With 3x and 4x placed objects we'd have to start from scratch - it's clear from the additional 3x pics (with objects) that even wilderness objects are too large up close; although they might look plausible from a distance, every tree trunk is very large - sure I've seen bigger in parts of OZ & NZ - but it just doesn't feel right and they are too spread out.

Yet starting from scratch on that scale is a truly considerable amount of work; it's 9x or 16x as much area to cover, and can we get 16x as many placement modders as Bethesda had working on this for the same amount of time it took them to complete the task? All that is potentially still usable are the door links to interiors (caves etc), travel markers and possibly the IC city walls. The remaining wilderness will require using the region generator, with each region split in to sub-regions to avoid the CS crashing. Luckily AFAIK Oblivion.esm still has Bethesda's region generator presets and it's only the objects that need the placing, no re-texturing. Then existing settlements and ruins need recreating (yes, you could be lazy and just copy with 1x render from the Tamriel worldspace I suppose, but for each town the idea is to actually make a small town out of them, not copy the one street version). And finally it needs a purpose, or the mod itself is just a modding resource. :shrug:

On the other hand 2x is the option for the least amount of work; just the towns, villages and ruins require recreating (copying 1x render temporarily could be used as a stand-in measure I guess) - there's 4x as much space to enlarge them and create some additional settlements in between. I'll upload the 2x mod files to another site over the weekend, maybe upload the 3x files too. I still consider them a bit 'alpha' quality because the placement data is slightly off, but the landscape is pretty close so they're good for testing out ideas.


Ugh, so many options. It's possible to use any combination of horizontal:vertical scaling, but TESAnnwyn's TES4 texture importing works best if the horizontal scale is a whole number scale of the exported version (because for accuracy you could end up requiring over 9 layers in a single cell sub-quad, exceeding the CS's limit). Any quantity of vertical scaling is still plausible.

The game's LOD display range is very low however and this would be a problem with non-proportional scaling - inclinations would be less noticable. It's already a problem at 3x scale where you can't even see all the IC from a little way up the opposite bank. Getting lost in a 4x scale map with such limited LOD range would I think be tedious for most people.

To properly consider 3x (and even 4x) we need help from someone in the know such as a developer; there might be some Oblivion.ini parameters to increase the number of landscape quads to display at any time and also decrease the fogging effect. Does anyone have any knowledge on this? :confused:


Since these are in completely separate worldspaces, any mod will require additional work to move it to the new worldspace, though for the most part that's copying and pasting the render and recompiling AI packages and scripts so they refer to the cells in the new worldspace. But due to all the cross-referencing of FormIDs they won't work straight out of the box like a TES3 mod would unfortunately. Also, mods that modify land wouldn't 'fit' right, so they'd need to be put through TESAnnwyn and TES4Scale to appear as they did in the original Tamriel. Mods that use other worldspaces could be modified easily though - they just need a new door to link to the new worldspace.

I'll investigate full scaling of all Oblivion.esm records at some point, but there are so many FormID references, it's a toughy, and I think a handful of records are still not well understood yet ...


That's really worth a try. You're the 3rd person I've heard from in the last 2 months that's described something like this with DistantLand textures, always patched with the latest version. It sounds like it might be a combination of graphics drivers, the latest patch version and the DDS files produced by TES4qLOD. Personally I'm running a GeForce 7900GTX - I haven't patched since Shivering Isles, and KOTN is also installed. I'm using S3's original (9 year old) DDS converter program to make the actual dds files but AFAIK these have worked fine for everyone up until very recently.

I have seen random weird black patchy bits on close-up landscape textures and VisibleWhenDistant objects on mods in the past though which I'm sure is down to a texture memory bug - it only happens with lots of meshes+textures. But I haven't seen it on DistantLand textures myself. If you rename your Data\DistantLOD directory temporarily and run the game with just the landscape ESP (don't load tamx2-placed.esp), do you still get the same problem?

Lightwave

p.s. I will put up some pics of the 1x IC render on the various scale landscapes so you can visually see how much extra space there is to build.

looking forward to those pictures!

I was wondering a couple of things, one was whether or not its possible to allow the player to "see" further since even the smoggiest cities dont block your view that much and it looks wrong on the 3x and 4x. However you seem to be wondering about this too! I was under the impression that the fog settings are stored with the weather types, but there is no use removing the fog to be faced with blank nothingness where there should be LOD land. (which I presume would be the case)

The other thing I was wondering was, what happens to the in-game map, does it get screwed up and is this another problem that may be unfixable?

Wow, it's really amazing work you're doing here. One of the things I hate most about walking through Cyrodiil to go on a quest is that you're garanteed to go past at least 5 dungeons on the way. "Ancient forgotten ruins", yeah right.

Since we have the tools at hand, I think it's important to settle for a realistic size that could become the base for all future modding. The objective should have real-size mountains, plains and rivers: 2x probably doesn't do the job, does 4x work?

I'm also thinking, that since you're probably scaling Vvarfendell 2x for your other project, Cyrodiil which is already too small should be scaled 4x so they could in theory be placed in the same worldspace.

As far as objects go, except maybe for walls I like the current size of objects in the game. For a start, I'd suggest copying the normal-size objects to the game, with recalculated coordinates so buildings are not disjointed, etc. If you're up to it, Lightwave, I think it would be worth scaling all the original quests, even though some of them are pretty simplistic: I'd gladly go through the guild quests again in a realistically scaled environments

To see further, there are several ini settings you can manipulate; I used to play a lot with that, try those (I am only sure of the first one):
uGridDistantCount=
uGridsToLoad= //buggy and kills performance
fNearDistance=
fFarDistance=

The mod Streamline played with view distance, so in its own ini file you can get some hints at which settings control what.

I would love to see a 4X Cyrodill, but I agree the view distance needs to be increased quite a bit. Even at 1X the view seems pitiful when you climb the higher mountains.

When i saw this topic 3 days back, i said "this is what i wanted!".

So i dl your 2x landscape and begann to explore the possibilities. I swimed in the bay of Anvil, walked to Kvatch, reached the hills and visit Bruma. The land that former feeled so narrow and small, opened and is now ... in scale, allmost. 4x the space for the cities is just right. Therefor the countrysites would look even more immersing if they are at 3x scale. But when it comes to fill up and populate the landscape with rocks, trees, wildlife and all types of creatures it is more realistical to use the 2x landscape as the 3x or 4x one. And don't forget that 2x landscape means that we have 4x the space to fill.

Yesterday i began to rebuild Leyawiin from scratch, but not this in my opinion ugly one from vanilla. Where the city block's the Niben and you are thinking "how does ships travel from IC to the Topal Sea? Have they legs and feets to use the road?" As reference i use the layout from the concept page. Until now the castle lies in the middle of the Niben and connect the west with the east side of Leyawiin.
?hm... befor someone asks, i make this to get the right feeling for the scale and i dont know if i release it.

Back to this topic. More space to fill means there is more, much more stuff to place. Free FormID's are not a problem but whats with the game engine? Is it fast enought to handle 4x, 6x or 8x the amount of object's. I hope so because i want to see cyrodiid at 2x scale.


Excuse the bad spelling. I don't write often in english without a cup of coffee.
0815Chris

I am ... bowled over. Many thanks, Lightwave! :blink:

This is going to become great...

Wow. Thats a fantatsic looking world and much more realistic than the Vanilla scale.

Im not sure if you modders are just flirting with the idea of seeing this through or not, but my advice would be if the whole world is rebuilt at 2X or 3X the size I think it would be a shame to just transfer across the original Vanilla MQ and storyline.

If people are going to go to the work it would take to upscale the whole world i think a whole new storyline, with new Guild quests would be in order. Otherwise its only the Vanilla game but at a larger scale.

Just my 2 cents...

the one thing i would suggest is that if this is successful.....dont add anything else.....no more dungeons, no more villages, add absolutely nothing. for once it would be nice to actually have some open space where im not bumping into a shrine or cave or something else every 2 minutes.

would it be possible to make a seperate esm file where you got rid of everything except npcs, monsters, furniture etc. so that just the architecture and landscape is scaled up. if you then loaded that esm or esp last in your load order it would only change the size of buidlings and such and wouldnt interfere with other mods since they would also be upscaled. (im assuming that you are changing a universal measurement in the game ie feet to yards or some such thing, or are you doing each item individually).

I'm only artist not programmer please sorry me if I tell something wrong
but we have mod where are infinity distant view, than we have mod with blurring distant planes
so if we'll mix both of them:
infinity distant view>little blur>classical TES fog of distance
- it will look very natural imho)))
PS imho 4x will be more balaced variant)

Hi Lightwave,

Right I was able to fix the problem with the distant LOD textures by importing all the distant LOD dds files into photoshop (CS2) where they displayed fine and then saving them out again (using the nvidia DDS plugin). I just left all the DDS options as default (Which includes mip maps that are probably not required). And I have to say the landscape is looking stunning! went for a little stroll around the imperial city before work and was blown away by it.. although I'm thinking x3 would be just about right

So I'd say its the DDS format your using thats causing problems on older cards. I can upload my resaved textures if anyone else is having problems with it. Or if you want to compare them to your own.

What ever you do don't give up on this project/idea, it is exactly what Oblivon needs and once the quality mod makers out there get a hold of it I'm sure there will be tons of support!

Hi folks. I've added some CS pics of the 1x Imperial City render placed on the 2x, 3x and 4x landscapes; it's at the bottom of both the original http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/Tamrielx2/index.html pages.
I've also uploaded the 2x files to http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13911. The 3x will have to find another site since TES-Nexus has a 300Mb limit (without splitting that is).


Yes - you're right. That fog is entirely part of the weather; it's clear that "clear" isn't as clear as I thought it was.
I've created a simple weather ESP (http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/downloads/zweather_00aaaaaa.esp) which has a much greater fog range; I'm able to see the entire landscape from 1x Tamriel - just load the ESP like any other and type setweather 00aaaaaa in the console - I've hacked it to modindex 00 so it should always work. The fog should roll back to virtually nothing.

The Oblivion.ini figures to increase the number of quads is buried down in the [LOD] and [DistantLOD] sections, I've had to change several values for it to work, but I can now see many times further. Unfortunately the water cuts off at a certain distance, but maybe there's a option for that too. I've just changed a bunch of them, but don't know exactly which ones are required yet.
Another problem is that the number of distantLOD objects the game can load at any time and the distance at which it can do it; you can't see Bruma or Cheydinhal or Bravil from the IC because they're so far away (but you can see the dark patch of land they should be on). There is also a cache limit on how many distant meshes the game will load in a worldspace session; it's this limitation that saw off my http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/LOD2/ replacement project which used full detail VWD meshes to try and get around the vanilla low quality DistantLand system. This will mean that for VWD (VisibleWhenDistant) objects we have to be choosy about not picking too great a variety. To see the distant towns we'll have to increase the range to huge proportions, which will increase loading time somewhat (it has to load all VWD cell files within a wider certain radius).

No clue about the in-game map and whether there are unexpected fundamental limits there. Technically there shouldn't be; we should just have to specify the new cell range values.


No, absolutely every item, cell and piece of land has been scaled.

The game is pretty well optimized for loading massive landscapes; everything is grouped into 32x32 cell groups and 8x8 cell sub-groups. The only thing that's slow is the initial loading of the game, which could make testing a bit tedious. 2x is fine, but 3x can take about a minute before the game gets to the opening menu; from then on it's about normal speed. I guess the slowness is the game picking through every record in every mod file and indexing everything before it starts. 4x is obviously much longer, but I'll write the mesh generator before getting some shots of it.


Fab, thanks for testing and verifying that - it's funny how nVidia and S3 are so incompatible with different configurations. I'll have to source another command-line DDS converter which does nVidia DDS conversion (AFAIR nconvert can't handle really small files which is why I stuck to S3's version). I have hit a similar problem before with the worldmaps where the CS crashes with one or the other format. This info will help others who occasionally get the problem too.

Will upload the 3x files somewhere tomorrow ...

Lightwave

That looks amazing! One question, sorry if this has been asked before. If everything is scaled up, why wouldn't mods be compatible? Couldn't they be scaled up as well?

Looking your new screen -OMG!!!! i think that 3 x is truly enough!!!!!
enough to build Imperium Capital at his full Glory)))

Awesome. I hope all the major mods get behind this and scale their stuff to the larger scale. Not only will it make the game feel bigger, but it will add so much free space for people to do more modding in. It's a win win I think.

By a "certain" distance do you mean exactly where the max view cut off before? I'm not sure that the water will be fixable, but I haven't had that much of a look.


by "choosy" and not "too great a variety" do you mean that oblivion uses a clone type system where duplicated meshes dont add to the max number? as in there is a limit on unique meshes but not on the amount of meshes so you can have a million LOD rocks if they are all the same mesh? sorry I dont know much about this side of the engine.


I have heard before about mods being unable to add province expansions to the main world space cause the map wouldn't work, might want to look into that before you deem this possible. It would be sad if it was a problem, but most people find the in-game map fairly essential!



I presume your machine is fairly fast, but at the same time I dont think load times are something to worry about and by the time anything that used this would be released the average PC spec will be even higher, I am sure people would be happy to wait for the extra size =D

I'm really interested in what your doing here, great work so far! The tools are really impressive and its somewhere where the CS was severely lacking. Not wanting to be a pain, but with the way the CS is set up do you think it would be possible to set up a way to build region information into the map based on for instance a coloured BMP that went along with the heightmap? or is that all done by the CS and the information is only there for as long as it takes to "build" the regions (place models?) after your done?

I used the colored map from a mod and it works just fine in the 2x landscape. The used the default values for the image and doubled the values for the cells.

Could you make a seperate version that makes all objects normal sized, but the world is still huge?

It's not as simple as that. If you scale up the land, the points at which the objects were placed are moved, and the space in between each object is doubled. Imagine a wall, there will be a gap in between each wall mesh, so the only way to make it work is to double the size of the objects, so that they fit back together.

I'm pretty sure thats how it works, and I don't see a way around it, other than manually copying each city from the old small worldspace into the new one, though most things will look wierd, like the Imperial City on Lightwave's latest screenshots, it will be a tiny little city in the center of a big island, Bravil wont sit on it's islands right, the only other way to do it is to manually expand the cities to suit the new landscape, but that's a huge job for a big modding team.

What should be done when this is completed is to use the Region generator to refill the land with the same density as before.

Thanks for uploading it to TESNexus Lightwave, downloading it now. :foodndrink:

This should definitely should be done.

The 2x archive is on FileFront too. I'm on my 4th attempt uploading the 3x scale landscape to Filefront (over 400Mb) but the last attempt failed after over 4 hours, so if this one fails I'll have to start splitting them. Even if I do get the 4x world uploaded too, I think that'll be too ambitious to work with.


That won't do it since the real fog (the one that shows up on LOD) is controlled by the weather. e.g. If you try that weather ESP I linked to in my previous post or two the fog will roll back completely, leaving all the LOD land perfectly visible.

Yes, that appears to be what happens - since each mesh is a unique .NIF with the LOD2 system it exhausts this cache sometime after approx 2,000+ meshes, which sounds a lot, but this cache seems to be held over the entire worldspace 'session', so if you travel from one end of the land to the other and the limit is reached, no new LOD models will be displayed; only ones that may have been used previously.

As 0815Chris says the worldmap will work fine just by doubling the 4 cell co-ordinates (you can use the vanilla Cyrodiil map).

Btw, my PC is good but not great: Single-core Athlon64 4000+ (obsolete when I bought it for ?40 = US$80), 2Gb DDR400 RAM which is old technology and a 7900GTX (which is a good card, but not in the league of the 8800s). I prefer a good silent PC, always building my own, rather than a super-fast expensive noisy one. I don't even overclock anymore, maybe I'm getting old. The game barely takes any longer to start up with the 2x ESPs ticked for me, but the 3x makes a noticeable difference. I've also cheated on the .lod files: I used TES4qLOD's "make everything VWD" option so there's an lod entry one for every placed object on the landscape which is far more than necessary and won't help performance, even though I've barely noticed. The game will obviously only load any _fn files it finds and ignores the others. Considering all the city buildings are in the parent worldspace too it handles pretty well on my hardware. These shortcuts allow me to get test worldspaces up with LOD in record time. For example, there's probably half-a-dozen White Towers being displayed there, because each child worldspace has one. That's why you'll probably notice some shimmering when you get close caused by clipping of all those models. With a bit more care, things can only get better in that respect.

The quivering animation effect (just draw your weapon and watch your hand in first person mode) seems to become noticable between 30-40 cells from the world centre. It's the same game engine problem that affects Morrowind and shows up near Cyrodiil's east and west borders. The problem becomes slowly but progressively worse from the world-centre, so it's something else to consider when testing the landscapes; e.g. take a trip down to Anvil and see how it looks.

One last thing - it's well trying the 'default' weather (setweather 015E in the console) when you visit the worldspace - it's so much clearer (though the distant fog distance is the same) and also gives more more Morrowind style colouring - more fantastical than the drab-realism ones, with gorgeous pink sunrises in the mountains. You'll get nicer shots than anything I've posted with that. Oh, and a 2x Land Dreugh is one of the most intimidating things I've ever had to battle.

Lightwave

The 3x placed content ESP and LOD files are now up on FileFront: http://files.filefront.com/Tamrielx3+27z/;9067254;/fileinfo.html.
The 3x landscape ESP failed after a few hours yet again, I'll just have to split it and upload it in separate parts. :wacko:


For now though it is still possible to visit the 3x world and see how things would look with the uploaded file since all the buildings are there, as is the distant land and distant buildings. You'll have to fly around with clipping off though (tcl) since without the landscape ESP there's nothing to actually stand on yet. Ironically it's the exact opposite of what people usually get (close-up land, but no working LOD. )
The Tamrielx2 and Tamrielx3 mods ESPs cannot be loaded at the same time in the CS or game due to conflicting FormIDs - so make sure you untick whichever one you don't need.

I'd recommend renaming your existing Oblivion\Data\DistantLOD folder to something else then unarchiving the new one. It's not vital, but it will make it easier to remove later and also help in-game performance; the 3x landscape comes with over 100,000 .lod files and windows is pretty slow displaying folders with that many files.

Hmm I've been thinking about this for a while, If you really wanted a huge scale landscape with right sized chairs and such you could just resize the outside cells and leave the interiors alone seeing as thats where most of the clutter is. That way if you really wanted to make this into a viable mod you'd just have to work on the cities within the tamriel worldspace.

I've loaded the 2x Cyrodiil and had a look around, some of it looks great, but I'm getting weird lod in some of the quads, have you seen this before Lightwave? http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i201/Vality7/Screenshots/ScreenShot34-1.jpg

Would be nice to see the expanded landscape while maintaining barrel/box/houses/creatures normal size.

What about a 1.5x? Did you experiment with that?

The 3x landscape is also up on FileFront - I set off one last desperate attempt before going to bed. http://files.filefront.com/Tamrielx3+17z/;9068468;/fileinfo.html (416Mb). I'll update the post at the beginning of the thread.
You can load that with the placed content&LOD archive: http://files.filefront.com/Tamrielx3+27z/;9067254;/fileinfo.html (71Mb).

Yup, it's our old buddy the heightmap editor and its myriad of bugs - this one the stripifier bug, it somehow forgets how to join triangles and trashes every LOD quad you make thereafter unless you restart the CS. You'll see it down at Anvil and north of Chorrol - another reason why I'm writing my own mesh generator because unless you check each nif in NIFSkope after generation you won't realize you're wasting your time generating any more. The first time I generated the LOD in that area it worked fine (you can see from some of the 2x shots) - it's such a silly random memory bug. Anyway, in the end I decided there was enough LOD generated to decide how a 2D land feels. If you try regenerating the dodgy quads in the heightmap editor it'll probably work next time around.

I'll try a 2x horizontal and 1.5x height to see what people think of a less steep Cyrodiil. A non-integer horizontal scale means there will sometimes be too many textures to fit in a cell (which I explained in an earlier post) so I'll be avoiding that type of scaling.
Normal sized exterior clutter will be part of rebuilding better towns. The leveled creature scaling I'll fix before any proper mod work could start (as with interiors - I'll be wanting to include those too and at 1x scale of course, though 1.5x Ayleid ruins and caves could also be tested). The NPC size is already fixed at 1x for the 3x landscape.

There are also other things to consider; such as whether to use aspects of Oscuro's Oblivion overhaul to improve gameplay, such as removing/reducing the level scaling.