Wilderness Overhaul

[l3lessed]

Can't wait. This with all the new terrain and tree/flora mods that create epic massive landscape style terrain is going to look amazing at the end.

Also, if you want tons of nature shots for high mountain forests and prairie, and oak and grass cover hills, check out my albums. I use to backpack every year for a week deep into the Sierra Nevada's, and spend summer and spring camping and fishing the California valley, hills, and Sierra Nevada range, and I took good amount of nature shots over the years. As said, Skyrim was the first game to make me ever feel like it was a believable natural environment I know from my own life, reminded me of wandering the mountains in my backyard when I would travel across Skyrim's lands.

Maybe these will help you get the look down you want?
https://www.facebook.com/sean.maddox.71/photos_albums

[Zonk]

This looks incredible! I've been waiting for somebody to figure out how to do exactly this since DFU came out, so glad somebody figured how to do it.

[Daniel87]

I3Iessed, thank you for the link but I don't have a facebook account >_<
Closed mine a year ago, when I came to realize that these social bubbles and algorithms targeted for our brains ruin societies and democracies all over the world. I am a German from temperate woodlands and meadows, living now in Taiwan, subtropical and tropical jungles, waterfalls and pacific beaches
I appreciate both to be honest but don't like to freeze and would therefore always choose the jungle over temperate forests xD

Currently my mod is still based on randomization. All it does is juggling some random numbers (I think I incorporated about 30 if/else statements so far).
So there will be spots that don't feel natural and with only 32 nature billboards per climate, what we can explore is very very very limited.

For now the mod is only supposed to make nature more believable than it currently is, but on the long term, I would like to have a closer look at the terrain generation, erosion, rivers and creeks, model replacement through 3D models. - But I suck at blender, so all I can do for now is hope that Trees of Daggerfall will be finished rather sooner than later or that somebody else comes along who wants to recreate 32 models for each climate zone + adding a couple of hundreds more new models I can place into the world of Daggerfall. A very important point on my ToDo is to look into terrain generation and how to get min and max height values, so I can vary the vegetation depending on if its a local valley or local hill top. I might see problems comming in the future concerning mods alternating landscape height and changing the height map. I'll try to incorporate these possibilities, but I'm not sure what variables these mods use for the worldHeight.

Tonight I had a weird dream about Common land in Daggerfall. Where do city people grow or get their food from? In medieval societies, cities used to share the surrounding land to grow food. So I dreamed from wide fields and apple plantations around the cities of Daggerfall, from procedurally generated farmlands in the landscapes. The player could buy a junk of land outside the city and plant apple trees. It would take a couple of in-game years for them to slowly grow (like maybe 5 or 6 different 3D models of the apple tree in all stages of growth) and in the end the player can sell the land for a higher price, harvest and sell the apples or just let them rot

Then I woke up and was like: "Write that down!" to myself. So when creating random landscapes, I will now try to work out a concept that allows for the placement of what looks like farm land. Best would be to have them in conjunction with BasicRaods and spawn a little wooden fence next to the road with a couple of farm fields and a single farmhouse next to it. Not sure about the placement of houses and how to flatten the area to place them/how to manipulate the heightmap for create flat areas for structures as this. I will slowly crack down on these subjects as I progress further with my mod.

One major issue I run in to all the time is the limitation for flats per billboard. I would need 2-3 billboardBatches instead of one, if I really want to create a lush landscape. I tries decreasing the size of "dirt" tiles in the map to have more grass tiles and place more trees but directly hit the cap limit.
If I were to repurpose the "dirt" tiles into "farm land", I will need more available billboards and have to place vegetable sprites line by line on the fields. I only played around with the terrain generation a little bit, so I am not sure yet if I can effectively control the placement of dirt tiles and get them square shaped but oriented randomly. If so, maybe me and King of Worms can work out some vegetables and place them on fields, so when travelling Daggerfall, one would come by these common lands and can either steal food or leave it be - or even buy it if its in vicinity to a city. I also believe farm blocks need to be adjusted a bit and get more actual farm land. Usually you have a bunch of houses and one meager field of veggies for up to 8 ppl managing it, haha.

I will ask the devs and our lovely modding community to help me expand on the nature billboard capabilities, once this mod is released. Its best for now to get it work within the limitations and not alter the base game too much for my purposes. Also this way the mod stays closer and more true to the old Daggerfall.

My ToDo List grows every day xD
Today I am caught up in lots of IRL stuff, but will devote myself back to coding tomorrow.

Nevertheless, here a few pictures from the almost finished mountain lanscapes:

Spoiler!

High plateaus of Ephesus (highest point in Daggerfall?)


A great view into the valley


Dense forest ahead

[Daniel87]

Little Update:

The Desert Biome is done for now. I also had my first try with the ITerrainTexturing.cs and implemented small and rare pools of water to serve as seeds for Oasis. Deserts have a small chance of spawning Oasis without water and Oasis without trees (cactus + flowers). Most of the time they are what they are supposed to be. Empty, sandy and desolate places stretching to the horizon

Enjoy the pictures

Spoiler!

"Hey this looks like an Oasis!"


"It is one, but what a bummer... no water here."


But the next one had some. What a lush green in this desolate oven of a countryside!


And it really is a oven... with sand as far as the eye can see...

[pango]

This is really looking sweet, can't wait to experience it in real time...
Given billboards' performance I assume it's still running great?

[Daniel87]

Thank you!
Yes on my not so high end PC it runs smoothly without any issues. I still hope to be able to use 2 or 3 billboardBatches in the future, to really give it my all and add procedural farms, farm fields, etc.

My goal is to make Daggerfalls wide landscapes feel alive. There is so much potential burried in this exceptionally huge game world.

[edelgart]

Just here to say amazing work,as to farms,if i remember correctly real grass mod added some models to crops which were pick up able,seriously i was playing this game for quite some time and haven't though of the forests as something to change and give more reason to explore,thats my empty head for you,can't wait for updates..fingers crossed

[pango]

Just here to say amazing work,as to farms,if i remember correctly real grass mod added some models to crops which were pick up able

That's actually Harvestable Crops mod, which is an addon

[Daniel87]

Thank you, edelgart!

Okay here a small update:

Today I was not too productive concerning new biomes as I was experimenting with the TerrainTexturing and finally figured out how to properly create small Oasis puddles (by hijacking the perlin noise and adding water as an element to only be spawned inside of dirt since with grass or stone the edges look sharp and artificial) and populate them with plants as well as populating the already existing lakes in the desert.
A picture says more than thousand words:

BEFORE:

Spoiler!

AFTER:

Spoiler!

Later on I decided to add more vegetation depending on the altitude of the land. Since the lake is in a basin, I wanted to have more trees grow in the vicinity of the lake, not just a dense line of trees right around it.

Spoiler!

Also I adjusted the plant variety at the Oasis to distinguish between water plants and land plants

Spoiler!

The procedural Oasis look like this now

Spoiler!

After that I spent a couple of hours solving some issues I had with edge cases, such as no vegetation below beach line on smaller islands.
Also I adjusted the composition of plants on those areas to establish proper beach line vegetation/population with stones.

Spoiler!

I messed around for an hour with ridge noise and tried to create river systems, but failed and gave up for today, as I have more pressing matters to solve. Rivers are a thing of the future, once all biomes are done.
After a long all-nighter it is finally time to fall into my bed. Wish you guys a good morning/day/afternoon/night, wherever you are!
Stay safe and healthy!

Spoiler!

[King of Worms]

Very impressive progress!

I wonder, given there are not many places with water in the desert I guess (?) - if the decision to make the desert so barren is good. Because it will maybe mean you will just travel thru empty space 99% of time. Yes it might be realistic, but Id personally have the desert interesting in a way it was PLUS have the nice oasis places scattered around as a bonus.

The nice solution to this might be the following:

I can imagine this barren desert you have now to be succesfully used in the lowest (white) part of the desert. I know that Climates & Calories mod distinguish between these 2 types of deserts, so it might be possible for you to do the same? That would be actually really good and add to the diversity and variety of the game!

So as you travel far from the ocean you have
1) Sub tropic - sandy ground with lots of palmtrees and flowers
2) Desert 1 - original kind of desert with added oasis from you
3) Desert 2 - Hell... just sand and oasis

Climates images:

Spoiler!

49-1581664533-1073213764.png (45.8 KiB) Viewed 2288 times

49-1575491231-300419793.png (71.93 KiB) Viewed 2288 times