I would be adding stuff from provinces, but since it appeared that everyone was already doing that, I had to make up my very own, lore friendly, entirely plausible place of my own.

Hopefully people can get together and add other places, as large expansions like that would be cool. I'm making my own, but playing it won't be the same as playing one made by someone else.

Guys, you really should check out the http://www.darkcreations.org/forums/forum/120-beyond-skyrim-discussion/ forum on Dark Creations. The full heightmap is almost done. These guys are making really good progress.

I count on you. Love your great work and i think your team will rock skyrim and the rest of tamriel.

Hence why I said "let alone the engine handling it". Of course I was referring to the entire continent as one world space which is what everyone expects.

I would love it if a seamless transition between world spaces could be achieved and if and when it is all our problems(except the development scale feasibility) would be solved.

Not before they finish it I hope. They're making some awesome stuff.

http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/8172/morrowind20120103205911.jpg
http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/230/morrowind20120103210023.jpg
http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/9373/morrowind20120116212742.jpg
http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/209/morrowind20120116212833.jpg

Good to see all the interest!

As has been said, I am currently working on the all-Tamriel heightmap. It was rather held up because we found it was not really within Bethesda's terms of use to take a direct extract of the Oblivion heightmap as we'd hoped, so I've had to recreate Cyrodiil. That's mostly done and I'm bringing in (and updating) heightmaps for Elsweyr, Hammerfell, High Rock and Valenwood at the moment. I expect I'll have a decent first cut of Tamriel done by the end of the month - RL permitting.

We will have to wait and see whether the engine is going to cope with an all-Tamriel worldspace although I've not seen any particular reason to believe that it won't. The worst case is that we'll have to slice the heighmap up into separate worldspaces for each province.

As has been said before, do drop in on http://www.darkcreations.org/forums/forum/120-beyond-skyrim-discussion/ - I'm putting updates up there as often as I make significant progress. The hope is that we can focus a number of modding teams together on the single heightmap rather than trying to coordinate a single massive team.

Makes me wish i had morrowind.
I have Oblivion Game Of The Year Edition, and Skyrim but sadly not Morrowind.
The scary thing about morrowind is that character textures actually look better to me then in oblivion.
They look less like the skin is a colored blob that was slapped over them.

If you want them to be polished mods, you'll need to scale down your expectations. The Tamriel Rebuilt team decided to just focus on Morrowind, and have created great stuff over 10 years. There was a good Elsweyr mod for Oblivion. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of good mods for Elder Scrolls games, but I think it's telling that the massive provincial projects that are any good can be counted on one hand. Certainly if you want the density of dungeons and towns that exist in Skyrim, people will have to think on the county level, not continental!

Even so the reasons you quoted for it not being feasible are inaccurate.

You said that people would run out of video memory or system memory.

That's not going to happen, because only the items in the immediate viewable area are loaded into video memory at any given time, and the same goes for memory. The entire playable world is not loaded into memory, video or otherwise, the minute you step outside from an interior cell.

Everything beyond a certain distance consists of increasingly smaller and smaller textures and lower resolution models. Even the landscape itself.

And this assumes infinite viewing distance not occluded by objects or terrain, which obviously isn't going to happen.

As it is currently there's a couple points in Skyrim where you can get high enough to see probably about 1/3 of tamriel rendered, in low detail, granted, but that low detail will stay at that distance, regardless of whether or not higher detail was available or not. The higher detail will only load in once you're within a few cells.

I think the main risk is not the memory requirements of large worldspaces, as DarkDragon says. A bigger concern is that the engine may have trouble performing the mathematics required to manipulate objects at very large displacements from the origin. Early testing I've read suggests this will not be a problem for a worldspace the size we intend for Tamriel but we won't really know until someone tests a fully populated cell.

Surely he knows what LOD is?

Yeah, the world map in Skyrim is a (new?) level of LOD, so that says enough.

In fact, a large portion of Tamriel is already present as LOD, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlbA2qiXsf0. Not that it will be of any use for a province expansion, of course.

Compared with the most widely accepted map, the Skyrim LOD is pretty badly distorted. Cyrodiil is severely foreshortened in the y-axis - and not even really in a linear fashion that could be corrected. The small part of High Rock that's present is OK, and quite a bit of Hammerfell is usable but again, it loses it pretty badly towards the south. Some of north west Morrowind looks OK (-ish) but again, it's a bit of a mess compared to the map so I don't think it's much use. Anyway - see for yourself: http://i991.photobucket.com/albums/af32/morcroft/Technical/SkyrimLODmapoverlay.jpg

I'm lining up to the LOD structure as far as possible in the new heightmap.

It's a nice thought to have an ultimate ceiling of necessary loaded assets but again your not taking everything into consideration. The entire Skyrim.esm has to be loaded into the system RAM. Currently it's 237mb. How large do you suppose it will be with a fully populated continent? My guess is around 1.7-2.2gb(with or without separate world spaces). Currently all of Skyrim's low level AI is probably running somewhere around 50-70mb, so multiply that by 10 and your already pushing 3 gigs and you haven't even loaded any cells yet. Yes, my figures are grossly exaggerated but I'm right more or less.

Actually, I'm not so sure about that. Articles like the following http://www.primagames.com/games/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/news/bethesda-refutes-skyrim-ps3-lag-claims-by-fallout-, if Bethesda is to be believed, seem to me to indicate that not everything is loaded into RAM at once... I suppose I could be misunderstanding the point of Hines' claims, but it would seem that what he is implying, at least when he mentions cleaning up your hard drive, is that Skyrim does a LOT with the hard drive, rather than the way Bethesda games worked in the past. I could be wrong though.

Also, some of us have 8 GB memory anyway

skyrim only draws what the camera sees every thing else is occluded. it will only load what it needs to display open console and tfc flight cam youll notice the backfacing mountains are not rendered. theoretically therefor you can build as big as the creation kit will allow for cpu of your machine.

Doesn't matter, 4gb is the ceiling with a x86 application. Once Beth moves to x64 the cieling will be removed and the size of your system will be the ultimate limit. Currently however the entire main ESM file DOES have to be loaded so I'm afraid a fully populated continent at Skyrim's scale is not possible which is just as well anyway as it would take an army of people 20 years to make it.

It would be possible on the other hand to make the entire continent as a landmass and then spread a single province's content all across it. Even that would take a very long time to make but it would be enjoyable to explore and technically feasible to run.

Worm,

Has there been any talk of when Bethesda will move to x64?

No, but I think we all know when that is going to happen. The next gen consoles will mark the death of x86.

We can hope.

It's pretty much a given. The next gen will be x64 based and will become the lowest common denominator. Bethesda will then design their engine around the new xbox's specs. Fallout 4 will likely be Beth's last x86 engine.

Windows 8, I believe, has been confirmed to be the last Microsoft OS that will support 32-bit architecture. So, Bethesda has until Windows 9 to move completely to 64-bit+

The tools will be there to do what it is you are talking about, the problem is the amount of work it would take would require a full modding team that was dedicated to the mod. I've been a part of many full conversion mods for games that fell short because some people generally tend to not be that dedicated to a task as others causing rifts in the team, or real life becomes to busy for others even including project leaders and they stop falling short of the greatness they could of achieved.

Is it possible? Yes, Will it happen? Probably not. Though I applaud anyone who would try such a thing. It would be nice to see great large mods made by people who had a devotion and pride for their mod that they would see it through.