Hi folks,

For anyone curious, I've attempted an intitial export of the Skyrim heightmap and placed it alongside TES4: Cyrodiil and TES3: Vvardenfell (Morrowind, Firemoth, Solstheim). The TES5:Skyrim Tamriel worldspace is a bit smaller than TES4:Oblivion's, though larger than TES3:Morrowind. I cannot comment on the playable area but I suspect it's not much different, maybe a little smaller, but the wild topography obviously works in its favour. Here are a couple of pics of the heightmaps and vertex colour maps of the 3 worlds:

Morrowind (Firemoth+Bloodmoon), Oblivion & Skyrim Comparisons:

1. http://flic.kr/p/aFd7fb

2. http://flic.kr/p/aFd7fu

3. http://flic.kr/p/aFd7fY


Morrowind (Firemoth+Bloodmoon), Oblivion & Skyrim, Fallout 3 & New Vegas Comparisons:

1. http://flic.kr/p/aFd7gj

2. http://flic.kr/p/aFdg17

3. http://flic.kr/p/aFd7gw


Full Heightmap Sizes (ignoring playable area borders):

Skyrim Tamriel Worldspace: 3808 x 3008 [ 119 x 94 TES4 size cells ] = 6.9km x 5.4km = 37.6 sq km = 14.5 sq miles
Oblivion Cyrodiil Worldspace: 4288 x 4128 [ 134 x 129 TES4 size cells ] = 7.7km x 7.4km = 57 sq km = 22 sq miles
Morrowind Vvardenfell World: 2688 x 2816 [ 84 x 88 TES4 size cells ] = 4.8km x 5km = 24 sq km = 9.3 sq miles
Fallout3 Wasteland Worldspace: 6304x6400 [ 197 x 200 TES4 size cells ] = 11.3km x 11.5km = 130 sq km = 50 sq miles
Fallout3 New Vegas WastelandNV: 4096x4128 [ 128 x 129 TES4 size cells ] = 7.3km x 7.4km = 54 sq km = 21 sq miles

Highest Map Points:

Skyrim Tamriel Worldspace: 4924 THU (39392 Game Units) = 561.336 metres [Cell (13,-13)]
Oblivion Cyrodiil Worldspace: 6581 THU (52648 Game Units) = 750.234 metres [Cell (52,58)]
Morrowind Vvardenfell World: 2369 THU (18952 Game Units) = 270.066 metres [Cell (3,8)]
Fallout3 Wasteland Worldspace: 10897 THU (87176 Game Units) = 1242.257 metres [Cell (-86,83)]
Fallout3 New Vegas WastelandNV: 2584 THU (20672 Game Units) = 294.576 metres [Cell (-30,26)]

NB. Skyrim's north coast is well below normal sea level: approx -14,200 game units, about 200 metres. So relatively speaking the highest peak in Skyrim's Tamriel worldspace matches the same height as in Oblivion's Tamriel worldspace. Pedantically this means Skyrim still only consists of pointy hills, not mountains.

I'll wait until the CS is out to verify certain details before releasing a new TESAnnwyn. FYI the TES5:Skyrim ESM/ESP structure is mostly the same as Fallout3's which is very close to Oblivion (all start with TES4). Many CELL records are now compressed which is probably the playable area of the map.

Now back to playing it.

Lightwave

edit: Added Fallout3 heightmap sizes and info that Skyrim's world sea level is well below that of the other games.
edit: Added new VCLR/8/16 bit heightmaps (Skyrim export bug fixed): Also Fallout 3 comparison exports.

I know in OB on the height map, sea level is at 4000 but what if it's at zero in Skyrim? Would that change the calculation?

Morrowind and Oblivion sea level was always 0 - in exterior cells it was everywhere, omnipresent beneath the land. You could adjust it for interior cells, and since Oblivion you could adjust it manually for individual cells (creating mountainside ponds and landscapes), but the default level was 0 everywhere else. In Fallout3 this changed and the existence of water became cell configurable; many cells have water toggled off entirely.

You have raised a point though, because if one does "COE 13 -13" which takes the player to the highest peak above High Hrothgar, that's the 39,392 GU. Jumping down to Riverwood the lowest point in the valley below, is approx -80 GU (fractionally below conventional sealevel).
If one the does "COE 0 30" which takes the player to the shipwreck on the north coast, the sea level there is about -14,200 which is a massive 200 metres below sea level. Taking that as absolute sealevel, it does mean the highest peak is much closer to Oblivion's 750 metres.

I wonder why Bethesda dropped the sea level so much lower in Skyrim, unless it was to avoid some clipping issues with the landscape? It means the exported maps need skewing by 200 metres vertically to become visually comparable to the previous 2 TES heightmaps ...

Now back to playing it.

Don't get lost, it's a wonderful game, but we need Tesannwyn for Skyrim...

Great M8 was just waiting for this .... Can you make also a comparison with fallout 3 map?

Also in terms of real size and dimensions how are the units = to ? and so in reality how big are those worlds?

For example I have been playing with terrain in Crysis and I did create an area of 8 x 8 kms , seems Oblivion is less than half of that size , in Crysis I could create an island as big as 16 x 16 kms .... but then filling wiht details is another thing ...

This post is partly for Onra if he is watching.

So to get past the border regions I added this line to the Skyrim ini under General:
bEnableBorderRegion=0

At the most south eastern part of the map is a gateway with a road leading out, but you can't pass unless you turnoff border regions with the above ini edit.

It goes out pretty far and not far out at all and Skyrim starts to look really small. To the east is what looked to be distant land meshes for morrowind Island. Here is a shot to the west of Skyrim: http://i361.photobucket.com/albums/oo54/psymon11b/SkyrimBorder2.jpg

Why the west though?

Strangely as my character ran toward it with collision off (~TCL has to be capitols for some reason) as soon as he hit the distance of the white tower he drowned - all those miles up - like the world was held in a sphere of water.

[edit] Hmmm maybe that wasn't the west of Skyrim but the south after all. I did have my character travel south-east for a while. Yeah I think it was that was the south of Skyrim.

Psymon, yes that does look like a low quality LOD version of the Oblivion heightmap. It will just be distantland LOD meshes though, not LAND records of the type you can walk on. Since Oblivion its been possible to adjust the water height for each cell and for some reason the north coast of Skyrim seems to be well below the normal water level (around -14,200 AFAIR), possibly you ended up in generic height 0 cells beyond that point, which meant you suddenly found yourself 200 metres below the usual sea level and in a bit of a pickle.

The Oblivion and Skyrim game heightmaps look to be of the same scale - the ^ profile of the bordering mountains on both heightmaps follows exactly the same profile, so it wouldn't take much to merge the Oblivion heightmap on to Skyrim's, though I'm pretty sure the borders would have to be manually reworked a bit to make a smooth merge.

Btw, since Skyrim and Fallout3 both have very similar game formats, it's quite possible that existing versions of TESAnnwyn can already import heightmaps in to Skyrim with the "-T 5" option - I haven't tried, has anyone?

Hi Prometheus; I've added the stats for the Fallout3 and FalloutNewVegas maps to the original post. Btw, is the Crysis engine practical for making an RPG (character interaction, dialogue etc), or are most the tools still geared towards FPS style games?

Lightwave

p.s. Prometheus, in Oblivion you could use massive heightmaps - so long as they were loaded inactive in the CS you could mod with them. The 4 x Cyrodiil world was 30.4 km x 29.6 km (complete with every mesh, and every mesh from all the small worldspaces merged in to the Tamriel worldspace). Sure you could go even larger still, even on the old game engine, but ... quality over quantity.

A few interesting things about finding distant LOD for Morrowind/Cyrodil:

They are very basic sketches - not really designed to look like anything that is of the quality of the closer stuff, but still there ... does this mean that at one time they were going to add them? That they wanted to illustrate to us that this is where it could go?

Since the road leading out of Skyrim (south east most part of map) was an open gateway with a road ... and the only thing that was stopping me was the border regions ... makes me wonder if that is meant for an expansion (casts spell of rumors).

I've not found the angle or area in Skyrim that allows you to see that whitegold tower of Cyrodil. That is not a land mesh it was architecture. I don't think the morrowind isle is visible either - unless you go out past the mountains in the game.

In the near future I can probably bet there will be a Skylivion type mod like they did with Morroblivion and vvardenfell. But since there are some pretty close similarities between Skyrim and Oblivion the modding to allow oblivion type content and cyrodiil might be alot easier then it was to bring vvardenfell to Oblivion. I'd love to see if it would be entire possible to see that. Although certain creatures (mostly daedra related ones like scamps, daedroth, etc etc....) would probably not work if I'm not mistaken. Of course Bethesda probably wouldn't like a full port of oblivion (main quest and what not XD even if there is over 200 years difference between Oblivion and skyrim.) It would still be crazy to see what oblivion would be like in the new radiant engine .

Atm its more oriented in FPS direction altough it has open programming allowed for introducing inventory and database to manage a rpg oriented system tough this is not provided with the free sdk , the engine is ofc very much superior in terms of lighting and modern technologies , but it has a limitation atm in the size of the worlds to 8 x 8 km for a resolution of 1 pixel = 1 m , whats the scale resolution in oblivion ? the world is large like 4 x 4 kms? 1 pixel = 1 m ? is it comparable to crysis proportion? I have imported the oblivion heigtmap into crysis 2 engine and it feels and looks like a fishtank of 4 x 4 kms ...


Yes but if you remember when you where helping me with the DUNE project the main reason that I had to stop on it is that it didn't load distant water lods making appear many holes in the rendering of water ....

did you try export the new skyrim maps and reimport?

btw The bethesda engine tough has a better weather day cycle and also features normal maps for lods in distance that the cryengine doesn't ...

k sO I read fallout is the biggest area ever done by Bethesda , I wonder why they wanted to go smaller this time , like of a half instead than going for a doubling that would have pleased the most ... like a 12 x 12 kms seemed more appropiate than 7x5 ...

Actually, if you think about it, there's a reason why the water height has been adjusted to a much lower setting. It's probably using a 16-bit variable, meaning a height and depth limit of 65535, and if the water was kept at 0, that would have meant that mountain ranges and The Throat of the World would end up being much shorter and smaller than what we see. So, in order to make the mountains and The Throat of the World so high, and still have some space for the dragons to fly above, that means that the water height has to be lowered so that you don't end up with a mountain that's suddenly making you reappear at the bottom of the map and then find yourself falling "into" the mountain when you try to go down - Much like how interior cells behaved in Oblivion, and one of the occasional glitches that happened in Fallout 3.

Hi Lightwave, good to see you're still working on TESAnnwyn. I love that program
Would it be possible to add the functionality to copy\paste an area from a worldspace to another worldspace (or even the same worldspace)? Just the LAND data, and maybe the textures.
I've been trying to do something myself, but I'm sure you have much more experience with the file formats, especially when it comes to the heightmaps and stuff.

.
It's 32-bit, both the water and the landscape. The TES3 game engine wouldn't render land above 32762 game units, thought the CS would (hence TESAnnwyn has a progressive logairthmic scale option for importing TES3 heightmaps - e.g. Oblivion's worldspace had to be rescaled when http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/BeyondCyrodiil/index.html

Oblivion and above has no such limitations, you can create land many kms up in the sky, though all those game engines started to suffer animation jitters more than 1 mile or so from the world centre, huge world projects were somewhat marred by it - not surprisingly Skyrim suffers this same bug (same engine).

You already can, though you have to use an image editor (e.g. Photoshop, or gimp). All you do is crop the images, then reimport them. If you want to import vertex colour and texture placements maps at the same time you have to make sure you crop them exactly the same way or they won't line up.

Tagging on to an existing worldspace is possible, though a little more fiddly. The FormID (and name obviously) of the imported Worldspace has to match that of the parent worldspace - use the "-F" option for that. The only hiccup you might get is that the FormIDs used for each CELL and LAND record by TESAnnwyn conflicts with those already used in the mod file you're importing to, but it might work OK as those imported records should start with a different modindex to the Master file. If not, then TESAnnwyn could do with another to specify a different starting FormID range for the CELL & LAND records.

An alternative (but involves being a little more techy) is to import starting with a FormID you know is abov the used range, then just fix the 4 bytes of the WRLD record (the worldspace) so the FormID matches that of the master.

It's all possible though, a few ways about it. I haven't been keeping up with stuff for the last couple of years - anyone know if Fallout3 fixed the modindex-LOD issue (i.e. the load order of your mods was critical as to whether the LOD would show up)? If so then the modindex 0 solution "-0" is not needed for Skyrim.

Same scale in Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout3 and Skyrim. Each heightmap point is 1.8m x 1.8m in size, which makes a TES4 cell 57.6 x 57.6 metres. Morrowind cells were 115.2 x 115.2 metres (they were 64x64 heightmap points per cell).

When talking about size, the OP forgot something important:

Vvardenfell and Skyrim are both somewhat square and compeltely filled up, while Oblivion's landmass is actually kind of crescent, with Elsweyr and Valenwood jammed in there.

Overall, i'd say that in terms of playable area, Oblivion is actually smaller.

AFAIR the figure at the time of release (from someone who had actually counted the cells) was that 60% of the Oblivion Tarmiel worldspace was non-playable in the original game, which makes about 9 sq miles playable; that made both games are of very similar size.

I think Skyrim also looks a little smaller but haven't tried to determine where all the non-playable boundaries are (a bit of COE'ing around would find them whilst we wait for a CS to come out). On the http://flic.kr/p/aEpWY8, I believe the missing strips are near where the borders are (there is land there, it's just a TESAnnwyn quirk with cell co-ordinate detection). Inside that region CELL records ae compressed to save disk space (Skyrim is the first game they've started to compress them in). This suggests there's more detailed data in those cells, so compressing them makes sense. Outside the strips have more basic detail, places a player probably wouldn't normally go, so the data is left uncompressed.

Of course, regardless of their actual size, both Morrowind and Skyrim feel bigger because of their rugged terrain. In Oblivion you could virtually bee-line almost everywhere ...

Hmm, never thought of renaming the ID's before. I'll try it out. And yeah, I should have mentioned it needed to be tagged on to an existing worldspace. Would it be possible to specifiy the X,Y coords where you want to start pasting?
And more importantly, what if you want to overwrite the existing records at those coords?

I've done it in the past, though it's not currently part of the normal TESAnnwyn, I usually hack in something to write the FormIDs from the original ESM/ESP to a file, then have it read those on import so that they match back up. I could (and probably should) add it in, as it's useful. If you had a specific case you wanted to import (i.e. you have cropped heightmap files ready) then I could always do this manually for you.

I can't recall what will happen if you try to load up an ESP that overwrites a master worldspace with CELL/LAND FormIDs that don't match the master, but AFAIR the CS throws the new ones out, but it's been literally years since I've done something like that ...

by points you mean pixels?

in cryengine you set up a map of 8192x8192 pixels = to a 8192x8192 meters map , if I set up a 2 m x pixel resolution then the map can be 16 km , I can go up with the resolution and scale more up .. but ofc the size reduces in comparison with the player character , so you mean that one pixel in bethesda engine is 1.8 m? virtually like a 2nd level type map of cryengine , if is like so then a 3800 x 3800 map of skyrim would be equivalent to a 6840 x 6840 map for cryengine?

here is a experiment I did with cryengine ...

http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/7265/confrontoopenworld.jpg

I valued also the best openworld yet out made RDR ....

The 4 x 4 kms for Skyrim was a guess out ...

What I actually wanted to do was copy the data from a worldspace and paste it over in the parent worldspace. (It was a city in its own worldspace that we needed to move to the main worldspace, no not Oblvion's, a from a custom mod (now long dead)).
The problem with reimporting a new heightmap, is just that, its creating a new worldspace, I don't need a new worldspace, I just need copy\paste.
Your program TESFaith seems to do exactly what I'm asking for, but it's for Morrowind. .
To clarify: I don't need it right now, but it's probable I might find a use for the functionality.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain how it works. I'll give that FormID thing a try, see if I can code something up.

Morrowind is very small by a wide margin..but it still FEELS bigger than both >.<.

"bEnableBorderRegion=0" didn't work for me, it has to be "bBorderRegionsEnable=0" (in Skyrim.ini [General] too). And tcl (lowercase) works fine for me ... may be different EXE versions? Mine say "1.1.21.0".

Run through the gate south of Falkreath until I reached the http://fuyohin.weebly.com/uploads/5/0/4/8/5048364/5817132_orig.jpg. 2 Steps further and down you go ...
Took a closer look on that "tower": looking http://fuyohin.weebly.com/uploads/5/0/4/8/5048364/5620311_orig.jpg and http://fuyohin.weebly.com/uploads/5/0/4/8/5048364/14126_orig.jpg

Developers having a bit of fun? There is no way you can see that from the normal playable area.

I've updated the maps in the original post, there are now 6 maps:

The first 3 show the Vertex colour, 8 and 16-bit heightmaps comparing Morrowind, Oblivion & Skyrim.
The last 3 show the Vertex colour, 8 and 16-bit heightmaps comparing Morrowind, Oblivion & Skyrim, Fallout3 and Fallout3 New Vegas,

I've fixed the Skyrim export bug. You can see the mountains bordering Cyrodiil-Skyrim in Oblivion and Skyim occupy a similar space, but their vertical profile is different; a merge would have to compromise one or the other to some extent.

Also slightly amusing is that Fallout3 has by far the biggest heightmap, yet has by far the smallest VCLR (playable area). That said I really enjoyed Fallout3 heaps, lots to discover and wacky stuff going on.

Yup, each heightmap pixel represents an area of 1.8 metres by 1.8 metres.



I had something several years ago, once before I stuffed it up, called TES4Scale. It exported all the objects from TES4 and allowed you to reimport a moved or scaled version (e.g. move them X and/or Y and/or Z, or space them out for a scaled up world).

That's how I got the world spaced out for:

1. http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/2x2/index.html
2. http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/Tamrielx2/index.html
3. http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/Tamrielx3/index.html

Windows XP service pack 3 saw the end of my development on that tool (it's a long story).

Anyway, so long as you get the FormID of the worldspace to match, imported land will go in to the same worldspace. For content, you can just copy and paste it. If you had a world of objects you want moved, you'll either have to copy and paste large selections of render to the new worldspace, or maybe a tool to export TES4 Oblivion style records and import them in to TES4 Skyrim format (e.g. TES4Scale, but I left it in a broken state years ago) or maybe one of the other tools like TES4snip or TES4edit, if they allow exporting and manipulation of records, before reassembling in to a Skyrim formatted ESM/ESP?

TES3 was vastly simpler - no FormIDs and worldspaces, so there were none of the complexities ...

How would i go about fetching the Skyrim heightmap ?