TTW - Tale of *Three* Wastelands?

[TJ]

[quote=zilav]Lets just use an Elder Scroll [/quote]

I guess we forgot to tell you guys. That's why the kids in the capitol wasteland are still kids after 8 years. 

 

 

[Risewild]

I always said they are kids because the fungus they eat makes them grow slower and messes up their sense of time but an elder Scroll would explain it too .

[FloorBelow]

I've been doing some little experiments of my own, and came across another pretty significant potential issue. Previous Bethesda games have had a limit of 6 land textures per cell quad. Fallout 4 appears to have raised the that to at least 10 layers, but from what I can tell it has a limit of 5 distinct texture sets per quad, which means where there are 6 different textures in a quad you start getting bugs:

[collapsed title=Images][/collapsed]

As you can see, it affects both Skyrim and Fallout 3, and can really screw things up in some places. I'd say it affects somewhere between a third and a half of the cells in Skyrim, and even more in the Capital Wasteland, and in order to fix it you'd most likely have to hand edit every one of the affected quads to make them use a smaller number of textures.

[zilav]

It is not new, I had the same problem with Skywind and Skyblivion convertion when Bethesda reduced the number of landscape texture layers per quad from 8 in Oblivion down to 6 in Skyrim causing the same black areas. Had to create a script for xEdit to remove excess layers with the minimal usage to preserve as much landscape painting as possible.

Worked quite good, no black spots just occasional abrupt textures transition around truncated areas that can be fixed manually, judge yourself

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_t0XhDDIYf8TNv5uxBFA2Q/videos

So you say that they reduced it even more and now only 5 layers are supported? Bah, Oblivion engine looks to be godly now compared to this.

[TrickyVein]

I don't understand. It's 64 bit now. Even the minimum recommended specs for this game are steep. And they reduced the number of textures per quad for making the transition to 'current' gen. 

What do we get for shaving off a few textures from the landscape? It's a mystery.

[zilav]

Yep it is strange, I guess that is the easiest part in the engine to truncate when you need more resources somewhere else. Probably because landscape textures now use 3 textures (_d, _n and _s) instead of only 2 (_d and _n) like in all previous games. But still sucks...

[TJ]

[quote=TrickyVein]What do we get for shaving off a few textures from the landscape? [/quote]

More quality and quantity to all the quests said no one at Bethesda. 

[TrickyVein]

[quote=zilav]

Probably because landscape textures now use 3 textures (_d, _n and _s) instead of only 2 (_d and _n) like in all previous games.

[/quote]

This makes sense. Also, I suppose you have to factor in the huge memory increase going from 512x512 textures to 2k textures. I'm going to blame consoles for this.

[FloorBelow]

Okay, I've taken a closer look and I'm fairly certain the limit is actually 4 texture sets per quad, which seems bizarrely low.

[zilav]

If you really want to convert Skyrim, you'd better concentrate on meshes converter first, even just the mesh data without collisions and animations for starters. Converting plugin data itself is quite an easy task.