Saturday, February 11, 2012

Height maps and making a new world

Some height map data:
Skyrims min height is -8192 and max 122878 Game Units. As a default, land is generated at -2048 GU, and water levels at 0 GU. Interestingly the Tamriel world space of Skyrim has a default land level of -27000 GU and water levels at -14000 GU. I have no idea why this is.
As before the max gray scale height of a height map was 75% gray, if the image was lovered to -8192 with TesAnnwyn (-h -8192 function). 


I will use the same height map that I used for Oblivion when making my world in Skyrim.  The image is a 16384 x 16384 px, 16 bit raw file. With the help of Lightwaves new  beta TesAnnwyn (v0.23) I can easily make a esp file that works in Skyrim.
The settings I used in TesAnnwyn: -i Skyrim - p 1 -b 16 -d 16384x16384 -x -255 -y -255 -h -2048 "x.raw"

EDIT:
use -h below -14000 to lower the land so water LODs work in Skyrim, I use -16048 to have 2048 units below sea level.

After making a esp I still need to convert it to an esm file, the Creation kit crashed when I tried to open a 16 quad world :) I used TESGecko's convert to master function and this worked fine.

To try my world in game, I named one cell, and put out a COCMarkerHeading in that cell, and saved this as a new plugin esp that I loaded together with my esm. In Skyrim press ~ (or §) to open the console, and type coc NameOfCell and this cell will be loaded.

Next step will be to make LODs...

/E





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