You can see a faint glimps of the tower in the distance if you manage to climb on the mountains along the southern border. Did that the lazy way with "collision=off" (TCL console command), but there may be regions with this view you "really" can reach.

Strange how it was different for you.

Would you say that the height of where the gold tower was in your game was lower than the height of the main of Skyrim (like where Whiterun is). As in the landmass elevation was lower? I think this may be why my character drowned.

Also I think if you were to keep going (if you could keep going) more distant LOD may be there. I noticed that as I was traveling around that more would appear as I got further out. I guess a test would be to open up the console to display what cell your in and then ~tcl and press C and have the character just run for as long as the world is. I did that once in Oblivion going south and ended up approaching the continent from the north. Not sure if that is what will happen in this game.

I'm doing a topographic 2D map right now and I need the height information of the world map for the contour lines. I tried tracing the lines manually based on the original 16bit image you posted. But a more detailed view would make this much easier.
I'm shooting for two variants; One like http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Easter_Island_map-en.svg and one more akin to a http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Topographic_map_example.png.
Are the images you posted compressed (the resolution I mean)? If so, how big is the actual resolution? Can I output the information as lines only (as opposed to the gradients? It'd have to be more lines than gradient repetitions, obviously.)

I guess I could use the updated 16bit color image to automate most of the work with some preparation in Photoshop/Illustrator, but I figured I ask before making this task harder than it has to be. Because it would still take a lot of work.

Secondly, for all the other information (roads, building placements, water, vegetation, etc) I need the actual ingame map or the texture of the world itself. Can I export that information with TESannwyn?

After ascending the disappointingly short trip up the throat of the world I ~tcl (no caps needed this time) and ran up to the height of the peak - from there you can barely see the top of the white gold tower.

I then ~coe around till I found http://i361.photobucket.com/albums/oo54/psymon11b/SkyrimEnd2.jpg. The LOD map is approximately 200x200 cells. Maybe more like 180x180.

The picture linked is the south east corner with field of vision set to 120. It shows red mountain (on the right hand side) cut in half - because that is all that is rendered. You can see the water plane through the entire world space. On the left hand side it is the cyrodil portion and is cut off about where Bravil would be. Skyrim is central white peaks right of center. I think all this exists only for a vague showing of something if one is at the highest peaks.

My character was able to go further out, but it was all just funky squares of raw material so to speak. The game crashes when you try to exit that far out.

Well, that doesn't sound promising.
I wonder if it will be possible to add whole heightmap without the crashing as you go further from the centre.

I haven't tested if it also crashes if you ~tcl and go up a mile and are still in the main game cells.

So I was bending the rules.

Yeah I'm all about scouting for a Tamriel Heightmaps project.

I would say the tower is on a "lower level" than Skyrim. Much lower, I think. The Mountains of Skyrim look quite extrem from "back" there, they raise way to steep to me.

Without TCL I dropped much deeper than the Skyrim level until I reached the water. The "tower" is placed only a bit higher than this low water level.

Problem is I can't activate TDT, so I can only guess it all but not "measure". The EXE seems to know TDT (no error message, and the string is in it, with help text) but nothing happens when I enter the command. Same with SDT and so on. TCL and other cmds work, that was how I did the two "closer" pictures. Has anybody been able to activate TDT? I tried some settings in the ini's, but they didn't help.
If Bravil is the "southmost end" Onra's planned "Full Tamriel" worldspace has to go into a separate worldspace, don't you think so?

Edit: damn, I should have refreshed ... last question was already anwered

It doesn't matter?

Couldn't resist, sorry.


WOW! I had never even heard of the Vvardenfell x2 project. Those pics are amazing, and I suddenly have a super craving to load Morrowind back up and start modding for it.

Is that an ongoing project? I couldn't imagine even starting getting all that terrain painted, touched up, and filled with objects, but still... amazing.

I had (well, have really) several projects I was working on for Morrowind that kind of stalled because the lack of a large usable space that wouldn't conflict with just about everything else was so hard to find.

EDIT: Oops didn't realize they were all separate pages and not just image links! The 2x Cyrodiil looks amazing as well!

I'm not sure what the last question was but when I say the rendered LOD space was only at max 200x200 cells that is just what it means - the developers didn't make any renderings out past that point. I didn't take screens, but the western side didn't have a high-rock/hammerfell shape to it.

The Oblivion worldspace looked to go on as rolling hills for a long time but they didn't, so what Onra created was already beyond what was in the game natively. If Onra does decide to do something my bet is that all this LOD land mesh stuff would have to be scrapped anyway.

I'm interested in if the water level of the north sea is the same as the LOD water level as seen cutting through the LOD in my screen shot there.

[edit] it does seem to be the same water level across the LOD and game worldspace. Except of course the elevated lakes.

When I ~coe to the south western edge it is all dark and can't take clear screens there. Dead center of the map (0,0) is just west of Whiterun.

I also have been able to exit without crashing, so that may be related to something else.

I wonder how http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/5217/tamrielrebuilt.jpg compares.

The crash would (hopefully) be related to something quirky, like some missing data so far from the world centre, not a fundamental engine problem. Oblivion and Morrowind could handle massively larger maps so I'd expect Skyrim to be able to (I'll try importing Oblivion's heightmap on to the Skyrim worldspace to see, but atm, when I'm not in work, then I'm too busy playing it - I'll pay more attention when the CS comes out).


Got a link to the ESM and/or ESP download that contains the main world, haven't looked at TR for years.

Haven't tried, I just use "player.getpos z" to find the height (x and y to work out the cell), If things are proportional I expect if you TCL to the water height around the imperial capital island, that the position would be about -14,200 or so - that's if the devs matched the sea level of Skyrim (which they should have!)

Can't even remember exactly how I did it all. I scaled up the Morrowind heightmap (with Firemoth and Solstheim) and reimported (automatically retextured) with TESAnnwyn - TESAnnwyn was originally written for this project. Got the static location records and NPCs imported with a modified version of TESPort. Then used TES4Scale to shift the static positions to the scaled up locations. And used Galadrielle's MW->OB NIF convertor to get the meshes. We had official permission to use the heightmap, but I'm sure you're aware that meshes could not be used (crazy legal wranglings, I'm sure anyone trying to use converted Oblivion meshes in Skyrim will have the same issue).

The project choked several times, it needed a large team of mesh designers to create new buildings for the world, I tried to kickstart it producing the above examples as a living template, but even that wasn't enough.

4 years is a long time ago. The [url name='http://www.silgradtower.net/Websites/Vvardenfell/index.htm'project forum'] has been archived now, some threads are there,, others don't work - I think Razorwing has just started archiving it, which is a shame because there was some really good stuff going on in there .. once.


Flickr has compressed them annoyingly, yes. The original heightmap image is 3808x3008.
TESAnnwyn is primarily there to allow you to export and import heightmaps (complete with vertex colour maps and placed textures) between the TES games. It's incidental that you can, with a bit of skill, turn them in to more readable maps. Some people import the heightmap in to a 3D modeller, then a texture map on top. That way you can get some very cool maps.

I have a program for getting the LOD texture maps for Oblivion (TES4qLOD - short for quick LOD), that gives a singular map of the world. Haven't tried it on Skyrim yet though. And whilst it might give roads, vegetation, snow, etc, it won't show water (though it may show where the river runs - it'll be the river bed) and it won't show buildings (though it'll show the textures around the buildings). If you use a BSA extractor on Skyrim's files, you should be able to find the DistantLand LOD files - there you'll find texture files in grids which you can paste together, they'll probably include overhead images of buildings too (Oblivion's did). I will look at getting Skyrim texture maps out with TES4qLOD sometime, mostly out of curiousity ...

So, I tried tesannwyn and it gives me the following error

Unable to read entire marker record (20297 bytes) from Skyrim.esm into memory: No error

It produces the tmp files, but doesn't output anything else. If I try it again I get the same message with "file already exists" instead of "no error", presumably in reference to the tmp files.
Any ideas how to avoid this error? Alternatively, can you upload the uncompressed 32bit heightmap somewhere (say, mediafire)?

Here is what is released:
http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=276723&id=7040

It has been years since a release so I sort of doubt there's anything new there for you. That screen was something I took of the WIP build earlier this year. You can get an alpha of map 4 http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1201579-wip-tamriel-rebuilt-sacred-east-2/page__view__findpost__p__18075468 but that won't account for everything in that shot.

If you are actually interested in comparing TR to these heightmaps, I could upload the normal map MGE makes every time it generates textures for distant land, and then you could pretty easily scale it to the heightmaps you've posted. Hell, I might even just do that myself for giggles.

Did you update your TesAnnwyn program for skyrim ?

Apparently http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/457148-graphics-modding/page__st__20__p__3804996#entry3804996. Command hook is there, but no code behind it.

Oh, great, that's to easy for me
With ~coe 20,-60 I'm quite close to the "tower", and "player.getpos z" after "Collision on" is -14095.69. "Collision off" und up to http://fuyohin.weebly.com/uploads/5/0/4/8/5048364/6233571_orig.jpg is -8193.

Going extreme, http://fuyohin.weebly.com/uploads/5/0/4/8/5048364/6706616_orig.jpg is ~coe 1024,1024 player.setpos z -27000. There is land below the water but the sky goes squares

Don't expect that the Creation Kit (CK ?) will support a cell around there

So, I extracted the texture information from textures.bsa/terrain/tamriel and stitched them together with http://pacific.mpi-cbg.de/wiki/index.php/Fiji (image processing tool geared towards scientific research. quite useful to stitch together microscope images, and faster than writing my own script). I had to format the filenames somewhat first, but the http://i.imgur.com/6Q0do.jpg looks quite cool, so it was worth it. There were tiles for several different resolutions, the largest resolution is http://www.mediafire.com/?82ee7uml4zi1hm2. Interestingly there is a spot of texture at the very bottom. That should already be far in Cyrodil, right? any idea what it could be? I don't know how cells relate to the coordinates of the texture files, but they go from -96/-96 to 96/96 with 0/0 a bit above Windhelm. The patch at the bottom is at 0/-96.
There are also maps for markarth and a few others. I'll get to these eventually.

EDIT: Typing error, the image size is 7 mb, not 27. and I went ahead and uploaded it,

Thanks for the tips! Oh no, I don't want to transfer from TES4 to TES5 (not yet anyways), just from TES4 worldspace to TES4 worldspace. And since poking around in the esm has revealed the formats are essentially the same, it shouldn't be hard to code it again for Skyrim. Anyways, I'll try to make my own code then, thanks again (and I'll stop hijacking thsi topic hehe).

Ah okay. Now I understand. This was actually done for Oblivion's engine, not work for Morrowind. I was hoping it was a project to increase the size of Morrowind for Morrowind. It really needed so desperately to bigger. Heck, actually everything since Daggerfall needs so desperately to be bigger.

I think Bethesda made a *huge* mistake scaling everything down. They didn't need to give us ALL of Cyrodiil or Skyrim. They could've just given us parts of it. If you calculate the landmass of Tamriel based on the scale of Cyrodiil, it's smaller than most metropolitan cities here on Earth. In other words, Tamriel is actually a very tiny island by Earth standards. The most generous landmass calculation for the entirety of Tamreil would be 100 square miles (260 square kilometers), based on Vvardenfell and Cyrodiil. It's probably closer to around 80 mi² (210 km²). That's 9 or 10 miles square.

The Bailiwick of Guernsey is about the same size. Check out this google maps link: http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&rlz=&q=guernsey&gs_upl=587l1792l0l2031l6l5l0l2l2l0l197l445l1.2l3l0&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x480d20e4f4bfb3ed:0x990ad58a5d0d9899,Guernsey&gl=us&ei=dXjFTu7QCqW3sQL9tMm_AQ&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CDIQ8gEwAA

Now scroll out to see where it is on the world map and how it compares to neighboring countries. Yeah. It's a speck, and that represents ALL of Tamriel based on the scale of the last 3 games. Bethesda made a bad decision in releasing entire provinces in such small scales. Notice England up above it when you scroll out? When Daggerfall was released, they said *that* was the approximate landmass of just the Daggerfall regions. So Daggerfall used to be England size (which would've put Tamriel more on par with an entire continent), but now all of Tamriel is speck size.

Yeah ... but
Yeah but they had a new engine to deal with in Morrowind.
Yeah but then they had a budget and time frame to develop the game.

I too was hoping Skyrim would be larger. If the land were flat it would seem less than Oblivion. I don't buy into the idea that the elevated heights of the 'mountains' gives more world to explore. Even the throat of the world is pretty barren except for those steps going up. No dungeons along the way or anything other than the steps. Huge amount of real estate. Looking at the surrounding mountains - I again see a lot of real estate used in sheer looking faces that have little on them.

If Skyrim gameworld doesn't match up with lore maps next to Cyrodiil heightmap and is smaller then I'd think a buffer of more mountains would be in order to make a better fit. Maybe room for an orc kingdom or something.

But again - I too would have wanted a more spread out continent.

Wasn't sure who you were responding to, but if it was me, I didn't mean to insinuate they should've given us Vvardenfell, Cyrodiil and Skyrim on Daggerfall's scale. I know that would've been too big. My position is that they didn't have to give us the entire provinces of Cyrodiil and Skyrim. What each of those games covered could've been (and should've been) representing just small sections of the total land area.

I'm glad to see you're back for Skyrim, Lightwave, your tools are excellent!

Neither "bEnableBorderRegion=0" nor "bBorderRegionsEnable=0" (in Skyrim.ini [General] too) are allowing me to go past the "You cannot go that way" message. Can anyone confirm which command works for them, and if they are editing Skyrim.ini or Skyrimprefs.ini?

this

bBorderRegionsEnabled=0 in Skyrim.ini under general tab.

Nice one putting that together so fast. The white texture patch at the bottom would be directly in line with the Cyrodiil's capital island, though I'd estimate the patch looks a bit further south, so somewhere along the river or out the mouth of the estuary.

The Cyrodiil LOD isn't important anyway, the devs would have put it in for visual reference. Importing Oblivion's actual heightmap would be a simple process (but gaining permission to distribute such a thing probably wouldn't be.

12288 x 12288 is interesting ... that infers the DistantLand LOD textures are probably using 3x3 sized images of each land texture (land texture resolution is 34x34 textures per cell - so marginally more than the 32x32 heightmap points per cell).

Scaling up Morrowind is actually massively easier than scaling up Oblivion. I did start the Vvardenfell heightmap by scaling up TES3 programmatically (modifying TESfaith) then converted it to Oblivion using TESPort at that time. But directly scaling the cells gives a steppy landscape, hence why I wrote TESAnnwyn to get the heightmap out so it could be smoothed in Photoshop first.

The Morrowind game engine is very laggy at loading cells on big heightmaps though. And you can't go beyond 32,762 game units in height (2x scaled Vvardenfell causes a heightmap overflow at Red Mountain's peak). And vast doesn't necessarily make a game fun if it takes forever to get to places and there's not a team many orders the size of Bethesda to fill it up.

It's worth remembering that Tamriel Lore is just some made up stuff, like the games, so it depends which you like to believe in as being more accurate. You can think of the books as rough drafts and the game as an accurate representation if you like, it's just as valid depending on your point of view. Oblivion really failed to feel epic though, it was too small. Scaling it up was an experiment, but proved it really could feel epic being in a world that big, without it being boring.

I can't imagine the Skyrim game engine having a problem, Oblivion could cope with more than a full scale Tamriel heightmap (at Bethesda game level scales). But LOD failed to work beyond a certain number of cells in Oblivion.

I personally don't remember cell limits of +/-1024 (AFAIR I thought you could COE 32768,326768 in Oblivion, but 3D animated models completely drifted apart). But before anyone ever embarks on a grand scale land project in the TES games, they need to judge whether the animation jitters at the extremes of their world would spoil it. Sometimes splitting it in to smaller world spaces are better, though like everyone else I hate load times ...

When the CS is out I'll look to release TESAnnwyn with an import option (Skyrim follows the Fallout3 New Vegas file format - not the Fallout3 file format).


I haven't release TESAnnwyn with Fallout3 New Vegas or Skyrim support, honestly I'm enjoying the game far more atm, so not concentrating my recreation time on the tools just yet, and when it comes to importing I might need to wait until the CS comes out to figure out what's wrong (or come to think of it I might have specified Oblivion/Fallout3 format instead of Fallout3NV/Skyrim, I'll check when I get home tonight). In the meantime I'll pm you a link to the heightmap (16-bit RAW is the best) since you obviously have a copy of the game.