I know that the landmass is more or less "compressed". This is done to facilitate the ability to travel between cities in game without growing old in real life. What I want to know is if the landmass wasn't compressed, exactly how big would it be in real world units (kilometers or miles).

The reason that I ask is that Skyrim and all other outdoor games use a standard, but dated method to generate and render terrain. There is a rather new technique, geometry clipmapping, that allows for terrain rendering in real time on a planetary scale on current hardware. I would like to try to make a terrain engine based using this technique and would like to recreate Skyrim's landmass as a test. However, there isn't much point in making a planetary-scale terrain engine and then testing it with a compressed landmass.

Anyone have any ideas?

I haven't counted cells in the Creation Kit yet (as I've done with Morrowind and Oblivion) but...the playable area of Cyrodiil is approximately 8-9 square miles in size. I have heard that Bethesda have claimed that Skyrim is roughly equivalent to Cyrodiil. If that helps.

If you flatten all the hills and mountains in Skyrim, I'd say that the landmass is approximately 10-12 sq mi (16-19 km).

I guess I am asking the wrong question or asking it the wrong way.

Skyrim is part of a continent on the planet Nirn. The sizes you gave are the compressed units. Think about that. Imagine a 10-12 square mile continent on earth. If this were a real continent on a real planet, the actual size would be thousands upon thousands of square miles. That is what I am asking. Stretch it out to real world dimensions. What would it be? How many hundreds or thousands of miles wide/high? How many thousands of feet would the mountains be? When I said "planetary scale" in my original post, I wasn't exaggerating!

I can't fathom a comparison between Skyrim's illusive world to that of Earth's.

In Oblivion the best way someone put it to me was that traveling between the towns is suppose to really take weeks but being that the game is condensed down, you get the feeling that cities are "just down the road" from each other. So if we applied that logic to Skyrim, that its actually suppose to take a week or two to travel between the major cities I would have to think it would be thousands of miles large. Maybe like Scandinavia in size?

My answer isssss......


BIG!


ba dum dum tisssss

The Mazoga quest in Oblivion had Mazoga say she would meet you at fishermans rock 3 hours walk north of Leyawiin, which in real time was about a 2 minute walk. A human being walks at about 3 miles an hour, so given that calculation, I would guess the distance from Leyawiin to Fishermans rock to be roughly 9 miles. Given those calculations, I would say the distance from Leyawiin to Chorrol to be about 81 miles. Which would probably take the best part of 3 days for a native of Cyrodil to walk. Which I guess would be roughly the same as Riften to Solitude.

http://www.uesp.net/oblivion/map/obmap.shtml

I don't imagine Skyrim would be all that big in reality. Aren't the 7000 steps more like 700 steps when you walk them? Considering this and the number of cities/settlements, etc and the size of the mountains, then a ratio of about 10:1 works for me. About 160 to 200 km2 or so.

I heard skyrim is 14 square miles big

As big as my..ahem...!

As I stated this is a calculation taken from a condensed map. The feeling that each town is just down the road from each other is heavily implied by the game. However lore states many trips taking weeks between towns which would negate this calculation.

I used to RP on here a while ago, and we worked up the length of time it would take to march an army from Morrowind to High Rock would take a few months. Instead going by ship would be quicker assuming that winds were in your favor and it would only take about 1-2 months. That said, I'd say that a safe assumption would be around 3-4 thousand miles for Tamriel as a whole. I could be wrong, and I am being conservative in my estimates though.

I guess if we take some of the "compression" into account, it might be 10-20 times as large, realistically speaking. NYC and Berlin are over 300 square miles, and those are just large modern metro areas. This is supposed to be an ancient province, so I'd assume it must be at least that big.