Hello! Let me first say a few things about myself, if you are interested in the problem only please scroll to next paragraph marked Problem. I am a bit new to the Oblivion modding scene itself. Not because I never wanted to get into it but because I have never had a computer even close enough to do it. I barely have a computer that can run the game right now at all and I am trying to mod to the best of my abilities. I have modded many other games including Morrowind in the past and would describe myself as a resourceful intuitive 'tinkerer' but in no way would I call myself educated (e.g. Computer Science graduate or self taught talent). I can barely script but I can find my way around. Enough about myself...

Preface to Problem:
Mods that may effect or contribute to desired outcome and currently employed:
- Darnified
- Streamline
- Oblivion Stutter Remover
- OBGE
(I have many other mods employed when launching Oblivion that may effect the outcome that I overlooked. If you would like me to make a full list I can)

Problem:
While successfully creating a large .dds world map (without MIP maps) I have attempted to load this map into Oblivion but it crashes when loading the map itself.
Current Map Resolution: 11837 x 8856
Current Map Size: 409487 KB (409 MBS)
Compression: None*
*This may be my problem for the crash, however compression will annul the end result so I would still like advice. See 'Desired Results'.

Desired Results: Have oblivion launch the map without any texture quality loss in any method available.

Notes from modder:

This file was much more difficult to make than I initially thought it would be. First I noticed that the current .dds tools available are outdated for the most part and many of them need old operating systems or old software to use. I have been using Photoshop CS5 Extended for much of my textural work but the .dds tool refuses to work properly. After downloading and trying several third party programs and having them fail I finally found a solution with GIMP. It actually loaded the BMP that I had the file stored as and converted it to a DDS successfully (without compressing and without MIP-mapping).

The reason I want to make such a large file is for image quality itself because I noticed that even if I had a nice high definition image I couldn't get the game to load it properly (which may be related to Darnified UI. I have explored his scripts and found the mapscale "zoom" but it doesn't actually effect picture quality in game just how close to the picture it will get. Perhaps there is a picture quality script I am unaware of?). My solution to this was to increase the map size by 3x and try to test and see if Oblivion will load the larger picture and I could scale back the zoom to achieve the results I want, but alas Oblivion isn't interested in large pictures (or Windows Explorer I have found out xD).

The picture itself isn't really of grandiose quality what-so-ever. It's just very large as in it is covering a lot of space as a conventional map. It's a map of all of Tamriel based on Onra's Tamriel Heightmaps (http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27235). I would find it difficult to believe that there isn't any way to get this map onto the screen at a high resolution. If both Photoshop and Gimp can allow me to load the image and successfully look at it without crashing my operating system I think there must be a way to get this thing to load up. That or increase the quality of the image without actually increasing resolution (then I could perhaps scale it down 30 or 40%).

All help is much appreciated.

Afterthoughts:

I should have a perfectly working .esp to load the map in. I have the correct pixel specifications (although the cells are not correctly aligned) and I have hex-edited the 'esp' so that the correct file path will be used.

-Seven

Seven, although there may be other issues, I believe your image size is wrong. Although I haven't tried to make a map for Oblivion, every other place where a .dds file is used in Oblivion requires the dimensions of the image in pixels to be powers of two (256 by 512, 4096 by 128, etc.). I believe this is the reason for the crashes.

Once solution would be to use a blank image 16,384 by 16,384 with you original map centered in it. If that doesn't crash your system, you've learned something. For a regular mesh, it's possible to have a power of two blank image with a smaller, non-power of two image in it, and UV map it so only the actual image is mapped to the mesh. I can't tell you about the Oblivion reference map, but there are several alternate map mods available that you can study to see how those modders solved the problem. Good luck.

Thank you for the advice! I actually tried that and it is needed if you are going to compress the file I believe (it must be a multiple of 4 for a DXT5 compression). I have actually gotten a picture to load of a certain size, but after a certain size it gets transparent and blue which is rather odd. I must admit I have kind of given up on this part of my project for the moment as it is so frustrating to me and I don't have the technical know how to troubleshoot it. It's just not working properly even with the proper compression methods.

Although I will try putting blank images in there I haven't tried that yet. That is a good idea. Thank you!