TES4 Oblivion Scale vs Silgrad Tower

[Astarsis]

There are two types of depencies. The first type is the type you got when an esp depend on an esm, or on the models from another mod. That's not what I was talking about here.

The second type is spatial dependency. In morrowind, unless you merged and reworked mods, mod that had frontiers that were close would interfere with each other. Beardo told me that to be 100% safe, he found out it was best to leave 2 exterior cells of distance between islands. In tes4 oblivion, if you use autonomous regions (your own map) you are not affected by spatial dependency or by scale dependency.

Scale dependency, the last big dependency type is best illustrated by example. Let's say you build your mod in the morrowind map. When you did the silgrad map, you were using the same scale as the morrowind map, that is 1 miles in vivec = 1 mile in Silgrad. If you do that in tes4, because the scale is smaller, the silgrad map will be so small that silgrad will not fit in.

Originally posted by 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.

[Astarsis]

The landscape scale is smaller. The morrowind map redone with tes4 scale wold be half width and half height, leaving little place for cities. The city scale is much bigger. They take about double height and width for the building. End result: morrowind redone in the same map space would be very crowded. There is also the problem of loading time when moving.

Msfd have confirmed cities themselves are done as separate regions, when you enter a city you get moved to that separate zone. you can still see inside the city from outside and outside the city from inside. Neat trick !

It may mean the seamless transition I was talking about may be already built in. Neat !

Originally posted by 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?

[KuKulzA]

Originally posted by Astarsis
the landscape scale is smaller. the morrowind map redone with tes4 scale wold be half width and half height, leaving little place for cities

the city scale is much bigger. they take about double height and width for the building.

emd result: morrowind redone in the same map space would be very crowded.

there is also the problem of loading time when moving

msfd have confirmed cities themselves are done as separate regions, when you enter a city you get moved to that separate zone. you can still see inside the city from outside and outside the city from inside. neat trick !

it may mean the seamless transition I was talking about may be already built in. Neat !

so.... that means... well what are we to do?
are we to create our own world? teleportable to it from Cyrodiil?
I want to create Vvardenfell and so does my team... we were all hoping for a bigger and better Vvardenfell... this my affect our mod a lot....
I wouldn't like to start anything I know I can't finish or can't finish perfectly... if Vvardenfell is going to go bad because of scale problems... my morale is gonna got splat on the ground...

so how should we all do this? we were all hoping that the Blacklight, Silgrad, Vvardenfell, Skyrim, Velothi Mts. could fit together....

[Astarsis]

no reason to panic !

if tes4 are done that way, clearly it's rather smooth !

I mean, you can see outside the city from inside
and vice versa, seems pretty seemless

but msfd clearly confirmed they were separate space

like I said I think it work between region too

it's like if morrowind region was done on a different map yet, when you move through it it's all a sing;le thing

confused yet ? :banana:

it's just the way the engine work

to understand we'll have to see how they really do it

I don't think it's complicated

As for same map / different map, if you can copy/paste and merge everything it's not a big deal. I was building my interior and exterior that way

In morrowind you could not copy landscape thought, but even that was made possible when someone built a tool called tesfaith

so you can work in different map and merge everything latter, or maybe you wont need to

it may just be a special mod that sit on top of the 3-4 others and link them magically.

Don't worry

[KuKulzA]

well know that you say it that way my worries have been swept away... thanks....
I doubt Bethesda would TRY to make it complicated... they want to make their engine as practical as possible, makes everyone's life easier! :yes:

[Zarkis]

Interesting thread. Using a seperate cell for ST is favorable since it will not only help with the scaling issue but also solve the compatibility problem with other mods. I would even go so far to seperate ST from Kragenmoor, Blacklight and Vvardenfell. Should be rather easy because ST has natural borders on all sides (mountains and the sea).

When it comes to city building it looks like ST will need some big Hlaalu style walls with doors and towers for the main city and it different parts. Did you already think about how to lay out the city this time? I would think that several seperate cells will be necessary to allow for a lot of detail without sacrificing performance.

[Caligula Superfly]

Hmm, id rather not see it separated from Kragenmoor or Blacklight, since that would be more artaficial boundries that we don't really need, but Vvardenfell would be acceptable I suppose, but what would we gain from doing so if ST already becomes separate from Cyrodil? If someone is going to add something significant to ST I think we will know about it.

[Zarkis]

Originally posted by Caligula Superfly
Hmm, id rather not see it separated from Kragenmoor or Blacklight, since that would be more artaficial boundries that we don't really need, but Vvardenfell would be acceptable I suppose, but what would we gain from doing so if ST already becomes separate from Cyrodil? If someone is going to add something significant to ST I think we will know about it.

It wouldn't be a problem to seperate St, BL and KM because of the mountain ridges to the north and south, but you have a point, so far there is no absolute necessity doing that. If the ingame map is limited in size like it was with Morrowind that would be an argument. Hopefully new exterior cells can have there own maps...

[Razorwing]

I think it's one of those things that we can't really decide on until the game is out and all the facts are on the table. But once it's out and we've familiarized ourselves with it, I think the best solution will be apparant. We can speculate about it in the meantime, sure, but to what end I don't know since there are so many unknown factors.

But I love speculating myself, and here are my two cents

1) One thing I think we can all agree on is that we don't want to shrink our landmass just to make it fit with Oblivion's scale.

2) If we want to keep the scale we used in the TES3 mod, or knock-on-wood use an even lower scale, we should build our landmasses in something called "autonomous regions". I think these regions function as independent worlds, so for instance Cyrodiil is one a. region and Oblivion is in another a. region. As a bonus we would conflict with very few other mods, as the "portal" to our world is the only place in the main game world we'll affect. The portal will be on a road leading from Cyrodiil to Morrowind, and once the player comes to a certain place he's automatically whisked over into our world. The transition will hopefully be more or less seamless, as the place on the Morrowind side s/he winds up in would mimic the end stretch of the road in Cyrodiil.

3) Then there's the question of teams independently building landmasses next to each other, which might have some challenges if we go with the autonomous region idea. I think what we'll have to do is to create a master mod, on which all the main .esp's are dependant. The master mod would set up the autonomous region and the transition from Cyrodiil to Morrowind. That way all our landmasses can be built in the same a. region and we can set up seamless transitions between them, just as Rodan did between Blacklight and Silgrad in the TES3 mods.

We could also choose to use the master mod for things that span several areas... for example we could add four swords to the master mod, then each main file admin could drop a sword in the world and a quest be set up to collect all of them. Just a theory for the future though.

What do you guys think?

[KuKulzA]

sounds good to me Razorwing... and swords idea is awesome... maybe it can be an easter egg.. when you gather all the swords and give them to some very random guy somewhere in the middle of all our mods.. he'll say something funny... or give you a speech or dialogue text about the mod or something...
or maybe something more important like... "urrg, I am hungry"
...or like... "good, now get me the 4 legendary spears!"*
*and we all know somehow spears ceased to exist once the Daedra invaded