ok...here we go....the first heightmap 8 Blackmarsh)

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=27235


please use the mirrors as long as it is not possible to upload the files on Nexus....


have fun


http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/27235-1-1259339904.jpg

Well that's nice. Awesome picture. Thank you. That's my evening taken care of.

(S'lider skips round the room like a little girl, singing a happy song. The other members of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee exchange worried glances.)

I'd love to see that. It would have fitted perfectl? in a Monty Python sketch. Oh, a new part avaialble. Weee, off to download. Nice work, onra. :goodjob:

if you use my ships this depends on windspeed and ship model. may be 10 or 20 minutes real time?

Anyone have any input on load order? Especially in regard to other heightmap adding mods? I know it's early after release, but I thought I'd put it out there at an early stage.

Thanks! It's in-game time I was curious about (at vanilla timescale of 1 to 30). So that works out at... 5 or 10 hours. Wow, no time at all. Tamriel is so small in TES4.

set as high as possible in your load order...this will allow other mods ( taking place near the cyrodiil border) to overwrite it if necessary...

Excellent!

You my friend are a genious!

Honestly, I'm very surprised this hasn't been done yet. But perhaps it's much more complicated than I think.
It only makes sense to allow a modular resource playground for modders to build on. With this, all of Tamriel
could be built out region by region! Maybe the UL crew will take an interest! Who knows? But If there were
a future for TES IV's expandability and replay value, it's starting here with your work.

Any chance some nice soul could upload the Blackmarsh Heightmap somewhere else, trying to download it from 4shared at 3-5kbs and it constantly fails on me at about 30%

but...wont this make the other provinces as small as Cyrodiil?

like i would be able to see Rimmen from Senschal for example? doesnt sound much fun.

I've just spent a couple of hours running around Blackmarsh, here's my impressions-

I started at Meredin (spelling?) the HQ of The Stranded Light (bg2308's mod) because I could fast travel there, it's right up against the Cyrodiil/Blackmarsh border, and I was worried that the Blackmarsh mod may have funked up the terrain around the place. I'm pleased to report that the Stranded Light HQ is all present and correct.

From there I headed roughly south wast into the heart of Blackmarsh. The transition is seamless, no loading screens or anything, the landscape just continues.

I travelled SE through terrain similar to that due east of Leyawiin until I guessed I was half way into Blackmarsh, ie I was half way between the Cyrodiil border and the edge of my in game map. This proved to be a laughable underestimate.

By this time I was actually starting to get freaked out by the emptiness, (more on this below). I summoned a companion for company.

I play with eat/drink/sleep mods but don't have any portable camping equipment. I realised that I needed this stuff, so exited the game and downloaded the Portable Enchanted Tent mod, for somewhere to sleep, but also (I'm serious) somewhere to hide from the big bad wilderness.

The next day (in game) i headed south east. off the edge of the map. I encountered a river system and swam down it for ages, getting lost in a maze of islands before finally reaching the sea.

I headed north,then north west, crossing land and numerous bodies of water, until I realised I was back on the edge of the map. Here I decided to do a test, I was due East of Leyawiin, right on the edge of the map (way outside the Cyrodiil borders) and decided to run due east until I hit the sea. I have a speed of 46, it took 13 minutes real time of running and swimming to reach the sea.

So, Blackmarsh is big, very big. The in game map is useless (I use the Elseweyr Colour Map), much of Blackmarsh is off the edge of the map, even the coast line isn't correct. (Not a criticism).

I didn't encounter any visual problems (couple of minor exceptions below), everything seems solid. The distant land is a a fair approximation of what you find close up. The weather seems to work, there's grass, trees and rocks, there's ambient sound, it feels solid and believable.

An important point, after the crowded world of Cyrodiil, with a ruin every 100 meters and animal life everywhere, it feels spookily empty. Coupled with the apparently vast size, and the lack of a usable map, my exploration felt like exactly that: a bold venture into unexplored wilderness, and it was memorable for that reason. Swimming down one of the huge rivers I could imagine that I was one of the first European hunter/trappers venturing into the unknown Canadian interior.

OK. So a couple of minor observations. These are not meant to be criticisms, Onra has made plain that he is providing a basic playable space for modders to develop, but I think these points are worth making so that people know what to expect-
- Many large trees are not properly grounded. Basically any tree on sloping ground will have air beneath one side of it.
- Although there's grass. it's not as abundant as in Cyrodiil,so there's quite large patches of bare ground texture with very obvious tiling.
-It doesn't feel very marshy. There's open water and there's land, and nothing in between. It would be great to have mangrove swamps. reed beds,mudflats.

I'm not criticizing Onra in any way, he has provided a great resource, it's up to modders to breath the culture and ambiance of Blackmarsh into ESIV.

Performance wise, I didn't notice any slow down, or longer loading times at all. I suffered no crashes at all during my two in game days in Blackmarsh.

I followed Onra's advice and loaded the ESP early, just after the UOP.

That's it. I'm deeply impressed. The playable area in game has just increased by (wild guess) 50%, maybe more. The tangled waterways really need to be explored by boat. With great serendipity (I love that word) Side's Sailing Boats look like this will now be a realistic option. With the upcoming release of the Valenwood heightmap it should be possible to sail from the inlets of Blackmarsh all the way to Anvil. How cool is that?

Finally I hope someone takes up the challenge of adding a bit of life to the Blackmarsh heightmap. Some monster spawns, some harvestable ingredients, a couple of trading posts beside the rivers would go a long way to making this mod an essential addition to everyone's game.

@ outsider in

I will retry to upload the files on nexus today and add as well a filefront mirror...

@ S'lider

thx very much for this nice report of your trip

it is funny I had the same feeling during testing ...arriving by ship and then entering the system of rivers ( you can actually cross Blackmarsh fom west to east by ship without sailing around the south coast) make me feel like Columbus..allthough I knew that there are no enemies..I found it spooky as well...I really hope that probably coming province mods will keep a bit of this atmoshpere...not placing stuff every second meter..makes the world feel much bigger...at least in my eyes

the region is realy very basic...and as it has been generated it has of course a lot of small bugs ...there are no small rocks, plants, mushrooms and of course no unique Blackmarsh stuff and there is just one region for the complete landmass...but it is a good base for further modding and I really hope that someone will improve and create different regions etc

btw..I will try to provide an ingame map as soon as possible ( winks firesparks)

@ Luzur

all I can see from Leywiin is a very very far away coast line of Blackmarsh and the southern part of Elsweyr ( where Senchal is located)...which looks very realistic... as Rimmen is located a lot more to the north..it will be very hard to see Senchal from there...

Tes 4 is Tes 4 ...and even Tes5 will not change a lot...Cyrodiil is small and has only about a few hundred citizens...this is not realistic...everybody knows this...it is not possible to create a realistic empire with a size and population like in RL.....so if we want to create the other provinces for Tes 4 in the tamriel worldspace...they must have the right propotions compared to Cyrodiil....


regards

If you do work on a map then I suspect that it will have to be like the map made by - ohh geez - I forget who now, but it required an esp to go beyond the normal range of the map size provided.

And of course people are going to want all regions mapped. My bet is that most will want all regions installed too.

Now after installing this with BAIN and loading it right after the UOP/USIP section I get a long series of errors when running teslodgen - to large to cut and past but here are a few entries:
[01:19] LOD Generator:
[01:19] LOD Generator:
[01:19] LOD Generator:
[01:19] LOD Generator:
[01:19] LOD Generator:
[01:19] LOD Generator:
[01:19] LOD Generator:

Codebox would not work for oime reason and cut out the details. This goes on for about about 500 entries then TESLODGEN finishes the rest ok. REFR:12 is Blackmarsh.

I've not tested in game yet (very soon) and was wondering ig anyone else noticed this too and if there is a solution or need for solution.

Re Maps.

I commented a couple of time in my post above about the lack of a map.

Yes, of course, if the landmass gets filled in a map is going to be demanded by players, however,at the moment I feel the lack of a map adds to the wilderness experience, you are in literally in uncharted territory.

As I said above, the whole place would lend itself to a hunting/trapping/exploration themed mod, perfect for those that like to play the backwoodsman. It would need some creature spawns, with perhaps some unique and highly valuable drops to justify the whole trip. Some harvestable plants, especially the stuff you can eat, Blackberries, strawberries and err.... for those with hunger mods, and perhaps a couple of isolated trading posts, just a shack beside a small jetty on one of the rivers, where you can sell your furs (or whatever) and buy some essentials. It would work, even with vanilla resources, of course if there were a few modder's resources available to give the place a more unique feel, then everything would be even better. I'm no modder but would this be a difficult thing to do?

What would be really cool is if the in game map could somehow be self revealing, ie rivers, coast line, terrain features, only appear on the map as you explore, then roleplay as a cartographer would be possible.

Of course, all this is lore unfriendly, Blackmarsh is not really an untracked, unexplored wilderness, but at least it would make a start on exploiting Onra's great work.

hey psymon

I know about this....don't worry it should work perfectly ingame...no real problems...

now about these trees....as you will know beth created border regions around cyrodiil...only landscape textures and trees as this land was not designed as playable land....these regions can be edited or even deleted and replaced by new ones....no problem so far....but beth also added many many lod trees...a lot of them flying in the air...these trees are not part of the border regions...so you have to remove them by hand...of course I use Tes4 edit for disabling removed stuff...but even if you disable them the lod data is still there and you will see some of them flying in the air ...I had a quiet few of them in Blackmarsh...and what ever I tried I could not remove or overwrite the lod of some of them....so the only solution for me ( maybe someone else will know a better one)
was to resize these trees to 0...so that they are not visible anymore...of course the Tes4LodGen will be angry about this and show tese as errors...

but as far as I have tested it...it is no problem ingame or with other mods


regards

onra

hmm...I am not a real expert...but as I understand the lore about Blackmarsh....there are a few major cities , settlements and forts and a very few roads connecting them...the rest of the province seems to be a real wilderness..dangerous swampy with no roads and bridges...with Argonian tribes settlements etc....but I am sure the Blackmarsh team will know more about such stuff....

Well no teslodgen errors like that come up with elsweyr - maybe Iliana or an elsweyr team person knows an answer.

I don't think so..I checked the Elsweyr esp when I was trying to solve this problem....if the location or the region where these trees are placed is overwritten by new lod data everything works fine... like in the Elsweyr esp....but you can not overwrite lod data of trees flying in the air ...this is the problem...

As far as the map goes, here's something I've been working on for myself lately: http://i776.photobucket.com/albums/yy46/igerup/games/tamriel.jpg Oh, Psymon, the mod you're looking for is Tamriel World Space Complete by worm. It's around on TESnexus somewhere. But the esp needs to be edited (more cells added in all compass-directions) if we want all of Tamriel to show up. As you can see in the screenshot, my map is rather large.

Yeah I've been working on my own personal map right now for the black marsh region. I wasn't sure which map he was basing it off of, I used this one http://www.imperial-library.info/maps/cyrodiillargelowrescr7.jpg but it didnt seem to match up when I put it in game.
I'm not sure though because I don't have a very solid method with matching it up in the CS. I'm just going to use the heightmap as a base now.

That one looks nice. It doesn't quite match the coordinate system the game uses. But that's what Photoshop is for.

Yeah you're right it doesn't really match up. I just used the heightmap from this mod for the map I'm making now.


Here's my WIP for just getting the land to match up with the heightmap: http://i757.photobucket.com/albums/xx220/shadowbeast368/BlackMarshAddonMap.jpg

(I don't mean to take credit from Thacadian or Yian for their work making the color map. That was just the map I had for my game)

Bad News

I am really sorry...but I have uploaded a new cleaned version of the Blackmarsh heightmap. The first version contained cell edits from Skyrim and Elsweyr...don't ask me how they were copied into the Blackmarsh map..I really don't know....

So please redownload and install the new version, especially if you want to use it together with my other heightmaps....

Good News

The remade Valenwood and Elsweyr heightmap will be released later on today as well...

Note ! for compatibility reasons I will not generate basic regions for Valenwood and Elsweyr....this would make things too complicated...regions for South Elsweyr and Valenwood will hopefully be added by other mods

however...this will give me more time to create some nice regions for the Summerset Isles which will be release this month as well.


For the map...I can provide a full texture map for (bmp) if needed which can be usesd as a base for maps....

Last but not least a filefront mirror has been added...and I am still trying to upload the files on Nexus

cheers


http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/27235-1-1265958675.jpg


http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/27235-2-1265958675.jpg


http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/27235-3-1265958676.jpg

Woohooww, those look really good. Are you using the CS heightmap editor only? I've noticed it hogs resources like crazy. Or are you making the heightmaps with another app and just importing the *.raw files?