The project isn’t obviously completed, far from it. But I think I’m on the right track.
So, what has been accomplished in these last weeks? Here we go:
1. MAPS.BSA, CLIMATE.PAK, POLITIC.PAK and WOODS.WLD have been converted to .json and then, through some trigonometric magic, had every pixel rotated by 30 degrees counter-clockwise around map pixel 0,0.
The result is an Iliac Bay as faithful to the original as integer-based math allows, but cardinally correct in its orientation.
Following suggestion from Burt, those .json were later converted to .png, and now DFU reads directly from those (well, actually it reads from some 128x128 tiles that were obtained from those, more on it later). This means, among other things, that now it's possible to create and modify region, climate and heightmap just by modifying those files and putting them back in the right folders (almost).

2. I reworked the travel map, since the original one was clearly useless at this point. The new travel map is a bit rough, but it's dynamically generated, allows to toggle region and climate areas and has no transition between overworld view, region view and zoomed view, it's a whole image that can be zoomed in and out as needed. Still needs fine-tuning, but it does what it's supposed to.

3. I coded an editor with some functionalities: there are a bunch of filters to toggle on/off the usual heightmap/climate/politic/location maps.

It's also possible to select a pixel with or without a location and then modify everything about it: add/remove a location, modify said location in almost every aspect, set which RMB or RDB blocks it is made of; regarding this last part, it's now possible to add to a location one or more custom blocks with a new block name, making it so that it won't substitute every other block with the same name in other locations.

There are also a region manager to alter a region's stats or to create a new one, and a faction manager to (guess what?) do the same, but with factions.


Last, there's a working functionality that allows to randomly generate all the locations in a given region given certain parameters.

4. I downloaded Transbot9's Tamriel Heightmap from Nexus (Skyrim mods) and, after some experiments, I reduced it to 7680x6144 pixels (yes, it was shrinked: the original is a whooping 20480x16385) and then brutally thrusted the Iliac Bay in its right place. I then proceeded to manually map climates and regions, trying to take inspiration from UESP Lore sections, even if regarding the politic map, the major reference was Arena's Tamriel map.


The result is certainly debatable but, as said before, everything can be changed quite easily.
5. Thanks to contributions by Ninelan, Carademono and SquidKamer, I was able to make the code recognize additional Climate Types and Villagers, both old and new. Now the system is open to new assets of this kind.




In conclusion,this is the project, in an early state of development: much has been done, but much more has still to be if it doesn't want to remain just an oversized version of Daggerfall. Therefore anyone willing to contribute will be warmly welcomed.
In the next post I'll list what my ideas are for the prosecution of the project, and what those willing can contribute to.
