Heightmap?

[KuKulzA]

Originally posted by Caldera
Oh, 12 quads, well thank you you can just go ahead and forget evertyhing else I said.

please don't let his attitude make you angry
this mod has one main rule, respect... I hope you don't hold it against him or anyone of us :yes:

thanks

[The Grey Wizard]

Can I make it yet? It's been a while since we talked KuKu.

[Axen]

Originally posted by The Grey Wizard
Can I make it yet? It's been a while since we talked KuKu.

I am working on that, actually, unless aliens abduct me.

[KuKulzA]

Originally posted by Axen

Originally posted by The Grey Wizard
Can I make it yet? It's been a while since we talked KuKu.

I am working on that, actually, unless aliens abduct me.

yea, Axen's got his butt moving, sorry Grey Wizard, no Vvar for you

also if anyone's been wondering hwy I have been gone for a few days, my internet was gone... :|

[Pjstaab]

How about using the heightmap and stuff from the MGE distant land generator?

[Axen]

No.
1) Copyrighted.
2) Small.

[Lightwave]

Um, am I right in thinking someone else has also managed to export TES3 landmasses to TES4? In which case my efforts to do the same might have been a waste of time.

I got sidetracked converting TESfaith to work with Oblivion (which isn't too difficult) and tore the rest of my hair out making a utility to convert landmass from TES3 masters/plugins to TES4 Oblivion (currently without including any textures). But not every cell joins is perfect yet (my global offset formula isn't quite right, I'd have to collect more data to conclusively figure out how the 2 smallest bytes affect the starting height for the cells).
If someone else has figured that out, well great, I'd love to know what the formula is (i've got a horrible formula that starts like 4^(b4-62)*(1+(b3/128)) where b3 and b4 are the last two bytes and gets even more complicated when either b3 or b4 are negative ... b2 gets even more complicated and after that I lost commitment and carried on with getting the rest to work - plus I'm sure there's a better way to decode it maybe by analyzing the bit-pattern).

Anyway, the current program is called TESPort and is available from: http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrow...SPort.html
You can run around in Vvardenfell, follow the river from Odai Plateau to Balmorra, contemplate what a lifeless chuck of rock this is really is and why there's these occasionaly sudden gaps in the land you can see through(!), or ponder where Dagoth ur's citadel went, or why Ghostgate valley runs right the way towards Red Mountain with no gate ...
atm TESPort runs from the command prompt. You could temporarily patch the joins by just clicking once on the non-matching borders in the TESCS landscape editor (it'll automatically join them), but for a large scale project it's probably better to wait for perfectly converted cell-heights (hence why I'm interested if someone has already done this, it'd save me some hair).
TESPort was mainly written to help people import TES3 mods to Oblivion. Of course Vvardenfell is one of the ultimate tests, but isn't my official reason for writing it. Importing Vvardenfell could create legal issues (if you re-distribute it that is), but whether you create it from scratch (a major project) or convert it I think Bethesda have issues. For those converting Vvardenfell to Oblivion, I think not making too much of a big thing about it on the official forums is probably the wisest thing; personally I think it's unlikely they'd go on a witch-hunt to other sites; to me it sounds more like "if you shut up about it on the official forums, we'll pretend it doesn't exist".

Which begs the alternative ... it may not be as creatively fun, but if there was a program, or set of programs automated from a script to convert all the TES3 records in to their nearest TES4 equivalents and the TES3 bsa's unpacked and repacked for TES4 (if indeed that's even necessary), then Morrowind owners might legitimately run that on their own machine without any copyright issues (regarding redistribution at least, which is probably Bethesda's main concern, probably being the operative word 'cos no-one really seems to know where the issue is).

Oh well, my ten penneth worth,

Lightwave

[Zarf]

No.
1) Copyrighted.
2) Small.

1.) It never hurts to ask.
2.) This is an image, right? Images can be resized, right? Just resize the blasted thing, smooth out the gaps and add a noise filter. Use the canyonize filter on Terragen if you must, but we don't have to completely redo the heightmap from scratch!

Or we could listen to everything you say, but we'd still be discussing whether it's "Silgrad" or "Silgrod".

Now, I realize that we will have to fine-tune things. We might have to move whole mountain ranges. We might have to increase the brightness of our image after increasing the contrast a lot. We might have to use the blur tool. But it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper than buying a full-fledged terrain generator, learning to use it, and then create the terrain image needed.

[KuKulzA]

yea I must agree with Zarf on the fact that Axen, you tend to like to shut people down even if they have good ideas...
and I wouldn't be shutting anyone down, especially cause we don't see nothing done with the heightmap... hrug:

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by Zarf
Now, I realize that we will have to fine-tune things. We might have to move whole mountain ranges. We might have to increase the brightness of our image after increasing the contrast a lot. We might have to use the blur tool. But it's a lot easier and a lot cheaper than buying a full-fledged terrain generator, learning to use it, and then create the terrain image needed.

Well, just as well my land generator is only 99%. As an example, you can download tported.esp (8Mb) - it's the Vvardenfell landmass in Oblivion format, very few join problems now. So you can manually go in, fix the odd join problem, apply your own textures, muck about with the mountains if you must. If it ain't 100% converted correctly, can you prove it's a copy?
Only problem wit this file is that TESCS crashes when you try and save this file (probably one of the header sizes is wrong) and Oblivion crashes if you actually try to move to the TESPort worldspace. But for now you may get an idea of the concept ... and I'll only leave this example up for a few days as a precaution though.