Cyrodiil scaled to 2x and 3x the original scale


Background

It has long been a gripe of many that Cyrodiil is just too small, the cities are mere villages and a 10 minute trek from the capital takes you to the edge of the visitable world. Compared to TES3: Morrowind, the playable game size of the original TES4: Oblivion is virtually identical, which means the landscape was created approx 2.5x-3x too small and broke the size relationships in the lore maps. This has been exacerbated since the TES4: Vvardenfell project got under way which also scales the gameworld from Morrowind by 2x (some random land screenies http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/2x2/index.html and with buildings in http://www.silgrad.com/wbb2/thread.php?threadid=8021&page=2).

These are fully visitable 100 and 250 square mile landscapes with all the city buildings in the main worldspace (so you'll have to toggle off clipping to move through city walls and explore inside the towns). Everything exterior - including child worldspaces and all placed objects and NPCs - are 2x or 3x the original scale. This doesn't include interiors or any door links, so it is provided for fun, testing and/or as as modding resource.

Its goal is to test the plausibility of 2x/3x scaled up Cyrodiil worldspaces; i.e. does it still look realistic, or does it look like a giant's land instead? To my eye the land looks fine; road widths are fine (and probably still too narrow for an Imperial capital province) and mountain scales stretch more realistically in to the distance, reaching up to 1.5km in the 2x landscape, 2.25km on 3x. The double scaling offers 4x more playable surface area and 4x more space to rebuild a city. The triple scaling offers 9x as much space. The current giant architecture (and accidentally scaled giant NPCs which are obviously wrong) are just there to aid your bearings and a consequence of everything else being scaled and placed at the same time (including trees, rocks etc); the idea would be to replace them entirely with more bigger towns, more streets, more atmosphere, so please don't complain about them.

I don't know how much interest there is in someone starting up a mod and rebuilding the cities so consider this a 'feeler'. I'll contact Cryonaut, the modder that first seriously asked the question about scaling and see if he's still interested in starting such a project. Theoretically it would be possible to link the exteriors back to interiors and possibly (though not much fun) to scale up the AI package and script co-ordinates; if so it would be possible to scale the original game (including storyline)

The size of this mod is impossible to achieve using just the Construction Set, so I've written 3 programs to aid the purpose; TESAnnwyn (for importing/exporting textured heightmaps), TES4Scale (for importing placement data from one worldspace to another worldspace at a different scale) and TES4qLOD (for quickly generating DistantLand LOD textures and VisibleWhenDistant LOD object files). For the curious, here are some statistical comparisons between the two worldspaces:



In the meantime, have some fun with it. A readme is also included. You'll probably have to toggle off AI (tai in the console) if you experience sudden unexplained lags; I think the AI packages on many NPCs are still trying to get them back to the original Tamriel worldspace. I've also generated a textured 4x landscape with all the placed content, I'm just programming the LOD for it. I tried an untextured 4x world in February and that also worked fine, but it was huge - the tallest mountain was 3km and it took over 15 mins just to descend the mountains on horse. Something that big could be too tedious to play and too arduous a task to mod.

Lightwave

* edit * Added more download links.

Getting a 404 erroe on download link, am I to early?

Yup, it's failed randomly once at about 80%. Currently it's on 23% again. The trouble with free upload sites ... I'll post when it's available, or I might have to split the LOD files in to a separate archive instead ...

It'd certainly be interesting to see the end result of making everything 'fit' into a larger world. I'll have to keep an eye on this one.

It says that its still uploading. Seems very interesting cant wait to test it for myself.

Edit: Guess i got beat to it.

Create an account at filefront, it is free and has a 1 gig file limit great place to upload larger files, here is a reg link:

http://register.filefront.com/

also use 7z to break up the files into smaller (50 meg limit) packages and upload them to texnexus.

Buddah

Oh wow... Id love this mod but... how compatible is it with... any other mod? Mainly the big ones but any mod that alters landscape seems like it would mess this up.

assuming I wanted to mess around with it Id have to disable all other mods right?

Interesting but it's not compatible with other mods right?

Like the OP said, this is more a proof of concept, so no, this isn't going to be playable (in the general sense) much less compatible with other things. This is pretty amazing though. It'd be fun to see what the community could do with this. Scale has always been a gripe for me, not just for Oblivion but for RPGs in general.

Very amazing :goodjob:

Too bad you can't just use this to double the world size and still have everything else work

I really wished Bethesda would have done that right from the beginning. The world is so crowded and small, there is no feeling of really exploring the landscape. The layout of the heightmap makes it even worse - everywhere you are you can see that stupid white tower and have a measure for how small Cyrodiil really is. I walk the distance from Jerall mountains to IC each day when I go out with my dog - when I'm lazy. Kills immersion a bit for me and I really can't see a reason why they did it that way. Well I can, but I better keep it to myself. :flamethrower:

Looks great, nice to see how it could have been.

wow, the land looks amazing. it would be SOOOOO cool if someone (or actualy multiple someones) could be willing to do the work to remake cyrodiil with land like this (but regulard size tables ). that would be an insta-download if i ever saw one.

A 4x world would be simply perfect, but it would take too much time to fill it adequately.
But even a 2x world is nice. If someone wants to do this, I can be of help too.

Incredible. If someone could make an actual mod like this, I'd dl in a heartbeat. If you need help making this, I could probably teach myself to mod given a day or two.

I'm a very very poor/inexperienced modder, but I'd be willing to devote some hours, or even some hours a day, to helping, if I could get specific input on what someone wanted me to do. Interior/exterior static placements in a child-world, my computer could handle. Perhaps even more, but I don't know. Let me know if someone starts this and wants me to do anything.

I would love this. Though the 2x scale objects might be a little awkward... Id prefer just the land.

I really like the concept of this, and it makes a lot of sense. Vaardenfell in Morrowind is approximately the same size as Cyrodil is in Oblivion, but Vaardenfell should actually only be the size of one county in Cyrodil (for example, the Colovian Highlands). So this is exactly what should've been done: Cyrodil should;ve been made larger.

Yeah, Echonite is right. only the land should be at the 2X scale

My normal upload site was directly linked to my ISP and contained no ads, but they've just been bought out by the worst ISP company in the UK (Tiscali) so bang goes reliability - download failed at 95% this time. It already is a 7z and is uploading to filefront now too, but still has over 2 hours left ... ^_^

This mod is neither compatible nor incompatible with any other mods; the worldspace is entirely separate to Tamriel (it's called Tamrielx2) so you can flit between the original Cyrodiil and the scaled up one at your pleasure using the console, though I would advise against saving any gamesaves at this stage as it may taint them. It's also separated in to two files:


Both use modindex 00 FormIDs in a range well isolated between Oblivion.esm and anything TESAnnwyn/TES4Gecko will use. This means the ESPs can reference one another without requiring masters, which is OK for testing.

Btw, the reason for the 2x scale on everything is that if you use 1x scale on placed objects, all building segments become horribly disconnected and most objects float above the ground meaning you have to re-populate the 100 square miles from scratch, which makes converting them at all pointless. At 2x scale you can just delete the cities and recreate them in the render window; same goes for anything else that looks wrong when scaled. There is a slight quirk where the entire landscape is actually 1.8metres (one heightmap point) too far east, something that's barely noticeable most of the time. But just occasionally on some peaks you may notice a slight gap between a tree and rock or the ground; it's a quirk of TESAnnwyn, but something I can easily compensate for with TES4Scale by regenertaing the data (it takes approx 2.5 hours for it assemble the ESP). The NPCs definitely shouldn't be scaled at all though, but it doesn't matter for testing.


You'll be pleased to know that the IC disappears from view before you even get to any snowy areas.

Whilst that's finishing uploading, I'll scale the heightmap and texture maps to 3x and re-import them, which could be fun, though the ESP will probably be nearly 600Mb ...

Lightwave

*edit* Woops, 600Mb, not 600Gb.

It does look extraordinary - but would it conflict with every other mod?

Wow! A Scaled up Cyrodill is what I've wanted since I first played Oblivion. Even with the great overhaul mods the games pitiful scale kills immersion for me. I'd be interested in seeing some screenshots from your 3X scale experiment also.

It sounds like it's in a new worldspace, so I'm guessing it won't conflict with much if anything.

Awesome work Lightwave can't wait to test it out!


600 GB?

To make Cyrodil larger, why not just scale down the player char, NPCs, and creatures?

Then the grass would be twice the size. My guess is that with this mod, the grass is about one of the only things that stays it's original size.

Are you a mad scientist irl?

Wow, really cool stuff there! gonna have to reinstall oblivion for this one! So with the updated oblivion its possible to have working terrain to the limits of the CS, which if my past research is correct, 4x oblivion scale is the max you can do? even if your tool could do more that would be the engine limits right? does the CS now work with landscapes that big? would it technically be possible to get rid of the trees and regenerate them to sit on the land and not be as sparse as they no doubt are? Level scaling and the small feeling world were two of the main things that totally put me off oblivion as a game.