What Oblivion 2x mod?

very good point. just look at those guideposts and build around accordingly. what about mountains and hills though? enlarging the scale is only x and y direction correct? so you would also have to play with the hightmap a bit to avoid having spaces full off very wide hills?

It was in all three directions, although the Z axis was restricted by the limits of the game. One of the people doing the Vvardenfell resize said the game would crash in the area of Red Mountain because the vertical height was just too much. But generally speaking it looked fantastic. Rolling hills were actual rolling hills instead of just little bumps in the plains. It really looked great, much more like a world that you could easily get lost in.

I'd absolutely love a mod such as this. I find myself annoyed when I think I'm lost in the world of Skyrim, only to come across another town after a few minutes walking from the last town. I'd love a doubled, quintupled, or however big is feasible Skyrim!

Its funny I found myself wishing for the same thing for a long time now. Ive always longed for a game like TES to offer a massive sprawling world, where you could literally loose yourself in a forest if you weren't careful. I get the feeling too many things would be broken though, and it would just be far too much work to get everything working just right, Theres so many more things to consider then just rescaling EVERY object in the game, Extending the landmass outside is the best compromise I guess. Though like most people here Id really love to experience the skyrim world just at a more epic scale

I think the best way to do a realistically large region - as in thousands of square miles - is like this:

1) Build very detailed hand crafted zones - lets call them "Free Roam Areas" or FRAs. For Skyrim each of these FRAs can simply be one of the Holds at its current un-modified scale. These FRAs could still be quite large, up to few square miles.

2) When a character gets to the border of a FRA, procedural rendering would take over. Gigantic -yes, as in thousands of square miles- swaths of land would simply be generated randomly, but could still adhere to a specified topography. That is, the locations of mountains, rivers, lakes, vilages, etc. and the type of terrain (forest, tundra, snow, etc.) would be specified... however the placement of rocks, trees, logs, plants, animals, and monsters would be generated at random. This would allow the player to kiss civilization goodbye and explore the wilderness basically forever if they want to.

3) The detailed FRAs or Holds would literally be separated by hundreds of miles, and not everyone wants to spend 70 hours of playing just getting to the next city, so a fast travel system would be a must. But this would be a beefed up version of fast travel. More like an Elder Scrolls version of Oregon Trail, with chance encounters with enemies, traders, NPCs, and randomly placed dungeons. Fast travel would typically pass in days or weeks depending on the destination.

That would be great and realistic. I was really hoping that Skyrim will hit the borders of Just Cause 2 for example...

I'd be interested in helping with this. Should we use the script that someone talked about before that auto-upsizes everything and then divide the world into regions and have different people work on manually tweaking (doing things like fixing up object scaling and adding more trees, shrubs, rocks, etc in a realistic manner) each one?

You, sir, have just described the game I've dreamed about for years. Sadly, this isn't possible for Skyrim. I don't know much about coding but I do know we can't modify the source code, which would be necessary for this. But, maybe someday...



For now, we'll have to contend with discussing Skyrim x2, which sounds pretty awesome. When it comes to the 7,000 steps, would those even need to be re-arranged? Obviously the mountain itself would have to be changed some to fit High Hrothgar and such, but the steps would be fine provided the player could still walk them.

My one fear, if this actually were to happen, is that someone would make something lore breaking and huge, like the Dark Forest in Unique Landscapes, and it'd get popular enough that nobody else would put something lore-friendly there. Don't get me wrong when I say that, though, it was a cool addition, it just didn't belong in Cyrodiil. The one thing this would help is if there were a Unique Landscapes type thing made around this, it wouldn't have the main problems I have with UL, overcrowding being the first. The second is, if everything is some amazing marvel to look at, then nothing is really interesting. There's something to love about a simple field.

And at least the mountain flowers look nice and blend in, unlike the flax some of the UL modders liked to spam everywhere in ridiculous amounts.

This would be outstanding, hope this gets off the ground early ;0).

It kind of has to, if it's going to have any chance of being used. But as of right now, I don't think there are any tools to help convert things easily.

I love the idea, but having worked on a very large scale mod myself which was 3x the size of oblivions landmass, let me say this, unless you can get a team of at the very minimum 8-10 modders together who are jobless and have unlimited free time available, this isn't feasible. Granted half your work is already done for you if you scale the items back down but the shear amount of man hours required to do this is far far more than I believe any of you realize.

I get you. But we can dream, can't we?

sounds awesome, id defiantly download it

When I first looked at Oblivion, one of the main issues for me was how crowded and quite ridiculous it was in respect to scale. Five minutes walk from the Imperial capital were dungeons filled with monsters, goblins strolling around outside, bandits and the like. The Emperor was in real terms a useless old fart if he had been allowing this kind of thing to go on unchecked. The land needed to be much larger and I had a look at tripling the size of it. Then the double size mod came out, but as you say it was ridiculously difficult and massively time consuming to go and change everything back to original sizes and replace it all.

I decided the only way to go was to use the second version of the construction kits ability to push the landmass to the edges of the heightmap field. The result is this http://mesogea.spruz.com/user/380826/members/A7EDA3B7-F0E8-43D9-86CE-5576CA91B0E6/big_20106241410485.jpg

Compare with http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27235

Is it difficult to fill the place? Yes very difficult but thats not a problem, basically travel is as travel should be, an expedition for which the player needs to plan, get information, arrange food, take a pack animal, plan water stops on the map, ask around and find the dangers. Fast travel of a sort can be arranged by ship and by wagon now with Skyrim, so the options are broader.

The Middle Earth team are doing a similar thing with an enormous world map and again its about travel and epic at that.

In short, you dont need to fill a world with monsters and the like in order to make it interesting.

How can using a larger map not be the answer as opposed to expanding the current world - which at best will be a 4 year project and be compatible with nothing else but the vanilla game.

Having a larger map (like Tamriel Heightmaps) means that nothing has to be resized or repositioned - you just push the boundary out further and add there.

If Tamriel Heightmaps can be done sooner with this game then province modders can get on board with that and maybe this time we wont get all these closed team projects that appear to present their stuff a few months before the next official game is released.

Of the options that is by far the best and easier. The current heightmap can be pushed out (if the CK can handle it) and further settlements etc be added in. Much better than redoing the whole thing.

This seems a little crazy but couldn't you just shrink all the character models and make them proportionally slower? or am I making 0 sense

Nice Idea, lookin forward for it!

You'll end up with the same amount of work (man-made structures still have to be scaled proportionally, and repositioned within the environment) and the physics engine having the wrong behaviour.

Guys, just looking at the big picture gets overwhelming. If this is to be done it has to be done methodically. After enlarging anyone working on this should be taking one section at a time and my thought on cities is to rescale those back to original form to have them working, and once that is done you can open up for someone to make a Better Cities style addon. Making the game accessible should be first priority and lining out the heights that define rivers and mountains as a base with it.
Past that any section should be allowed to be claimed by anyone but I feel that cleaning up the cities first to make the game playable is preferable and then people who're interested in a Unique Landscapes style addon continue with the outside areas.
Whats neccesary here is someone who starts up the base, and then having someone who coordinates anyone and everyone who joins the project.
Naturally most areas will be ugly before having been "cleaned" but thats just something that has to be endured until someone takes a stab at it.

I dont have the details on how pathing works in its own but maybe its a good idea to have the quests worked off as an order of priority along with the cities, towns and populated building areas.
I'd be all for assisting on the coordination since I currently do not posess the skill to actually work on it and if I'd known how to bump up a homepage I'd stab that ASAP too.

Any thoughts? =)

I like this approach, so I am quoting it in its entirety.

That said, procedural rendering might or might not be possible. (And, if it is possible, it would be good to have the procedural system be repeatable -- and that's easy to do if you design it right -- so when unloaded and reloaded you get the same terrain again.) We just do not know yet what would be practical, nor what hooks the engine gives us, nor how we can leverage things. But if we treat the "engine's dataset" as a cache populated from the "real game's dataset", and if we can do the right things to move things in and out of the "cache", this approach might work...

Further wouldn't shrinking objects cause the textures to be funky - then what about the rocks? Wouldn't they look like even more cartoonish than borderlands?

Are you guys aware that Bethesda seems to have built the http://ppsh-41.tumblr.com/post/13145143504/entire-tamriel-landmass-built-into-skyrim into Skyrim? Instead of trying to inflate Skyrim, why not just expand into the neighbouring provinces?

I think because the idea behind this particular idea is so that there is more 'terrain' between each point of interest on the map. A map with more provinces, a bigger map encompassing a wider area with even more points of interest, would defeat the purpose of the enlargement mod idea... Its just so there is more space.

As was already stated, the idea of actually becoming lost in a forest that is actually huge would be pretty awesome.