Vvardenfell Region Data + Information

[Dave_91]

:goodjob: Great, thanks. I tried the weather too in a seperate worldpace, and just as you said, it appeared to be nothing but a cloudy sky. Shame.

I look forward to your seeing your screens.

A question whilst I'm here- I understand this could take a while, but unless there's some sort of automatic thing that could blend the Vvardenfell ground textures together, would it be helpful for someone was to go round all the cells in the worldspace, blending all (or most of) the ground textures together? Or would that be a waste of time?

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by Dave_91A question whilst I'm here- I understand this could take a while, but unless there's some sort of automatic thing that could blend the Vvardenfell ground textures together, would it be helpful for someone was to go round all the cells in the worldspace, blending all (or most of) the ground textures together? Or would that be a waste of time?

I wouldn't recommend it just yet, for a few reasons:

1. Much of the grass texture in the grazelands is CHTerrain01NoGrass - so there's no grass (just a flat texture). That was an accident; it's not meant to have been razed-grazed! When I made the texture conversion file (the same one that TESPort uses), I obviously chose the FormID for the NoGrass version of CHTerrain01Grass by mistake, so I should regenerate the heightmap with the 3D version of the grass texture. An update won't affect any mods anyone has already started on, it'll just mean swapping the heightmap ESP.

2. There's 17,222 cells in that heightmap. It'll be immensely tedious since you have to select the correct texture from the drop-down list to blend each patch for a specific texture in each cell. If you get immensely bored in the future waiting for other things to be done (new meshes to become available for example) then it could be worth attempting then, or just fixing the worst eyesores at least could be very useful.

3. Ideally, many areas should be multi-layer textured anyway to add more definition, though whether we'll get the manpower to finely re-texture so much of the entire landscape to a high standard is uncertain atm. But if we did, all your fixes would end up being overwritten again.

4. I haven't entirely written off the idea of generating circular blends of the textures in the TESAnnwyn texture convertor code, rather than the maximum opacity to absolute nothing cut-offs currently used. Though this is not the highest priority on my list atm and I'd have to write the TES4 texture exporter-importer system for TESAnnwyn first - currently it's just TES3 exporter-importer and TES3->TES4 convertor. I don't know how blended circles will actually look, but I'm sure it'll be a lot better than the current blocky patches!


Anyway, I'll fix the grass in the grazelands. If you think you might be able to do an in-game map then I'll wait for that before releasing a new heightmap which includes your region data. If not I'll just modify a VCLR map temporarily and incorporate the data for that in the ESP since the actual DDS can always just be swapped in future with a better one. When I'm roaming around taking the odd screenshots, I often haven't got a clue where I actually am, except my compass position relative to Red Mountain.



Lightwave


p.s. KuKulzA: I was thinking that with the gridded claim map, if you decided you wanted one that gave a more realistic feel than just the flat LOD map, maybe you could ask Vality7 if he'd make a birds-eye textured heightmap from the LOD map and an 8-bit heightmap export (I could provide both files if needed, or both can be exported from the Vvardenfell ESP using TESAnnwyn and TES4qLOD without requiring an installation of Oblivion). For example, like the one he did for the Dawn of Oblivion TES3 Cyrodiil claim map.

[Lightwave]

I've added a placeholder map to the Region data ESP that Dave_91 made. It's just using a 2048x2048 version of the Vertex Colour image exported by TESAnnwyn (that's the white background map with the dark drawn lines you might have seen before) but it serves as a useful starting point, is to scale and contains a lot of detail (way too much really).

The map lines up correctly, though for some reason I still can't quite scroll to the very south of Vvardenfell - below Vivec. Increasing the vertical resolution beyond 2048 makes the south viewable but breaks the lining up. Looks like a small game quirk, but it can be fixed later on by fiddling with the vertical res and the Y limit values.

This vertex colour image is just a handy placeholder until someone makes a much nicer map, though I'd recommend making it using the outline of this map since it's correct to scale and contains some useful and accurate data like roads, rivers, settlements and some ruins. TES4 maps (Tamriel and SI) tend to be very sparse, so most of the noise from the interior can be erased. It depends who feels like having a go really. But the map will probably always be subject to change until this project is finalized, because there could wlll be numerous modifications to some settlement locations along the way.

Rather than put it in a separate ESP, I've combined it with Dave_91's region data (hope you don't mind Dave. )

At some point I'll incorporate it all in to the heightmap since I still want to fix those grass textures, but for now it'll work just as well independently.

Lightwave

[Dave_91]

Of course not. This is great news Lightwave. :goodjob:

[Dave_91]

After I've downloaded and extracted, should the map automatically appear in the Vvardenfell world map straight away? Or do I need to do anything to enable it? Because all I'm getting is a blank white map.

[Lightwave]

Yes it should do.

So long as the ESP is loaded and the map (Vvardenfellx2Map.dds) is in Oblivion\Data\Textures\menus then it should appear in game. You should also be able to see it in the CS, if you go to World->Worldspaces and select Vvardenfell, the image should appear in there (though stretched, for whatever reason Beth made the CS map window in letterbox format).

Lightwave

p.s. This is the World map btw, the local map will still be blank because that has to be generated in the CS. This takes quite a few hours and produces lots of very big files: Each cell map image is 256x256 and takes up 256Kb. All 17,222 cells of Vvardenfell means the map will take over 4.3Gb of disk space!
It produces a very faint quality map when displayed in game too which needs statics and door markers before it starts to look like anything.

[Dave_91]

Ah, it's working now.

Lightwave, do you mind if I tried adding some effects and things to the map and try it out? Maybe add names to places, add a compass or something, make it look a bit more like the Cyrodiil world map, or even the Morrowind coloured map?

[Ebonyknight]

This is a very nice and compact amount of data you have done for us Dave it very well appreciated towards our team and benefits our team as a whole.

[Dave_91]

Thanks. :goodjob: I think Lightwave deserves some credit too for setting up and merging an in game world map for us, so thumbs up to him for that.

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by Dave_91
Lightwave, do you mind if I tried adding some effects and things to the map and try it out? Maybe add names to places, add a compass or something, make it look a bit more like the Cyrodiil world map, or even the Morrowind coloured map?

Please do. The map is just a 'placeholder' - the idea is for someone (e.g. yourself) to replace it with something much more elegant. :yes:

I'm looking at getting those converted NPCs placed back on to the landscape now, but to place them in the scaled up co-ordinates I'm having to write another TES4 utility in the process ...

Lightwave