landscape, and write tools for it, but I don't want to have this gap between programmer there and some others on the other side. The team must consist of people covering the entire range, passing the problems occuring on one end of the activities through to the other side. Simple example, make one guy responsible for DDS-conversions, don't let the artist bother with that. And that converter-guy has enough technical knowledge to indicate well which tool would make his life easier to a programmer, who could write that tool. If it's a full success the tool could even make the guy's function redundant and he can do something else, because now all the no-techs can do flawless DDSs. That's the concept of a complete team. Not 10 willing artists and then noone who can use the CS (because it is crashing, or for not knowing).


It makes no sense. You have a library of assets, put them in the game and be done. What's needed is a better editor, which makes re-placement rapid. You don't need to design Skyrim, you just need to re-create it. Example: Whiterun, make it's base 2x the size, how do you imagine to put the city-structure on that totally different shaped base. You know how whiterun looks like, just throw the appropriate assets in place and be done with. No complexity involved. Just a editor missing, if CK wouldn't look good. Another example: roads. You don't want them twice wide and it's impossible to do anything automatic with the data you have. What you need is a tool which allows parametrization of roads which in turn gets converted into textures. I doubt the CK comes with that.


There you go. More of this please. Write it down, put it on a wiki and count me in to try to make it happen! The better the description of the proposed workflow, the better.


I hope you understand I'm not talking about something like CityEngine, I mean just throw 30 houses of a style near the space you want to model, then you just place them how you want them. Or you set markers on the floor and the tools places specific houses on the markers. Things don't need to be overly complex to be usefull.


Programmers, by their very nature, don't need to be reminded that it's possible to write special software ...

Awesome! I mentioned this idea in the Skyrim General Discussion forums yesterday!

I completely endorse this. I'd like to see it twice, maybe thrice as big. I have the impression that anything bigger would just be overkill.

So you express a desire for modders to ask programmers to provide tools to ease the modding tasks required in a thread about rescaling the entire Skyrim worldspace, and then when modders explain what would be required from a tool to ease the workload for rescaling the entire Skyrim worldspace, you say that they're being uncreative and that what they want makes no sense, just use what is already provided (or will be provided next month)?

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot...

Just a thought on Ethatron's idea... I'm no programmer and a horrible modder, so it might be just crap.

I don't think a program will be able to eliminate all work, at all, but maybe it could do some little things that can help out. A simple program could be created which takes some imput from the modder and modifies just some things in the ESM. Per example, the modder goes into the Creation Kit, selects an object as reference which should be the center of the town which is going to be resized and grabs it's ID. That ID is typed in the external program and takes it as reference, and a radius is given around that object. The program then grabs all objects in that radius (excluding the reference) and resizes them and repositions and halves the distance to the reference for each of them. A filter could exclude different types of objects like trees, water, or whatever. You would then have most objects placed and resized, including triggers, markers, and whatever the modder wants. Then he would still have to go to the CK and modify the rest or repair whatever. And then to the next town.

As said, it's just a thought, as I have no idea what all this really involves and I might be talking [censored]. But I can't really imagine the brutal workload that moving and resizing every single object, trigger, marker could really mean. In Oblivion I tried making buildings before, and I remember too well how hard it was to position the door so that it looked perfect in place.

Anyway, I love the idea you got here and would love to see it done.

You should think about the workflow, not what a program could do technically. Try this: you have the heightmap scaled 2x, your task is to recreate Kvatch.
a ) you have all assets at 2x as well, how do you go and reduce it, what will you reduce?
b ) you have nothing, how do you go and place things?

My stab is:
- landscape vertex colors are scrapped, that makes a tool
- landscape texturing is taken over (except roads), that makes a tool
- rocks are taken over at corrected positions at 2x size, that makes a tool
- trees are taken over at corrected positions at 1x size though instanced 4 times, that makes a tool
- I define which trees/rocks have vertex coloring and autogenerate it at their positions to the landscape, that makes a tool
- I make a road-map with road-splines, those are used to recreate the road-texture (and paths) in the landscape, that makes a tool
- I totally scrap the old Kvatch and recreate it manually, using the same assets so scripts continue working, that I do in a editor, probably not the CK/CS
- to make things easier I occupy two instances of the editor, rendering the old map in one and rendering the new map in the other, I use the clipboard to copy and paste asset-references from the old to the new map, so I don't have to search anything and all related data/functions can be preserved, my worlkflow is reduced to placing
Once I'd start working on it I probably come up with another bunch of things which could make my life easier.

This is exemplary, you could do it the same with Winterhold.

Are you making the tool or are you just giving ideas/suggestions/criticism.

Aye - that what I meant about organizing and categorizing volunteers... Project management isn't about managing a project, it's about managing the people working on the project; knowing their abilities, strengths/weaknesses and making sure they're working in the areas of their strengths. You manage your people correctly, the project manages itself because everyone is doing what they know.



Absolutely, I should have been clearer, but I was writing 'off the cuff' so to speak. One of the items in my mental checklist about features of a tool was similar to a mapping program call ProFantasy... Lay down your 'base terrain' then select 'road' (from the menu) and start clicking on the base terrain where the road path is... when the path is set (i.e. you are 'done laying the road path') the texture of the road is laid down where you put your path... now you have base terrain and a road all pretty looking...

ProFantasy has their base product (a world map design program) a City and Dungeon Designer... you click on what you want to put on the map, where you want it and the size (aspect)... click and done (it is/can be more difficult than that, but only as complicated as you want to make it)... it uses layers for maps (for DM and Player views) and all kinds of other things that would be awesome if we could get to work in with a CK extender... I realize that's not bloody likely, as it'd be a serious, VERY serious and ambitious coding project on it's own... But... *thinking*

This is off the top of my head... and slightly rambling, but bear with me.... Perhaps... If 'prebuilt' buildings.. or 'packages' of things (castle, fort, cottages, etc)... A utility could load the map and you click (right click menu driven?) it pops a menu up of these prebuilt/package items to place them... select the scale (default world, 1/2, x2, etc) and it plops down the package in place... Basic Cell linking would have to be done (i.e. the exterior cells tied to the landscape), but the door, Pathing/Navmesh, map markers, etc would still have to be done manually... Things like roads become easy to place then... My brain is rumbling now ideas... argh!

i.e.
(I really should read all the way down rather than bits at a time... lol...




*nod* working on it... keep the ideas tossing at me... I work better with constant feedback/ideas/dialogue... Just have to make sure that whatever super utilities being designed don't get hammered with 'feature creep'!!!




Aye, very true, but programers by their very nature tend to get wrapped up in what they're creating and forget about ease of use for non-programers... Hence why most programers are not project managers! lol!

I seem to remember seeing a program that allowed you to move cells in Morrowind.

I wonder if you could do that with Skyrim too. My thought is that instead of 2Xing everything then downsizing and filling in the gaps, you could just add an empty cell next to every cell. I.e. you have cell 0,0 and at 0,1 & 0,2 you have empties then at 0,3 you put the original 0,1 cell. That wold give us a 3x mod.

Afterwards just look at what cells need to be moved back close to each other i.e Labyrinthian then just move the terrain back up and use a random seed to add trees and rocks and ninja monkeys in just like Oblivion had.

That wold give you empty land to just wander. The cities would also be broken apart and much much larger.gs in the empties. The biggest places this Just add in more buildin idea falls apart at is modifying the Z axis and fixing things like the path to High Hrothgar, without adding more steps, to stay lore friendly.

As a non programmer, please let me know what you think of the feasibility of this.

This is only working in 2D. In 3D - for example, in a heightmap - a road is actually a slope constraint (specifically, "the slope along this path is at most X, the slope perpendicular to this path is zero for a defined width of W") first, texturing, how the line is interpreted (line segments are as valid a choice as Catmull-Rom splines, for example), and minimum distance to be kept free of "clutter" (rocks, bushes, trees, ...) come at a later stage.

True, but I was trying to avoid overly techie-geek speak to keep things on a more overview conversation at the moment... Keeps/gets more people interested to get more idea/suggestions/commentary... once things get a little further along the higher level geek speak can be taken to PM/email or even onto a new thread/forum.

There's a lot of things I'm working on this week for not just this idea, but for my quest expansion mod... so a lot of documentation/plans typing up for me this week.

I try to provoke a consciousness that projects of this size are less prone to delay and eventual failure, if you headhunt for and integrate people that take care of technical aspects from packaging to file-formats, file-sanity and searching tools to making tools.
I program productivity tools for Oblivion, I programmed most of OBGE, and you can be sure that most modders and lots of users eventually benefit from those programs in one or another way. I'm not going around excessively announcing them, but I percieve with a strange kind of interiour humor, how things get lamented over and over again, be it a inconvenience, a thought-to-be impossibility or a urban myth - which have long be solved, are about to be solved, and often are on some programmer's TODO list - just because there is no middleman between the no-techs and the hard-techs..
I now have four tools to attend to, I can't be more than a guide to these projects, except if my interests/tools intersect with the activities required for a project, because the list is also growing, and I do them alone. I'm a niftools developer and a CBash developer as well. My table starts to be full, nevertheless I want to give what I can.
In this case, my next tool (of my own personal interest) is a landscape-editor, once I have the base framework established, it can be transformed into anything. And there it definitely intersects with other projects. If a project would have a programmer which is connected to that editor's development (like I'm connected to CBash), we could turn that base rather rapidly into well suited productivity tools for those projects.

That's the perspective I was writing from, and my suggestion to projects of the size like this.

@Ethatron

Thanks for all your input. While I am not in any magnitude able to contribute to this project I would like to request you to direct people you know who can help this project move forward. Whether they decide to help or not is left upto them but I don't want a good idea to gather dust in the corner.
While this project may seem like too much work to some I for one and am sure many others will be really glad even if tools existed to make the job even a fraction less tiresome.

I am a developer too but don't have much time, until at least the end of 2012. Nevertheless I will try to program (or help programming) tools for this project !

But... I think there is still a lot of work to do by hand, especially because of the 3D. Depending of the point of origin, many object will end up in levitation at x meters of the ground, and this repositioning is hardly done by a program (even with the Tes Toolkit function of “laying down” - don't remember the exact name). Or maybe I'm wrong ?

I recently visit Markarth... Hell ! I feel that the work here will be twice as Whiterun because of the height.

Quests could be easily converted because they usually works with ID's objects, and rarely with absolute positions.

@Ethatron (and others)
Do you have informations or links about the formating of .esm, .esp and other related files ?

as a modder a lot is possible, just think of the amount of time and resources you need and make a team, however the achilles heel of Skyrim is not the size nor the scope, but voice acting!!

Imagine you add 100 NPCs, all with 20 lines of dialogue, who is going to do the voice acting, and will you like it?

I mod morrowind, have my own House expansion work for two province mods, and have been modder at TR, so I know what is needed to make a HUGE mod, frankly Skyrim can be expanded in many ways with ease, heightmaps can be made, exteriors and interiors done, but what would it feel like if every NPC talks crap or nothing?

No need of voice acting, oblivion has plenty of mods with NPC without voices. It's possible to use only text ("subtitles" with "mute" NPC).

and you call that expanding :s IMO expansions should follow the original feel, and voice acting is a great part of it. It is like giving you food but you are not allowed to smell it.

Would make the Dragons MASSIVE if it was done in the same way as the oblivion one. lol