High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Discuss modding questions and implementation details.
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Freak2121
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High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Post by Freak2121 »

Back in the DaggerXL days, Lucius and I were talking of ways in which to improve the terrain in Daggerfall, as the heightmap is very primitive and blurry. Lucius talked of upscaling and then running the map through multiple passes of erosion, I think around 50m/px which is fantastic compared to the current 800m/px heightmap, and then generating any smaller details of the terrain procedurally.

Anyway, about a year (or two?) ago, I chopped up select portions of the map in Daggerfall, did exactly what Lucius said he wanted to do, and rendered them out. These were the results:

Isle of Balfierra:
Image

Direnni Peak with MSPaint tower:
Image

Betony:
Image

Wrothgarian Mountains:
Image

Dragontail Mountains:
Image

Just for kicks, eroded Dragontail Mountains at 800m/px:
Image

and a view near ground level:
Image

Apologies for the large pictures, I may need to get around to making thumbnails for them.

I'm wondering if DF Unity has the capability of using much higher fidelity heightmaps at this point? I have close to zero knowledge of programming, so I wouldn't really be able to do much myself. Off the top of my head I can think of major changes needed to either the terrain generation or the placement of locations in order to not have weird cliff cities and whatnot.

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Nystul
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Re: High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Post by Nystul »

Sure it is only a matter of how much space it will take up in memory if not procedurally generated on the fly...

Daggerfall unity uses a height map of 128x128 sample points per map pixel (on map pixel is about 812m if I recall correctly). It uses vanilla daggerfall's small height map (1000x500 pixels) for the rough modeling and adds up variation inside the map pixel for the 128x128 sample points.
I can't recall if it does this by using vanilla daggerfall's detail height map (5x5 pixels per map pixels - which is basically a noise pattern as it turned out) and adds some additional variation on it.
Nevertheless some variation is created somehow.

One future improvement would be to define the 128x128 detail samples per map pixel. But keep in mind storing it on disk will require 1000x500x128x128x2 for 16-bit height values - which is around 17 gb

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username
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Re: High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Post by username »

Just wanted to say, this looks AMAZING.:shock:
Check out my patch to remove nudity, it's a WIP but it's coming along quite nicely.

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username
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Re: High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Post by username »

Like really really amazing, this needs to be a thing :D. I don't even care if it would be 25 gigs, games nowadays are usually at least 60 gigs anyway.
Check out my patch to remove nudity, it's a WIP but it's coming along quite nicely.

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Jay_H
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Re: High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Post by Jay_H »

The Elder Scrolls II: Crysis? ;) Welcome to the forums!

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username
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Re: High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Post by username »

Jay_H wrote:The Elder Scrolls II: Crysis? ;) Welcome to the forums!
Is that a problem? :cry:
Check out my patch to remove nudity, it's a WIP but it's coming along quite nicely.

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Jay_H
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Re: High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Post by Jay_H »

None at all! If people's computers can withstand hi fi Daggerfall terrain, it would be a good idea as a mod.

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Freak2121
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Re: High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Post by Freak2121 »

Nystul wrote:One future improvement would be to define the 128x128 detail samples per map pixel. But keep in mind storing it on disk will require 1000x500x128x128x2 for 16-bit height values - which is around 17 gb
That would be quite a ridiculous level of detail for a heightmap, and fairly unnecessary at that. That would be around 6m per pixel, and not even the likes of Outerra is that precise. A more sane resolution would be 50m/px or 25m/px, both would be leaps and bounds beyond the current resolution, and would only come to around 1/4GB and 1GB respectively.

Al-Khwarizmi
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Re: High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

This is amazing. I would love to see it in the game. I don't have the technical knowledge to know how it would work as a DFU mod, but I hope you do it, I'd gladly spend some gigabytes in installing it.

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Nystul
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Re: High Fidelity/Eroded Terrain

Post by Nystul »

freak2121 what is the progress of your enhanced heightmap? Is it almost finished?

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