Hrmm... There might just be... If you're interested.... I'll drop you a PM.

So how long it woudl require to have this enlargement?

No I disagree , everything shoudl be put in the same exact position and with no recale just enlarge the map then if someone wants can go from there and make changes , this for two reasons , time and workload....

For Example Whiterun if is doubled would look the same as if the world wasn't enlarged , keeping the scale of the items and settlements the same without other add ons will make the world feel bigger...

You have the general idea of the plan underway... Enlarge the map, relocate objects to their new relative position on the enlarged map. More landmass, same object scale.



Depends on the number of people willing to help (and the time they can donate) relocate cells in the CK from the old positions to their relative location in the enlarged map.

There is also the possibility of a program to aid in such moving...

In another (recent thread) someone asked about increased map size... and my response was "Wait for an announcement about that sometime in the next week or two"...

Things are being worked on/planned for/outlined what/how to do them.

I agree.

Sign me up. I'll make you a nice settlement.

I'm potentially interested as well. I'm a C++ developer but don't have experience with the tools being discussed.

Just a little update, I got TES4Scale working for Oblivion and Skyrim a few days ago (which means it'd work for the Fallout3's too). I stupidly didn't have any copy of the working version I used to scale up Oblivion a few years ago so had to re-figure things out.

This program never produced perfectly formed ESPs and for scaled up Oblivion I relied on loading them in the CS and saving them again to get everything correctly formatted; the data is fine, just some of the ESP group structures and flags must be quirky.

Anyway, at present each ESP only works in game with about 150 original size game cells of placed data in it or Skyrim dies before loading any gamesave. For 2x Skyrim I can get about 600 game cells per ESP - so my problem is size related or number of placed object. I'm uncertain why atm without the CS, it might even be exiting due to exceeding a certain number of warnings per ESP, it's just slowing me up not having the CS. I may try the FalloutNV GECK, scale up that game and see what it complains about - since the way that game handles files will be the closest to Skyrim.

Anyway, I can conceivably create the fully scaled and placed landscapes as it stands, with the landscape in one ESP and the placed objects in 50 ESPs(!) - the game is happy if they're separate, just not all in one file atm.

FYI TES4Scale works by first exporting all the FRMR (placed objects) and ACHR (placed NPCs) to some dump files from an ESM/ESP. It can dump all the child worldspaces in to the same file too, so that town interiors appear in the main worldspace (again like I did with Oblivion). Then it can import them in to any worldspace using any scaling, creating a new ESP with the correct FormIDs of the parent worldspace and parent cells, but with only the relevant placed content inside it. I've disabled all the stuff that links doors back to original interiors, activation markers etc for now.

I should warn that there will be 'spoilers' when the scaled test worldspaces are released, as every object is placed on it (including those initially disabled) is shown, so you might find that quest related features - such as fighting in burning towns - are also shown.

Although I'm not importing custom water heights atm, most rivers and ponds already appear because they're actually meshes, and flowing rivers work like conveyor belts - again they're placed objects, not a landscape water feature. Without the landscape water imported you can't swim in them atm, but visually they look perfect.

All sounds are there so it's pretty authentic scaling. Fish and birds seems to do their thing in their scaled areas, so rather than follow pathgrids like other creatures, they seem to be more closely tied to either their scale or maybe they're even part of a placed 'set' (an object that includes several meshes and simple AI creatures).

If I feel I'm wasting too much time sussing out this ESP issue, I might just release sets of 50 smaller placed object ESPs for each scaled landscape since for play testing the game will work just as well ...

Good news all around... copy/pasted to the google group, check my response there...

Now to get back to the... er, surprise.. ya that's it!

I think this is a great Idea. I have to admit that Bethesda did a good job on making the map appear to depict a huge landmass; whenever i'm about to travel and look at my destination I think "Man, that's a long way" but once I start traveling i'm there in 20 seconds which makes me laugh.

Lightwave, do you plan on releasing TES4Scale? It would be useful to move stuff around from one worldspace to another
Open Cities creators would love to use it I bet.

Ayup... that's kinda what drove this project to get going... hopefully at the end of it, it won't kill too many people's systems.

Just thought I'd throw this out there, I owned a world that utilized the activeworlds client, it was small, tiny to be more precise, darn things were expensive so I could not afford to increase it's land area, so what I did was scaled all my models and avatars to half size(had to redo animations), in relative terms this doubled the size of the map.

It's just as much work either way with having to relocate objects to their relevant locations... and far less compatible... or rather far more complicated to make compatible patches for things.

As I recall, this doesn't work in TES4 anyway (and so probably won't in TES5) because even if you reduce the scale of the player, the camera perspective remains at the same height, so the player would still be seeing everything from high above the ground.

Hi from what I understood from your long post , is that you can enlarge skyrim and make the same engine you did to reposition the objects in the same relative position? so all the enlaargement woudl be 100 X speedlight faster?
Would it be possible to leave unchanged the cells where the cities are? and fill the gaps around either by hand modding or by filling in terrain and some stuff automatically?

This woudl make the Cities look the same but the world feel much bigger as for example the plains around Windhelm woudl just be doubled ...

Well it's a hacky program, but it functions, I'm quite happy to bung it out there, because I hang on too long wanting to vastly improve some things and they never see the light of day. I had a completely rewritten far nicer version of the program that I never finished, so I'm just playing around with the old one which is a hack of TEStroi (which is a hack of TESfaith!) It's not that complicated, but working out why Skyrim is so intolerant to its big files is perplexing - when both Oblivion and the Fallout games work fine without needing to use the CS or Geck to fix up the record counts or group cells in to 8x8 structures (from testing I've verified that neither of these Faults is the cause of Skyrim crashing).

I've scaled up Fallout New Vegas with it and that worked fine too (literally took about 15 mins to do both the land and the objects), possibly to be more productive I should just produce the 50-odd ESPs and we can merge/fix the quirks when the CS is out just by re-saving it.

I don't see the point as they're not cities atm, just little villages, Whiterun is more like a castle with some walled ground buildings, not a town or a city. There's no space for people to build anything, and modders need space!

If both the plains and town is scaled then it will still look more isolated from the mountains from a distance. If you want to envisage it looking like the image you posted in another thread (which looked more impressive I admit) then you actually just need to redesign the entire look of the town and land beneath it, which is an
entirely different kind of project (and there's nothing to stop someone doing this as their own project); at current 1x scale the buildings of Whiterun only extend to a third of the length image you posted and you'll still see a little village in the middle.

So to sum things up your tool can make the scaling totally automated comprehensive of relocation of all the assets in right relative positions?

how would work for example rescaling the geometry of the hill where the Winhelm lies and then repostion over the city itself?

The point of my idea was that by making so the "modders" woul still have a space to mod things in and enlarge cities after but I guess that woudl speed up the playability of the enlargement mod ...

Any news?

just pretty please if you do this make the raging rivers wider, I have yet to come across one that my character would be afraid to just swim across.

How bad is it that over a quick glance I completely misread the title of this thread?

It sounds like a great idea, and if it arrives early it might be so popular that it becomes mod that's required for almost everything else out there, and we'd have lots of space to work on so that it won't be so "cramped" when we add lots of other mods. And putting the cities in the same worldspace wouldn't bring so many problems, you'd still have more than enough space already to expand on.


Best Regards
-HighDarkTemplar

I for one would love to help out rebuilding cities and helping with any possible texture assets that might be needed. Afterall with the art book from the collectors edition at my side, I could do some amazing redesigns of the cities (so that they look like they were imagined) given model support.

Is there any new news? This is actually my most wanted mod. If you need any help with worldbuilding I would gladly help.

I am also very interested in seeing this happen, and any updates would be greatly appreciated. Also, the ongoing "Beyond Skyrim" project is working on creating all of Tamriel in the gameworld. This is probably a long-shot (and maybe impossible), but I think it would be fantastic to have the entirety of Tamriel at a more realistic scale.

A guy can dream, right?

i want in too