The Vvardenfell Heightmap

[Lord Skorm]

Due to the size of Vvardenfell, will Red Mountain still be visible to the player from any part of Vvardenfell, or will the player need to ride closer to Ghostgate to be able to start seeing it in the distance?

[Dave_91]

It can't be seen from all areas of the island, like Vivec, some of the Ascadian Isles and northern Sheogorad regions. From most other places though, you can see it.

[Lord Skorm]

That's too bad. I've always imagined Vvardenfell for Oblivion, and I always imagined being able to see Red Mountain from all of Vvardenfell, just standing there, all menacing like.

[Lightwave]

I've moved the heightmap and LOD files to a new server and updated the first post in this thread. My ISP has just started offering free unlimited file sharing, so I can still link to them directly (and avoid using 4shared.com for the others) and this'll free up space on my webserver for other things.

If you're curious, the current download statistics are:

1. The 2x Vvardenfell Heightmap: 212 downloads.
2. The Standard Res LOD Package: 107 downloads.
3. The High Res LOD Package: 17 downloads.

Nobody has bothered to download the placed NPCs yet ...

The LOD Mesh Issue

I've managed to write my own full quality mesh quad generator which I was going to bolt on to TESAnnwyn's heightmap exporter, but TES4's Landscape LOD render appears unable to render more than a single NifTriStrips block. This is a maximum of 65536 strip blocks, which is about 10922 vertices. A full quality LOD quad requires 1,050,625 (1025x1025) vertices.

So this means Bethesda's Landscape LOD system is only capable of rendering approx 1% of the full landscape mesh; they've gone for an optimization algorithm which concentrates on the mountain/hill peaks first, then on the sharp depressions between elevations. This optimization copes modestly well with a relatively flat landscape like Tamriel, which has just a few distinct mountains and hills, but is greatly inadequate for a very varied landscape like Vvardenfell, with it's many valleys and intricate undulations. Writing a new optimization algorithm will be difficult to get right and I'm simply very doubtful it's possible to create sufficiently accurate meshes in just 1% of the available heightmap (you can see some low quality screenshots of the problems Tamriel and Vvardenfell have; with Vvardenfell it's sometimes very difficult to see the lay of the land from a distance, there's too many anomalies).

However, the game can render full quality heightmap meshes as placed STATics however, so I'm attempting to use the same distant LOD static system as used for distant buildings (i.e. visible when distant). I'll break them down in to smaller meshes (maybe 16x16 cell quads) for some performance benefits and of course try half-quality, quarter-quality meshes etc to see where one can compromise. The downside is that distant objects rendering is much shorter than the landscape LOD (I'd guestimate maybe only 60% as far), though I'm fairly sure it's possible to increase this in the Oblivion.ini file, so overall we might be able to see much further than the existing Landscape LOD system and maybe see Red Mountain from all parts of Vvardenfell. Of course the trade-off is that all distant object rendering will have to increase at the same time, which will also impact on performance.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, as they say ...

Lightwave

[Donny]

Originally posted by Lord Skorm
Due to the size of Vvardenfell, will Red Mountain still be visible to the player from any part of Vvardenfell, or will the player need to ride closer to Ghostgate to be able to start seeing it in the distance?

You could see it when you downloaded that Morrowind mod that adds LOD terrain in the game It's a must.
Nothing beats the view from vivec towards north. Just breathtaking.

[Tarek]

OMG my favorite town second to balmora


:banana:
:banana:
:bananarock:
:banana:
:bananarock:



\o/

[adense]

Well, i got two questions..

Question 1: Have anyone made a Tes4-style map for this mod yet, if not, are you even planning to have one

Question 2: Is this the right place to ask for this?

[Dave_91]

As far as I'm aware, there's no TES4 style map for Vvardenfell yet, but that would be nice to go with the landmass. We probably will have an in-game map sometime, but it's not really anything we should worry about at the moment, as we can use a simple placeholder map for the time being, if needed.

[final reclaimer]

i saw the pictures, and it's looking great (not to mention huge). good work :goodjob:

[Lord Skorm]

Have you guys heard of the Morroblivion utility tool that converts all of Morrowind's NIF's and entire landmass to Oblivion... I tried it and it's pretty cool... the only problem is that you can't redistribute it since its NIFs and landmass is Bethesda copyrighted...

And the real Vvardenfell heightmap (after the conversion from Morrowind to Oblivion) is about 9 quads...