Terrain Tunneling/Arching

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silentthief
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Joined: 18 Apr 2013, 01:20
Location: Currently traversing the Ascadian Isles

Re: Terrain Tunneling/Arching

Post by silentthief »

Kasoroth wrote: 03 Oct 2018, 09:26 Perhaps if the openmw-cs had a quick tool for taking a snapshot of a selected area of the terrain mesh and auto-generating a static mesh from it, you could build a mountain with the terrain editor in the construction set (or select an existing mountain in the game world), snapshot it to make the "mountain surface" static mesh (with holes in it anywhere that wasn't selected when you created the snapshot). Then you could lower the real terrain mesh down below it to create the hollowed out space as you suggested, but leaving the static mesh copy of the original mountain in place above it.

I'm not sure if adding this "terrain snapshot" capability to the CS would be easier or harder than adding "hole boring" capability to the terrain layer, but it would confine the changes to the CS (since the game engine itself would just see a static mesh and regular non-holey terrain below it), so it seems less likely to require a change in the actual file formats.

There IS a 3rd party utility called cell to nif which was created by Yacoby, and this does exactly what you are suggesting (create a snapshot of a cell which is converted to a NIF file to make changes in a NIF editor, such as Blender w/ NIF extension). A quick search revealed the sourcecode as well:

https://github.com/Yacoby/CellToNif

Perhaps we can petition Yacoby to allow us to add the source to openCS? In theory its available for grabs but Yacoby has done many such projects and we would do well to keep him on our side.

ST
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Mistahtokyo
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Joined: 07 Sep 2013, 18:31

Re: Terrain Tunneling/Arching

Post by Mistahtokyo »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 03 Oct 2018, 14:28
psi29a wrote: 03 Oct 2018, 07:55 @Zini: pre or post 1.0 for higher resolution terrain meshes?
If I had to guess, the main limitation is the resolution of the original heightmaps in the game data. Maybe we could interpolate to smooth things out, but I'd imagine having the data at a higher resolution would be the best approach.
Depending on the new resolution it can be made to occupy the same exact space as the original heightmap, no? Same image, just higher resolution. This prevents vanilla assets from ending up floating/sunk in, but leaves modders the option to add detail.
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Terrain Tunneling/Arching

Post by AnyOldName3 »

I think it might be held in a table in the ESM instead of a texture, in which case it's not a case of changing the resolution as the table is probably a fixed-size record.
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Mistahtokyo
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Joined: 07 Sep 2013, 18:31

Re: Terrain Tunneling/Arching

Post by Mistahtokyo »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 04 Oct 2018, 18:37 I think it might be held in a table in the ESM instead of a texture, in which case it's not a case of changing the resolution as the table is probably a fixed-size record.
Any way to edit it in that case?
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