TES4 Oblivion Scale vs Silgrad Tower

[Astarsis]

Hello !

I talked recently to Razorwing about a suggestion to use an autonomous region to build Silgrad Tower in TES4.

What I didn't knew back then, is how much the change in scalling in TES4 would impact Silgrad Tower

You will find attached a rought merge of 3 maps :
the tamriel map
the Silgrad Tower concept map
the TES4 map ! straight from the video and painstakingly assembled by yours trully.

The map is rather crappy in quality because maximum attachments are 500K. I got the real thing at home.

TES4 outdoor scale is only half of Morrowind. This is a coloraly to the fact that indoor scale more than doubled. Houses are much larger now, both from the inside and in the outside. It's obvious on pics, even more obvious in the video map where cities take up hugue area.

Just look at the imperial city:
It's comprised of the central hub, the 3 hub arround it, and the port and 2 more small islands. It's gigantic compared to the other cities

The imperial city is about 100 buildings.

Well, I counted Silgrad Tower and there are over 80 buildings.
However on the combined map, Silgrad appear to be half the size of Choroll !!!! while it should be the size of the imperial city.

You're left with basically 3 possibilities.
[1] Trash Morrowind Geography,
and let Silgrad (the city only !) occupies half the south of Morrowind !!!

[2] Decide Silgrad is just a village after all and make it 10 houses.... I'm sure you wanna do that

[3] Use the technique I proposed to Razorwing to build an autonomous region. One thing that's fun is scale does not matter with autonomous region. You can even bolow up Daggerfall to it's TES2 size if you want.

After all, Tamriel, in reallity, is 1000s of miles. It is shrank in game for both playability and... feasability... they can't spent 50 years building it ! and no one got 3D layout generators (except for forests)

The harder part of course is that scale being different the transition won't be perfect. But even that isn't exactly true. You can copy over the morrowind frontier, and on each side put an invisible activator that ask if they want to go to Silgrad tower. You can even make it an invisible door, a giant invisible wall acting as a door.

All it does is move you on the exact same point on the other autonomous region. it look as if you didn't moved.

Well, it's up to you now, but you will have to face the problem one way or the other.

IMO I thought I overheard you wanted to make Silgrad BIGGER. Autonomous region let you do that. In fact it also allow you a nice buffer for rdiant AI since character usually don't cross between the two (I sort of asked the question a while ago, wasn't an absolutely clear answer, you know the devs. but it hinted at that, the same way radiant ai npcs won't rob your house.

By the way, skingrad buildings retextured would make passable (much cutter) Hlaalu buildings You may want to have a look. They are hugue 3 stories stone buildings and seems to have flat roofs. It's the pc gamer shot.

Hlaalu building in MW were kept simpler because they had to be low poly !

IMO every Arena CITY (8 per provinces) and it's surroundng villages and dungeons should be an autonomous region. As the Silgrad and Blacklight proved, it's enbought to occupy a large sized team

Bessides, if you do it TES4-style, every city has it's own architecture (every village and farm too !!!) and every building is a separate model (like in bloodmoon). It become a much bigger task ! On top of it cities have their own guards, wall structure, church and fort - and those have distinct architecture from the buildings. different stone color, shape, etc. makes the town look more varied.

One way to do it the easy way (rather than doing all building from scratch) it to check if some TES4 buildings are appropriate for modification and reskin. That way you can reach the Silgrad target (80 buildings) in TES4 without killing yourself, and focus on perhaps 20 important buildings that need more of a Silgrad touch (palace, temple, etc)

examining tes4 under all its facet, I'm really amazeed how far the cities progressed since Morrowind. It's day and night. I couldn't see two buildings alike in the Choroll map and/or video. Not just the size and shape, but also sometime the material (brick, stone, wood).

I don't think they use a tileset like morrowind. It look closer to the bloodmoon approach. I could not see a single building using the same windows. And damn ! Those windows are sometime very decorative, remind me of Fly TSI cathedral !

In other cities it just get *worst*. some look germanic, some look italian, the imperial city is straight from Constantinople ! It's really amazing in detail.

I think it's worth the effort to do any modded city as good as that, so that it match the rest in quality.

In fact focusing on Silgrad is a far better idea than doing Tamriel Rebuilt II. If good modding team do Silgrad, Black Light, Riften and who knows, some mysterious city far from there ;D each of those city add, in TES4 scope :

1 city (with gard uniform, etc...)
1-5 villages (depend on location, not split evenly)
10-30 dungeons
about ? 100-200 interest points
some extra creatures
some extra ingredient/flora/fauna/land texture
(not going overboard, but a custom tree or monster here and there make a hugue difference)
and lets not forget localized furniture, clutter, armor, clothing

From what I understood from the interview, each city has exclusive wares on top of the standard fare. could be known for it ebony armors and feature 4 different suits, or perhaps it's the hometown of a reknown potter. or what about riften exclusive fur cloaks ? or Silgrad exquisite elite bonemold armors ?

Up to you, but I know I'm questioning myself a lot on what extra make a really good mod ! Sure all that stuff add a lot.

And dungeons, by the way seem to be on par with Sotha Sill clockwork city. So a single dungeon will keep a modder busy for a long time, especially if you build a custom or retextured tileset or custom creatures.

Someting as dumb as a giant WHITE rat can be interesting. It break the monotony

I wish you to do the best possible Silgrad Tower !

Well ! Have fun ! And think about all that !

Cheers !

Astarsis

[Razorwing]

Greetings Astarsis, and welcome to Silgrad Tower!

:wave:

Your work preceedes you, as your bearded nords face collection have enhanced our plugin for a long time. I'm happy you're still around in the community, and I look forward to your face wizardry on the new game platform. I remember the devs saying that we'll still be able to mod any head we can think of, but I'm not sure how that'll work hands-on... there should be plenty of opportunities for modding unique mugs anyway

Thankyou for taking the time to investigate this matter, and for writing such an extensive post. I don't understand how the ingame map in Oblivion which you assembled on AsmodeusD's map can tell us anything about the scale in the ingame world, though. But maybe that's the side of me speaking who still clings to the hope of a having fluid expansion of the gameworld, because I fear you may be right.

If it turns out the scale is much higher this time around, I don't think there'll be much question that we should detach ourselves into a seperate worldspace or autonomous region or whatchamacallit. Personally I had hoped for a smaller scale so we'd be able to fit in a number of farms, partly for logistic believability on how people get food but mostly because I love modding stuff like that, without having to compromise on also having plenty of wilderness. But I also think it's something we have to wait on deciding until the game is in our hands, and of course it's something that has to be thoroughly discussed with the teams we're cooperating with before we begin building anything. It's so much easier to do that kind of detailed planning when we can take ingame screenshots and the like, and talk to each other about specific numbers and such which we won't know until it's sitting on our computers.

Our team's main city (not counting the other teams), Silgrad, had about 240 buildings in Morrowind and I hope we can keep and (knock on wood) go beyond that number as time goes on. Personally I don't think it's important to scale the city compared to TES IV in that regard, but others may feel differently and I respect that. Keeping the size of Silgrad would also fit well with using a smaller scale of the world, I think, so it doesn't look quite as huge on the map as it does in Morrowind. For me that would be a nice side-effect.

We'll be using the Hlaalu architecture set made by Oom/Jonathan Dodds to recreate Hlaalu settlements, including Silgrad. I think it looks pretty amazing, particularly in its truthfulness to Hlaalu design. For Redoran settlements we'll mostly be using the buildings Hoss made, so we're pretty much set regarding those too. For Velothi buildings we'll use the interior tile set spankybus is creating right now, and for the exteriors we'll either use a modified version of that, or the exteriors Veet did in the past. We're still looking for interior Hlaalu and Redoran tilesets, but I hope that Oom is willing to take on the former, so as to ensure it fits well with his exterior designs. Me... I do a little bit of everything, right now I'm having fun with modelling new versions of Morrowind plants. So, fortunately things are looking pretty bright on the modelling front. I never expected us to get this far before the game's release... :goodjob: everbody!

[Astarsis]

Your work preceedes you, as your bearded nords face collection have enhanced our plugin for a long time

Ah ! That's good news ! I knew Sheikiza and Zul's work were in but didn't knew about mine

Do I have a little tone slab with my name like in Veldion :banana:

Just kidding !

Joke apart, I hadn't seen my name in the credit list and assumed my work was too poor quality :eek: Glad to see it was ok !


tell us anything about the scale


I transfered both the TES4 map and the Slgrad map to the proper scale, as close as possible.

The little green patch is the expected (planned) area for the city

Those big dark area in the TES4 map are on the exact scale Yep ! That big !

By the way there is a map in the imperial library that put together Solstheim and Morrowind, it will give you an idea what those dark patch are. Because Ravenrock was pretty big too.

To make it understandable, I'm sure you can recognize the imperial city in the center, the round thing with 3 other circle arround it. This is taken from the (in)famous german interview video.I scalled it up to merge it with the e3 video map (which showed only about 1/4th the middle circle.

Back to that imperial city, It's 100 buildings. The Morrowind version of Silgrad would have to be just as big. (which I estimated at 80 buildings). You can check on the map that the imperial city is (alone) the size of 25% of Morrowind (or 50% of Vardenfell) So some solution is needed !!!

Of course my scale may not be exact.

What I did is scale it so that Anvil and the opening of the nibenay river (which is where the imperial city is) would be at their proper location.
The new map has a diferent shape. So it doesn't fit exactly. In fact I think the map should go lower, I think they moved the city a bit south east.


Our team's main city (not counting the other teams), Silgrad, had about 240 buildings in Morrowind and I hope we can keep and (knock on wood) go beyond that number as time goes on.

What !

lol that's more than twice the imperial city !
It's not going to fit on that scale !

I had the same problem trying to retrofit a simplified version of tes2 Daggerfall before giving up. Now I got my sight set on Rihad, and giving up all hope of keeping a compatible scale.

LOL ! Daggerfall had 50 regions, and 200 cities in some regions ! Try to fit that in TES4 scale ! It's like fitting an elephant atop a bycicle !

I think that's why they gave us autonomous regions. they know we like big cities.


We'll be using the Hlaalu architecture set made by Oom/Jonathan Dodds to recreate Hlaalu settlements, including Silgrad. I think it looks pretty amazing, particularly in its truthfulness to Hlaalu design.


It does look good, as lok as you do only one city Otherwise just vary the textures

In TES4 they splinterd the imperial style in 21 regional variants ! if not more ! They all vaguely look like imperial yet so different. The funniest part is Cheydinhall and Choroll, they look both very alike and totally different. Something about the chape of the rooftop and the exact coloring of the wood and stone. Slight but certain deviations in style.
Some are more dramatic, like Anvil (Italian style) or Skingrad (very germanic)

In Morrowind they had subtle things like that between velothi and Hlaalu. I'm sure there are ways to mix those creatively.

Sounds you got good ressources anyway, and since you don't got delisions of grandeur Like doing Nirn Rebuilt ™
(Nirn is the planet on which Tamriel is located)
Seriously sticking to Silgrad is a good idea, and that way you just need one style, or perhaps 1-2 variant if you got neighboring villages.

the exteriors Veet did in the past

Necrom was insane ! Those walls and tower would look neet !

I'm having fun with modelling new versions of Morrowind plants

Ah ! Local plants ! Sounds great !

Are you in contact with Vorheis for the Monsters ? He used to do pretty good stuff at Tamriel rebuilt before the split

If it turns out the scale is much higher this time around, I don't think there'll be much question that we should detach ourselves into a seperate worldspace or autonomous region or whatchamacallit. Personally I had hoped for a smaller scale so we'd be able to fit in a number of farms, partly for logistic believability on how people get food but mostly because I love modding stuff like that

The more of those details you want, the more autonomous regions look cool. It also give more freedom to the subteam and send to hell all the logistic problems of exactly matching frontiers.

your own piece of paradise... or in a way... your own morrowind map.

Farms and forest are really cool !

Actually TES4 cities are larger while the map has shrunk. That's a polite way to say it. So everything is clumped together.

Orginaly they had tried out a much larger map, as much as 10x bigger. But they were going for that feeling of non stop action and wanted more density (a bit like bloodmoon versu morrowind)

I don't know if you ever had one of those lonely low level long nights across the ashlands.... nothing ever happened there, except the ocasional Kagouti ! Molag amur was even worst ! In bloodmoon you could not walk past a tree without meeting a wolf or a bear !

I won't have time for a long time (master degree and what lies beyond...) but in my mind I got dreams of ....*Rihad Rebuilt* ™
a very tiny thing

and yes, I wouldn't be surprised to do some faces. The expectation is one face for every npc in a town

Speaking of beards... haven't seen any beards on any npcs so far.... are we stuck to beardless nords I wonder how easy it is to tame those facegen faces. The problem I see is I'm not sure we can paint them over because of the skin tone filter, but we'll see.

I know Dereko and Fariel are planing TES4 Better Bodies already ;D

Soooo what's that secret Morrowind plant of yours ? Moonsugar ?

By the way, while I'll work on my Rihad thing, I may be tempted to set up a Rihad import shop in Silgrad Tower

Only the finest orishalk armor, garanteed authentic ruins... err... artifact... from good old Yokuda... I swear Sahib, it's genuine orishalk not red-painted rusted iron... noooo sahib... it's not, only 50 dinar and you get that pack rat there as a bonus... if you can catch it

Never trust a Redgard merchant ! Especially not from Rihad !

I swear sahib, this is a fingernail from Azura herself, nooo... not from my dead grandmother you kwama eating pig ! ... a real precious fingernail from the forbiden dimension of Moonshadow, aquired by my at the risk of my life !

Cheers !

Astarsis

[Razorwing]

Astarsis: Oops, sorry about that You're in our credits now, though. No stone slab unfortunately Nah, your work is great, it was just an oversight of mine.

Yeah, if we kept the sizes of the houses as they are in the Morrowind mod they'd look like outhouses compared to the more realistic house scale in Oblivion, and if had built them to scale in the main world I'm sure our city would take up way too much space. Still, I'd personally like to postpone my speculations on that for 1? month or so, then whichever way it ultimately turns out to be, we can make a more informed decision. I'm sure it'll be clear once all the facts are on the table through the game.

I think the textures on the Hlaalu houses look really good up close, but there is something happening with them when looking at them from farther away. They do look even better with the extra maps, which are missing from the screenshots since Oom is making a Morrowind-compatible release first.

I'm not familiar with Rihad, but feel free to explain a bit about it. If you can write dialogue as funny as the lines you posted then I'd definetely love to see you mod a place in Silgrad Tower: Oblivion. 'Kwama-eating pig' is a great insult, I would never have thought of that

I haven't contacted Vorrheis, though I am in contact with one person who might do a Morrowind-related creature for Oblivion, which feels very promising. Other than that I've just figured I'd wait until after the game's launch since there are so many variables a creature animator won't know until then. I'm sure old and new animators will surface for the game, and we're lucky we might get more modellers working on creatures. In the meantime I've just assumed we'll use ninja monkeys a lot with whatever suitable animals Oblivion has, then as opportunity permits we can switch one Oblivion animal out for a new custom-made Morrowind-related one and it would instantly spawn all over the place. So, it most definetely is something we can adress over time with no negative effects, unlike interiors for example which we need to be able to use asap so we can start modding houses and similar.

Tamriel is located on Nirn, but Nirn isn't a planet

About the plants; I made an ash yam a couple of days ago, which I went over again today and finalized. Right now I'm dabbling with a stoneflower model. Are you into modelling?

[Astarsis]

Oops, sorry about that You're in our credits now, though. No stone slab unfortunately

No stone slab ! No stone slab ! you kwama-eating pig! may the desert eat your boones !

that wasn't me, t'was the merchant, he thought you were not giving him credit for ripping you off with that fingernail sales :lmao:

LOL ! Seriously thanks ! That was fast ! :explained:

Yep, I hope my lines are not bad, Cymoril liked them too, but I never did finish the deep sea. I might reuse them now

A picture is worth a thousand words

It's that Redguard city just north west of Sutch and located in Hammerfel. It's in a desert region. Always loved the place when I played Arena. I had a few favorite cities like that

My mod will have Rihad, Choughan, and the desert around it. Might expand latter, but I prefer going for something small and well done, and very very filled with content :banana:

Yep, filled to capacity with bannanas, now I need a modeler to do one :check:

The problem with Daggerfall is it's too well known, peoples would be expecting things.

No one knows Rihad or care about it, so it it will be a lovely surprise when it comes alive ! I will more than likely do Hnes Rax as well, because it's wildernes, and I got to do a port anyway - so why not push a few destinations :alert:

So, how expensive is the rent in Silgrad ? Can we pay with smuggled Dwemer artifacts ? Can we compete with the local thieves guild ? Maybe help slaves escape the law ?

What ? No, my merchant is perfectly honest, what were you thinking there ?

Nice work you got there, I might bug you when it comes to thoses bannannas :bananarock:

Nirn, not a planet ? Superstition !

Sakatak will eat your soul, maggot infested Cliff Racer !

mmmm I'm starting to develop a dual personality !

that insult seems nasty !

Cheers !

Astarsis

[Razorwing]

Umm.
Well I look forward to playing your plugin. I've always had a thing for deserts and even made a draft for a desert island not that long ago, which was inhabited by cannibals with bones in their noses. It worked out pretty well actually, save for some texture problems... hmm... anyway

The rent is 20 USD a month, payable to Bank of America, San Antonio TX. Or not.

[Astarsis]

mmm what's the change between imperial denari and USD ?

my merchant don't have internet ... but wait.. LadyE had a terminal of sort, I could mod a dwemer terminal and give him a schedule to make payments

Gorg did some orcs with bone in their noses, the Warcraft orcs, which I helped a bit with

It's more arabic desert than desert island, think diablo II act II, with some 1001 nights and Redgard lore thrown in

Should be fun.

Originally posted by Razorwing
Umm.
Well I look forward to playing your plugin. I've always had a thing for deserts and even made a draft for a desert island not that long ago, which was inhabited by cannibals with bones in their noses. It worked out pretty well actually, save for some texture problems... hmm... anyway

The rent is 20 USD a month, payable to Bank of America, San Antonio TX. Or not.

[KuKulzA]

whats this about scale?
is it smaller or bigger? I have a feeling its smaller though the TES4 world itself is bigger...
cause Vivec is gonna be in trouble... the other cities are okay.. I mean Vvardenfell isn't the biggest place out there but its BIG.... and VIvec is like 10 cities in one!
please I got a little bit lost reading this thread, can someone explain in simpler terms what's happening?
I believe it was stated that Cyrodiil city will have around 100 buildings... I think thats smaller than Vivec...

I would really like to know how the new scale will affect our modding... and also is it possible to create a "separate landmass" thats just Morrowind to solve this scale issue... I don't know if that is a good idea but I am just brainstorming...


would "autonomous regions" mean a sort of pocket region so that a big city wouldn't take up an enormous amount of space on a game map? or in the real game scaling?

[Razorwing]

We won't really know the scale for sure until the game is out, but there's a risk that if we attached our landmass to the main gameworld we would have to make it smaller than in TES III for it to fit on the same scale, so that the Morrowind Province didn't end up twice as big as the Cyrodiil Province. Using a separate worldspace might solve that, but if I understand things correctly, either only mod can occupy one worldspace or a secondary mod would have to become dependant on the one with the original worldspace... so if Silgrad Tower started building its mod in a worldspace and Vvardenfell wanted to be in the same worldspace, the Vvardenfell mod would have to be dependant on Silgrad Tower - or vice verca.

Dependant means that a mod can't be played without another mod, similar to how a (normal) mod can't be played without the main game file. If mod B is dependant on mod A, mod B 'knows' everything in mod A (like weapons, furniture, NPCs etc) but mod A won't know what's going on in mod B.

Or the mods could be separate both in dependancy and worldspace, and an add-on mod be released which sets up the travel between the two worldspaces. The latter might be better because then Vvardenfell wouldn't have to worry too much about its scale compared to either Silgrad Tower or the Cyrodiil province, and we wouldn't have to worry about the scale of our landmass compared to Vvardenfell's. I dunno. It's confusing the hell out of me at times. I think it'll be more clearer once the game is out though.

Presumably a city takes up as much space in the real world as it does in it's own worldspace, if we assume that a modder sets up the exterior facade of the town in the real world according to how the real city inside the separate worldspace looks. Otherwise it would just feel silly. Sortof like how one set up an exterior house model and an interior cell in Morrowind; you could make the interior look completely different to the exterior, it just wouldn't feel right.

[KuKulzA]

I understand....
TES3 was mostly all in the same world space and "real" scale... more like 1/10 but it all had to be "real" right?
I don't know if this is true...
I think that in TES4 there are bubble regions? I mean that in the sense that say you enter a walled city. On the outside it doesn't look as big but it looks bigger within since its actually a huge city in a bubble region so it can be as big as you want it to be but only in that region.... and you can't see that from the outside
that way you are effectively teleported to the city when you enter the gate, instead of just teleported through the door like in TES3....
it could look awkward to a careful observer though....

and if we were all to do real scale... we might as well just mod in one city.... since 1 would already be a chore....
I think the scale it skewed. Like on Vvardenfell... I don't believe that in real life those cities would be so small and yet so big compared to their surroundings....
Balmora could've been more of the big city it was supposed to be.... I think the section that suffers most when scaling down is the wilderness... although important, it is harder to tell that the wilderness is shrunken than in a city where it will be apparent... so in the Morrowind game they must have made the ration 1/10 but once that was done, expanded the cities.... ?

what is the scale in TES4? hopefully it is somewhere around 1/5 to 3/5... allowing modders to make more realistic work....

I could never see why the Ashlands were so bad... you could run across them in a day... or Molag Amur for that matter.. too small....you couldn't really get lost once you had gone through it once...

is it possible to change terrain.... periodically to simulate ever changing environment?