Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

I was in the CS looking at the way child and parent worldspaces were handled with cities and I realized two things.
1) That the cell coordinates of a child worldspace need to be the same as their parents for the LOD of the location that they are meant to be in to show up correctly.
2) That the height of the buildings on the Z axis of the child worldspace must be the same as they are meant to be for their parents, I assume that if they are not then LOD will appear to be floating to high or to low.

Could someone else take a look and see if my findings appear to be correct or not?

What does this mean for Silgrad? Though my findings haven't been tested, from what I have seen it appears that they are accurate, as it is the only logical way i can explain how city's worldspace set up their LOD.
1) Reich Parkeep exterior will have to be at the center of the Silgrad Tower Heightmap, or the LOD that is meant for the city will not match up.
3)The terrain for the RP area cannot be very high up, or the LOD will appear to float or something of the sort.
2) Other cities like Blacklight and Steadhelm with have to be A)paused until the heightmap is set up so their coordinates and height can be found B)somone guestimates their coordinates and z axis height and then the heightmap is designed to be compatible with the guestimation.

This causes and even bigger predicament for myself and Riften though. Riften is meant to be in the low mountains, in its own World space it is only about 1000 above 0 on the Z axis. So if my findings about the parent/child worldspace relationship are correct, I am going to somehow have to raise Riften some 5-10,000 coordinates up the Z axis to make the LOD function properly. The alternative is that I lower the base waterlevel of the heightmap when it is generated some 5-10,000 coordinates on the z axis so that Riften can stay where I created it, and I can have it in the mountains, but the valleys around it won't be under water or anything. The perk of lowering the water level is that I can have the effect of uber high mountains in Skyrim

They're probably gonna try to put the towns on the main worldspace.

I hope you're right Axen, I wouldn't want cities in their own worldspaces like Oblivion. Reich parkeep for now is fine because it has no landmass for now, but when do have a landmass we don't need towns in their own worldspaces

So is their any official word on whether or not Silgrad will have any seperate worldspaces?

I believe that when you make a worldspace a child of another worldspace, the child immediately loses it's landscape data (height, texture, vertex color) in favor of the parent worldspace. In essence, the child worldspace starts using the parent landscape data, so any changes you make to the landscape in the child worldspace also affects the landscape in the parent worldspace.

Early on I thought it was a good idea to follow Bethesda's example so I cut my first single worldspace into three. That took me about 30 hours and was one of the most boring jobs I've ever done, even more so in hindsight since it actually made things worse by instituting more worlspace transitions with the accompanying frustrating cell loads. I'm open to splicing in the Redoran District directly into the future landmass worldspace but I shudder to think how much work I'd have to do to move the Imperial Districts over to it as well. And as things are at the moment I think it'd be good to keep them in their own worldspaces because they have an almost extreme detail level and if they were moved as they are into the main worldspace it would likely impact performance.

(My findings are that exterior cells should have about 200,000 faces, 300,000 tops, otherwise performance will start becoming affected. Some of the I.D. cells have upwards of 800,000 and work comparatively ok, presumably because there's nothing outside the walls for the game to load into memory.)

I don't mind admitting that I don't know very much about heightmaps and everything else in that general category (like generating nature), and I'm not the guy to say what we as a team should or shouldn't do in that regard.

Hmm... *thinks* but if nothing else works, wouldn't one alternative be to simply keep the Redoran part of Reich Parkeep as a parent worldspace with the two I.D. as children? Sure, while in town you wouldn't see much of the outside world, and one would have to draw up two huge hills in the exterior mockup on the main landmass, but it seems to me like it could work. Then again there might be problems with moving inbetween parent worldspaces? Hmm... but if there are, how come you could save the Cheydinhal Count's son from the Realm of Oblivion? Because it sure looked like he walked with you from that worldspace back to Tamriel. In either case, that method could potentially be a solution in case the Redoran District can't be spliced into the landmass, though splicing it in would of course be the best solution in my opinion.

Quote:Originally posted by Razorwing
I don't mind admitting that I don't know very much about heightmaps and everything else in that general category (like generating nature), and I'm not the guy to say what we as a team should or shouldn't do in that regard.

Heightmaps are grayscale images, black represents the lowest height and white represents the highest height. (You probably already knew that, though.) As for painting them... one way to go about it is use a program like Paint to draw the landscape terraced, then import it into a heightmap editing program (such as GeoControl, the program mentioned in these forums earlier) and apply erosion (that'll get rid of the terraces and make it sloped) and other filters to the landscape.
As for importing it into Oblivion... a 1024x1024 sized heightmap is equal to 31x31 exterior cells, one quad, and the file format has to be 16-bit RAW. Go read up on one of the tutorials on the CS wiki on how exactly to import.
On auto-populating regions with objects... well, you do it from the region editing window. Perhaps you can figure it out by looking at it yourself.