Vvardenfell 2x screenshots with LOD

[Lightwave]

I've created a new version of the heightmap. This should join everywhere, nothing falls below -2048 game units so it blends with the default wilderness and this also prevents the rip that occured in Vivec. Currently available from here, but really I need to move it to somewhere more formal - any ideas KuKulzA? It should probably be renamed to something else too.

It's currently covered in the same sporadic grass as before (CHTerrainGrass01), but also includes the original scaled up Vertex Colour map: This helps taint some areas for effect and also mark the edges of roads, rivers and several building layouts in some towns and Dumner forts.

LOD joins are still vexing me. It only takes about 15mins to generate all the meshes and normals, but there are still mis-alignments. I can only think the fact that some quads have no wilderness cells in them is causing it, though really the CS should just fill this in with a flat sea-bed time mesh. Someone ought to write a decent mesh generator, much like Timeslip did from the heightmap data for TES3.

Hopefully I'll release some working, or at least fairly usable LOD meshes tomorrow. I've also cobbled together a more interesting generic LOD texture so the LOD landscape doesn't look quite so plain in these early development stages. e.g.



I'd like to scale up the TESPort converted texture 'map' on to this landscape so it comes fully ready textured. It'll look a bit blocky in places, and of course Oblivion's textures aren't ideal replacements for Morrowind's, but it'll still save a huge amount of re-texturing work, especially in those wilderness areas that many people are less interested in modding.


I'm also sorely tempted to write an LOD texture converter because apart from being cumbersome and prone to CS crashes and generating the textures for all 36 quads takes most of a day, for a good many people (including myself) the CS then goes a surreal stage further by trashing each with a half black band. I could use the texture position extractor from TEStroi and it would run very fast; the default 1024x1024 LOD images only use one pixel from each placed texture, so I only need a lookup file containing 1 RGB pixel for each texture. I would also combine it with the vertex colour data since it's important to be able to see that detail from a distance too.

We'll also need a claims map eventually. Vality7 produced a lovely one for the Dawn of Oblivion project by overlaying a processed version of the exported heightmap data, vertex colour data and grid map (TESAnnwyn can give all these). Perhaps we could ask him? The regions to carve up could then be coloured by KuKulzA later.

I'm starting a new job on Tuesday, my first job for nearly 4 years 9 months, been enjoying myself for too long. So my development progress is going to suffer a big slowdown, but I'll still plug away at it.

Lightwave

[Vality7]

Originally posted by Lightwave
We'll also need a claims map eventually. Vality7 produced a lovely one for the Dawn of Oblivion project by overlaying a processed version of the exported heightmap data, vertex colour data and grid map (TESAnnwyn can give all these). Perhaps we could ask him? The regions to carve up could then be coloured by KuKulzA later.Lightwave

I'm not sure i'll be able to get the same texture map going on, as I overlayed a premade map onto it. I have no idea how it was extracted from the game files but I got it from here: http://www.imgplace.net/files/121/Cyrodi...arkers.jpg

Where it said: Raw high resolution map extracted from the height editor

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by Vality7
I'm not sure i'll be able to get the same texture map going on, as I overlayed a premade map onto it. I have no idea how it was extracted from the game files but I got it from here: http://www.imgplace.net/files/121/Cyrodi...arkers.jpg

Since this is Vvardenfell, any existing map that's to scale (i.e. extracted from heightmap data and then processed) would work just as well, it just needs to be doubled in size to match a gridded VCLR image.

tesannwyn -c -g Vvardenfell-LW3.esp

(the name of the current heightmap) would produce a gridded VCLR map called tesannwyn-vclr.bmp that could be easily overlayed on top of such a map.

This depends on whether KuKulzA already has any ideas for a cell sized claims map though.?

Lightwave

[KuKulzA]

Originally posted by Lightwave
I've created a new version of the heightmap. This should join everywhere, nothing falls below -2048 game units so it blends with the default wilderness and this also prevents the rip that occured in Vivec. Currently available from here, but really I need to move it to somewhere more formal - any ideas KuKulzA? It should probably be renamed to something else too.Lightwave

hm... moving it somewhere more formal... I mean i could hold onto it and then give to people if they need it hrug: at least that would keep it out of the hands of people who wanna mess with it, i dunno, who'd do that? hrug:
there'd be no problem uploading it on the Silgrad resources, we share a lot of things, including space

Originally posted by Lightwave
We'll also need a claims map eventually. Vality7 produced a lovely one for the Dawn of Oblivion project by overlaying a processed version of the exported heightmap data, vertex colour data and grid map (TESAnnwyn can give all these). Perhaps we could ask him? The regions to carve up could then be coloured by KuKulzA later.Lightwave

Originally posted by Lightwave

Originally posted by Vality7
I'm not sure i'll be able to get the same texture map going on, as I overlayed a premade map onto it. I have no idea how it was extracted from the game files but I got it from here: http://www.imgplace.net/files/121/Cyrodi...arkers.jpg

Since this is Vvardenfell, any existing map that's to scale (i.e. extracted from heightmap data and then processed) would work just as well, it just needs to be doubled in size to match a gridded VCLR image.
tesannwyn -c -g Vvardenfell-LW3.esp
(the name of the current heightmap) would produce a gridded VCLR map called tesannwyn-vclr.bmp that could be easily overlayed on top of such a map.
This depends on whether KuKulzA already has any ideas for a cell sized claims map though.?

Lightwave

I was thinking of cutting Vvardenfell into regions and making claims in each region since we as a team hope to focus on one region, then the next, so more gets done at one place before we move on...
Maar Gan was obviously an exception, we needed to get something going
we are most likely to start with the Bitter Coast.
I dunno if it's feasible... but I think it is...
if having the grid would behelpful I see no problem in putting in the grid, then cutting up the big map
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and on a side note, is there Firemoth Archipelago on the Vvardenfell heightmap? that island just a lil to the southwest of Vvardenfell island... if not then that can be put in witht he CS I suppose, its my fault for not telling you... it was an official Bethesda plug-in

also, if there is an expansion later on (if we are really so successful and have the will to make an expansion) is it possible to extend land into the north?
(like Bethesda did putting in Solstheim)

[Lightwave]

KuKulzA: and on a side note, is there Firemoth Archipelago on the Vvardenfell heightmap? that island just a lil to the southwest of Vvardenfell island... if not then that can be put in witht he CS I suppose, its my fault for not telling you... it was an official Bethesda plug-in

I know of Firemoth, it first gave me the idea that large scale battles might be plausible before I wrote the Attack on Ynys Mon in late 2002.

No, Firemoth isn't on the current heightmap since this was extracted just from 'Morrowind.esm'. I'll have to modify TESAnnwyn to read several plugins at a time when it produces the height and VCLR maps, so one could combine many plugins in to single images, but this is probably a very useful feature anyway. Firemoth looks to be well within the TES4 LOD range which is good. In any case, Firemoth is a small and relatively nondescript circular ring island which would be easy to add from a heightmap in later or just create by hand in the render window.

Solstheim on the other hand is definitely way out of TES4's LOD range; this range is the equivalent of 48 Morrowind cells from (0,0) in any direction and since we're doubling the heightmap, anything outside +/- 24 Morrowind cells on the Morrowind Region map is ends up outside this LOD range.

We're only just inside it for this 2x Vvardenfell heightmap and for that I had to shift the heightmap south by 4 Morrowind sized cells. I should pm one of the devs and see if they know how to increase TES4's LOD lookup, because no-one I know of knows if it's even possible atm.

Solstheim could always be imported to a separate worldspace with some kind of script that teleports you between these worldspaces, should you cross it a specific X-Y border. You could include the north-west Vvardenfell LOD in that worldspace, but currently we don't know if it'd be possible to see Solstheim from Vvardenfell without resorting to some unknown hacks, like placing a distant LOD mesh of the island as a placed static in the distance ... hrug:

I believe The Grey Wizard is using separate worldspaces for Middle Earth and duplicating the LOD files so you can see the other worldspace from within your own, which is a neat work-around - so long as you don't mind teleporting each time you're near the border I guess. It makes it easier to manage the separate mods too.

btw, I don't feel we need to be over-protective of the current heightmap, it's really just two commands with TESAnnwyn to produce it, and doubling it in photoshop in between, so absolutely anyone is in a position to do it. And I don't think anyone else would be crazy enough to take on a 2x Vvardenfell as a competition.
Personally I think Beth must think we're crazy. Potentially 4x as much work as their Morrowind was (well OK, we don't have to recreate the land from scratch, but still).

Lightwave

[KuKulzA]

Originally posted by Lightwave
Firemoth looks to be well within the TES4 LOD range which is good. In any case, Firemoth is a small and relatively nondescript circular ring island which would be easy to add from a heightmap in later or just create by hand in the render window.

sounds good

Originally posted by Lightwave
Solstheim on the other hand is definitely way out of TES4's LOD range; this range is the equivalent of 48 Morrowind cells from (0,0) in any direction and since we're doubling the heightmap, anything outside +/- 24 Morrowind cells on the Morrowind Region map is ends up outside this LOD range.

If we DO have an expansion then we'll probably use GreyWizard's method like you said, it'll probably be best that way... and well Solstheim is within the Skyrim for Oblivion team's juridiction but I just brought it up as an example. So thanks so much

[Lightwave]

A fully textured scaled heightmap is being uploaded as Vvardenfellx2-LW4.7z. Hopefully it won't fill up my web-space. If you can't get it, it'll mean the upload failed! (it's 78Mb, the ESP is 80Mb).

This has been produced by adding a TES3 texture placement map exporter to TESAnnwyn, and scaling up this map by 2 (using nearest neighbour, because each colour means a specific texture, and any fancy interpolation methods will add weird textures to the bits it fills in), then re-importing it -
I've added the TESPort texture convertor to TESAnnwyn, as well as TES3 texture importing, so it's possible to import the TES3 texture placement map to both TES3 and TES4. Thus you could bring a scaled up/down TES3 landscape including vertex colours and textures into TES4, or put it back in to TES3, thus producing an staticless, but fully texture landscape. Producing a 2x Vvardenfell textured landscape with original MW textures for TES3 is just as easy, except TES3's 16-bit height limit means only a 1.7x replica is possible in the game, 2x means using the rescale option similar to the one used to bring Oblivion to TES3.

This version of TESAnnwyn hasn't been released yet, I've only just written it to produce this heightmap.

I'm not ready with LOD meshes or textures yet, but technically anyone out there can generate them in the CS, or use the originals from the old LOD pack I released. The new files must start with 2000000 (the originals were 16779519). I've also noticed that Oblivion's LOD meshes are pretty low quality anyway, smooth mountains look very peaky which was OK for OB, but not quite correct for Vvardenfell, though it does make Vvardenfell look even more dramatic in LOD, so hrug:


I still have to add Firemoth, though being such a simple island it's not a show-stopper.

My next main task is to write the LOD texture generator, so we can see the textures from a distance.

Obviously the texture positioning will be more blocky now. Morrowind's textures were 7.3m x 7.3m, quite blocky anyway. Scaled these are 14.6m x 14.6m (1024x1024 game units - 16 textures per OB cell, or 64 textures per MW sized cell). But with OB's higher res textures, 3D grasses and the vertex colour map super-imposed, it doesn't all look that bad. MW looks pretty bad in places, the devs just hid things under rocks.

Lightwave