That's great and just in time for my mod installation. Thanks TNO for this awsome map mod. :clap: :celebration:

Concurred. This is fabulous work.

Now if we could just talk him into hiding the parts of the map we haven't been to yet. xD

I mentioned that there were some problems with the local map generation in terms of quality.

I've started pasting the maps together, but I'm not happy with the results.

Look at this http://i429.photobucket.com/albums/qq11/aellis-photos/Row-4.jpg.

Any Ideas on how to get better results?
I've got all my video settings at the highest for the map generation, but still get washed out areas and transparent rocks.
And the water ... Definite tiling noticeable.

Or just accept it and keep on pasting?

Not sure how you could get better results but most of your problems are also things I encountered in my MiniMap. The transparent/dark rocks and areas are because the object in question is beginning to fade out. But this 'status' is only updated when they are in your field of view, otherwise they keep whatever transparency/alpha they had the last time you looked at them. I think there are some ini settings you could try to either increase the range of visible objects or make it so that when they do begin to disappear they do so in one go (as opposed to slowly turning black).

The water issues are due to water reflections, disabling them should fix that. Another possible issue with water is that it can appear very shiny/glittering. This happens when the current weather has a high sunglare value. You'll probably wanna be sure you don't generate textures with a very bright weather. Else you get very tily water.

-kyoma

Here is the first UL local map, http://bettercities.free.fr//UniqueLandscapes/Maps/UL-AncientRedwoods.7z. Filesize (26mb) is rising! But then this UL does edit 122 cells in a 12 by 14 grid. If aellis' Valenwood map is going to be a PSD, it'll be well over 100mb I should think.



I would suggest trying again to get the CS to output the files, it does produce better quality - it also has greater fade distances for objects, so that they shouldn't turn black or grey or simply not appear at all. Although you are doing a good job with the trees appearing, I've found that it's a bit messy to get them to appear in every cell, at least on my PC.

http://bettercities.free.fr/Maps/BC_LocalMaps.7z TheNiceOne, all the ones I'd previously uploaded are replaced by this archive, with the trees visible and the water layers more accurate.

These files are for TheNiceOne, anyone can download them but they're useless to anybody else! These are NOT files which will work with Dynamic Map in their current form.

WOOT!!!

Thanks kyoma. Your advice spurred me to play with the ini and video settings again.
I found a good combination.
This last batch had no smudges, no transparent rocks, and the water came out a nice evenly colored blue!
I should have this all peiced together by the weekend.

Thanks for the files Vorians.

I'm still busy with RL for a few days, but will start pasting it together ASAP.

And I'm looking forward to your contribution too, aellis.

Here's the second UL, http://bettercities.free.fr//UniqueLandscapes/Maps/UL-AncientYews.7z.


aellis, what INI edits did you make to assure the water appears smoothly? I'd like to try generating the local map pieces in-game to see how it compares to using the CS.

First, I don't know if these settings actually did / do something. They just seemed appropriate.


uGridDistantCount=13 <<<< This was to make the coverage of the VI mod easy
uGridsToLoad=13

iPreloadSizeLimit=52428800
bDoTallGrassEffect=0
iAutoViewMinDistance=6000
fFarDistance=20000.0000
iMaxDecalsPerFrame=20
fNoLODFarDistanceMin=100.0000
fGrassStartFadeDistance=0.0
fGrassEndDistance=0.0
iAutoViewMinDistance=100
bUseWaterReflectionsMisc=0
bUseWaterReflectionsStatics=0
bUseWaterReflectionsTrees=0
bUseWaterReflectionsActors=0
bUseWaterReflections=0
bUseWaterHiRes=0

In game, before loading, I set all the video sliders to zero and turned off all the options.

After loading the game and coc to the designated cell, open the console and FW 38eec (set weather to overcast). Exit the console and re-enter the console and type the map command. All the cells in a ugrids X ugrids square will get mapped with your coc cell as the center cell.

http://i429.photobucket.com/albums/qq11/aellis-photos/VIMap.jpg

Question for you, TheNiceOne, I'm wrapping things up with the next MiniMap version and I'm thinking of how to best implement support for Dynamic Map. More specifically how I should read/copy the data of each sub-map. I can probably read it from the xml but I'm not sure if that is accurate enough. Also, I have to admit I haven't taken a real good look at the internals of your mod so I might be able to read stuff from the script itself.

Ohhhh, that is better!

-kyoma

Any chance you could post a description of how you do it? If so, I could make an attempt for Bartholm.


I think the xml should be accurate enough. Each component contains exact position/size settings

	<_x> 0 	<_y> 0 	<_w> 0 	<_h> 0 	<_z> 1 

...which is the exact position and size on a 100% zoomed map - in addition to the derived x/y/width/height/zoom settings.

Not sure exactly what info you want, but I am happy to help

I guess that would work, although this way I'd have to 'wait' for Dynamic Map to update its data before I update mine. Then again, this probably won't be noticable. Anyway, I assume those traits are static (as in, they aren't updated/changed when you change zoom or something)? And their exact position will already be according to the worldmap data, right? :unsure:

I'd love a user function (which I'd get with GetFormFromMod) that duplicates your submaps data array directly though.

Actually it isn't an OBSE command, it's vanilla.



Thanks
Which site did you use to get an explanation of each setting you tweaked? The site I favour doesn't list most of these, mainly because they're not performance related. Also, you listed iAutoViewMinDistance twice, with different settings!
When you create your ESP with the cells named, you could also force the weather to be always only overcast.

I'm bemused that you set the view distance for objects to 0 for everything, why didn't that cause everything to disappear?

EDIT
Curious results. The local map tiles this output included the expected area as covered by ugridstoload, but it very carefully excluded every single cell edited by the mod I wanted to get the tiles for! Only the tiles within the ugrid radius but not edited by the mod were exported. Most surprising.
EDIT2
Mystery solved, it placed the other parts into a different folder.

Learn something new everyday ... Thought the output command was OBSE.

I didn't try to look for explanations. I just tried different settings for entries that seemed appropriate for viewing distance.

As to iAutoViewMinDistance twice, didn't realize I had different values and it's listed twice in the ini.

Setting objects to 0 removed the transparent / shadowy rocks and such that weren't VWD.

Thanks for the tip about setting the wether n the esp. Totally missed that possibility.

You'll want to change uNumDepthGrids to 1 for creating local maps, otherwise some water cells will contain transparent water (due to the increased ugridstoload).
I do prefer the results of the in-game local map creation over CS creation, because it hides all the x-markers, map markers, activator boxes, collision boxes, sound markers etc. along with the water being included. It's also quicker at generating the local map than the CS, and is capable of mapping more cells in one go than the CS.

Do you know about the coe console command? Instead of coc, you can use coe to go to specific cells, e.g.
coe 22,13
This will save having to edit cell names before loading the game. This is my preferred teleport command, but you might be quite happy with coc of course.

I experienced one strange error while using this mod (it's never appeared before i installed this mod) but i'm not really sure if it has something to do with this mod.
when opening the map, my screen became all black, then oblivion showed up in a windowed mode, but the screen was all black. my computer didn't respond to anything, except for CTRL + ALT + DEL, so i had to quit the game. i have had this for like three times now, in only 3 days.
is there a possibility that this is caused by Dynamic Map?

Interesting anomaly showing up in the game. I dropped a copy of (DC) Sutch Reborn.esp in to look up a formID for the city faction. Left the file sitting in the Data folder when I was done. It's *NOT* active in the game, however when I go to pull up the map, the map addition for Sutch has been added to the display. Still using OBSE 0019b for the moment, but I find this odd to say the least. Deleting the ESP returns to normal and the map slice is no longer displayed.

vorians and aellis: Thanks for your continuing work to create map components, and to find the best way of doing it


Dynamic Map does update the xml on the fly as it reads the ini file, so there's no faster way to do it than reading from the xml. One alternative is of course that you create a function in your MiniMap mod, that DM calls just after having created the map components. That way you don't have to wonder whether DM has been initlialized or not - but that function must work even when called before MiniMap has been initliazed, so coordinating the isn't that easy.

You can call GetFormFromMod directly on my array_var too, can't you? But I don't create a submap data array, I just build the xml directly and then completely forgets about the submap elements. The only array I build, is an array consisting of all worldspaces that are initialized through the ini (for now, only 1). The submap xml copies zoom and set visibility based on a few traits in their parent element, which is defined in the tnoDMrect.xml file.


I cannot imagine how DM can cause this, but it is of course a possibility. But to me it sounds like there is another Windows process that gets focus for a moment, that causes it.


Ah, thanks. The cause is the "or_mod" variable that is used for "Open Cities Reborn - Full Merge.esp". I have forgot to reset it after each submap component initialzisation, so Sutch is visible since you have "Open Cities Reborn - Full Merge.esp" installed - or at least that's what I think is the cause (and will be the cause for similar errors). To fix it, just add set tnoDM.or_mod to sv_Construct "" after the OCR block in Dynamic Map.ini. But I will fix it properly for next release.

Could the map pieces also be saved in a compressed format? There is a very noticeable delay as the map loads with all the files uncompressed.

I must find out how to get the engine to use low-res versions for players with medium or small texture size first. Because compressed files turn out as garbage when viewed with medium/small texture size setting.

But the delay is there only the first time you open the world map, isn't it?

Yes, but it took so long a couple of times I almost thought the game locked up.

I noticed this aswell, however when used together with MiniMap and changing the MiniMap - World.ini to read from Dynamic Map's map (it was either that or install elven map redux to get the elven map to show up on minimap for the time being) it seems to load a lot faster, I suppose that is because it does the initial loading when minimap is loading upon loading up the save.

that sounds reasonable. but like i said, it started happening after installing Dynamic Maps at moments i open up the map, but not everytime i open the map...

Doesn't setting ugridstoload to a higher number introduce the 'mexican jumping bean' bug?