My first real Oblivion mod (I have done minor things in the past, but nothing considerable). I have modded for other games and even Morrowind in the past. The most notable thing about modding a Bethesda game will be the provided utilities, most of the time I must resort to more dubious practices to make a modification to a game.

What I would like to do:

After testing Lightwave's Cyrodiilx2 mod and realizing the potential for a 'bigger Oblivion' I am really interested in successfully making Tamriel at least twice as large as it was before, and perhaps even 3 times as large.



This is not my first mod, and in fact I have been modding games for a long time since I was young in usually small ways. I can say I have taken up a number of big projects and done a lot of work on them (3 or 400 hours being my most extensive work on a single mod to date), and I can say I know what is in store for me by deciding to do this. I have not finished a large mod for the same reasons many others do not, but at I am well aware of why. I also understand how much work this would actually be.

I would like to use Onra's "Under the sign of the dragon - Tamriel Heightmaps -" as a base map (increasing it's size by at least two times) and then importing all of the objects into the worldspace as needed.

I am not interested in porting the vanilla cities to the x2 or x3 maps. The reason being I don't use them myself because there are mods that greatly improve their appearance (Better Cities being one of them). I also use clocks of Cyrodiil. The main problem I see with porting these cities into x2 and x3 is the unwritten permissions rule to use other persons mods (including my desire to use Onra's for the base heightmaps). What exactly is the rule about this? I do not see myself as being a big project leader with this thing and getting professional and business-like, so if it's a big hassle to get the permissions I need I may never release this publicly.

Also if anybody has recommended reading or advice that would be great. It seems TES CS is a powerful tool and it will be a while before I really learn it's ins and outs.

If your at all interested in at least the idea of making Cyrodiil much larger then shoot me a PM. I really can't say how long it will take, but I'm not going to be importing the quests until dead last (as I am least interested in quests). I will first do Objects>NPCs>Pathing>AI>Quest-related.

Anyways this is my dumb thread to get advice and see if anybody else is interested in working on this.

Cheers

Save and back up often. That's ultimately the absolute best advice I can give you - seriously. back it up on a separate drive or USB.

Do you mean you want to make Onra's heightmaps (all of Tamriel) even larger?
Or do you mean you just want to make Cyrodiil larger, so that it scales with the other provinces?

I would actually like to do both, but I am as we speak quadrupling the original tamriel.esp (Tamriel worldspace) and testing it out to see if it's "too big". If it is really noticeably too big I will test out a x3 version and will probably use it. As for the latter question, I am not interested in doing the work involved to rescale Cyrodiil to match the other heightmaps. This is a job for somebody else. If that somebody else is going to do it I hope they announce it or do it soon because I am already going through my conceptual testing right now so once I finish that and actually start doing work on the mod I won't be looking back.

So the answer to the second question is no and the first question yes.

Cheers

I'm not sure I understand. You are going to scale the whole world map, but not Cyrodiil?
Then Cyrodiil is going to be even more disproportionate.

I'm thinking you mean you are making a new world space as a foundation for others to rebuild all the provinces?

Sorry I'm not good at explaining things colloquially. I will just tell you exactly what I am doing:
{
I am exporting all world map information contained in the "tamriel.esp" from Onra's "Under the sign of the dragon - Tamriel Heightmaps -" which should include all provinces (if not I will have to include the other .esps and redo this thing).

I am quadrupling all dimensions of the heightmap, vertex color maps, and the texture placement maps using Lightwave's "TESAnnwyn" (brilliant utility).

I am then importing these new dimensions (at least x4 of the original dimensions defined in Onra's tamriel.esp) into a new functional .esp.

The end product will be a map that is four times the original size.
}

So yes, on a level of scale the other provinces will be even larger than Cyrodiil than before but hopefully that will be a good thing yet and not a bad one. I wish I had the desire to redo all the Cyrodiil heightmaps to scale myself but I really don't. I am not that interested in the land proportionate lore of TES (no offense to anybody else, but TES lore isn't very interesting to me at all. I prefer Tolkien. What can I say I'm jaded.) If I was interested I would do it but I'm not.

What I am interested in is making the actual space feel real. I like realism whenever it can be applied and after testing the Cyrodiilx2 scale I was completely sold. I could play the game giving up 90% of my mods and want to play Oblivion more if the scale was larger. So here I am trying to accomplish it.

Just a caution that there will be a number of mods that won't be compatible with this. It may not matter for your purposes, but Onra is trying to fix the issues that his mod has revealed. The conflicts are not obvious - they don't have anything to do with mods that do anything with worldspaces.

I think my 4x upload (with all placed objects, creatures and possibly NPCs) has long disappeared from upload sites. The heightmap was about 1Gb and AFAIR it took Oblivion about 1 min 30 to start which would be very tedious to test with. Also the CS couldn't generate DistantLand LOD in the mountains (even at 3x the CS fails in the snowy mountains to the north) and I never managed to configure the game to display many more DistantLand LOD quads, so it wasn't possible to appreciate the true epic scale of the land. 3x worked fairly well though, and it's 9x the surface area of the original land.

I thought 3x was a lot more manageable, quicker to load and test (maybe 20-30 secs to load up the game), most the DistantLand LOD would work and the landscape still felt epic.

If you still wish it, I can probably re-upload the 4x landscape. But I'm not up to date on things (haven't done anything with TES for nearly 2 years). Has Onra completely changed the heightmap too, or mostly just redesigned the placed objects and city spaces?

If anyone is serious about taking on a larger Cyrodiil (e.g. 3x) they'd best not worry about other people's mods(!) The scale speaks for itself, and a working project (which in many ways my original exports were a good start) would likely inspire some people to copy their mods across, but it shouldn't be a pre-requisite, you'll never please everybody.

For anyone that hadn't seen them all them years way back when, both size test worlds went up 3 years ago (scary!!! ). The 2x landscape was http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/Tamrielx2/index.html. The 3x worldspace http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/Tamrielx3/index.html

Lightwave

Jeebus! .... Back in my day, eveyone's first mod was either a recolour, an uber stat weapon or armour, or a buster sword.

I feel old.

Sorry to break it to you, but no, you do not understand how much work this will be. The amount of work that it will take to redo Cyrodiil at 4x is already suicidally huge, and all of Tamriel (which is already scale 2x in Onra's heightmaps in comparison to Cyrodiil) is infinite. Infinite. As in it can't be done. Running the region generation for an 4x Cyrodiil alone would take several dozen hours. Remaking the cities, plus making new interiors for the cities/towns/dungeons will be 4 times as much work as it took to create the original Cyrodiil. When you add quests and NPCs into the mix - which won't be a simple copy/paste due to AI issues - you're looking at something thats nearly unimaginably huge. None of the current mods or vanilla content will work in a 4x Cyrodiil - everything has to be redone from scratch. You're looking at 6 years of work with a professional team at a professional schedule for Cyrodiil alone here. Furthermore, when you get far enough from 0,0 the engine starts having serious issues, including stuttering and objects randomly jumping in place. Its very annoying, and impossible to fix without re-writing the engine. Cyrodiil alone at 4x will run into these issues, and all of Tamriel will go so far beyond them that I seriously doubt it will work at all.

Which leads me to ask: why? Yes, Cyrodiil could use more area, but is all of Tamriel at 4x really necessary? If you want more land, I'd develop something for Onra's maps. If you want a bigger Cyrodiil, I'd go 3x at the absolute most (and I would already consider that pretty crazy).

Good luck, a total conversion of cyrodil on much larger worldspace with actual large plains were something i have been hoping for, a longtime.

This depends on perspective ... for me Oblivion felt like living in a snow globe.

Jitters are a problem and they're even there in stock Oblivion - it's even noticeable down in Anvil.

Perfection is simply impossible with a very imperfect game engine, so the final result has to include some tolerance; and everyone's varies. Each human has different perspectives on what detracts or adds to a life experience, and hence what's important in a mod. Some people prefer highly detailed small areas, great attention to individual design, detail, lighting, beauty and artistry. My perspective has always been towards grandness, openness, freedom and the epic. Perhaps I'm just paying more attention to the destinations than the journey. But I believe it's always possible to go back and improve on places that are bothersome when you've already got good underlying scale, and it helps that Bethesda have already done the meshes. I never liked the claustrophobia of Oblivion, yet when a scaled world just feels so ... right, and does the landscape more justice. And I honestly felt the scaled exteriors only became a detracting problem in 3rd person mode and in first person tress and rocks at 2x, 3x are just as they often are in real life; big.

And I'd argue a pre-scaled mod like this is more rewarding than a start-from-scratch mod; you can immediately appreciate your own changes amongst an already 'complete' landscape without the daunting prospect of how many more times you're going to have to keep re-doing this. I feel the key is to work on it as a personal project and let other's take areas if they feel the urge - e.g. Vality7's Dawn of Oblivion (Cyrodiil recreated in TES3: Morrowind) - that was a grand personal mod which he didn't expect help on - hoped maybe, but never expected, he just got on with it (and others did join for parts). Be wise about what's reasonable for you to achieve, experiment at the extremes of the world (high in the mountains with LOD) and see how problematic/or not the issues are for you. And not worry too much about the other opinions over timescales and detail, but don't despair if few people or no-one aids you. I'm sure they'd still try playing it.

Unfortunately I broke TES4Scale badly in my rewriting and haven't touched it for 3 years, I also got really frustrated with the game engine's limitations and felt I was constantly jumping through hoops to find a way around them, and some were simply too fundamental to the game. I just wanted a better working world so anyone could also start modding. That program was designed to link scaled exteriors to normal scale cloned interiors, preserve scaled regions, clone NPCs, dialogue and scripts etc. It was more advanced than scaled re-positioning of the original version (i.e. the mod files I uploaded in 2007) - it might have resulted in a fully scaled Oblivion.esm, albeit needing some tweaking to AI paths etc.

I kinda feel a bit sad I had to give up on it, but hey.

Lightwave