Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

I just played a bit of Morrowind with the Graphics Extender, the one that adds terrain to the distance view, and I've got to get this off my chest.

Morrowind is still huge. But now it feels so small. I decided to do an experiment. I went to the tallest part of Red Mountain and took a picture of Tel Vos. Then, I went to Tel Vos, and took a picture of it once it came in to view. I shot a straight vector from Red Mountain to Tel Vos, so the below image is accurate in both size and angle. Only the colors are off a bit.

Anyway, as you can see below, I took my picture of Tel Vos and scaled it to my picture from Red Mountain.



1600x1200 version

Does this not feel like the same distance between Cheydinhall and the Imperial City? Tel Vos is far to the north - a location I rarely visited because of it's remoteness. Red Mountain, at least this part, is a little bit north east of the center of Vvardenfell. Cyrodiil feels big, but still smaller than Morrowind... at least, before the Graphics Extender did it's trick. This convinces me that if Oblivion still had the loading screens and the fog that Morrowind had, it would feel almost Daggerfallish.

One other point I'd like to bring up is that this Graphics Extender program generated a hightmap of Vvardenfell. One that could concieveably be used to create Vvardenfell in Oblivion's engine!

woah, someone actually added LOD to morrowind? I'm impressed.

about the heightmaps, I read that that was one of the things in morrowind that you aren't allowed to use in oblivion. .....annoying beth dev rules.

Well, you could always turn distant LOD off for Oblivion... Hmm... I might actually give that a try...

Quote:Originally posted by TheImperialDragon
Well, you could always turn distant LOD off for Oblivion... Hmm... I might actually give that a try...

I've tried it, and it kills the feeling of the game. I was about 300 meters from the IC and couldn't see it, it just didn't feel right. :no:

the thing with oblivion lod is that it's kind of bad either way. You can look out from the jerall mountains and find a nice sunny beach. LOD is great, but I want BIG worlds, the kind like when you're in the mountains, all you can see is the moutains and the bottom it's that big.

Quote:Originally posted by IAMTHEEMPEROR
the thing with oblivion lod is that it's kind of bad either way. You can look out from the jerall mountains and find a nice sunny beach. LOD is great, but I want BIG worlds, the kind like when you're in the mountains, all you can see is the moutains and the bottom it's that big.

Imagine if somehow all the Beyond Cyrodiil projects were merged into Cyrodiil's landmass, now THAT would be BIG!

Quote:Originally posted by Psychotic

Quote:Originally posted by IAMTHEEMPEROR
the thing with oblivion lod is that it's kind of bad either way. You can look out from the jerall mountains and find a nice sunny beach. LOD is great, but I want BIG worlds, the kind like when you're in the mountains, all you can see is the moutains and the bottom it's that big.

Imagine if somehow all the Beyond Cyrodiil projects were merged into Cyrodiil's landmass, now THAT would be BIG!

Not possible. Unless we decided to make our landmasses very small.

And using a heightmap extracted from TES3 isn't legally possible, either. The vertical height data is a copyrighted asset. And, keep in mind it's EXTREMELY flat.

Quote:Imagine if somehow all the Beyond Cyrodiil projects were merged into Cyrodiil's landmass, now THAT would be BIG!

Quote:Not possible.

You are such a killjoy.

Actually, Morrowind doesn't look as flat as even I would have thought. Red Mountain is huge. It's about a fourth as tall as Vvardenfell is from the south to north tips.

I used to think it would look really flat, and even drew up a horrible picture to show what I thought it would look like. It certaintly isn't as jagged as one would hope, but it's not flat. It's ultra smooth though.

Looks like we are still going to have to craft our own heightmap anyway. :-D

It'll be amazing once they figure out how to do distant buildings and stuff. Though I do remember hearing that one of the devs tried it, and it looked like an amusement park. :confused:

look for a mod called Tamriel visible when distant. it makes forts, ruins, and settlements appear from far away and really improved the quality of gameplay.