Entire land mass of Tamriel modelled in Skyrim?

RichieC

http://ppsh-41.tumblr.com/post/13145143504/entire-tamriel-landmass-built-into-skyrim

I didn’t know if this was posted yet on tumblr, so I thought I’d do it. The landmass of almost all of the provinces in Tamriel, has been put into Skyrim. All which are inaccessible(without console commands) and which serve absolutely no purpose in the game. Why are they there? I personally don’t know. But take a look at the effort Bethesta put into these seemingly pointless landmasses.

apologies for the link dump but this has my mouth watering..

Not my blog either so don't go accusing me of shilling

humanji

I can't use the link from where I am, so I'll have to check it out later. I read somewhere mention it before and say that it was so they didn't have to have drawn mountains textures in the distance, like Rage etc, but instead you can see real mountains. It makes it look much better.

Plus, it opens up places for them to use in DLC. Instead of having to go to the edge of the map and be transported to a new zone, they can just expand an area and plop in more locations to make the whole experience more immersive.

pixelburp

humanji wrote: »

I can't use the link from where I am, so I'll have to check it out later. I read somewhere mention it before and say that it was so they didn't have to have drawn mountains textures in the distance, like Rage etc, but instead you can see real mountains. It makes it look much better.

Plus, it opens up places for them to use in DLC. Instead of having to go to the edge of the map and be transported to a new zone, they can just expand an area and plop in more locations to make the whole experience more immersive.

Well they could have done that with Fallout but they didn't; the DLC for the two Fallouts featured standalone areas, unconnected with the main Wasteland (obviously apart from the DLC that added things into the existing world). You got convenient doorways or boats that whisked you away to a separate overworld area that was independent of the main landmass. I suspect Skyrim's DLC will be of the same variety.

I'm not sure it's even possible to extend the existing play area without re-distributing the entire map data all over again. I think the way the GameBryo engine works is that you have to define a definitive area for your overworld, and once the borders of that are set you can't extend it without fooking up stability, or recompiling the whole map all over again. I'm a bit fuzzy on recollection, but my brief tinkering with the Creation Kit seemed to suggest this. I remember trying to create a test area just beyond the default borders of the map area, and the game said "Noooo no no no..."

I suspect the extra landmass was to give the map-makers some reasonable point of reference, so they didn't accidentally build Skyrim in the wrong location.

Monotype

pixelburp wrote: »

I think the way the GameBryo engine works is that you have to define a definitive area for your overworld, and once the borders of that are set you can't extend it without fooking up stability, or recompiling the whole map all over again. I'm a bit fuzzy on recollection, but my brief tinkering with the Creation Kit seemed to suggest this.

They have a new engine now, Creation Engine, so that might change things.

pixelburp

Monotype wrote: »

They have a new engine now, Creation Engine, so that might change things.

It's not, as far as most people can tell. Bethesda can call it "Creation Engine" all they want, but it's quite clearly the old gameBryo engine, a modified version of it admittedly. I mean you can tell just looking at the game in action it's gameBryo. It's still the same engine in many respects & I'd imagine that'll include how the map data is handled.

Monotype

I was a bit suspicious myself about that. I haven't played it but thought that the the flow and look is very similar. I was thinking that maybe it's the artists and the programmers' choices that gave it the same feel.

pixelburp

Monotype wrote: »

I was a bit suspicious myself about that. I haven't played it but thought that the the flow and look is very similar. I was thinking that maybe it's the artists and the programmers' choices that gave it the same feel.

Naw; once you play with it for a few hours, you soon spot the telltale signs that show it's a GameBryo engine. Things like character animations and their interaction with the environment; Bethesda did a great job smoothing the characters' animations - particularly transitions between routines - but it's still unmistakably Bryo. Even the file structure's roughly the same; heck the data-files even have the same file extension (.BSA).

The upside to all this is that it'll make modding that much easier as the knowledge gap to bridge for Oblivion modders will be quite small (you're already seeing a slew of mod out there)

Linkus

Borders can be removed easily enough, wasn't hard to do with Oblivion. Was fun riding a horse through the deserts in the region south of Cyrodill courtesy of el mods.

pixelburp

Removing them completely isn't hard; the trick is if you want to add a new area, but still have defined borders around the edges to stop people wandering into areas they shouldn't. That's the bit I don't believe you could do in previous 'bryo engines