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About this mod
Replaces original terrain with a faithful but more accurate and interesting overhaul.
- Permissions and credits
Many thanks to chtujo for helping me out and for creating tools to assist in the creation of this.
It is recommended that you use this with Nystul's Distant Terrain mod for best effect. It should be fully compatible with any and all mods, and should work on vanilla Daggerfall on DOS as well, although you'd be hard pressed to notice the difference.
Daggerfall originally has a very boring and undetailed heightmap for its terrain. The game in 1996 had a draw distance for something like 70m so it made sense, it wasn't necessary. However, today with mods such as Distant Terrain, it does look very bland. This mod intends to address that, along with some other issues with the original heightmap.
Creation process:
First I looked at the travel map, which had cartoony representations of mountains, and used them as a guide to add details to the original heightmap. I traced an outline of what looked like the base of each mountain, and raised the traced areas (whilst avoiding existing details such as lake valleys).
Next, I used the climate maps present in the game files to construct coastline, precipitation (for which I used a Dwarf Fortress utility called Perfect World DF to add small scale details), rock hardness, and snow maps.
I fed all the data into a program called World Machine, and through various processes and modules it put the heightmap through erosion and river channeling simulations, among others.
The end result is a much more natural and realistic heightmap.
Finally, I went through every single coastal location in the game and marked which ones are sticking out into the sea, edited the heightmap to fix for it, and then checked every location again to make sure it is all fixed. If I have missed any, please let me know.
Issues/caveats:
1. The terrain can be very bumpy in the small scale.
2. There are no more lakes. I'm sorry for killing them off. 
Daggerfall and Daggerfall Unity use sea-level heights to form lakes, water doesn't form on any other height. If I kept it as is, there would be a bunch of massive pits all over the landscape.
3. The terrain could be a lot more detailed, down to 97m/px, however, as it is currently it is at a detail level of 266m/px.
All three issues could be fixed through a custom terrain sampler, however, I am not a programmer and have no idea of where to even begin with such a thing. This is the best that I can do at the moment.
I hope you enjoy this mod, it took a lot of work.
It is recommended that you use this with Nystul's Distant Terrain mod for best effect. It should be fully compatible with any and all mods, and should work on vanilla Daggerfall on DOS as well, although you'd be hard pressed to notice the difference.
Daggerfall originally has a very boring and undetailed heightmap for its terrain. The game in 1996 had a draw distance for something like 70m so it made sense, it wasn't necessary. However, today with mods such as Distant Terrain, it does look very bland. This mod intends to address that, along with some other issues with the original heightmap.
Creation process:
First I looked at the travel map, which had cartoony representations of mountains, and used them as a guide to add details to the original heightmap. I traced an outline of what looked like the base of each mountain, and raised the traced areas (whilst avoiding existing details such as lake valleys).
Next, I used the climate maps present in the game files to construct coastline, precipitation (for which I used a Dwarf Fortress utility called Perfect World DF to add small scale details), rock hardness, and snow maps.
I fed all the data into a program called World Machine, and through various processes and modules it put the heightmap through erosion and river channeling simulations, among others.
The end result is a much more natural and realistic heightmap.
Finally, I went through every single coastal location in the game and marked which ones are sticking out into the sea, edited the heightmap to fix for it, and then checked every location again to make sure it is all fixed. If I have missed any, please let me know.
Issues/caveats:
1. The terrain can be very bumpy in the small scale.
2. There are no more lakes. I'm sorry for killing them off.
3. The terrain could be a lot more detailed, down to 97m/px, however, as it is currently it is at a detail level of 266m/px.
All three issues could be fixed through a custom terrain sampler, however, I am not a programmer and have no idea of where to even begin with such a thing. This is the best that I can do at the moment.
I hope you enjoy this mod, it took a lot of work.