Screenshots courtesy of PPSH-41
This Tumblr post has been tumbling its way around the web recently, and concerns one intrepid explorer's forays beyond the borders of Skyrim's lands with the use of the game's trusty "noclip" mode.
What is interesting about Skyrim is that, rather than a few square miles of LOD surrounded by infinite water, as has been the case in previous games, Bethesda seem to have included the landmass files for the province of Morrowind, Cyrodiil and even more.
The blog post contains photographs and documentation showing the process the author undertook, but what is exciting for modders is that much of the work of generating the heightmaps and landscape for other provinces, a time-consuming and painful job, has already been done for them. Some have speculated that the files are in preparation for expansive DLC, or just to provide sightseers with a glimpse of something distant from the peak of Throat Of The World. Whatever the case, once the Construction Set is released, modders will waste no time filling this empty land.
To conduct your own expedition, open the console and type "tcl" to range beyond the invisible walls of Skyrim's east and south.
84 comments
If anything? I have suspicions we might get to see more of the Alik'r area, thanks in part to some Alik'r people running around making a mess of things. Being a desert, I'd feel it'd be easier to render a large area of, and then drop in a few villages and towns, rather than having to populate an entire province.
But really, the extra land is probably just there for LOD purposes. You can't walk on it - you can't even get there without enabling god mod and no-clip. While I suppose that in theory it might make the modder's job easier, it wasn't put there as blank canvas. Don't get me wrong - I'm agog with the possibilities too, but it's being over hyped as something it's not.
Apparently you haven't used it!
Well in answer to your questions.
1. Yes the game is set in a different time period to the Oblivion story so that gives you more options for individuality.
2. What stops modders using the dead space is the dirty great rips in the terrain mesh. Such tears would mean a modder would have to regenerate the entire height field for the terrain again, a process in the past which is extremely prone to era. Not to mention that redoing the entire terrain mesh can cause other unintended issues resulting in floating meshes, lost map makers and creature spawn locations. Its simply not very practical.
The tools provided for this process in Oblivion's Construction Kit were flawed, caused naming eras when generating textures and many modders were forced to use third party applications such as TESIVLOD and TESIVqlod to simply make the game actually do proper LOD. When I worked on the Unique Landscapes project, even editing the terrain in one individual cell could cause further rips and LOD problems so its not a good idea.
If you add in the dead space areas and fix the heightmap, navmesh it, populate it with props, dungeons and npcs, plus add in all the extra scripts needed for all this content you would probably only succeed in bottlenecking the game further, given that all this extra stuff would have to be loaded into memory.
This is why all DLC uses its own worldspace. Its simply too much effort for Bethesda to go back and rework what they've already technically finished. Its a shame these areas aren't used but thats the way it is.
Personally if you want to mod a large empty area do the NCR beyond Mojave Outpost in New Vegas, since the terrain mesh is relatively sound and shouldn't present too many problems. Of course you'd have to figure out how to make the main map scroll since after a little walking you go out the mapped game area altogether.
You advertise it as "less hassle free" which means it's more trouble. I think you want it to read "less hassle" or "hassle free."
1) Isnt this game based hundreds of years after the oblivion story?
2) What stops modders opening the "dead space" provided, navmeshing and expanding? (edit : in general but u mentioned geck)
Hi new TES player