TESPort-Discussion

[Candlemaster]

Originally posted by Lightwave
http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/...Effect.jpg
Lightwave

Oh my... That can't be good.

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by candlemaster
Oh my... That can't be good.

No, you're right there.
It's certainly a vexing problem, especially when I'm so near yet so far. There are still some joins problems between the quads (something don't add up, 'scuse the pun) and the ribbing on north-south slopes exacerbates this when it comes to joining. In the meantime it still helps to see some scaling pics I made a couple of nights ago of what a 2x2 original Vvardenfell might look like, automatically scaled using a hacked version of TESfaith:

Screenshows of Vvardenfell 2x2x2

The land has been expanded by 2x in all directions (i.e. 4x larger surface area, 8x larger volume) and all placed objects had their X,Y,Z co-ordinates doubled, so items that were on the ground are in exactly their original relative positions. I haven't expanded out the textures though that could be solved easily, currently each block of 4 cells has the same texture pattern repeated as the original MW cell.

I'm at sixes and sevens how to solve the join and interpolation problems. Being so close it's difficult for me to abandon all the progress so far and start afresh, but sometimes I wonder whether it'd be worth writing a heightmap importer which works on height data rather than the original TES3/4 LAND ESP/ESM data (which is progressive gradient data in the X plane) and then try to turn the heightmap data back in to TES LAND records. It'd make interpolating easier and solve join problems and of course be useful for importing any landscape from a BMP, RAW or other format, but it's not an easy job. And of course the TES4 CS already has a RAW heightmap->LAND importer, albeit a bit daft with it's 1024x1024 per image limitations, but I think it works.

Anyway, if anyone has any advice on the following question, I'd be really grateful:

Does anyone know of a third party heightmap interpolator program that can scale and interpolate raw height data by a specified number?

If so, I could just run the original TESPort on Morrowind.esm, dump it out as a BMP using TEStroi, scale it using the third party app and re-import it using the TES4 heightmap importer, I don't need any additional programming. I can't believe I'm having to write everything from scratch, there must be alternatives for spreading out raw height data by interpolation.

I might post on the official TES forums too, in case some people out there have ideas.

Cheers,

Lightwave

p.s. I tried a 4x4x4 Vvardenfell in TES3 CS a couple of nights ago too by feeding it back in to the same program, it finally loaded after 30 mins, but breaks the Region Map editor (it shows only black) - the resulting Morrowind.esm was nearly 1Gb in size anyway.

[The Grey Wizard]

I know Vality has some programs that can import raw, talk to him. Anyway KuKu, I'll do my best to start and finish a height map by the fourth, though I have been rather preocupied with real life and Middle-earth. Anyway, with the whole y axis effect, why couldn't we just use smoth verticles in the CS and just run over it all with a 15 brush? That would make a good starting canvase anyway, and each modder could "perfect" his or her cliamed region. As for the 6x6 I was talking about, I was mentioning that we must make sure our map does not exseed 6quads by 6 quads, or in total, 36 quads, or we can kiss LOD goodbye. If you were to stright import Vvardenfell into Oblivion it should take about 4x4 quads if I am not mistaken, based solely on your statement that Vvardenfell is not much smaller then Cyrodiil. Correct me if I am wrong, becuase Morrowind didn't have the border regions that Oblivion had.

[A_flyboy]

I think i heard somewhere that MW is 6 square miles. that doesn't sound right...
ill see if i cant find that website again.

edit here we go:
an excerpt from the Daggerfall artical at wikipidia:

Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game to date, featuring a game world estimated as being 161,600 square miles ? roughly twice the size of Great Britain ? with over 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player's character to explore. According to Todd Howard, Elder Scrolls programmer, the game's sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is 0.01 percent the size of Daggerfall. Vvardenfell, the explorable part of the province of Morrowind in the third game has 6 square miles. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has approximately 16 square miles to explore. In Daggerfall, there are 750,000+ non-player characters (NPCs) for the player to interact with, compared to the count of around 1000 NPCs found in Morrowind and Oblivion. It should be pointed out that the geography and the characters in these later games is much more detailed.

[The Old Ye Bard]

Originally posted by A_flyboy
I think I heard somewhere that MW is 6 square miles. that doesn't sound right...
ill see if I cant find that website again.

edit here we go:
an excerpt from the Daggerfall artical at wikipidia:

Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game to date, featuring a game world estimated as being 161,600 square miles ? roughly twice the size of Great Britain ? with over 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player's character to explore. According to Todd Howard, Elder Scrolls programmer, the game's sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is 0.01 percent the size of Daggerfall. Vvardenfell, the explorable part of the province of Morrowind in the third game has 6 square miles. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has approximately 16 square miles to explore. In Daggerfall, there are 750,000+ non-player characters (NPCs) for the player to interact with, compared to the count of around 1000 NPCs found in Morrowind and Oblivion. It should be pointed out that the geography and the characters in these later games is much more detailed.

And that houses where more than just a square block.

[Lightwave]

Original posted by The Grey Wizard
Anyway, with the whole y axis effect, why couldn't we just use smoth verticles in the CS and just run over it all with a 15 brush? That would make a good starting canvase anyway, and each modder could "perfect" his or her cliamed region.

Sure, we could just brush it, a click (sometimes two) with a 15 brush smooths out every lump and join problem. It's just that I would have preferred to have given a perfect to-scale copy or we'll have these two 2 height maps to choose from : A brand new one that is smooth, though not a replica, or a 2D near-replica that's lumpy on slopes and needs some brushing everywhere.

The playable area of Cyrodiil is only about 40% of the Tamriel landmass in Oblivion.esm. Vality7 compared what TEStroi pulls out and what's playable compared to Vvardenfell:

1. Oblivion Tamriel Worldspace
2. Oblivion Cyrodiil Explorable

The 2x2 RAWs exported by the TES IV heightmap editor is closer to the border region version: Compare the sizes of these:

1. BMP export heightmap from TEStroi or a really detailed greyscale version:
2. BMP export from the combined TES4CS RAW files

[Ignore the colour differences, the first is from a 32-bit, formed from the ESM data, the second from the heightmap editor is only 16-bit.]
The 4 quad export from the heightmap editor doesn't cover very much, but approaches the size of Oblivion's explorable Cyrodiil, which is very similar to the size of Morrowind's Vvardenfell.

So you're right, an original Vvardenfell scaled by 2 should be about 16 quads (4x4).

Thus far I haven't been able to load a ported 2x2 Vvardenfell in to TES4CS yet, I only have 2.5Gb of RAM and it crashes before finishing loading, I'll have to increase my swap space. Could be another reason though (TES4 group sizes or something), still investigating ...

I know Vality has some programs that can import raw, talk to him.

I'm not sure Vality7 had anything for RAW files, I wrote this so it might help him yesterday: this thread. But I still don't know if scaling in a 2D image editor and re-importing is another alternative to creating a 4x Vvardenfell (if so I could just re-import a TESPorted heightmap from Morrowind.esm). Maybe I should try it and see ...

Originall posted by A_flynoy
the explorable part of the province of Morrowind in the third game has 6 square miles. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has approximately 16 square miles to explore.

They've been quite misleading there, the explorable area of Oblivion is barely more than the explorable part of Morrowind (which I make about 6.9 square miles, but some of that's underwater).
The complete Tamriel worldspace in the ESP is about 16 square miles, but as a player one can't get to 60% of it. :no:

Lightwave

* edit * One of the links to Vality's maps was wrong.

[KuKulzA]

wow... I'm gonna have to reread a few times to understand it...
this technical heightmap and stuff and its lingo is not my forte...

but anyways, I will try to make sense of it.... I'm sure it makes sense to people who know this stuff

[Lightwave]

Okey dokey. I've uploaded the first version of the automatically scaled up TES IV Vvardenfell landmass. You may download it from here:

[URL="http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/downloads/Vvardenfellx2-LW0.rar"]Vvardenfell2x-LW0.rar (58Mb)[/URL]

It has all the problems discussed before, but as the Grey Wizard suggested, 1 to 2 clicks of a size 15 brush does a very good job of instantly correcting any lumpy/band problem (and cell joins, vertex normals at the same time). The downside is that this one click process needs doing across a lot of the landscape to smoothen it, though not necessarily as large an task if it's already going to be split up for other team members to work on their own areas anyway.

You're looking at an area of around 27 square miles for the entire landmass, in the X plane cell numbers can vary from -72 to +95, in the Y place from -64 to 111, overall there's 20,672 Oblivion cells. That's one mighty big project ... explorable Cyrodiil is only about 5880.

Here's a shot of the first thing I saw when I loaded the 2x2 Vvardenfell in to TES3: Morrowind (before converting it to TES4 with TESPort):

[URL="http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/2x2/MW_2x2_Dwemer+BandEffect.jpg"]A Dwemer observatory ruin sitting on a slope showing the band effect.[/URL]

Btw, that's the original Morrowind mesh (just run under Timeslip's DirectX9 MGE patch). Here's two example shots of before and after clicking with a size 15 soften vertex brush:

[URL="http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/2x2/2x-band1.jpg"]1. Part of ribbed Vvardenfell before the brush.[/URL]
[URL="http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/2x2/2x-band2.jpg"]2. Part of ribbed Vvardenfell, corrected after one click of the brush.[/URL]

i.e. one click instantly corrects the problem. I haven't loaded in NPCs or their placements atm, but can do with TESPort relatively easily, so if should it decided to go with this version as opposed to The Grey Wizards new creation you could have all the NPCs ready placed in their original positions.

My TES4 CS heightmap editor always plays up and I haven't been able to generate an LOD - it crashes instantly (but then my CS also crashes instantly trying to use the basic import utility supplied with the editor on any files).

I'd recommend checking it over to verify there's nothing missing. If the ribs are bothering people, I can smooth a load of them out myself - the landscape is far more inviting after a click of the size 15 brush.

Hope it's of interest,

Lightwave

p.s. I could automatically apply a base if it was wanted (e.g. a type of grass, rock or sand), this is obviously a fresh heightmap without textures; I'm assuming The Grey Wizards will also be a virgin heightmap ready for texturing?

[bob196045]

Howdy

I haven't read all these posts but I have just one question

Can the OB landmass be brought into MW using this tool?

Bob

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by bob196045
I haven't read all these posts but I have just one question
Can the OB landmass be brought into MW using this tool?

Not with TESPort, that's for moving MW mods to OB (landmass, NPCs and a few other things).

Moving OB Worldspace landmasses to MW is TEStroi's job. Vality7 is using the exported OB (Tamriel) landmass for his Cyrodii: Dawn of Oblivion mod.

I'm sure one day I can combine the tools together though.

Lightwave