Actually Dave_91 is already the current joint leader alongside InsanitySorrow, I'm still in the core too, but honestly not sure who else still is, yet things have clearly become unglued and directionless, they never really came together after KuKulzA left. In fact I think things were drifting sideways before KuKulzA left and he could sense that, and it just didn't really get back on track.
It's entirely down to modders themselves to make this project and anyone in the core/leadership are guides and should be trying to drive enthusiasm and interest when momentum starts to dwindle or confusion reigns. Some people visit the forums and take great interest from time to time, but without them being able to bounce off an excited team who are already working on the project, they lose interest too.
Personally I'm more than happy for anyone else with a keen interest and some experience to be allowed in to the core, but I mostly view the core and leadership as a means for centralized guidance on technical issues, lore and when anyone working on the project is unsure of how they should be going about something etc, this project is down to each of you and the enthusiasm must be nurtured here, 'cos trust me, it ain't happening up in the core forums atm.
Quote:Originally posted by raggidmanWhat do you think Lightwave, is there a possible compromise here that would give us the best of all worlds?
Btw, the bit you quoted referred to TES3 landscape textures, I was referring to the placement squares which cover a wider area in TES3; 7.3m x7.3m. In TES4 a texture point only takes up 1.7mx1.7m so there's far more variety possible, and that's before blending. Region generation can add that detail, but could be very difficult to get right, and it will destroy all roads, fields, landscape texture features specific to ruins and towns in the process. But we're using TES4 textures already on the landscape, no TES3 assets and personally the lack of blending isn't nearly so much of an eyesore on a populated landscape.
The temporary placed content (which does come from Galadrielle's content converter and is using TES3 assets) was always meant to be replaced by swapping the static/activator mesh filepath in the CS, so it's an extremely fast way to have the land populated with newly TES4 detailed (and legal) meshes in exactly the way the team at Bethesda placed them. We've always been in need of meshes to replace them with of course and will regardless of what method we start with. Starting this way eliminates the requirement of placing them all, struggling with region generation now, and we know they'll look right. It's also far easier and more inspirational to working with this populated and explorable template than go back to the barren landscape of the last year which has already shown a year of honestly, overall negligible progress.
I've been doing what I can to jump-start the project by alleviating the physical effort as much as I could, especially the things that seemed to be intimidating (reflected in the lack of progress people were making) so I've automated what's feasible and would have required too much repetitive man-hours. When I first found out about this project in late 2006 I'd just written TESPort, but no-one had managed to produce a heightmap to start building anything on (I suspect because of CS memory limits). Then hearing KuKulzA wanted a 2x scale landscape I wrote TESAnnwyn to get it scaled up.
So since January 2007 we've already had a barren empty landscape to build on, but after the initial excitement (such as when Bethesda agreed to let us do it, probably because they think we're crazy
) people's efforts just seem to fizzle away. Texture conversion by late February had made the land look like a lot more appealing, but still empty. I converted and scaled the positions of the NPCs (with TES4 equivalent clothing, weapons) again to help alleviate the daunting effort but that didn't raise a lot of interest (hardly anyone downloaded it) and things continued to fizzle slowly.
By the 3rd quarter of last year Galadrielle's mesh converter came out so I got that converted in to a modindex 00 ESP to produce full LOD
screenshots, which created a good impression with the people who saw them, but still didn't inspire anyone enough to really get in there and change anything, despite having a fully visitable world to download and visit.
And this is kind of where I left it once again a month ago. Dave_91 has wanted to reduce the project to a 1x heightmap, but this loses our uniqueness over the other Vvardenfell projects that have since started up and loses the awe factor of a grand landscape. That said, 1x also removes the intimidating workload and sometimes oddness of scaled up landscape features. But yes, it can be rescaled to any size really, 1x, 1.5x, 1.75x, 2x, anything.
Coinneach: The ST heightmap is huge, in fact their scale is monumental (which is why they've only chosen a small area of the map of Vvardenfell). AFAIR the heightmap was about 6144x6144 pixels. Our 2x heightmap is 5376x5632 and it's surround by a large area of water. The 1x heightmap is 2688x2816 pixels. ST covers over 5x the modding area of the original 1x Vvardenfell. However, the last time I looked (about 6 months ago in fairness), ST was mostly an empty landscape and that's been going longer than Vvardenfell and with a bigger, better organized team. If we were to replicate Vvardenfell at the same
scale as ST, we should be probably be doing a 5x or 6x heightmap.
I do like the uniqueness and awe of the 2x landscape, but appreciate that this has proved too much for some and so it should go to the vote. Like a lot of you, I just want to get on with this mod too and start working on the world and leave the scale behind us. Being too pedantic just isn't working for this project ...
Lightwave