The Vvardenfell Heightmap

[Lady Nerevar]

wow, its

HUGE

a bit too huge imho. expanses are good and all, but it seems just a bit too big in comparison to the original or to cyrodiil

[Dave_91]

Originally posted by Lady Nerevar
wow, its

HUGE

a bit too huge imho. expanses are good and all, but it seems just a bit too big in comparison to the original or to cyrodiil

In some cases, yes.

Remember though that's it's the size it is for a reason.

-Lightwave, is it possible to see the LOD landscape even further without it 'fading away'? Or is this not possible with Oblivion?

[Lightwave]

I'm not sure myself, but it's probably possible to alter some fog values in the console, someone will know. You can also alter your FOV very easily by doing something like:

setcamerafov 120

The default is 75, it goes up to about 160 (very wide angle and very weird). You can get more in your screenshots:

Lady Nerevar: It looks bigger than it is. Don't forget that the TES4 game engine makes things look further away than they are, kind of like a reverse telescope. In Cyrodiil, the snowy mountains look at least an hour's walk away, but it doesn't even take you 10 mins from the IC on a horse. You can actually traverse this double-scale Vvardenfell from south to north in less than 20 minutes on horse, AFAIR it took this amount of time in foot in the TES3 original for a mid-level character.

IMO I always felt that TES3's Vvardenfell with the MGE distantland shows up the island as being too small and cramped for it's many features. Oblivion's Tamriel feels even smaller (though it's much the same size as TES3's Vvardenfell). In any case they're all 100 or more times smaller than lore and there's no consistency in map to game scale between any of these TES games, one needn't worry too much about trying to conform to the ever changing thus non-existent scale standard. This Vvardenfell is still way too small really, but were it much bigger it could get tedious for a player and impractical to mod. I do agree that this is still huge from the perspective of project time though; it's a huge expanse to fill but having it ready textured means that some wilderness cells can be completely left alone if desired, though most could always benefit from a texture touch-up.

Lightwave

[Lightwave]

I've uploaded a separate higher detailed LOD pack for those who have mid to high end graphics hardware. It contains 2 improvements over the standard pack:

1. The normals have been increased to 2048x2048. This gives some extra detail to the landscape shading, much like Qarl did with Oblivion's LOD normals. The original 1024x1024 textures were actually full heightmap detail anyway so to get higher requires interpolation - I just scaled these in Photoshop.

2. The landscape texture generation script has been increased to 2048x2048. You can toggle this up to 4096x4096 for a high end graphics card (those with 512Mb memory or more) by changing one number in the batch script. The higher quality textures reduce the blandness of the coloured blocks on the original LOD and make them look more 'textured'. It also reduces the ugly TES4 line that occurs between the high detailed rendered cell and the LOD textures; 1024x1024 doesn't really cut it. It will take longer for TES4qLOD to produce these higher res textures though. At full 4096x4096 it might take over 40 minutes because there's 16x as much detail than the standard textures.

This pack doesn't fix the current LOD mesh problems, but it does make other aspects of the distant landscape look better. 4096x4096 runs just as fluidly on my 7900GTX as the original 1024x1024 textures, but performance might suffer later when Vvardenfell is populated full of statics.

I can't seem to link to it directly, but you can download the higher detail texture pack from this link:

lightwave.4shared.com

Just go to the Projects->2xVvardenfell directory and download the file called: Vvardenfellx2-LOD-HighDetail.7z

To generate 4096x4096 textures, change the line in the GenerateVvardenfellLODs.bat file from:

TES4qLOD -q 2 -f Vvardenfell Vvardenfellx2-LW5.esp

to

TES4qLOD -q 4 -f Vvardenfell Vvardenfellx2-LW5.esp

The default was '-q 1', which generates standard quality 1024x1024 textures (like the standard LOD texture pack).

Lightwave

[Hector the Hooded]

Mother of God!

Thank you!

Edited to stop myself from looking like a(n) Moron

[Ebonyknight]

.....

[Local]

So when do we start modding the landscape?

When do we start adding cities? and Stuff?

===local===

[Hector the Hooded]

It already has, just talk to KuKulza and I'm sure he will hook you up.

[Local]

Awesome!

===local===

[EnnJ]

Very Nice! :bounce: