Exterior cell size in Oblivion vs. Morrowind

[Axen]

Your math is wrong. Do 870*16, not 870*256 (for a 400% scale).
[strike]And, if MY math is right, Silgrad Tower will take up 14.5 quads at a 400% scale!! Worldspaces can go up to 16 quads. (Something just doesn't sound right, though... Razorwing, did you measure that correctly?) At a regular old TES3 scale, that landmass would take up 3.6 quads.

So, a 400% scale would be highly unreasonable, and according to what I've found out about the view distance, you definately don't need to get as big as that to make towns and cities not appear close together.[/strike]

Uhh, my math was wrong... sort of. :eek: Worldspaces go up to 256 quads, not 16 (it's 16x16). Still, 14 quads is larger than TES4's worldspace (the parts that you can explore, that is). But, if you really don't have a problem working with a landmass the size of TES4's Cyrodiil...

[Razorwing]

Originally posted by Axen
[strike]Your math is wrong. Do 870*16, not 870*256.
And, if MY math is right, Silgrad Tower will take up 14.5 quads at a 400% scale!! Worldspaces can go up to 16 quads. (Something just doesn't sound right, though... Razorwing, did you measure that correctly?) At a regular old TES3 scale, that landmass would take up 3.6 quads.

So, a 400% scale would be highly unreasonable, and according to what I've found out about the view distance, you definately don't need to get as big as that to make towns and cities not appear close together.[/strike]

Uhh, my math was wrong... sort of. :eek: Worldspaces go up to 256 quads, not 16 (it's 16x16). Still, 14 quads is larger than TES4's worldspace. But, if you really don't have a problem working with a landmass the size of TES4's Cyrodiil...

I know I don't have a problem with it, no.

It was clear early on that the scale of the world in Oblivions was much different than the scale of the world in Morrowind, because naturally Cyrodiil is a whole province while Vvardenfell is only like one fifth of a Province. If we had recreated our world to fit Cyrodiil's scale we would never have gotten it to fit and get all the stuff we wanted to get into it. Not to mention leave room for fresh ideas and concepts.

Bottom line, the scale of Cyrodiil compared to ours isn't important to most people. If it had meant that the later stages of the mod could only contain so much land, that had been another situation, but the way Oblivion works it's not a problem to just switch between worldspaces. It'd just be a matter of setting up collision box doors set to be automatic doors along the border between the worldspaces. A lot of work? Yeah - but not more work than I could get it done over a weekend, and in that perspective, it's not much work compared to how much playable content we can offer the player by giving him huge meaty chunks of wilderness.

[Axen]

We've got 256 quads. I don't think we'd need to split it up into multiple worldspaces.

[Razorwing]

Originally posted by Axen
We've got 256 quads. I don't think we'd need to split it up into multiple worldspaces.

Mm, no it was just a theoretical example if we had had to do that, then I might have had another viewpoint.

[Axen]

The main obstacle is, though... the heightmapping. As I said before, the CS's heightmap painting tools are incredibly weak compared to some external programs out there (and, if you want a TON of wilderness, you'll probably want an interesting landscape). Thing is, these programs can only edit heightmaps up to 4096x4096 in size (and for a good reason... an 8192x8192 heightmap would take up over 2 GB of RAM :eek: ). You can always split the heightmaps up, but then you get seams.
Though, for the Silgrad Tower and Blacklight landmass, the multiple heightmaps thing isn't an issue to be concerned about, since a 4096x4096 heightmap is 16 quads.

The scary part is... we can go at this 400% scale, recreate all of Morrowind, and STILL have space left over. :dunce:

Perhaps someone can divide up Prometheus' map into Oblivion quads? (There needs to be a border one quad thick around the whole thing into the other provinces/the ocean, though, so you don't stare into nothingness once you reach the edge.)

Edit: You know what I just realized? The Inner Sea will actually be a sea, not a wide river. Which means we could have... controllable ships!

[Razorwing]

This strikes me as the current main thread for "landmass scale" discussion, so I'll post this here.

I've finished setting up citywalls around the town and checked out the heightmap dialogue window to get an overview of it (attached below). The 'safe zone' the city would need is 15x14 cells. It's not really that big because I calculated all the cells I raised and one can assume the whole outer rim of cells is blank space outside the walls, but it's good to have a little buffer.

I'm a bit hazy on how the transfer of the Redoran district to the landmass will work, and indeed maybe it won't, but just the same the city would need to occupy that much space in the exterior whether it's the real city or just a mockup.

[Siegfried]

I'm transferring Riften to the exterior landmass by just using Riften's worldspace as the main Skyrim worldspace, of course, Rodan is doing the heightmap and you are doing RP, so it might be a bit more compicated, unlike with me where I'm doing both.

[Greybeard]

Originally posted by Axen
Thing is, these programs can only edit heightmaps up to 4096x4096 in size (and for a good reason... an 8192x8192 heightmap would take up over 2 GB of RAM :eek: ).

Axen, since you're the guru of this area, you'll have the answer to this. Somewhere (maybe WIKIpedia) I read that OB doubles the heights of the heightmap. Do we get a virtual height in-game twice that of what we see in the CS, or does the CS also adjust the height?

[Axen]

Originally posted by Greybeard

Originally posted by Axen
Thing is, these programs can only edit heightmaps up to 4096x4096 in size (and for a good reason... an 8192x8192 heightmap would take up over 2 GB of RAM :eek: ).

Axen, since you're the guru of this area, you'll have the answer to this. Somewhere (maybe WIKIpedia) I read that OB doubles the heights of the heightmap. Do we get a virtual height in-game twice that of what we see in the CS, or does the CS also adjust the height?

Guru? I wouldn't consider myself that; I just know some things.
As for your question, I'm not entirely sure. It might not double the intended height that you want if you export it with the CS, then import. The reason the CS doubles all the heights is because a 16-bit RAW height field only has a height range of 0 to 65535 (or 0 to 65536? Hardly matters), and the game has a height range of -65535 to 65535 (or -65536 to 65536).

[DarkAsmodeous]

Whatever you do, make it manageable, we don't want another TES3 silgrad, finished just as no one cared any more, get thiis out within 1.5-2.5 years.