OpenMW/OpenCS and Blender

[Tes96]

There is no such thing as infinite view distance. You are limited by your map in this case and yes, TR is getting bigger every day. There is a cut-off point where you are physically no longer able to see things in the distance... same holds true in game with the amount of information you can fit into a pixel. Your physical screen resolution will dictate what you are able to see.

SquareRoot(height above surface / 0.5736) = distance to horizon

When you levitate extremely high, you can see all of Vvardenfell and mainland Morrowind in one field of view. Surely we'll be able to see all the other provinces if high enough from the ground, much like how we can see Earth from outer space.

[psi29a]

Doesn't work that way... those maps are flat and unnatural. There is an artificial limit, the sides of the map. The Earth is round, so it naturally bends and you can't see the other side. However, the same rules apply when looking out into space. Things are too far away to see, you have to use telescope. Same holds true with games, at some point the details get lost in the background noise.

[Tes96]

Doesn't work that way... those maps are flat and unnatural. There is an artificial limit, the sides of the map. The Earth is round, so it naturally bends and you can't see the other side. However, the same rules apply when looking out into space. Things are too far away to see, you have to use telescope. Same holds true with games, at some point the details get lost in the background noise.

Would there be a way to actually make the continent of Tamriel, once the other provinces are made, look curved as if it were actually on a oblate spheroid planet when extremely high in the sky?

[Chris]

Would there be a way to actually make the continent of Tamriel, once the other provinces are made, look curved as if it were actually on a oblate spheroid planet when extremely high in the sky?

It's definitely possible, but there's a few problems. For one, we don't know the actual size of Nirn... the various in-game and official sources about distances within Tamriel is pretty inconsistent and we don't know the size and distances to other continents like Atmora or Akavir. Secondly, the game world in Morrowind is heavily scaled down, so if the curvature were equally scaled it would look weird. I think the only game in the series that would really work like that is Daggerfall, but even that wouldn't be perfect. Heightmap scaling is another issue, which would prevent having decently large mountains that help give that sense of distance.

[Tes96]

Will OpenMW allow for more than 250 esps to be loaded? Will there even be a cap for how many mods you can have?

[Zini]

Its actually 255, not 250. And that limit is already gone in OpenMW. Currently we have a limit of 255 dependencies per .omwaddon file (all .esp files are seeing as .omwaddon files by OpenMW), but it wouldn't be too hard to remove this limit in future versions of OpenMW. The total limit of content files that can be loaded at once is a bit over 2 billion.

[Okulo]

A bit over two billion? That's a weird number... How do you end up with that number? 16^8 or 2^32 is about 4.3 billion... The next step down comes to 65536...

[Tes96]

Really? OpenMW can load over two billion esp files during game play? I'm not sure even the i7-4960X processor overclocked at 5.4Ghz could handle that, though..... or could it?

[Zini]

@Okulo: 2^31 to be precise. This is a signed 32 bit value (we are using some negative numbers for special purposes).

@Tes96: I did not make any claims about the hardware that would be able to handle that in a reasonable way. It may very well require technology not developed yet. But on the software side it would definitely be possible.
Of course if you drop the "reasonable" part, then all you need is enough RAM to hold all the game state (plus some extra) and enough time (btw. I think having a fast harddisc would be far more important than having a fast CPU).

[Tes96]

@Okulo: 2^31 to be precise. This is a signed 32 bit value (we are using some negative numbers for special purposes).

@Tes96: I did not make any claims about the hardware that would be able to handle that in a reasonable way. It may very well require technology not developed yet. But on the software side it would definitely be possible.
Of course if you drop the "reasonable" part, then all you need is enough RAM to hold all the game state (plus some extra) and enough time (btw. I think having a fast harddisc would be far more important than having a fast CPU).

You mean like having a solid state drive as opposed to a traditional hard drive?