Well, look at it this way: At least there's only the one big divide. And if this really does take off, I'm inclined to say this one has more of a chance of completion, even if it isn't as popular. With this, The things that need to be done are all reconstruction of what is there. We know exactly what that could entail, and it would likely be easy to split it up between people. The only real contingency on this is what Lightwave brings us to do the initial transfer. Without his tools, it's probably not going to happen at all. I'm not a coder. Nobody in here was discussing the how until he came in, so I think it's safe to say nobody else is, either.

With new provinces, you'd literally have a blank slate, the only things holding you being lore. That's a lot of room to move in, and that seeming freedom will probably draw many more modders looking to work on something big. Most of them are going to burn out first, though, provided both us groups get up and running. Some people will thrive on the combination of freedom and lore restrictions, but many will either get tired of those restrictions or the project itself will conflict with lore, much like parts of Unique Landscapes did. There's also the fact that they're just covering more ground than we would be. Most of the people going to that project will want to go to whatever area they want to go to; I doubt they're all focusing on the same place to start, but please correct me if I'm wrong. Even if the team mostly stays together, it's going to go like Tamriel Rebuilt did. They'll lower their scope.

All of this ignores the conflicts they'll have about direction, and all of the new resources they'll need. There's the obvious large amount of new textures/meshes, and there's the fact that everyone seems to want fully voice acted this time around. Looking at this like a competition for users, we'd be able to boast a much smaller download in comparison, a comfortable place for modders to build, much more completion in general, and they mostly wouldn't have voice acting which would deter some users.

But the way I see it is, there's nothing wrong with two installs.

You only needed to read the opening post, it would have changed your view. Regardless, even if it were a viable option, the end result would be exactly the same - everything which didn't need rescaling would be fine (as in 2x), while exactly the same objects which needed rescaling back down after 2x, would need scaling down if only shrinking the characters and artificial objects (buildings, walls, furniture, containers etc.) and then the landscape texturing would need touching up to suit exactly as needed from 2x - but there's a limit to the brush size for landscape painting, if you shrink things down too small, the brush won't be able to produce the detail needed to match, so you won't be able to make footpaths to fit the scale of the people.

Your math is broken. The number of axi doesn't matter for the scale; you event went so far as matching area with volume (scaling a house would reduce/grow volume, not area). Just leave it at what it is: 2x scale, 4x area, 8x volume. Sorry.

The idea of getting lost in vast forests is definitely appealing but bear in mind this is a game and wondering through vast landscapes with nothing to do only goes so far before the novelty wears off and people become bored. You'd need interesting random encounters and by interesting I don't mean a constant stream of bears and wolves attacking you. You're also going to need to expand Stormcloak, Thalmor and Imperial Legion camps and you might also want to look at expanding hunting camps beyond the average of one or two people (largest I've seen so far has 4 people) and they in themselves could become quest givers giving you more to do out in the wilderness.

I also think 10x would be far too large. That would make Skyrim so large you'd be more inclined to use the fast travel, not less, therefore undermining the whole concept of increased immersion. 3x sounds like the sweet spot.

No, actually you are incorrect. If you leave a house at 2x scale, then it will be a giant's house when the player approaches it - it will be either two times or four times the size of a normal-sized house (yes potentially my math may be inaccurate, my wording did suggest that I was uncertain as to whether with the land being four times larger, the objects would also be four times larger or just two times, which is why I left the initial rescale example in but then went on to offer an alternative if the rescale of the building matched the rescale of the land). It must be rescaled back down to match the scale of the player, which is still at 1. And once you rescale it back down, the area of ground it covers is reduced, thus the area of ground around the house lacking in content is increased.
So it the size of the area around the house needing content adding to will grow proportionately to the size of the rescale. 10x will leave a much larger area of land to manually modify than 2x once the house has been scaled back down to 1 (presumably 5 times as much, but now we're back to maths again, which I may or may not be entirely accurate with).

Regardless of how accurate the maths is, the point is still correct and valid. Stick to 2x scale if you ever want to have any true hope of getting this off the ground.

I only commented on the math, I don't disagree that it's more work (and more area). Your factors were off by a magnitude, that's all.

Sorry, been cleaning up from the 12 hour party I threw last weekend, 35 quests eating drinking and dancing all night until nearly 8am in the morning.

Then on Tuesday Steam suspended my account without warning or reason, they're awful, and it takes 26 hours between each ticket response. They've re-enabled it late last night, but without apology or explanation despite their mistake. I had to download a crack for Skyrim just to continue playing it in the meantime, how ironic.

Anyway, TESAnnwyn seems to be working so I'll compile and release a beta of it soon (when I'm home from work). For anyone interested I've uploaded an original scale copy of the original scale textured landscape from Skyrim which you can walk around in http://www.4shared.com/file/es61oa80/Skyrim1x-v0.html. The worldspace is called sk1 and each cell position corresponds exactly with that in Skyrim's original 'Tamriel' worldspace - so you can flit between identical locations for direct comparisons. TESAnnwyn doesn't currently preserve cell data (a feature I'm adding), so inland rivers probably won't show atm.

This means I'm in a position to produce the scaled textured landscapes right away, but without the CS to generate the LOD it'll be hard to gauge exactly how vast and imposing this is. We could try making tools to generate this now, but the CS may come out before then and you never know, be better at it (though from experience this is unlikely. ) I could use the GECK from Fallout3 (assuming Skyrim's LOD uses the same system - it certainly has the same looking bugs), but as some of you might recall, it has the worst LOD generator on the face of the earth and would literally take months .. much faster to knock up our own.

One could use the LOD files in Bethesda's BSA files, renaming them to work with this 1x landscape, but at the moment I cannot find a BSA extractor that handles all the new Skyrim BSA files without falling over partway - can anyone point me at one? I've tried 3 of them so far ...

Yeah Steam is horrible. Every other time I try to load this game I get:
"This game is currently unavailable, please try again later"


I used this one and it seems to have extracted eveything with no errors:
http://www.gamefront.com/files/13132677/FO3_Archive_Utility_v1_0 (should be FO3_Archive_Utility-34.zip, even though it says v1_0)

Regarding a split in interests between people working on an enlarged landscape, and those working on a TES4 (Oblivion & Skyrim) scale continent. There are sooo many good and bad things about each I don't want to go in to.

Either way they don't have to be mutually exclusive (if you can consider a portal between the worldspaces near border regions), and with the size of the community I don't expect they'll split each other's resources too much. It's best not to have any illusions about trying to create a standard for the modding community to follow; because the standard will always be Bethesda's Skyrim, not an enlarged Skyrim or a new combined continent.

I'd just say that an enlarged Skyrim will be by far the fastest to generate and get running, just as it would to tack an enlarged Cyrodiil on the South (were Beth to allow it), or an enlarged Onra's Tamriel (were he to agree to allow it to be used here in addition to his original scale project).

Certainly both approaches are not directly compatible (without a portal) due to scale differences. For anyone wanting to do all of Tamriel, (remember that Bethesda will release some of their own versions of continents before you've finished) then is it really worth starting at the small scale? Because some lore buffs will still be unsatisfied, saying, "yeah, but Elsweyr should be x and y times bigger, this is too small!" Doing all of Tamriel at enlarged scale might be a better start, but terrifyingly large to work on, probably unreasonably so. The biggest problem is, as it always has been, designing a sufficient quantity of textured 3D architecture for modders to start making their environments with; it's a lot of time and a lot of skill. That bit isn't a problem for an enlarged Skyrim.

Please remember that ultimately we can't get ever get 'perfection' with this game engine, the human imagination will always be greater. Those animation jitters mean one must use separate worldspaces, or just accept it's going to feel a bit weird in the farthest flung continents.

Back to this thread's topic, if an enlarged Skyrim takes off then the development time would be comparatively rapid as the greatest concentration is just repairing and recreating the towns (actually that's the bit people love to do most!) I'm a little torn over which is best:


1. Completely replacing Skyrim.esm with a scaled one; this includes all the original quests and AI paths. Although this would be the ideal, I can't practically achieve it by myself, not with my social life.

2. Adding an enlarged Skyrim ESP that contains the new exterior world, and various overrides so that the original ganes' interior spaces point to the enlarged world, not the original. This includes moving NPC, their AI and scripts so they're in the new world instead etc.

3. Adding an enlarged Skyrim ESP that starts with the original exterior world, but expects all interiors and NPCs to be duplicated (so it doesn't affect the original game). The player can be transported to this world and from then on spend all their future time playing in it, not the original Skyrim.


Possibly 3 would be best, having the fewest conflicts with the original game as possible so official DLCs still work. It allows new development to continue in the enlarged world whilst simultaneous converting of old quests and NPCs is carried out where desired.

Anyway, where's our bloomin' CS? I want to generate some LOD.

Awesomey, I'll give that a whirl.

Maths corrected now

Here's some comparison screenshots to show what I was describing, for those who didn't try it themselves. I deleted the doors, barrels, door steps and roof overhang to simplify things:
http://bettercities.free.fr/NotBC/Rescale/1x.jpg (vanilla)
http://bettercities.free.fr/NotBC/Rescale/2x.jpg
http://bettercities.free.fr/NotBC/Rescale/10x.jpg

As you can see, at 10x, just one single house is now surrounded by enough empty space to fit an entire city. A 10x scale world does indeed sound fantastic for those who love to explore, but it also means so much extra work.

Looks more like a proper size of empty space around a house to me. A quick calculation:

At 10x scale, the house's location becomes space for 100 (10x10) houses.

Let's assume the house is enough for a single household, so some 200 square yards, give or take a few dozen. So 100 of such houses have an area of 20000 square yards, or a bit over 4 acres.

Such a household also usually had an area they used for agriculture, about a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hide_%28unit%29 (equal to some 100 acres) in size.

So at 10x, each house in the wilderness like this, which doesn't have any agriculture at the moment, still has a factor of 25 too little of empty space around it. In fact, it only becomes believable in scale at 50x ...

Yes, but that space still needs to be filled with something. I think that's the point being made: that the larger the scale, the more work there is. That "agri-space" needs a texture, plants, a new path leading to the door, more rocks and trees, etc.

Compare the work required in creating a believable foliage density in the 2x world and the 10x world.

Precisely as Sabin76mt said. The whole point isn't that there needs to be an increase in the amount of space around a house so more can be added, but that the more space there is, the more work is required to find something to fill that space - and that's for every house. KhadirgroGhurkag, you seem to be suggesting that every house needs around 100 more houses added around it along with farm land. I assume I am misunderstanding you as this makes no sense. Keeping with Oblivion's Roland Jenseric's Cabin for my example, you're hardly going to approach Roland's Cabin hidden in the woods and find that the cabin is part of a massive city (massive for computer games) of 100 houses and around 200-500 people living there working on their fields. It's a cabin in the woods! Now for a house in a city, yes I'll readily agree that 10x allows for some impressive-sized cities and the number of buildings added might well be appropriate, but then again, someone has to add all these houses, add the roads and paths around them, clutter the streets, create the interiors, add the NPCs to live in them complete with AI to give them lives... imagine doing that for an existing Skyrim city of around 25 buildings - that's 2,500 new households to create just for that one city. Meanwhile at 2x, you'd have slightly less than enough space to add one additional house for every building (since we don't want them touching/overlapping) - now what we have from a city of around 25 buildings is perhaps an additional 20-25 households to create. At 2x scale, you have a reasonable goal, while at 10x scale you'll have several modders lying in exhausted heaps beside their computers, unable to lift a finger to click their mouse buttons.

And on top of all that... at 2x scale the trees and rocks etc. can be left at 2x scale, only the artificial objects need scaling down to match the scale of the player. But at 10x scale, suddenly those trees are unrealistically massive, and the rocks beside the roads are small mountains (and the roads are super-highways with space for 10 horse-drawn carts to travel along side-by-side) - so now all the trees and rocks need rescaling down at least partially (maybe not to 1x but 2x would likely be the largest you could leave them) and the roads would all need retexturing on the land to reduce their width, which will again take a lot of excess work as now you're having to rescale everything in the world back down. And what does that leave? Yet more empty space around every tree and every rock needing filling with something else, and great lengths of open space to the sides of all the roads and paths also needing filling.

LOD is not that much different from Oblivion, and it's by far not that bad:
http://paradice-insight.us/stuff/oblivion/Skyrim-LOD.png

I'll update Oscape when CBash and Niflib have Skyrim support.

No. I suggest that nearly every house in Oblivion needs about 500 times its own footprint of farmland added around or near it for it to make sense. You don't need more houses; you need more empty space with a farmland texture ...

That works well in homogenous areas, as deep forrest or a vine yard, but in rough terrain fe. it's really tidysome to place thousands of rocks, just to have a good feeling about the space.

I would think that the default time multiplyer would need to be changed as well. Probably something closer to 5 or 6 or so. Default is what, 20 (1 minute real time = 20 minutes game time)?

Configurable and/or optional, of course.

Delete client.blob in the Steam dir (close Steam first, obviously, then open it and try again after you've deleted it).

Figured this thing could do with a small bump? Still incredibly interested in the project.

Hi everybody,

I read with great attention this thread, and are very enthusiastic about the possibility of a more realistic Skyrim ! It seems that the bigger (!) problem with this project is the huge amount of work needed to fill the new space. People have already suggested ideas to solve it : Split areas between modders, use scripts to let the TES Editor fill the space (maybe the new script system – papyrus? - will provide interesting features for this purpose).

I want just rise questions and a possible answer :
The size of cities. If a cabin into the woods need “only” rescaling, repositioning of objects and retexturing, a city or even a village could need more buildings and people ! I see two cases :
- We keep the standard surface and number of buildings. Less realistic but we have a compatibility with all the future buildings mods (“better cities”). We still have cities like cottages but it's more safe (no need to change closed cities !). It's more problematic with a city taking advantage of the landscape (Solitude for example), and it need more customization, which brings me to the second option.
- We increase the surface of the agglomerations and need to fill it with buildings. It's a lot more work, and we lose the compatibility with vanilla buildings mods. But hey, now we will talk about real “cities” (even, as already pointed, with generic commoners) !
There are some small organization issues if we talk about open or closed cities, but it's nearly the same.

I think the better solution is to choose the first option, at start.
And maybe later, the second solution. What do you think ?

Ps: sorry for my english, i'm not a native speaker.

You might want to check out this thread:

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1309245-believable-holds/page__p__19692882#entry19692882

My thinking is that while all buildings should be rescaled back to a correct size, city walls should be left at an increased size (including the minor walls at places like Riverwood) creating larger settlement area for including more buildings.

I have a few mods ideas in mind that would add more settlements/buildings piecemeal:

1) An extension of the civil war questlines/the civil war in general including more forts and settlements being fought over, possibly additional military barracks in settlements with radiant quests to kill imperials/stormcloaks

2) An extension of the Companions questline that will add Companion halls to other major cities and Silver Hands camps around the world

3) An expansion of the Blades related recruitment and Dragon hunting, including settlements destroyed by Dragons, Blades camps, and rival Thalmor camps

4) The survial/realism mod I want to work on might include 'Healers' service providers dotted around in settlements.

In general I think it might be a good idea to think of it in terms of 'Add Enchanters Shop to each major settlement', 'Add Hunters Hall to each major settlement' etc projects, with designated areas in each settlement for a given project.

From the "Believable Holds" thread:

Don't forget that some city walls include viewing windows, arched doorways, platforms to walk on, and open interiors for some towers. If these are left at a higher scale, it wouldn't fit as the walls would look like they were made for giants with their oversized doorways and windows too high to look out of. The alternative would be to leave the walls in the same place, but rescaled down and additional wall pieces added to link them back together across the larger area.

Sounds good to me!

I personally want the entire world of tamriel at 2x... Yes, focus on syrim only to start. however have the height maps in place and enlarged as well... By doing that, you encourage interest from the "I want to build X region" groups... And that's to the good all around.

Yes, some of the regions will require new textures (Elswyr desert for example)... However, there are plenty of landscape textures for oblivion that could, with the mod makers permission, be ported into skyrim as 'placeholder textures until someone makes better'....

I have my plans for expanding the vanilla quest lines (which at some point I'll post for people to start pecking at me. ) and I bring that up because it's a similar concept as 2x tamriel... the quests feel to 'short' to me... even the main quest... just like skyrim feels to 'small' to me...

After beefing up the vanilla quests, I have plans to expand all the questlines beyond skyrim's borders (hence my preference for all of tamriel 2x from the outset.)

The point of the few lines... I'm willing to toss myself under the bus as the project lead. Why? I have plans of my own already to expand skyrim, I've modded for Temple of Elemental Evil, Civ 4/5, Oblivion (only for myself) and FO3/NV (again only for myself).... I've been a professional RPG (tabletop) developer for over a decade now, I've been in the computer industry for 21 years now, the last 8 in various roles as a project manager, I've worked with/lead all volunteer and open source projects for years and years, leading anywhere from 3 to 500 people in remote locations around the world, in all time zones (yeah, I'm a chronic insomniac )... Plus I'm an anol-retentive OCD when it comes to documentation.


So now that I've thrown myself out there for this... regardless of whether my offer is accepted... here's some thoughts on organization...

1, Set a 'Scope of Project' - In this case: "The increase of size of the Tamriel World Heightmaps to 2 times the current size, with the initial focus of scaling Skyrims non-landscape features correctly and filling in the barren areas as needed" --- Little long winded, but it's specific enough to keep people focused, and open enough to attract talent to help complete it.

2. Get a preliminary 'Design Document' made - this is essentially a list of what needs to happen in broad terms, i.e.; Enlarge heightmaps, Generate LOD, reposition all outdoor buildings to appropriate places and scale them back to 1x aspect, fix map markers, fix pathing, Get proper heightmaps to start with ("Onra"-One-Kenobi you're our only hope! ), TesAnwynn working, the CK), etc...

3. Determine what types of team members are needed, get list of volunteers, their skill level with CK (since the CK is supposed to be similar to the GECK), etc...

Once the map is generated... a lot of people will be needed to start getting coordinates in game to reposition all the exterior cells... You'll want to divide up people by location. That only requires people to open the console and get coords, so even non-modders can help...

I would have these preliminary things ready to roll _before_the CK comes out in January... Once the CK is out, the more formal direction documents can be made....

You may want to consider a separate website with forums and bug tracker as well... But that can wait until things get a little more settled.

As for how to 'package' this mod... I'd go with Lightwave's #3 suggestion as well... Less (if any) conflict with official material or other region mods.

By 50 cents (hey, inflation ya know. )

I find it "very funny" that almost all of these efforts are the only projects of that size I know of, that never even slightly mentions the possibility and the need to have specialized software developed for. That's why they often eventually break terminally at the cliffs of an immovable CS/CK ... if I could only count the number of unnecessarily wasted manual hours one could compensate for with 1 hour of [your favorite programming language] programming. There are enough programmers ...

/endrant /me continuing programming a landscape editor with CBash.