The Vvardenfell Heightmap

[KuKulzA]

this is very dissapointing news... so how should be best deal with it?
i doubt DEVs will be much help, perhaps others Beyond Cyrodiil leaders have suggestions?

[Dave_91]

Lightwave probably knows the most about this stuff, but I'd say there's not much really we can do other than wait for an patch of some kind, or try to find a way around this ourselves. The majority of the Vvardenfell heighmap looks fine to me, and because of its size, I find most of the errors unnoticeable, though I must admit, I've seen and encountered a few.

[Vality7]

I don't know anything about LOD, but aren't the LOD meshes just .nifs? If thats the case can't you just edit them manually in 3dsmax or whatever and distribute those files?

Or is it something that needs to be fixed during generation?

[Hector the Hooded]

I'm hoping lightwave can help us out here...

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by Vality7I don't know anything about LOD, but aren't the LOD meshes just .nifs? If thats the case can't you just edit them manually in 3dsmax or whatever and distribute those files?

You certainly could, but it's very time consuming. You'd have to load in all the surrounding quads for each quad you want to fix, manually line them up and then try to blend them (I haven't fiddled with 3dsmax, but I assume it's easy to blend meshes together?). The danger being that blending may still not fit the profile of the actual landscape. It's certainly very tedious work and has to be done for each quad in turn. And re-done for any areas where the heightmap is changed significantly during the project's progression.

Bethesda's LOD mesh generator doesn't just get joins incorrect either, it creates barriers across valleys and rivers for inexplicable reasons and fixing the multitude of these is harder to find on a NIF. Tamriel is relatively flat and gently rolling so the bugs are less severe. I haven't really explored the LOD on a 1x Vvardenfell, but knowing how low quality the approximated LOD mesh is for TES4 it could well look quite scary!

Seeing how Bethesda haven't fixed the LOD load order issue for Shivering Isles (they've done the same as I have for Vvardenfell and put it at the same load order level as Oblivion, which works fine, but really it's a hack) I'm really not sure we'll be getting a fixed LOD generator. I'm kind of interesting in writing one anyway, or knowing how to. The knowledge of this is actually right up Timeslip's street - I think he made his LODs in DirectX mesh format - not NIF, but the principle is totally the same though, I'll see how I get on before pestering him.

I've never fiddled with NIFlib before either, nor thought about how to create a mesh of vertices from the heightmap, but as it's quite a common process, so I'll guess I'll get there eventually. I just hope this is a simple LOD generator bug, not a game bug, but it's more likely the former.

The other advantage of our own LOD mesh generator is that they could be made at a much higher detail, there's about 2 million vertices in a fully detailed heightmap quad (32x32 cells of 32x32 heightmap points containing 2 vertices per point), so I think even modest hardware should be able to cope with a high detail or even full detail LOD mesh and it'll certainly look more realistic. Plus I'm sure you wouldn't mind having another heightmap->mesh generator for your 3D maps.

Lightwave

[Vality7]

Originally posted by Lightwave
Plus I'm sure you wouldn't mind having another heightmap->mesh generator for your 3D maps.

Lightwave

That would be awesome yes! Good luck with that, i'm sure Timeslip willl be more than happy to help you out. :goodjob:

Do you have Shivering Isles btw? I'd really like to see its heightmap/texturemap...

[X23]

This is looking pretty awesome guys. Great job. Inspires me to reinstall Oblivion again and check the new versions of mods out

[Lightwave]

Do you have Shivering Isles btw? I'd really like to see its heightmap/texturemap...

[Sorry In advance because this is slightly off topic ...]

I've just installed it this evening. It looks really enchanting in places (a few bits are almost as good as your TES3 Mir Corrup. ).There's a number of meshes that could be useful for Vvardenfell, some wooden buildings, Telvanni style twisting tree trunks, giant mushrooms obviously, though my interest waned after I hit a bug in less than an hour: A quest filed that I'd never even started when in the Dementia realm - I got called a murdered when it turns out an over-levelled wilderness creature that must've been following me slaughtered all the inhabitants. There are also LOD rips all over the new worldspace (which is called SEWorld) which are more noticale than in Cyrodiil because they aren't obscured by many LOD trees and they run across all 4 points of the compass. I'm bewildered as to why Beth still don't fix this prominent bug. No wonder one doesn't see any LOD screenshots advertized for this new game, just close-ups images ...

They've added Shivering Isles in to Oblivion.esm rather than create a new ESP or ESM which is a bit of a surprise. Unfortunately this is also incompatible with the current CS, so anyone who installs SI is unable to continue modding, unless they're doing a TC mod which is independent of Oblivion.esm. I'd read about it in advance so backed up my OB directory prior to installation. *edit* The new CS is now out: Version 1.2.

*edit*TES4qLOD includes the 36 new textures so can generate up to 4096x4096 maps of SI. I've also joined the 4 LOD textures extracted from the BSA in to one image and extracted the vertex colour map and an 8-bit heightmap (PNG format which should convert back to BMP with no loss of detail) both made with TESAnnwyn. I'm pretty sure TEStroi could also convert SI to TES3 easily enough too, though to have it ready textured the dat file needs updating too. Anyway, with both the heightmap and texture map I think that should be enough for you to make one of your awesome 3D maps from it.

They're in the TES_Images directory at lightwave.4shared.com, the 3 files starting with ShiveringIsles. *edit* I've also added the two texture maps produced by TES4qLOD, one at default 1024x1024 and another at 4096x4096 (the full map image is 8192x8192).

And these are the stats for Bethesda's new Shivering Isle's heightmap:

Heightmap Image: 2048x2048 (64x64 cells)
Highest Point: 212metres [14928 game units @ cell (7,11)]
Lowest point: -30.8 metres [-2160 game units @ cell (0, -19)]


Lightwave

[Vality7]

Excellent, thanks for doing that, i've made a map!

Shivering Isles 3d View

Shivering Isles 3d Map

Theres a few lakes I need to add/fix up, but otherwise mostly complete. I coloured everything that was sea level blue, so i'm not sure if some of that was meant to be swamp or whatever, I haven't played the game so I don't know. The bridges kinda got cut off so i'll have to fix them. I also flattened the heightmap at sea level so everything below sea level is just flat, its something I should've done on previous maps and will do from now on.

Looks good though


<sorry for the offtopicness guys>

[timmay]

This is simply amazing Lightwave, you did an excellent job! I'm so excited to see Vvardenfell in Oblivion! You are the champion of Cyrodiil...or Vvardenfell, well both!