Exterior Planning

[Dave_91]

Right. I think it should be time we get these claims up and working for exteriors. Currently, as you know it, we have 10 regions for our landmass. These are:

Ashlands
Ascadian Isles
Azura's Coast
Bitter Coast
Grazelands
Molag Amur
Red Mountain
Sheogorad
West Gash
Zafirbel Bay

Not long after the landmass was made, I set up an esp file with the regions created and applied the weather settings to each region correspondingly with those of TES3. For the regions to be complete however, we'll need the details... the rocks, trees, locations, dungeons, landmarks camps and random NPC's and enemies. Right now, I think we should try get started on generating at least the rocks for the regions before setting up claims for each.

In Razorwing's Moldcave set, he made a large amount of rocks, both large and small sized, that I think would be greatly useful for the exteriors... a little retexture of each and we could have enough rocks for the regions in my opinion to get started on the generation. I'd like to know what others think on this and whether or not we should start on the generation. Right now the landmass looks great, but you can tell things are missing because of the lack of details and trees etc.

We should probably discuss region by region what trees and rocks we could use as placeholders from Oblivion, and what ST assets and our own assets we can use for the regions.

I know that in Kvatch, there are a few dead trees we could probably use for Ashland or Molag Amur trees... some (dementia) trees in the SE expansion, I think work well for trees in Bitter Coast region. The Ascadian Isles shouldn't be too difficult, the trees there were mostly generic looking anyway, right? I'm sure we can use some standard Oblivion/ST trees for use there. We also have a few Mushroom trees we could perhaps use in various places... combined with rocks + rock retextures, I don't think it would turn out so bad.

Should I move this to the Cities, Landmass & Claims forum?... or is it okay here?

[cire992]

Placeholders should be fine, as long as we're careful about it. I was thinking more in terms of land textures... I'm on the impression that we have all the terrain textures we need, but after work I'll go through Morrowind nonetheless an make sure we're in good shape for that. It's important, too, if we're going to retexture rocks.
Second off, doing this generation might also be a good excuse to create a master file at least for the heightmap, even if we continue to use Silgrad.esm for assets.
Finally, I do agree that we have the means to do a solid generation. That, at least, will give us a good bearing on what's where in the heightmap (I got a little lost the first time I fired it up). I'll do a little more work on Ebonheart tonight (I promised an update), then I'll have a look at the rocks and see what I can throw together in GIMP.

[Dave_91]

That would be excellent. :yes:

Silgrad already have West Gash and Bitter Coast rocks, so we could use their textures +rocks if needed. Would save a bit of time.

So the generation... I think, personally, the regions we have now are far too big for generation. If we perhaps cut the regions down into smaller sections, we can generate them individually.

We should probably figure out what regions have enough assets to be created using what we have now so we can get started right away, I'd say either the Ascadian Isles or Bitter Coast may be a good place to start...

[cire992]

Bitter Coast, we have rocks, and can easily get more. Tentatively I want to say that we're fine for terrain textures, but we made need some that match the Silgrad-made rocks. Base Oblivion has some nice, big rainforest trees we can use. I also thought I saw some Bitter Coast ferns and bushes in the ST assets in the CS. Again, I'm not in front of a computer where I can go and check on that, but you may want to take a look at some of the flora, and make sure the rocks look alright with the Terrain textures. I have SI, but I never installed it and I've never seen what the assets are like, but I think ST only has 9 parasol type mushrooms, so we may want to look into that. The Bitter Coast is going to take some serious detail work because with 2x scale, the bogs and marshes no longer have water in them (confirm that?). But as far generating I think we have a lot of stuff to work with because of ST's work, Shivering Isles and Leyawiin county's relative similarities to the Bitter Coast.
How exactly does the generation process work? Do we just plug in statics to spawn over certain coordinates?

[Dave_91]

I'm not sure, I rarely use the generator. All I do is drag in some statics that need generating for the region, change the settings so not too many generate, then generate the cells. It tends to take a while depending on what you tell the generator to make, but it should look pretty decent when compared with the empty landscapes, even when not fully completed.

So we'll start with the Bitter Coast yeah? I'll need to create a sub region and plan the cells of Balmora so the generator doesn't make rocks where Balmora will be... that won't take long. In the meantime, I'll start on seeing how the ground textures, rocks and SI/ST/Leyawiin assets work out on a practice worldspace. Then I'll finish up some interiors if I get time...

[cire992]

Bah, I'm still stuck at work for the next four hours! Oh well, I'll just have to kick it into overdrive when I get home.

[Dave_91]

Being unemployed has its advantages. :lol: I'll probably be starting work in the next few months... not much time for modding then.

Anyway, I copied the region for 'LODSwampyRegion' to the Bitter Coast and it's just finished generating. Took quicker than I thought, actually. I generated LOD for it so I can see what the distant trees look like, I'm waiting for that to finish generating. Then I'll go get some screens to see what others think (that's if it does look okay).

[cire992]

Awesome, can't wait to see it! You just wait until I start college in two months, then you'll really have to put with my whining! Fortunately for the mod, I'm going to school for game design, so I'll be learning all osrts of nice tidbits of information which I can apply here. :bananarock:

[Dave_91]

Excellent.

It has actually turned out a lot better than expected. Even though it was generated in 10 minutes, it looks friggin? beautiful!! Of course, it?ll need plenty of work, and the generated trees and LOD brought over formID errors as per usual so it?ll need cleaning. It?s only a test though, an experiment? one that?s turned out nice!! Heck, at this rate, we could probably generate the whole landmass in a few days time if we get enough assets!

Note that the weather is a little sunny, it?s because I used AWS, and it didn?t load up in time (the weather), usually, it?d be pretty foggy or coudy/rainy in the BC region.

It's generating again with some SI trees... but in the meantime, here are some of the ones I generated before:

[cire992]

Ohhhh, that's pretty nice, a lot better than I was expecting! Is there anything you want me to help with? I'll be out of work in about two hours.
What did you make of those BC rocks, btw?