Nothing per se. By coincidence (or not ) it's that the resolution of the heightmap and the resolution of the parameters for the terrain-colors (texture and pure color) are the same. Because you can transmit a vertex-color only at the vertex-position (which exist on the raster) it is only logic to have both resolutions match, even though the heightmap could have higher resolution if they wanted. One has to remember that one does not paint into textures, one paints the parameters for blending upto 8 textures, that can be up to ~100 bytes per raster-point, or ~4KiB per cell. You can imagine the size of that data for a huge map is going out of hand very quick.

I managed to continue on beyond the borders, finally! Ok, these regions are rough LOD of the actual landmasses but if Bethesda are decent enough, they may allow the CK to create heightmapping beyond the currently produced cells. IF, and I say if Bethesda have made the CK with the same capability as the second release of the Oblivion CS (the first one was useless for larger lands) then modders will be able to develop beyond the current borders. Of course porting across items from other Bethesda games should be an absolute no, and as long as people respect that there is no good reason Bethesda would not make extensive map making possible. Given that the game is set 200 years after Oblivion, there is real scope for modders to make the Oblivion/Morrowind lands etc somewhat different to how they appear in Oblivion et al. It would take quite a lot of model making and texturing.

We can only keep our fingers crossed that Bethesda have not limited the CK to produce useable map space over a small area rather than making it like Oblivion, available over great distances. In all honesty without the ability to map beyond the current borders and beyond 96 cells in any direction and to create LOD, the game for me will be all but useless. The same will likely be said of those working on Middle Earth and other such large landmass conversion projects.

My fingers are crossed and I only hope Bethesda will be as helpful as they were with TESIV

Another hint for explorations: the default (clear?) weather is the same as in Fallout. Setting ~fw 15e gives a better look at the scenery ...

How much of Tamriel is there?

I'll have to go back in and scout around.

Gosh http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1264541-skyrimoblivionmorrowind-heightmap-comparison/page__view__findpost__p__19243939 on these forums and I don't get called a genius (though maybe the italics mean something else).

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1264541-skyrimoblivionmorrowind-heightmap-comparison/page__view__findpost__p__19291554 is my best guess. So about 190x190 cells are rendered. I'm certain more could be added.

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


Ok back to my point ...

Is Skyrim around 6 kms ? and not 3.8 ? so more or less like 1.8 m x 3800 ?

second question

how large is the brush for painting terrain ? I mean how large is a square of texture minimum ? covers one whole pixel from the heightamp or more? or Less?

Since I know this can be done throguht the tesannwyn giving it the texture files ...

if this is likely to be sorted I couldwork in worldmachine and cryengine the terrain to my liking shaping ups and downs with proper terrain editing tools and then export a raw , feed Tesannwyn and get into TES engine ...


also would Tes engine support large overlay maps?

And apparently you can play the rest of Tamriel if you find a secret pass through the mountains.

Btw I wonder if the Cyrodiil LOD was included as it can be seen as part of the main quest - when you're up at the Throat of the World you can scramble to the very peak and have a clear view south. The weather was such that I couldn't see the white tower as it was obscured by hovering clouds, but I could see further over the top of it - as far as the southern sea. There are other quests too (like a statue near Solitude) where you will float a mile or so above the worldspace, able to survey everything, and it would look daft if the LOD landscape suddenly disappeared at the edges of the actual heightmap.

Yes. 3800 pixels corresponds to about 6.8km distance.

In the game and CS there's one texture point placed for every heightmap point.
But TESAnnwyn exports every texture point from the ESM/ESP - and there is extra detail in there:

There are 32x32 heightmap points per cell.
There are 34x34 texture points per cell (and up to 9 layers).

So the texture files exported by TESAnnwyn will be slightly larger dimensions than the exported heightmap.
e.g.

Oblivion's Heightmap: 4288 x 4128
Oblivion's Texture Map: 4556 x 4386

If you have a texture placement image from another heightmap and decide which colour will refer to what texture, you'll need to enlarge the image by a fraction of 17/16 (1.0625) - and make sure when you enlarge it that it is not interpolated by any algorithm - so the colours remain exact; because each colour refers to a texture FormID. I'm pretty sure you've done all this in the past with projects like Dune?

Yes but I just feed the tesannwyn with one texture to splat all over the territory , I didn't know or I dont remember the texture map was larger and actually I haven't understood why ...

anyway if I provide a texture color map as big as the heightmap with a color grades , that if placed inworld over the whole surface woudl make it look like if the terrain is already painted etc , woudl that work ? and why I need in case o enlarge what's the extra data ?isn't going to match perfectly pixel over pixel?

An alternative is (for now) to use the vertex colour map (which is the same size as the heightmap so no resizing necessary). Thjs is so much simpler to apply, but strongly tints the landscape instead rather than changes the textures. For any serious mod you'll want to hand texturing areas or region generating anyway, and for that you'll need the CS (because you'll no doubt want to layer many levels of textures).

This is the direct application of the vertex colour map http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/TESAnnwyn/ta_web3.jpg - the colours and mesh come straight from a screenshot from a webpage turned in to 3D with TESAnnwyn.

Lightwave et al. I am looking at the current world space created for Skyrim (including the other LOD lands beyond the borders.) The earlier restrictions (Oblivion pre 2nd release of CS) allowed for 8x8 quad landmasses and nothing more, the LOD would not render beyond it. Does anyone have a calculation of the quad size of the currently rendered world?

When I say quad I mean the heightmap sized quad, formed of I think 32x32 cells (or thereabouts).

For instance, Oblivions unpatched CS and game could manage 8x8 quads of LOD, beyond that it wouldnt render. The patched version of the game and CS would render 16x16 quads in the heightmap LOD.

I wondered what the calculation was of the current size of the available playing area.

Ok so is possible to :


1 heightmap create the landscape
2 lay down a vertex color made in PS liek same size of the heightmap
3 put textures on the terrain ingame

but if a texture is as big as one pixel of the heightmap , why shoudl the size of the picture be larger?
also what means layers? I can only put one texture on the terrain or mor one over the other? I don't remember well now how works but in cryengine I can paint up to 15 different textures on th whole map but not one on the other ....the layers for each texture are about normal maps or shiny maps eventually ....

this is the knd of result that can come out by using heightmap + color map .... 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 there is no texturing or items on the map just a color map ....woudl that work in tes ? as vertex map?

Can't believe there are again limits as in unpatched Oblivion. Most things seem to be like Fallout, so I would assume the heightmap can be at least as big as there.

You jest, but after a long play session I went past the borders near a sanctuary looking thing on the eastern border using the hugging the cliffs so as not to fall bug and eventually made my way to http://i361.photobucket.com/albums/oo54/psymon11b/MorrowindLOD.jpg. I kept running (no ~tcl) to see how far I would get before the ground runs out. Actually further than that pic ... about where the ground meets the characters left horn on his helm. Maybe a cell or less before the water starts.

I know that the LOD of red mountain is cut in half (nothing on the other side), so I still think it is there for incidental viewings only.

Still a taste!

Yes to your points, that's the easiest thing to do. When there's a CS you can manually texture much more easily, and generate some LOD.

Layers means you can put textures on top of each other (up to 9). Same as you did in Oblivion. Why is it slightly bigger? I really don't remember now because it's been so many years, but it is, the data is in the ESM/ESP and TESAnnwyn preserves every bit of it when - don't worry about it.
FYI, only 6 layers max are being used anywhere in the Skyrim heightmap.

Yes I had seen the Morrowind LOD - but only from playing with borders still on; when still inside the playable area the Vvardenfell LOD is a lower quality render and there appeared to be a land bridge between Vvardenfell and mainland Morrowind - I assumed maybe the Red Mountain eruption had done this, though as you've shown, it's actually an LOD mesh bug and must disappear when you get closer. Nice to see in any case, even though there's no actual land (though we could import Morrowind and Oblivion's heightmaps easily enough).