Vvardenfell Region Data + Information

[Lightwave]

KuKulzA: Lightwave - "I can give a cell gridded version of the texture overview map if required that will help with claims, if KuKulzA wants it?"yea! sounds great to me

I've uploaded two images:

1. The same LOD texture map I posted in one of the other threads a few weeks ago. It's the same image made by the LOD texture generator given with the LOD texture pack. It's a 5024x5376 jpg (only 3.7Mb in size but I think still holds enough detail - the same size in BMP form was 79Mb!).

2. A 5024x5376 gridded gif image. This is just a white/transparent background with black grid-lines every 32 pixels. Every 10 cells (320 pixels) the lines are twice as thick, just to make it a bit easier to count your cell position. You might want to consider superimposing little text labels along each axis because with an image of that size it is quite easy to lose your position! I've put a small pink 'O' at position (0,0) just to help you find the worldspace centre a little more easily, but feel free to remove it or add something more vivid. Counting the pixels from the bottom left of the image it's at pixel position (2144,2464) or in cells: (67, 77).

I've left it as two separate images so you can superimpose them in Photoshop in case you want to change the grid-line colours or enhance the vibrancy of the texture map separately.

The corners of both images correspond to these cell positions:

Top-left: -67, 90
Top-Right: 89, 90
Bottom-Left: -67, -77
Bottom-Right: 89, -77


The images are available in the Projects\Vvardenfellx2 directory at lightwave.4shared.com. They are called:

Vvardenfell-TexMap.jpg
Vvardenfell-CellGrid.gif

Originally posted by Dave_91However, if there's another way which involves drawing or something, I'd happily make a hand-drawn one if it would help any.

Possibly the easiest is to get hold of TESAnnwyn and run this command (with both TESAnnwyn.exe and the Vvardenfellx2-LW5.ESP file in the same directory as one another):

tesannwyn -c -w Vvardenfell vvardenfellx2-LW5.esp

This will dump out the vertex colour map (-c option) in to a separate BMP called 'tesannwyn-vclr.bmp' and will be exact to scale (5024x5376 pixels).
You can erase as much noise from the interior as you like, and if you want to print it, re-draw little sketchs of towns in the interior and scan it back in, you can. Apart from having the outline to the exact proportions, the VCLR map also shows up the outlines of numerous towns (though much less well defined than the ones in TES4's Tamriel), several Dumner forts and other ruins, roads, rivers, Dagoth Ur and the exact positioning of GhostFence. It'd take a lot of work to identify many of them, so I think just having the positions of the main towns marked with some kind of sketch, the main roads, river and GhostFence would be sufficient for now. Beth's OB map is quite sparse really.

Alternatively you could try sourcing a to-scale TES3 map if you find one you think that looks nice. So long as it accurately fits the profile of the TES3 Morrowind, it can be stretched and directly super-imposed on this heightmap. I could always start by putting in the VCLR image as the map, but as it is, the original is far too busy and can be quite confusing.

Good luck,

Lightwave

[Dave_91]

Hmm... I tried using TESAnnwyn, ran "tesannwyn -c -w Vvardenfell vvardenfellx2-LW5.esp" in the command window, when it finishes, I end up with over 34,000 temporary files named after every quad cell. Here's a pic, did I do something wrong?

[Lightwave]

Err ... well it should clean up all those temporary files after itself unless it crashed, which I haven't heard of before (you didn't run out of disk space or anything?)
That command should generate two other files and tell you it did so as it finished, along with info such as what the highest and lowest points were in the heightmap, which cells they occured in, the pixel size of the images, etc - did it not get this far?? The two images it should make are:

tesannwyn.bmp: The heightmap image (which you don't need).
tesannwyn-vclr.bmp: The VCLR image.

If it's left those temp files, sort your folder by file type, select all the tmp files and delete them. Or even easier, type 'del *.tmp' at the command prompt. Shouldn't happen though, really hrug:

Lightwave

[Dave_91]

Yeah so I imagined. The command window the generation was done and complete... strange. I certainly have enough disk space free, not sure if it may have crashed or not. The command window did not display any errors or stop responding, it just said done or something then I closed the window. I'll delete the files and try again.

[Lightwave]

If it said it completed then the file you need should be already be there. Not sure why it would have left temp files, unless the last TESAnnwyn I released (been over a month now) had that bit of debugging left in it. So long as it has generated the 'tesannwyn-vclr.bmp' file, just delete the .tmp files and you won't need to run TESAnnwyn again.

Lightwave

[Dave_91]

Because of Lightwave's suggested deadline, I began work on the region modding, and it's looking pretty cool so far. All the regions are made and coloured accordingly, and have the appropriate weather effects. For Red Mountain, I temporarily added the Oblivion weather effects.

The regions themselves were pretty much guessed. Thanks to Lighwave's maps, it made creating the regions a lot easier, although some areas were too difficult to get exact, the majority is covered well and can easily be edited later if needed. I could get a few screens, but the map of Vvardenfell won't fully fit on the screen of the region editor, so I'd have to take indiviual shots of the regions which may be confusing (I can get some though, if anyone wants ).

I decided to add Zafirbel Bay as a region too, cutting down Azura's Coast a tad. Although this may be a little off line compared to Morrowind's region plans, I personally feel it's better with Zafirbel Bay as a seperate region. It covers all of the smaller Telvanni islands, and Sadrith Mora. I coloured it pink in the region colour settings, so it shouldn't be hard to recognize from the region map in the CS. If anyone is against the idea of Zafirbel Bay being included as a region, please say so. =)

I'll be releasing the early regional plan in a few hours probably, so you can take a look, maybe edit a few things or give feedback.

Also, I'll be messing around with various SI weather effects in a seperate testing worldspace, because there was a particular weather type that caught my attention called 'Ash storm'. If it's anything like Morrowind's Ash Storms, it may prove useful.

[KuKulzA]

sounds great... i hope that ashstomr thing is good for us...
as for Zafirbel Bay it makes perfect sense to me... Azuras Coast was a rocky mushroom forested place... Zafirbel is fragmented into isles, not easy for a mushroom-forest ecosystem to persist in. Sounds good to me

[Dave_91]

Excellent. That's that sorted then.

I'll try get some screens of the regions with their weather effects working soon... right now I'm fixing a slight distant building problem with Maar Gan. Nothing to worry about though.

[Dave_91]

Okay, I've tweaked it a little. Download it here.

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by Dave_91Okay, I've tweaked it a little. Download it here.

Great job Dave, that really adds a new dimension to things. I should add it to the heightmap ESP since it's the most sensible place for it, but for those with slow connections they can just keep them as separate files for now. I might wait until a map becomes available too though, as it'll be useful to incorporate them all in one go. The actual map .dds can always be modified separately in the future as new settlements are created, but I would need one of the correct size to line up the settings first.

Btw, I tried the TestAsh weather (setweather 00071D2F) last night after reading your post, but unfortunately it just seems to cloud the sky a bit. I don't know how difficult it is to create an ash storm using the weather creator, but it almost looks like fun(!) perhaps we could even heavily modify a precipitation NIF from TES3 to work with it (assuming we can find the TES3 ash storm weather meshes).

It's about time I took some new screenies too, my 2x Vvardenfell shots are still predominantly full of the older blanket grass texture pics.

Lightwave