I knew it would require a lot of work, but I also wasn't necessarily thinking of exactly doubling it either. It just needed to be bigger. Maybe even a 1.5x Vvardenfell would've been nice, especially if the program could've simply displaced all objects by the same value without resizing them. That would let you have a perfect reference for reassembling things and also give you a lot more room to work with without feeling like you were tripping over a dungeon or city every time you turned around. It would also make redecorating a lot easier.

I had been working on a very large city mod complete with quests, a new race, and an entire main story mystery for the player to solve (main story for my mod I mean). It took place in a behemoth citadel I made using as the base area one of the Stronghold platforms that came with the game scaled up to double size. That's huge in Vvardenfell's landscape, and there was no easy way for me to get away with it without interfering with dozens of other people's mods.

And yeah, I know firsthand how much work this stuff requires. I worked solo on all my mods for about 3 years, and only the smaller ones ever got finished. It's really hard to get large projects done because people lose interest and life isn't static. Still, I was rather hoping that a finished landmass had been completed for modders to play around in. That's why I got so excited when I saw the screenshots and I hadn't even been aware such a thing had been worked on.


I realize that. My point is that Bethesda could've kept this feeling like a massive world if they had only given us bits of the provinces for our playgrounds instead of the whole thing. The whole thing would've either been impossible to program, or had to be scaled down so drastically that you could cover 100s of miles in an hour or so. Obviously, the latter is what we got.

But, I just try and pretend that this isn't really how the lands would be. I think of it in the style of Final Fantasy VII, where when you were in the "overworld" all the cities were little objects placed on the map and the world map was scaled down so small for ease of getting around. But when you bumped into the city objects, you then got teleported into a huge city map.

I actually started work on a mod similar to this for Morrowind. Since the land was so scaled down, I thought: Let's keep cities in the world smaller and completely walled off, and when the player enters we'll teleport them into another cell where the real city is. This would let me make the cities much larger and believable without wasting the limited exterior cells. The problem I ran into was that, at the time, you couldn't make interior cells look like exterior cells. At least not with creating fake land meshes and sky. I believe it was Tribunal that first introduced "interior exterior" cells, but even then you still needed to have meshes for the terrain. I ended up scrapping it because of those obstacles, but also because I wasn't sure if players would like the idea of separate city cells since they were all open cities in Morrowind. It's ironic that Bethesda themselves ended up choosing this method in later games.

No problem anymore: http://obge.paradice-insight.us/wiki/LLOD_%28Module%29

ok..let's talk about seize


a very rough and quick first impression of coming Tamriel heightmaps for Tes 5........dimension of the map is 10441 x 7163 or in other words about 70 quads...cyrodiil has been enlarged using a factor of 1,32...


[img]http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/27235-1-1321713203.jpg[/img]


cheers


onra

PS: .Vvardenfell will be changed of course to match the new lore...

Hi Lightwave , sorry to repeat but is your tool updated to work with skyrim now? I was wondering if is possible ot add another landmass north of skyrim but placing it in the same skyrim worldspace but without breaking the game....

Not much has to be changed geographically imo. Where the 'crater' was supposed to be is already water so just without Vivec city. From Morrowind's dialogue Red mountain's lava is supposed to be very fluid and when the volcano erupted it was supposed to flow down through foyadas (those canyons that lead to Red mountain).

I'll say again my humble opinion that bringing fallout3 to Morrowind would be such a stupid and ridiculous idea.

A bit of work to do to match the textures.
http://paradice-insight.us/stuff/oblivion/twmp_skyrim.jpg

Work: not this copy'n'paste job, but the vertex-painted textures, because they are (of course) different ...

Nice!

That's really nice to see and a nice fit ... or misfit(!), it's very interesting to see how the heightmap land profiles deviate from the original map. Also it's very interesting how Vvardenfell should technically already have been part of the Oblivion heightmap, but clearly isn't (even if one assumes the Red Mountain explosion formed a land bridge between mainland Morrowind and Vvardenfell, Red Mountain itself is missing - unless it blew its top?)

Actually importing land already works - to a new worldspace using the FalloutNewVegas version I did over a year ago - (but don't think I ever released). I just tried it and had a good wander around Vvardenfell in the Skyrim engine, not that that it was that interesting really, had a wander up past Balmora to Red Mountain. Importing to an existing worldspace I could probably automate (you'd have to specify the master worldspace ESM/ESP as well as the heightmap), but I won't get round to it for a bit. In any case it's of no particular use to you - there's no CS yet so you can't mod with it, place statics or texture it or even generate the LOD, so why the rush?

Land beyond (1024,1024) is no problem (didn't think it would be), but animation jitter is quite noticable. If anyone is to embark on a large heightmap project, as ever work out how large the land is then shift your character to the edge co-ordinates of an existing world to see if it's even worth starting; it may be better to use separate worldspaces and avoid the jitter. Water also starts to look corrupt and have a matt finish if you go to, say cell (5000,5000). It probably starts to look wrong before that, though it looked OK at,m for example, (1200, 1200).


FYI, my apologies to everyone in advance as I'll be slow keeping up with things this week - I have a party to prepare for the end of the week (40 odd guests, mostly dancers) - and I like throwing parties. Though right now part of me would rather be playing Skyrim.

Lightwave

It's not the size that matters, but how you use it.

no rush but I coul dstart making some work on worldmachine and see the formats , proportions, scales etc...

Kinda svcks that Bethesda doesn't have some type of utility where people could add/link in Oblivion and Morrowind lands without having to do full redesigns...could you imagine how awesome that would be, to be able to go to all those places in the same game?

so just to be final the world size of skyrim is 3800 x1.8 m ? so 6840 ?
Oblivion 4200 x 1.8 = 7560 and fallout 6000 x 1.8 = 10800 ?

this mmakes it bigger than I tought but I am wondering how is big a texture quad in the game? it equals a 1.8 m? or is smaller? as i understood the pixel in the heightmap is = 1.8mx1.8m sq but how about the texture size single quad?

Yeah but you can just play those games if you want those. Skyrim is set 200 years later and the visual quality is much higher, so I would much rather see parts of these provinces reimagined for the new game than just a port of all the old stuff.

The heightmap is 3808x3008. Not a square. And that's larger than the actual walkable area. But if you compare it to the heightmap of oblivion and fallout in the same way, that would be correct, I guess.
That depends on what texture quad your talking about. The texture files in textures.bsa/terrain/ are all 256x256px. But there are several sets (sorted in folders 4, 8, 16, and 32) which cover varying space of the worldspace - which equals to different resolutions. The ones used in the stitched image I posted in this thread are from the "4" folder. Their coordinates start at -96 and go in multiples of 4 to 96. So, at maximum, there are 48x48 tiles á 256x256px (12288x12288px), at minimum 6x6 á 256x256px = 1536x1536px (the coordinates start at -96 as well, but iterate in multiples of 32).

These are the default image files. If you want to compare it to the heightmap, you have to do some scaling. If I open the 12288x12288 image in photoshop and want to align the 3808x3008 heightmap, I have to scale the texture down to 50%.

Or use the tiles from the "8" folder.


So to answer your question, one pixel in the "8" tiles is 1.8mx1.8m, one pixel in the "4" tiles is 60cm, one pixel in the 16 tiles is 3.6mx3.6m, and one in the "32" would be 7.2mx7.2m
Correspondingly, one whole 256x256 "8" tile spans 256x1.8 = 460.8mx460.8m. And so on.

I fully agree with you.
Skyrim so far feels better, because the landmass is not as bowl-like as in Oblivion and you have a lot of obstacles in between, but I guess once I get more used to it it may start to feel as stupidly small as Oblivion.
There is this book in Skyrim telling about the great war between Thalmor and the Empire and I just couldn't imagine that sort of thing taking place in Cyrodiil as depicted in Oblivion, the sense of scale was just totally off.

Now, I do understand the problems behind getting an entire "realistically" sized province in a game on current hardware (let alone development times), but to me that simply means that Bethesda should focus on smaller portions of the provinces.
Oblivion could have e.g. taken place in the Imperial City and the surrounding island (see FO3, still smaller than DC, but in terms of believability leaps and bounds ahead of Oblivion). Alternatively the game could be limited to several smaller chunks all over the respective province which are linked by some travel system.

Has anyone moved out beyond the current limits of Skyrim and tested the games ability to render land, including distant land beyond the current. -96 to +96 rings alarm bells. I recall the first CS would create land beyond 96 cells but the game would not render it, the world ended abruptly. Trees and rocks would float in the air beyond the games ability to produce land. What worries me is that Skyrim ends abruptly in a solid line of LOD.

I made Mesogea run from -256 to +256 in each direction, but it took the second CS version and game patch to enable this to work.

Ok I made two comparison pictures of same oblivion heightmap ... one is scaled at 2 m x pixel for a 8192x8192 landmass in m and the other at 1 m x pixel for a 4096x4096 map ... wich one tes game belongs to?

if the res of each texture pixel is 1.8 probably is more similar to the 8 km map otherwise the 4 km map


in this picture the greenier area is the 2 m x pixel and larger map , the other is 1 m pixel res and smaller map ...

http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/6038/oblivioncryengine.jpg



about that ... I meant only according to the pixel size of the heightmap , they do nothave different heightmaps right? Just one ... so


each portrayed pixel of the heightmap it is scaled as a 1.8 m this shoudl make so the 3800 pixel map of skyrim ingame as a landmaps percepible of 6 kms right?

Then according to what you said they have a metod to go into more details for the textures under 1.8 m? you can manually paint less than 1.8 m square? I mena when you are in the editor the minimal brush size for painting the terrain and memorizing the detail is 1.8 or less? if is less then it coudl probably go under that level and have a superior resolution of texture tile x pixel compared to cryengine ...

and how about terrain editing? you can actually modify the terrain in smaller scale portions with a brush smaller than 1.8 ?


this island I did in cryengine that I am working on has a res of 1 m x pixel , the heightmap is 8192 pixels x 8192 , then in a tes gameengine woudl be like 16 x 16 kms?

http://www.n-a-i-m-a.com/wp-content/themes/Sabuy/timthumb.php?src=http://www.n-a-i-m-a.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/islandn-1024x521.jpg&h=260&w=570&zc=1

Oh right. I misunderstood you. No, only one heightmap. But you can export it as different bitmaps.


yes.
We don't derive the scale of the world from the heightmap dimensions. We derive it from the number of cells and ingame units, (as shown in the OP by Lightwave) and conclude from that the resolution of the heightmap.


Just so we understand each other:
As far as I understand it, the heightmap is a 2D bitmap representation of the mesh that the world texture is laid over, right? So I don't really understand what the resolution of the heightmap has to do with the resolution of texture editing.
And for editing the heightmap (which is what I assume you mean by editing the terrain), You could paint the mesh as detailed as you want in your editor, it's just a matter of how high of a resolution you specify for the exported heightmap, isn't it?

Now, what the maximum supported heightmap resolution in gamebryo is, that I don't know.

Did you use the TESConstruction Set with Oblivion?
I can't imagine that it works much different than Creation Kit for Skyrim will.
I often see Oblvion for 10€ or even 5€ in stores, so you might want to check out the construction set of oblivion (or the version of fallout 3) if you want to understand that better.

Alternatively read up on some things here

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php/

it's the documentation of the construction set and I'm sure you'll find some pointers for heightmaps and size conversions.

Yes. Using noclip mode, some genius traveled beyond Skyrim's borders and was amazed to find that the entirety of Tamriel had already been created by Bethesda. No cities and landscaping of course, but the heightmaps are already completed.

http://kotaku.com/5861752/skyrim-contains-the-entire-elder-scrolls-continent-including-morrowind-and-cyrodiil

Not sure how big this news is, but it seems pretty awesome for anyone interested in bringing additional provinces to life.

I used the border regions setting at 0 in the skyrim.ini and tried to use tcl also, but no joy going north further than currently created land. Whats the noclip setting?

It's a console command, though I'm not 100% sure what the exact line is. noclip. no clip. no-clip. I guess you'd have to play around.

Basically, it lets you explore the entirety of Tamriel, which Bethesda has created the heightmaps for. No idea why they created the whole of Tamriel this time around, since they didn't with the other games. Perhaps for modders?

tcl is the noclip command (toggle clipping).

Are you sure you set the border regions properly? I don't have the exact command in my head, but it should be listed correctly in the console command thread that floats around here somewhere. Make sure it ends in "...enabled=o", not "enable=0".

I havo no idea how it happened, but I just crossed the border with no console commands and sitting on a stolen horse. I'm going right now down the other side of the mountains and can see High Rock already. The horse rides on the terrain as normal.

I added this
bBorderRegionsEnabled=0

to the preferences general ini and used tcl but the borders are still there...

Thats definitely not right for my copy of the game. First it's not all of Tamriel, a great part of it yes, but very much is still missing. Second it's not "real land" but only LOD. If you go to far you "drop into water", no collision there. That's where you need to deactivate clipping (~TCL), as only then you can "fly" further even over the LOD land. Not much detail there either, only as much as to give a nice background when looking around from the Throat or other high places.

For crossing the border I first had to set "bBorderRegionsEnabled=0" in Skyrim.ini [General]. TCL alone wasn't enough for that.