A kind of crazy idea

Not about OpenMW? Just about Morrowind in general? Have some random babble? Kindly direct it here.
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silentthief
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Re: A kind of crazy idea

Post by silentthief »

terabyte25 wrote: 19 Dec 2018, 22:12
silentthief wrote: 19 Dec 2018, 16:12 I think it was like 30,000? Not sure, but it did top out below one of the "magic" power of two numbers.
Wouldn't we be able to to shift the terrain to negative values or is the height limit from 0 - (insert whatever upper bound of the height limit is)
Pretty sure that there is a negative value limit as well. As for lowering the height - you would then have to adjust for water levels, and all non land assets as well. I don't think that openmw has the same limits though

ST the 2 time assumer
PS - This has been something that has popped up a few times. I should simply test the max heights in openmw to lay this issue to rest.
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Mistahtokyo
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Re: A kind of crazy idea

Post by Mistahtokyo »

It would be great to test this. The height cap and the low terrain mesh resolution are two of the most visually outdated things with the MW terrain, in my opinion.
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ArashiAganawa
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Re: A kind of crazy idea

Post by ArashiAganawa »

Well now that over time is... over at work, I have time to read and respond! First and foremost, I didn't think that I would get so many responses!

Now, as I said before, the 10X was just a place holder, and not a desire. I have no need to walk a literal three day trek from Seyda Neen to Balmora in game. Granted my timescale being at 1:1 would make that interesting, that's also a ton of land to fill in.

I should do a scale image of what the land would look like with different sizes, and that would help decide what should be done. That said, the one thing I am interested in knowing is "dividing points". Chopping the map, as is, into biome bits, then "pushing" them all apart, and filling in the land in between, as opposed to a straight up scaling up of the land.

Image
Something along these lines. If such a thing is possible, would it be better to do it this way?


Now about that height map. If such a thing can be altered and allow the land to be raised far higher, that would be very very ideal. Red Mountain can become more imposing, valleys deeper, and mountains... well become mountains. So, while it's going to be tested, I'd like to know if that's something already set in the engine, and if that can be changed without mucking up everything already done. As the old saying goes, 99 little bugs in the code, take one down and patch it around, 107 little bugs in the code. My fear of asking for this to be altered is that it could cause other issues. As you are all volunteers, I'd like to not ask you to do things that would cause extra work if it becomes too much trouble. As I know nothing of coding, yet, I'm not sure if what I'm asking for is too hard to do.


Edit:
Increasing the size would make using mods that increase speed more logical in my opinion.
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ArashiAganawa
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Re: A kind of crazy idea

Post by ArashiAganawa »

Visual for how much larger Morrowind would be if upscaled

Image

Needless to say, I think I agree that 2X would be the best way to go. Then again, that really depends on how many people would be down for modding this. If there was a way to move statics without doing it manually, or, if you can divide the land up and move it with statics and just paint in land in between, that would make this much more viable.
CoolthulhuMan
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Re: A kind of crazy idea

Post by CoolthulhuMan »

I'd be down to upscale/re-landscape Morrowind and then manually fill it with random statics (plants, rocks etc.), provided it wasn't just me. Sure it'd be a ridiculous amount of work, but look how many mods there already are for MW that re-landscape the wilderness, add extra clutter to cities or fix rocks that were slightly floating above the ground because they were hand-placed. Having it all done by a machine would mean that a lot of it would have to be redone, because MW has a weird thing for architecture that's built-in with the ground in odd ways (see Vivec)
terabyte25
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Re: A kind of crazy idea

Post by terabyte25 »

I don't think anyone realized this, but if we make Vvardenfell 10 times bigger, the transportation cost for boats and silt striders will also increase. Basically 32 gold for Vivec to Balmora will become an insane amount (320 gold), so we must modify the GMST to keep the cost down.
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ArashiAganawa
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Re: A kind of crazy idea

Post by ArashiAganawa »

CoolthulhuMan wrote: 24 Dec 2018, 04:08 I'd be down to upscale/re-landscape Morrowind and then manually fill it with random statics (plants, rocks etc.), provided it wasn't just me. Sure it'd be a ridiculous amount of work, but look how many mods there already are for MW that re-landscape the wilderness, add extra clutter to cities or fix rocks that were slightly floating above the ground because they were hand-placed. Having it all done by a machine would mean that a lot of it would have to be redone, because MW has a weird thing for architecture that's built-in with the ground in odd ways (see Vivec)
Oh heavens no, you wouldn't be alone. I'm going to work on it, and I was thinking about asking Morrowind Modding Showcase to actually do a Mod-a-thon for it, if it happens. There would be many great modders who would love to leave their mark on such a project. I'm sure of that.
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ArashiAganawa
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Re: A kind of crazy idea

Post by ArashiAganawa »

terabyte25 wrote: 24 Dec 2018, 04:25 I don't think anyone realized this, but if we make Vvardenfell 10 times bigger, the transportation cost for boats and silt striders will also increase. Basically 32 gold for Vivec to Balmora will become an insane amount (320 gold), so we must modify the GMST to keep the cost down.
I do think 10X would be extreme, so sticking to something smaller would be nice. So far as prices go, those could be adjusted. I'm not seeing that as being an issue.
luthis
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Re: A kind of crazy idea

Post by luthis »

Funny, I have had very similar ideas about scaling up the map or increasing the amount of empty map between significant areas. I always use the silt strider / boat travel mods (Abot's?) to really appreciate the distance that Morrowind's "Fast Travel" covers.

Here's my 2 cents:

While it seems like an easier task to upscale just Morrowind island, we're still going to be faced with the task of hand-filling out the spaces in between. After exploring some of the greater Vvardenfell on foot, the scale really became apparent; It's already a big map with TR. We would get more bang for our buck working on filling out the rest of Tamriel. (Yeah, everyone dreams of that.)

A full Tamriel map at the current MW scale would take long enough in real world time to cross, like an hour depending. I'm just starting to look into what it would take to convert the Oblivion map into playable MW piece by piece. The same could be done with the game commonly referred to as Skyrim. Or SHOTN could be complete.

See this for relative scales: https://i.imgur.com/B7rBN.jpg

Heavy polishing would be required for both, but with TR that's ~60% of Tamriel.
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lysol
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Re: A kind of crazy idea

Post by lysol »

luthis wrote: 25 Dec 2018, 22:37 We would get more bang for our buck working on filling out the rest of Tamriel. (Yeah, everyone dreams of that.)

A full Tamriel map at the current MW scale would take long enough in real world time to cross, like an hour depending. I'm just starting to look into what it would take to convert the Oblivion map into playable MW piece by piece. The same could be done with the game commonly referred to as Skyrim. Or SHOTN could be complete.
Sure, but this will still be kind of like having a HUGE miniature scale model of a place. When having the view distance set to see very far, you get the problem of having Vivec visible from Seyda Neen and the foyadas become really obvious backdrops carefully made to make smooth transitions between a very tightly pushed together game world. It's like playing one of those "entire world" maps in RTS games like AOE. Sure, the map size could be set to huge and it'd be a really big map for the game... But it's still a small map to fit the entire friggin world in it.

And I haven't even talked about red mountain... If red mountain was to be a REAL mountain in height, you'd have to have the elevation start right by the shore of Vvardenfell, otherwise it would be too steep to climb up to. A bigger Vvardenfell map would solve this.
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