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 1x Landmass |
Lightwave
First Knight
Registration Date: 2006.11.18
Posts: 156
Location: Cymru [Wales]
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Hi folks,
The 2x/1x subject has come up again in pms which we need to address,
both Dave_91 and cire992 have brought this up, owing to the sheer scale
of the 2x and the daunting prospect of filling it.
First I'll print my reply to Dave_91's question about it to me in a pm in December (which I copied InsanitySorrow in on):
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To the question about the 1x landmass, of course it's plausible and I
understand that scaling up land features doesn't always look ideal,
though I don't agree it's hard to find features, especially since the
placed content makes it extremely clear where every location is. It is
possible to see the entire 2x Vvardenfell with distantland too, it just
requires modifying a parameter (or 2) in the Oblivion.ini file to
increase the number of quads loaded and increasing the fog distance in
the weather so the default mist stops getting in the way.
These are the problems I have with a 1x landscape, though I'm not
particularly against it, I think we should bear it in mind if you want
to put the question to the rest of the team:
1. At 1x we've changed from being the most developed Vvardenfell mod to
being no longer unique and the probably the least developed.
PostalDude/Hunger's team have already texture and region generated the
entire 1x Vvardenfell months ago and have placed many objects, albeit
in their own vision. The Morroblivion team will have a well developed,
albeit lower quality TES3 authentic conversion and Phitt (AFAIR) has
already developed a very detailed Sheogorad region using the 1x
landscape (and he's done some really authentic meshes too). If we are
to do the same, we almost have a conflict of interest and it doesn't
feel good to be competing for the same thing, ulitmately all our mods
are going to be similar and have a lot of overlap, it's just the
content of some towns and the quest/storyline we add that'll make it
difference, so it begs the question whether we should agree to pool
resources with one of these teams or end in direct competition to them.
2. The efforts made by other members of the TES4:Vvardenfell team have
been for the 2x landscape, so they will have to delete some of their
work, obviously.
3. The DistantLOD is generally worse at 1x with more bugs due to the
greater number of undulations at 1x. This will affect the other teams
too though I respect it'll probably be solved when I get round to an
optimized DistantLand quad generator, but I haven't got round to that
yet. Most notably there are barriers in the walk up to Dagoth Ur which
totally obscure the path through the volcano and you have to walk
through them, and the prominent fin shape of the Cavern of the
Incarnate is almost non-existent in 1x.
4. If you can region generate for 1x successfully, then you can region
generate for 2x too. I've successfully region generated the largest
regions of Tamriel in the CS for 3x Cyrodii using automatically scaled
regions, so the scale of the area shouldn't cause reliability problems,
it just increases the time it takes to generate. AFAIR Hunger was
having a common difficulty getting a clean merge between region
textures on his Vvardenfell mod, but this affects everybody - the trick
is to have an overlapping region which combines some objects and
textures of both regions.
Other options are equally plausible too, like a 1.5 scale landmass even ...
===========================================================================
From a technical standpoint it won't make much difference to myself. I
haven't been working as solidly as I used to on re-writing TES4Scale
(spending a lot of my spare time IRL lately 
) so I realize I've been holding things up a bit regarding the
auto-placed, scaled content, with interiors, which is a bit ironic
since it's mainly the interior links that'll come out of the rewrite
for this mod (other mods would benefit from duplicate NPCs, and
completely cross-referenced FormIDs so a world is duplicated and
optionally scaled without conflict with the original).
So if there is to be a shift towards re-doing the landscape (and the
rest of the core are not phased by my comments) then it'll be the same
amount of work for me, I'll just run the final program with either 1x
scaling or 2x scaling. I can make the heightmap for the time being very
quickly (anyone can with TESPort or TESAnnwyn really) - in fact I
posted a 1x landscape, complete with all the LOD and TES3 placed
external content in the thread in Galadrielle's content converter - the
same worldscape and content I generated the pictures from, the download
link to the archive is on that page.
But I wanted to get this out in the open rather than in pm's so if
there is to be any sudden direction change, everyone is aware and able
to discuss it and voice their opinions.
Thanks,
Lightwave
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2008.02.03 16:13 |
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cire992
Seigneur
Registration Date: 2007.05.26
Posts: 274
Location: New England, USA
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1. We're not the most developed Vvardenfell mod, not even close.
2. I'm not making 10,000+ cells of exterior claims. If we use the converter, we only have to make a few.
3. Even if I did make all those claims, who's going to fill them all. I
posted the interior claims last summer and less than 10 of them have
been completed.
4.Conflict of Interest... What, Vvardenfell?
5. Exterior claims in the 2x landscape: Aside from Dave, all other
exterior modders have been missing for at least a year, they're towns
need to be restarted anyway.
6.Your fourth comment is missing the point. With the converter we can
100% accurately place meshes as they were in Morrowind. That's a lot
better than a random or less dense generation on 2x landscape.
1.5 scale landscape is kind of missing the whole point: we're trying to
make this whole project easier since no one is doing anything anymore.
You, Dave and I are the only ones left really contributing anything to the mod.
If you like I can ask around at the other projects to see if they have solutions for the 1x LOD issues.
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2008.02.04 04:37 |
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Dave_91
Marquess
Registration Date: 2006.07.12
Posts: 1,371
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Hmm... some good points, cire.
I'm happy to restart and begin working on exteriors again. I'd be much
happier working on the regular scaled landmass as the 2x scale required
a lot of landscape editing and fiddling around to get right.
I found some of the Silgrad Tower tilesets very hard to work with,
especially those which don't have fixed buildings like the shack and
Hlaalu tilesets. I guess that I can put up with it (and I understand
why the tilesets were made that way), but it did make things difficult
and sometimes boring. I would have much preferred fixed buildings like
MW.
I believe Phitt mentioned that he's allowing modders to use assets from
his mod if they want, if that's correct, there's a ton of nice assets
he has made that we could benefit using.
If I'm correct in a assuming the 'converter' can place the statics used in MW with ours in the exact locations (or thereabouts), then I imagine it would save a lot of work.
BTW: According to a few posts on the official forums Bethesda announced that using the converter was not
legal by their rules, and usage is prohibited (or something like that).
I could be wrong though. Then again... we're only using the coordinates
of the meshes from the 1x land (if we go ahead with it), right? |
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2008.02.04 11:37 |
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Lightwave
First Knight
Registration Date: 2006.11.18
Posts: 156
Location: Cymru [Wales]
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The LOD issue is not a critical one, there are problems with the 2x LOD
as it is. It's just that 1x is worse because Bethesda didn't design it
to cope with the rapidly undulating land that we see in Vvardenfell.
A bit further down my hit-list is an LOD generator, one less strenuous
on TES4 than my "LOD2" system which although has a perfect mesh
profile, exposes other game limits.
None of my points are meant to hold up the idea of a 1x landscape, they
were just my quarms about losing our greater uniqueness and by
'conflict of interest' I meant as a modding community as a whole we
have largely competing projects, so collusion would increasingly
benefit everybody.
Also the placed content (which you can see in the screenshots I did
months ago) is not to the density one would hope of a TES4 project.
TES3 was good for its time, but many might expect added richness. Which
is why others (such as Phitt's and PostalDude/Hunger's project) are
using region generation instead.
I haven't seen Bethesda's response to the converter, they may have
grabbed the wrong end of the stick and put a rubber stamp across the
whole modding community as being stupid, so gone for the heavy-hammer
approach because someone somewhere will probably try to distribute the
meshes (it's probably happening anyway behind people's backs). The
placed data in the ESP is likely no problem at all, but unless the
replacement meshes have identical centre points and are the same sizes
as the originals, they will not fit together properly or sit right on
the landscape. I can add something to the mesh replacement system to
change the x,y,z offset of any placed versions of those meshes, if
required, but that means someone will have to figure out the
differences in positions first.
Btw, in case it was forgotten, the link to the 1x landscape I posted in
September , with LOD, NPCs placed content file (in separate ESPs) is
here:
Vvardenfellx1.7z
All I've got to do is import interiors and re-link them to the
exteriors, but my re-write of TES4Scale has meant I've gone backwards
in many ways before I can go forwards and do that part. 
Lightwave
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2008.02.05 00:59 |
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cire992
Seigneur
Registration Date: 2007.05.26
Posts: 274
Location: New England, USA
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^ Then why didn't you say it was a good idea before?
Lightwave, you mentioned that we have "competing mods" out there. Funny
thing is, they wouldn't say the same. We need to get ourselves and
start working in tandem with these other projects, because as you said:
there's no point in having four identical products of the same vision. |
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2008.02.05 16:24 |
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cire992
Seigneur
Registration Date: 2007.05.26
Posts: 274
Location: New England, USA
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| quote: |
Originally posted by InsanitySorrow
We have had discussions about working with other teams, I feel we
should work alone and together and focus on what we have to do not what
other teams are doing. I am not sure what Dave and Lightwave have to
say but I really think it does not matter how many mods do the same
thing, its what is different thats important, like quality for instance. |
QUALITY?! This mod doesn't have any sort of quality! As a matter fact
it doesn't even have a master file. It doesn't hold a candle to
Galadrielle's Converter, or Phitt's Sheogorad, or SoVvM's Solstheim.
The only thing this mod has is a team that shrinks every single day,
and it's happening again right now. I want out of the core. |
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2008.02.08 08:23 |
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Lightwave
First Knight
Registration Date: 2006.11.18
Posts: 156
Location: Cymru [Wales]
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We all need to be open minded I think. To quote TESNexus where Galadrielle officially was hosting copies of his content converter before it had to be removed:
"Essentially, we let folks mod our games like Morrowind or Oblivion,
but we don’t allow for folks to take content from another game and put
it into a new game – even if they own both copies, and even if it's one
of our own games." (Bethesda)
"There are many reasons why this is so; among others, it is
important to protect the original licensor's rights when Bethsoft has
licensed a resource to use in a game. That license may allow use of the
resource in that game alone, and Bethsoft is duty-bound to prevent the
resource from being used in any other game, including their own." (TESNexus moderator).
This sucks and also means we cannot proceed with the intention of using any of Bethesda's TES3 NIFs in TES4:Vvardenfell.
It must be worse for the Morroblivion team, the only way for them is to
proceed underground - Bethesda won't be motivated to pursue them
further than outside the mainstream modding community, but it's harder
to put your heart and soul in to something like that. My TESPort never
came under such a glaring eye solely because it replaced TES3 content
things for TES4 content (because I wanted TES4 detail). I didn't think
they'd get that picky about people re-using the TES3 resources on their
own machines though.
The statement is not explicitly restricted to NIFs either, merely
'resources'. To my knowledge we are the only mod that has official
permission to use the heightmap and from Vality7's other past
experiences, Bethesda are prepared to be much more flexible with the
contents of their ESMs/ESPs.
Admittedly this was done on the 2x pretext, but I think using the heightmap in general is not a problem, for us.
So this changes my priorities a bit too. There is no point in
converting any interiors for our own use as we cannot realistically
just swap in our own tilesets - they'll never line up.
We're restricted to the exterior data and will have to wipe towns clean
(as we already knew anyway) and replace the wilderness models with our
own. This swap doesn't have to be immediate, we can still gradually
swap things but how tolerant Bethesda will be of us in the meantime as
we officially go about that business, I can't say obviously. Even if we
make it explicitly clear that it's only a short-term measure, legally
they can't tolerate that either ... just don't make a song and dance
about it in the meantime.
Btw, there is no point in me writing an application to swap the TES3
model records with our own, because it's far faster and simply for
someone else to change that in the construction set and browse for the
new file. That will instantly change the model for that NIF everywhere
it is placed. What could be useful is when we need to do automated
X,Y,Z adjustments. e.g. When a rock is replaced, check the landscape
and see whether they sit right, if not, note down the current
co-ordinates of the object and move it slightly so it looks right. The
goal is to see how much we need to move it, supply me the info for each
model and I can run it through the ESP to shift them around. This could
technically be done with Bethesda's own models, such as Shivering Isles
mushrooms. I just need to know how much to offset it.
AFAIR there is only one thing wrong with the 1x landscape/data, AFAIR
all the placed content is slightly off from their original positions
(by about 2.4metres, enough to see doors slightly sticking out of hills
etc). I'll dig out the original TES4Scale and run it through there with
different offsets. Technically it's the landscape that's offset by 1
heightmap point, not actually the placed content, so maybe I'll just
re-import the heightmap and offset it by one point instead so it's the
same as TES3.
If we're going to drop back to 1x, an announcement needs to be made to everyone by one of the leaders.
And cire992, I really appreciate your concerns, you've put considerable
effort in to this too and we need to compromise to give it a chance.
I'm very easy on whether we share resources or keep to our own, but
personally I think especially with Phitt's work, that would really help
us, trouble is, do we have enough at this stage to give back to him.
Lightwave
p.s. Who's got access to the Vvardenfell website? We seriously need to
update this thing because it looks like it's been dead nearly 2 years:
Last updated: March 22, 2006
Getting some shots up of the 1x I took with Galadrielle's content on
our 1x heightmap with LOD on the main page would make a massive
difference to visitors, even if we can't keep that TES3 stuff
permanently. |
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2008.02.08 22:50 |
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