Any way to accurately measure distance in the GECK?
I am fine tuning weapon ballistics, and in order to properly dial in my Mildot scope and bullet drop I need to find a reasonably flat area 300 yards long to use as a range.

Would also appreciate any suggestions on good locations to site my range.

Do you really need a range or just to test this distance against a target? Console commands can do a lot..

If its just distance - - find yourself an enemy in the wasteland, set "getrestrained 1" on it from the console, then walk away from it, then use "getdistance player" on it to see what it says. You'd then keep moving to the distance you want. I do not know how getdistance's output translates into yards but maybe you do.

if you really needed a range, assuming there is some object to shoot at in the range, you could use a similar technique - - getdistance player should work on kinda anything. You can also do "prid ********" (the object's REF ID) and then do "getdistance player", and you'd see how far you are from without needing to click it with your mouse.

The game uses the same scale as Oblivion... so 128 units is 6 feet, or 64 units is 1 yard. 300 yards is 19200 units. 19200 units is roughly 4 and a half cells wide. This is where the problem exists...

By default, the game only acknowledges the area within a 3 cell radius around the player as being active. Or, with the player being in cell X, only the O cells would be active and thus registered as having anything other than LOD terrain. Things located in the @ cells don't truely exist yet.
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You can change this within your .ini to change the active area from a 5x5 grid to the 9x9 grid you would need in order to have the entire 300 yard distance around the player active (and thus existing). But this can cause some significant memory and framerate issues. As for seeing a target within this area, you have another problem. By default the maximum fade distance is about 6000 units away from the player in any direction. This is the maximum distance that any actor will be visible on the horizon. Although this too can be adjusted within the .ini, you have even more significant performance issues as you are now rendering far more objects than previously. Additionally, none of the vanilla scopes can zoom in far enough to distinguish a target 15000 units away as it's not really magnifying the distant object, but instead is just making the rendered image larger.

Even if you could find a reasonably flat, non-obstructed area the degree to which you would need to adjust how the game works in order to replicate the values would be just too far beyond what anyone would probably be using, especially when you consider that NPCs within the loaded area have a tendency to run to their death if there are any hostiles within that area.

In short, accuracy and realism might be great, but you would need to both create a situation which doesn't exist, and then calibrate your weapon around that situation that doesn't exist so that it can be used in a situation which will never happen in normal play. For all intents and purposes, anything on a scale larger than 100 yards (6400 units) away is just impractical, and most fired projectiles will show almost no drop in such a short distance.

Aha, I didn't realize how far away he was talking about. 4+ cells away, ow.

Thanks for the info Vagrant, though I must say it's dissappointing to hear. :nope:
Most sniper rifles will actually fire a couple of inches high at 100 yards, and at that range a man-sized target would be about 3 times larger than the MilDot reticle. It really makes the sniper rifle a bit of a joke.
Hell, even 300 yards is still comfortably within the range of a decent battle rifle with ironsights!
I will have to give this some thought.
I'd like to at least simulate the flavor of range finding and calculating shot drop using a Mildot, but it looks like I may have to truncate the actual ranges by a least a third to accomplish this, e.g. calibrate the scope, round velocity, and shot drop to simulate 450 yard values, but within a 150 game yard range.
A bit of a fudge, but it might be worth a try to spice up the sniping a bit.
Any change from the vanilla has to be a step in the right direction!

Nevermind. I was wrong. "A good thing to remember while you're getting used to units - the player is 128 units tall, or about six feet."

I am noticing that Actors seem to fade from view around 6300 units (just under 300 feet) though they are still clearly visible through the scope.
I would like to dial this up to 400 feet (about 8500 units). Which setting do I need to change to do this?

Also It seems that the scopes only allow increase of magnification up to an FOV of 10. Is that the limit?
Setting values lower than this seems to result in no magnification at all. Any way around this?

Many thanks for any assistance.

thats a player graphics setting...... so kinda, not possible to mod in. You can change the actor and object view distance and stuff.

Where can I change those settings?

You pause, then click settings, then Video.... >.>