Potential Skyrim Enlargement Mod : V

» Thu May 24, 2012 1:28 am

POST UPDATED

Okay so this thread will be a brief interjection of my idea, whetting the appetite to stir interest in something I have wanted to do even before Skyrim's release.

A few years ago there was a nice modder who released an Oblivion x2 mod. It essentially doubled the size of the terrain (of Cyrodiil).

Play testing this mod made me realize something very interesting (and perhaps it was just my own perceptive predisposition), having realistically proportionate terrain made the game feel better and more immersive. Suddenly forests felt like forests, miles like miles and the distances between cities made sense. (He also made a x4 version that I adored but it didn't load the objects like the other version did.)

I am wondering who else would be interested in doubling, tripling or quadrupling the size of Skyrim to realistic proportions. It would be great for players who love immersion. And most importantly, if we can make this a project early on there will be more mod support for this later if it was released. You could potentially have a lot more area to 'plugin' content from other modders. And it would, in my mind, be a big hit to most PC gamers I would imagine. I anticipate the Skyrim modding community to outclass Oblivion's.

I said I would make this post brief and will discuss further details after I find out how much interest there is in such a mod.

UPDATE: Here is a post that "nice modder" made in this thread.

Technically it should be possible.

1. As SevenDragon says, the Cyrodiilx2 and Cyrodiilx3 (and there was even a downloadable 4x) weren't meant to be replacement mods, just successful proof of concept experiments (done about 3-4 years ago). I was curious whether the game could handle such a thing, how would it look, how would it feel, then threw the playable world out there to everyone in case anyone was serious about taking it on - and giving them a monumental headstart in doing so. It was entirely programmatic upscaling - nothing was hand placed:

http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/Tamrielx2/index.html
http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/Tamrielx3/index.html

There was a (now also dead) 2x Vvardenfell (Morrowind in Oblivion) project that came first and was scaled and converted the same way (there were no crash problems with an upscaled Red Mountain btw - there would have been a minor issue with a 2x TES3: Morrowind though as it would not have been able to display the peak of Red Mountain - but it was visual, not enough to cause a crash). Oblivion can render land miles high, 1x Red Mountain is only 1/3 the height of Oblivion's tallest mountain:

http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/2x2/index.html

2. For those questioning why the static meshes were also upscaled; it'd look awful not to start that way; nothing will join - buildings would be made of fragmented walls, pieces float up in the air, clutter would be airborn, tree roots would be the wrong height and so mostly underground - some things wouldn't even show up above ground level, likewise rocks etc. When scaled up, LOD statics are in their correct places. And the wilderness looks fine - with the FOV distortion of the game 2x scale trees don't seem out of place at all. Landscape textures But 2x scale towns, ruins etc are easily replaced by copying and pasting the render from the original worldspace; then they can be improved upon. 1x scale meshes was always intended to be the final solution (for settlements and ruins at the very least) - scaled was the visually correct starting point because you could instantly appreciate the overall world better.

3. Someone said just half the scale of the player; this achieves nothing but changes the visual size of your character when in 3rd person mode, the game still plays the same, your field of view remains the same and the same amount of land still visible. Doubling the size of your character might solve the visual height problem in a rescaled world, but creating a much larger area was always the goal.

4. Oblivion didn't have a problem with 3x scaled landscapes. It was just that the CS had problems generating the DistantLand LOD meshes. But someone now has a solution for that game with a mesh generator which produces better LOD meshes for the vanilla engine, and doesn't have the height clipping issue of the CS.

5. Hundreds of miles of upscaling; please forget doing that with the current TES game engines; they're too limited. Whilst you can load such a heightmap and play on it, it takes many minutes between loading each game (4x Cyrodiil which is 1500 sq miles took 1.5 mins to load up), you'll have dreadful animation jitters the deeper you stray in to the wilderness (bug has been there since Morrowind), and trying to fill it, region generate it and fix bugs, the rest of the world would be playing TES14 (Morrowind III

) by then on a newer more amazing game engine.

6. Expanding the world map instead and doing the other regions; Bethesda will always be doing the same, and probably beating the amateur teams to the deadline. Whatever wonders the modding team creates, the Bethesda will be the standard one the vast majority play. e.g. I wonder how the teams of modders who were working on a Skyrim feel atm, and those doing Cyrodiil (for Morrowind) just as Oblivion came out?

7. "7000 steps". When you scale the meshes at the same time as the landscape, then the steps already look perfect in their original positions. If the steps are too steep for the player to walk up (or you actually want to get more steps in) remember that on a scaled landscape the gradient is still the same - so it's easy to snap 2 or 3 of the 1x scale meshes together and have extended length steps.

Enlarging Skyrim

It's possible, and best done soon if there's a chance to sway the culture of modders towards an enlarged land rather than vanilla Skyrim. I don't want to project lead, but I can probably provide a technical starting point, a completely scaled exterior world, maybe more.

Remember that fractional scales are also possible (e.g. 2.5x) - but whole numbers are psychologically nicer.

We might discover new game engine issues we weren't aware of with an upscaled landscape which is why we need to see how it looks and feels ... though I think we'll be fine as Oblivion coped pretty well.

Such a project must be started with scaled statics as a reference point: Most mountain profiles have are mostly static rock meshes; without them appearing in the right place and size then LOD mountains will be reduced to the more curved style of oblivion. Waterfalls and distant trees the same. Just as it was if anyone had taken up the mantle with a 2x / 3x Cyrodiil, they'll have to replace the 2x/3x scaled building render with that from the original Skyrim - but that's a trivial, though tedious, copy and past job. Then interior<->exterior doors will have to be relinked with the original Skyrim interiors. There's a world of AI and scripts that need doing too; that is if the plan is to scale up everything in the existing world (and not just start with new quests in redesigned towns).

My current version of TESAnnwyn should be able to rescale a textured Skyrim landscape already. But I don't have a working version of TES4Scale anywhere atm, I haven't worked on it for nearly 3 years; I was turning it in to an all singing all dancing thing to upscale scripts, re-link interiors to exteriors, scale regions etc; to all intents and purposes upscaling the entire Oblivion.esm and any TES4 mod file programmatically. Then my virtual PC (I developed on Linux) went belly up and I couldn't work on it anymore. And I never had a working version to go back to. Shame because it would probably have been simple to apply it to Skyrim too. I'll have to dig it out (will have to wait until next week as I'm throwing a big party this weekend) and see what progress I can make saluaging what's left.

Here's some sort of initial plan, which is all quite doable:

1. I'll scale up Skyrim in to a new worldspace using TESAnnwyn at 2x and 3x.

2. When I can get TES4Scale going, I'll shift the static co-ordinates (including scale) of meshes to fit on to the new landscapes like I did for Cyrodiil.

3. Hope to hell the Construction Set (when it comes) has a decent LOD landscape generator, and not that appalling slow (takes days or weeks) one that was provided with the the GECK (Fallout3). Otherwise hope that the new improved LOD generator someone's written for OB can be extrended to Skyrim's system (I've had some contact with the author and he is curious).

4. People will have to playtest the 2x and 3x landscapes. Naturally there'll be disagreement of which to go for.

I think we should be reasonable and go for 2x (4x the mod area), but hey ... 3x looked and felt more real in TES4: Oblivion. It's no good if people are put off by the sheer daunting scale of the thing.

After that some sort of project could be formed based on it, and agreements on how far to go; whether people want to re-link all the existing Skyrim interiors to exteriors. Preserve existing quests (in which case exterior AI and scripts need recalculating for new positions). path grids should be redone. And how far to go - reproduce Bethesda's Skyrim game (i.e. quests) on a larger landscape, or start with a fresher world?

» Wed May 23, 2012 10:16 pm

I would love such a mod. Skyrim is great, but the world does feel kind of small, never overwhelming. When I stand outside Whiterun and look towards some place, that seems far away on the map, it's always rather close by in the world itself.

But I saw that the Oblivion x2-mod had to increase the size of everything, including chairs and flowers and stuff? And that kind of ruins the mod IMHO. I just want more empty land between all the places, as in real life.

» Thu May 24, 2012 3:11 am

I honestly thought Skyrim felt pretty big, though there is always room for more. Bigger can be better and in this case I believe it would be. I wouldn't go more than x2 though as I have a strange and dreadful feeling that anything bigger would bug everything up pretty bad.

» Wed May 23, 2012 5:59 pm

But I saw that the Oblivion x2-mod had to increase the size of everything, including chairs and flowers and stuff? And that kind of ruins the mod IMHO. I just want more empty land between all the places, as in real life.

I'm not exactly certain why they did that part, but a modder could go in and manually reset everything I'd assume. Maybe it was just for references so they knew how much area used to be covered? Obviously things like chairs and flowers aren't that big of a deal, but maybe it was more keeping track of city outlines and such. That's just my guess though. I would love the x2 but everything else normal scale, which I assumed was going to be the final intent whenever they got that far. That way the world would be so much more vast.

After all, if everything is double size, including the objects and - presumably - the player, there'd have been no point to double anything in the first place.

EDIT: Getting really tired, so I hope what I said made sense.

» Wed May 23, 2012 5:16 pm

If someone doubled the landmass they'd have to manually adjust all the objects on the landmass and add 100% more to fill in the empty spaces, wouldn't that take forever?

» Thu May 24, 2012 7:09 am

I would love such a mod. Skyrim is great, but the world does feel kind of small, never overwhelming. When I stand outside Whiterun and look towards some place, that seems far away on the map, it's always rather close by in the world itself.

But I saw that the Oblivion x2-mod had to increase the size of everything, including chairs and flowers and stuff? And that kind of ruins the mod IMHO. I just want more empty land between all the places, as in real life.

The program he wrote did all of this automatically and yes it doubled the size of the objects, but it was a potentially simple fix to use the editor to make the object size equal "1.0" again. The only downside is you needed to do it manually. The upside was that everything was essentially "in place" and that did help a lot. Instead of needing to redo everything from scratch you could just resize objects and replace them. This was tedious but the end product would have been worth the effort.

If someone doubled the landmass they'd have to manually adjust all the objects on the landmass and add 100% more to fill in the empty spaces, wouldn't that take forever?

I had this question too before I started to test the mod. Surprisingly your brain doesn't notice that rocks and trees are twice as large. Everything still looks very natural and believable. The only touch ups I would do are some minor landscape tweaks and also perhaps put more trees in certain areas.

But for the most part the mod concept worked very well.

I wouldn't go more than x2 though as I have a strange and dreadful feeling that anything bigger would bug everything up pretty bad.

That was one of the problems with the x4 mod. The terrain would load, but LOD didn't work properly with mountains and the renderer had trouble with landscape at certain heights. I was hoping this might be fixed with the Creation Kit however, as it still felt like a believable landscape.

» Wed May 23, 2012 5:22 pm

If someone doubled the landmass they'd have to manually adjust all the objects on the landmass and add 100% more to fill in the empty spaces, wouldn't that take forever?

Yes, and all the cities that are built around the landscape would have to be totally redesigned, the steps up to hrotgar would have to be redone, as all the old models wouldn't work.
And you know whats funny?

Why would you need to increase the size of the world in what that guy did?
Just shrink the player down.
Bam same result, less stress on the game.

That said, the concept would only work, if the cities could actually be re-worked/place in the terreign properly, without scaling them to fit it. But that won't happen.

» Wed May 23, 2012 9:44 pm

ai and quests would become an issue, i say just add on the the landscape. tamriel rebuilt skyrim edition amiright? alot of morrowind is done, but that's another mod group, "silgrad tower". they could import their hightmaps into the worldspace next to skyrim i guess. no legal conflicts because its mainland morrowind and not Vvardenfell.

» Thu May 24, 2012 5:05 am

ai and quests would become an issue, i say just add on the the landscape. tamriel rebuilt skyrim edition amiright? alot of morrowind is done, but that's another mod group, "silgrad tower". they could import their hightmaps into the worldspace next to skyrim i guess. no legal conflicts because its mainland morrowind and not Vvardenfell.

All of this. I'm sure someone will get the ball rolling on a Tamriel Rebuilt style project for Skyrim, though I am assuming the TR project for Oblivion is still unfinished. For the TR team to take on Skyrim would be pretty mind-numbing after all their hard work. Still, with all the assets they've created I'm sure a simple port over to Skyrim wouldn't be too big of a deal (for models, textures, animations, landscapes). Rewriting the quests, recreating the NPCs and creatures and all the other stuff may be a potential pain in the ass though.

» Wed May 23, 2012 7:30 pm

That thread title sounds like junk mail!

» Thu May 24, 2012 3:28 am

ai and quests would become an issue, i say just add on the the landscape. tamriel rebuilt skyrim edition amiright? alot of morrowind is done, but that's another mod group, "silgrad tower". they could import their hightmaps into the worldspace next to skyrim i guess. no legal conflicts because its mainland morrowind and not Vvardenfell.

Practically that might be more attainable. But for me personally I would like to see more realistic geographical distances between cities (as well as some higher mountains worthy of the 7000 steps).

Tamriel Rebuilt is in itself overtly ambitious. Think of it this way: If you could finish either the project I'm projecting or Tamriel Rebuilt what would have better fruitage? For one thing, 90% or more of the content would be exclusive to Skyrim itself considering nobody is going to be able to generate the amount of professional quality and quantity of content needed to fill the other provinces. So it will be a mishmash of sparsely modded and barren landscape (with much potential I might add), at least for the near future. If you finished the less ambitious idea of expanding on the geography of Skyrim to double the size fixing the minor object placement and the more major quest and ai pathing you would have a larger province with professional content and a potentially immersive playground for more mods to be plugged in.

What sort of mods? Well particularly I'm looking forward to the teams who will redo the landscape and make everything even more immersive than it is already (just like Oblivion). Including the city mods.

However, if this Skyrim expansion idea doesn't have a strong start it will be too late to the party to matter. I hope that doesn't happen if this has enough interest.

That thread title sounds like junk mail!

This made me laugh. Not intentional

Mod feel free to edit if you so desire

» Wed May 23, 2012 8:46 pm

Where have you guys been?

All of Tamriel is available for modding in the Oblivion worldspace:http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27235

And further unlike other closed team mod projects - it really is all on one world space - no teleporting to elsewhere.

Any attempt short of trying this seems to undershoot what has already been attained. Tamriel Heightmaps proved that it could be done.

» Thu May 24, 2012 6:28 am

It's a great idea, and I'd be interested in trying it if it does happen.

» Wed May 23, 2012 3:31 pm

I long for getting lost, those with the skills please make it happen... i will send all of you cookies of your choosing.

» Wed May 23, 2012 3:45 pm

SkyrimX4 would be great, even with potential precision problems around the extreme points of the map. I did try (and plan out) something like this with Skingrad, and it definitively leads to more believable towns. For example, my map of SkingradX4 had about 300 buildings (and fields inside the town walls, as it should be!) with 1500-2000 inhabitants in total. That's enough for a (small) medieval town.

» Wed May 23, 2012 6:28 pm

Well... in Beth games we get what's called a "caricature" in terms of design. We get the "important bits", like people that matter and so on. For example, in OB, IC wasn't more than 120-140 NPCs counting the guards... but lore tells us it's more than 1 million people there.
Also, the mere half a sq. mile the game had of farm fields wouldn't feed Hackdirt for more than half a month, not to mention the entire Cyrodiil population.
Skyrim suffers the same problem. Though there are more farm fields, and being able to work them give us the impression of them bigger, they're still far from really being enough.
And don't start me with the political implications of demographic distribution in Tamriel... ?Empire? ?Altmeri Dominion? those don't even exist!, there are no true power structures, nor real law enforcement! We have bandit camps every half a mile! Forsworn population is 7 times bigger than "legal" Reach population! A place like Skyrim couldn't hold more than 2 or 3 groups of 12 or so outlaws (of any kind) if the holds had a basic domain over their territories, and maybe we could have 4 or 5 unexplored tombs and ruins, not invaded forts every 25 seconds by foot down the road, or 20+ "ancient mysterious ruins" so close you throw a rock from your house at Solitude and you could hit a Dagur Lord on the head

Hell, it's as if people legaly living in Tamriel never got out their houses.. for generations! It's as realistic as summoning an hybrid between hot swimmer chick and fire elemental... Oops!
But, as I said, this is a "caricature". You want to make it demographic and geographically real?. Sure! I can help you design it! But it can take more than 3 years to make it, even based on existing assets, and forget about 97% of the quests.

» Wed May 23, 2012 2:52 pm

Would certainly be nice to have, but unfortunately it's an impossible task and would be a huge compatibility nightmare even if completed. Instead of increasing the size of an already existing worldspace I would rather try to add the adjacent provinces or at least parts of them. That takes more than enough time already if done right and actually adds content instead of spreading out content that already exists.

» Thu May 24, 2012 2:34 am

Can a mod add additional landmass beyond Skyrim's borders? Sorry I'm new.

» Thu May 24, 2012 4:22 am

This is something i've been thinking about for a long time, really suprised to see a thread saying almost exactly what I would in the OP!

In short, i'd love this. Your point about modders taking advantage of it is really important - remember how cramped cyrodil got? How many things modded in the same area? All those patches? They could all be alleviated somewhat, but ONLY if the mod worked perfectly. And for the life of me I can't see how to make it work nicely.

But yeah I adore the concept.

» Wed May 23, 2012 5:21 pm

Well, since you don't need to enlarge the interiors, just the exterior skyrim map, the work comes down to tweaking the wilderness, changing the exterior buildings etc back to normal size and adding around a little, and then redesigning city exteriors like mentioned. It sounds doable, and I agree to the OP's point about it letting modders add content without it becoming as cramped up as oblivion did, plus this game will have a lot more modding attention. Once the CK is out this should definitely be one of the priorities of the community to open the path to so many other enhancement and enlargement mods!

Definitely a mod that would interest any immersion player. The world already feels too full and running into something every other minute breaks the immersion.

» Thu May 24, 2012 1:32 am

I'd like to see the holds separated by literal miles. As in it would take days to travel from one to the next. When you get to the border of a hold the game would then prompt you into an Oregon Trail style mini-game which could be interrupted by chance random encounters.

» Wed May 23, 2012 6:55 pm

I am wondering who else would be interested in doubling, tripling or quadrupling the size of Skyrim to realistic proportions.

Make it ten, twenty times if you can. Started with Daggerfall, never been able to love these tight-packed maps that make no sense whatsoever.

Also, we need a mod that adds at least few super-duper large dungeons. Not 'pipes' leading to the quest room and a handy fast exit right next to it. In Daggerfall you searched for the quest object for a full day, and the next day the way out.

» Thu May 24, 2012 3:09 am

Yes, Daggerfall is exact ally what I had in mind regarding scale. However, each hold would be a detailed region of its current size in Skyrim.

» Wed May 23, 2012 2:59 pm

+1 to the daggerfall style dungeons!

» Thu May 24, 2012 1:10 am

If someone doubled the landmass they'd have to manually adjust all the objects on the landmass and add 100% more to fill in the empty spaces, wouldn't that take forever?

Well technically they'd have to add 300% more than originally existed to fill the same space, since doubling in both directions is actually 4 times the area. Either way though, yes, it would require a phenomenal amount of work. The upside to it is that if all the objects are left in, you don't have to recreate everything from scratch, but could instead use the old stuff as guideposts. It would certainly be a bit easier than the massive projects wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch for a whole new world.