Personally I think if this much effort was going to be put into it you would have to do what would generally be considered fixing the glaring flaws in oblivion, and level/world scaling would be one of those things. The diversity and environment (jungle?) might also be considered. Making oblivion what it should have been would be tough though I must say.

Question: Once the kinks are worked out (or now) is it compatible with any other mod?

Well I don't want to overstretch the requirements. I prefer the necessity list to be small and the rest to be optional. Basically:

1. Double-scale:

2. Triple-scale:

So 2x is comparatively easy, it's a nice scale, it looks fairly majestic in places, towns are now distant from one another. Many wilderness objects are actually the right size now (most tree trunks were too skinny at 1x). But if someone wants to run the region generator or scale the UL mods, we can merge that content in easily enough. The main thing is it's not a requirement so doesn't add any overall pressure.

Whereas with 3x scale, apart from me keeping the markers and door links, it's going to require starting from scratch and placing 9x as much. Actually, Bethesda's region generation presets don't seem to take all that long to run, so it is quite plausible to regenerate everything using the presets (and even better if anyone from the UL team gets involved). That said I still think manual work is required to move things that shouldn't be there, like new objects sticking out of houses, on roads etc.

A major thing for me to work out is whether I should be scaling Oblivion.esm or just using a new worldspace for visiting; the former could be quite difficult, but would be more compatible with other mods.

I would prefer a new worldspace.
1. the vanilla one keep safe for reference or whatever.
2. we are able to copy and paste things that are worth it.
3. the original DLC's won't work on a scaled Oblivion.esm
And
4. it is possible to switch between the worldspaces if needed. ( ?hm ... point 1 i guess???)

@ Lightwave
What do you think of an 3x horizontal (x,y) and 2x height (z) landscape? So the CS won't cry in case of "to complex land"

0815Chris

The basic 4x files are up on FileFront; that's the 4x landscape, over 1000 square miles of it and the 4x placed content, with NPCs at 1x scale. I've included a map ESP which should help you find where you are; it uses the standard Cyrodiil map which works fine even on this size a landscape. I haven't generated the LOD yet though, much of it is beyond the CS's capability but I'll get around it; the low level areas around the CS will generate fine in the Heightmap Editor if you want to try that way. And TES4qLOD can generate the objects and textures fine. The main thing is to watch you don't kill your character walking down each step.


Until the LOD files are up, it'll be difficult realizing just how enormous this world is. I recommend turning the AI off as with the other worldspaces, because every hour some NPC AI packages get confused with which worldspace they're in and there's massive lag.

Scaling the region (REGN) records looks pretty straightforward. When that's done I can try region generating the most complex region at 2x and 3x (4x maybe even) to see how long it takes and whether the CS can handle it; if we can use the existing scaled region co-ordinates and presets then life will be so much simpler than having to carve them up in to smaller regions.

I have to decide what else we want brought over to the new worldspace. e.g. Should any NPCs be brought over at all? If so it will be better for me to duplicate them all with different FormIDs (and with a prefix on each name to distinguish them like 'aa_x2_' or something, I'm open to suggestions) - and without any AI packages since most are currently tailored for the 1x Cyrodiil worldspace. If cities are going to rebuilt the majority of AI packages will be obsolete anyway.

Also if the copies of the NPCs are included, should the ownership of any interior cells owned by them be preserved?


I agree, the separate worldspace option is the simplest option by far and the least problematic, otherwise I'll be fighting FormID references for the next few months making a program to scale all records, and I've better things I'd rather be doing.

I refuse to let the heightmap editor's limitation jeopardize our scale however; I can make a better mesh generator in time and an unoptimized one in the very near future. The lower height scaling will just be a final option for people to try, to see if softening the severity of those mountains aids realism, or reduces the dramatic effect instead.

Lightwave

p.s. When this mod starts becoming really technical I think it'll have to move to the Construction Set forums. In the meantime enjoy the worlds, I'm curious to hear feedback on what people think of the different sizes and which they'd most like to mod with and play in.

So this means that everything, even NPCs and items are going to be 2x bigger?

Not to sound rude or anything, but if you read all the posts it should have answered your questions.

No, the screens with the big NPC's were just a test. If this mod was realized, NPC's would be the normal size.

This is sounding better and better Lightwave, so from the sounds of it you think you may be able to regenerate all the foliage and rocks etc to make them as "thick" (closely spaced) as vanilla oblivion but just cover the same area on the scaled up world? and I am very impressed at you considering making a custom LOD mesh generator. This would basically just leave the cities to be remade and the more annoying job of filling them with npc's!

You mention a stutter bug the further you get away from the "center" of the world, I presume this is caused by some poorly written code related to large numbers and the position in the world but is this more/less apparent depending on your hardware? or is it something that will affect low and pc's just as much high end ones? I really gotta find my oblivion and install it again to test this, shouldn't be asking questions I can partially answer myself.

Anyhow great work, would be nice to see some of the talented modders around here jump aboard and help out with this. I hope it happens but it's a BIG job, not as big as some of the new province mods, but lets face it, imperial city reborn failed and kvatch has taken a long time, with 9 cities and somewhere between 4 to 16 times the area to cover remaking the cities will be no easy feat! (even if there is a basis to work from)

Quoted for Truth. An often forgotten technicality...

The interiors would be fine correct? As it is just the outside that is being scaled..?

And which one is going to be used the most do you think? 2x? 3x?

I myself think 2x would be perfect, if that is the general consensus then I am going to start rebuilding myself some cities.

I'm wondering will there be a TESfaith type of tool made to move towns around so that towns can be added from existing mods and so forth. I can't wait for this mod to past testing stages keep up the good work.

FYI, I've timed how long it takes to load each sized worldspace on my PC. That's the loading time before the Game Menu comes up after the Bethesda Softworks intro (which I skip). Once the initial load is done, loading up gamesaves and play load-time is pretty similar. All examples include loading Oblivion.esm (including Shivering Isles), KOTN and all the DLCs:
You might want to compare the first figure to how long it takes your own system to start up. Apart from playing time, each sized worldspace will affect how long it takes to test each modding change, so a larger worldspace could be quite frustrating. I think a lot of it is processing time whilst it indexes FormIDs, not disk speed related.


This is an old TES3/4 bug which AFAIK everyone gets. I first heard about it a few years ago in TES3 when people were moving the islands 100+ cells from the world centre with TESfaith where they found a curious quivering effect on all animations. I suspect this is due a chaotic rounding error between the animation position and the extra calculated distance of the player from the world centre since height also adds to the effect. So it's the same bug in TES4, unavoidable for us, but I don't think a major detraction - it's something else to test how people feel about it. It's noticeable from about 30+ cells in vanilla OB when holding weapons or sitting on horses in 3rd person view. You can see it in vanilla OB, just move to a worldspace without borders. e.g.
Then pull out your weapon and watch the hand quivering. Tamrielx4 extends to over 250x250 cells in any direction (353 cells diagonally from the world-centre) and up to 3km high, so do a setpos z to get really high. When you get near the edges of the TES4 gaming world, your head will come out of your backside and your feet, eyes and teeth will be floating somewhere else. e.g.
It's a freak show.

I don't want to go off-topic with that because the subject has been done to death in the past. Distantland is only a small part of the problem. The player's movement speed is actually similar in Morrowind and Oblivion, you'll find it takes a similar time for players to run through the same space of land in both games when their stats are set the same (e.g. acrobatics, athletics and speed @ 100). It's only that in the beginning stages the player starts much slower in Morrowind than in Oblivion. But that made an encounter with a mudcrab a wonderfully terrifying prospect. AFAIR the playing area itself is approx 4% bigger in Cyrodiil than Vvardenfell, so it's nothing significant.

IMHO even more important than distant land is that you can just bee-line straight for any destination in Cyrodiil (made ridiculously easy with an objective compass). There are very few geographic obstacles, fewer reasons to get distracted by something interesting on the way, with only repetitively spaced weakened level-scaled suicidal creatures to make it a nuisance, not an interesting threat. In Vvardenfell this was impossible, you had to walk through unavoidable winding valleys that gradually veered unexpectedly off course via strange settlements and hidden ruins with genuinely dangerous opponents and sometimes dead ends. Often you'd end up somewhere different to where you intended. This made the game much more interesting, surprising and lengthy. That is until you became skilled or rich enough to make a constant effect levitating item that is (ooh, I had lovely pair of levitating trousers. ) TES4's horses also make it easy to zig-zag up almost any slope. They make equally light work of Vvardenfell's smooth valley walls. I won't mention fast travel or the myriad of other factors.

Apart from all this, many people were expecting the scale between TES3's Vvardenfell and TES4's Cyrodiil to match Beth's official http://elderscrolls.com/codex/races_map.htm. All the press surrounding the game prior to launch actually spoke of the 60% of unplayable landscape outside of Cyrodiil's borders, not the 6-7 sq miles you could play that was only slightly more than the previous game.

I haven't done anything with TES4faith for over a year, that's where I started before I ended up with TESPort, TEStroi, TESAnnwyn, TES4qlod, TES4scale, TES4god-knows-what-else at this rate. Seriously though, the majority of the work porting a mod manually to the new world will not be too hard. Just make a back-up for use with vanilla Oblivion only, then load the mod and the new landscape in the CS, cut and paste the render from the old worldspace to the new landscape (this may require landscape shape changes of course). Make sure the interior doors line up to and from the correct worldspace (not sure if this happens with cut'n'pasted render, it might). Then make sure any scripts and AI packages reference the new world and new co-ordinates; the latter would be the most time consuming I think, but really depends on the mod. TES4scale could do some of the work (essentially it just copies and pastes render to scaled up co-ordinates atm). Uncompiled scripts would be easier to automatically scale than AI packages and path grids though. I'm not going to entertain the idea at this stage though, I've got more than enough to do and honestly would like to mod some day rather than keep fixing the limitations of the original game ... :mellow:

Wouldn't this have the effect of making previously unclimbable hills climbable?

doing what you suggested I would qualify that as unplayable =D so maybe 4x is out of the question due to loading times and stutter bug? Pity, it would have been pretty cool! I will have a look at 3x but in the end maybe 2 is the only reasonable one? =/ still 4 x the area is still better than vanilla.

I am so interested in this project!
But I don't really know what to think of it. I would love to see the world become larger and all that. But I also understand that it requires a lot of work.

You can argue that a version that only adds the "vanilla game" onto this new bigger world wouldn't take as much time to whip together but when faced with such a large new interesting world, how can someone avoid adding new content?

That's especially for the cities, an expansion of the cities using the new larger areas would be wonderful.

Actually, a version that scales the land x2, makes the nature dense again, adds some more wilderness spawn points, expands the cities with more houses and/or larger districts, and on top of that just adds the vanilla content and nothing else would be lovely to me.

The quivering is only slightly worse with increased distance - like I say you can see it in 1x Oblivion and it's by no means diabolical, even at the highest 3,000km peak in Skyrim on a 4x map, in fact it just looks like you're shivering.
You can quickly test out what that looks like by doing something like:
That's about as bad as a 4x Cyrodiil will ever look. But load time is an unavoidable problem. Future faster PCs maybe, but now is now and I think it could be frustrating to mod with because of that. I want everyone to have a good time.

It's just a final option to try out, but yes it would with some hills, but most mountains would still be too steep. I think I'll try 2x:1.75x as a better in-between. junk pointed out that the hills were a bit steep just north of Cyrodiil, but this can happen in the real world so it's not necessarily wrong, but it's relatively easy to create and test. I suspect Beth deliberately made them steep to make it more difficult to just bee-line to destinations in the north, but then most horses can get up them.

interesting, I kind of thought 4x was using the max game size and the coords you gave me would be close to that max size so I was sort of expecting the effect I got to be close to what 4x would look like as you got close to the borders. I didn't even have to use setpos, it was a huge jittery mess just by typing cow anvil world 32700 32700! I suppose if load times are a serious problem maybe 16 smaller esp's could be made of segments the size oblivion that could be tested individually and when done or close to done be merged with the full size version? I am probably not suggesting anything useful, I really don't have too much knowledge when it comes to this part of modding! I just think that anything at all that can be automated or make doing this easier will increase the chances of success hugely.

As for the size, for some reason I am against 3x, but I think its just my odd quirky mind stuck on powers of two from every other aspect of game modding heh If this was to be a viable project some compromise would have to be taken between what the players would be excited about and want and what the modders could pull off I suppose!

ok, well I just went for a look around the 3x landscape, the jitter bug was getting fairly noticeable around anvil docks, the load times were a little annoying and I was getting some pretty harsh fps around anvil too. Interestingly with the loading it loaded fairly fast at start up (under a minute) but the main annoyance was actually loading a save, which took probably around 3 minutes and it just sort of froze at around 2 3rds loaded, and that was on an almost new character out of the sewers. Given that mods plus an "old" character with a fair few hours on it can make load times significantly longer I am thinking that 4x will simply be unplayable and 3x will be pushing it. Just my thoughts, which do you think is the most plausible solution Lightwave?

Really nice work, I hope someone takes up the at least 2X project.

Very nice work. Makes me think.

1. Would there be any advantage to just shrinking all world objects (everything except land/sea) by, say, 3 times? Then the world area will be nine times bigger.

2. Uniform horizontal & vertical scaling will increase distance between points in the world, but it won't change gradients. So slopes like the main road to Bruma will still be as steep (ridiculous IMO) and you'll have to walk three times as far. Horzontal scale > vertical scale would be better I think.

3. Rather than scaling, is it possible to insert land (cells?) to the existing Tamriel worldspace like laying cards side by side. This way you can increase the distance between cities but leave all the existing world untouched. Still leaves the problem 2 but hey, such is life.

4. Do you have to scale the whole world at once or can different parts be scaled independently? Scale the space between cities but leave the cities alone.

5. Can you put a small gravity force on all objects so they fall to the ground, eliminating the gap that will appear when you scale up the world?

Have fun.

It looks like nothing more than Player set to scale 0.5.

Cyrodiil x2 is something different.

1. This was discussed earlier and it's better to scale everything up than to fake it by scaling down.

2. I imagine a uniform scaling would work out better. I've yet to see any examples of a non uniform, but I imagine it would be a too weird, especially if the meshes still have to be scaled, everything would appear too wide/fat.

3. Even if that was possible, which it's not, it would totally kill the map. I mean the terrain would be so deformed it wouldn't be Cyrodiil anymore. I guess if a program like TESFaith was made it may be possible to move cells (or groups of cells) around, but manually doing so as well as manually adding in new terrain would be one hell of a job, not a fun one, and again you'd end up with a really distorted landscape.

4. see 3. I think what Lightwave is doing is the way to go.

5. Gravity force? Heh, no. It's not just a matter of the objects needing to be pulled together, it's the problem with the land they sit on. If you were to scale up the Imperial Isle but keep the Imperial City the same size, it would no longer fit properly on the island, or try imagining Bravil trying to sit on it's isles.

Any new news on this?

A few comments:

A critically flawed assumption is made in the opening paragraphs, stating that the scale relation between Morrowind and Cyrodiil screws up the scaling of the lore maps. Some may argue that Vvardenfell's size screws up the scaling when compared with Daggerfall, and that Daggerfall screws it up with Arena. The critically flawed assumption is this: Morrowind is the first Elder Scrolls game (which it isn't).

Secondly, the reason why Cyrodiil feels so small isn't because of size or anything, it's because of ease of traveling. Foot speed is drastically increased from MW (for the better, walking or running anywhere was agonizingly slow in MW unless you had the Boots of Blinding Speed), and Fast Travel is a little too universally available.

I'm just wondering, how could one do this for a completely new landmass? Is there a special program, or is it all done in the CS?