Hi ShadowIce,
Map generation went OK. I made the full skyrim-sized map in all it’s 13824 x 10752 pixel glory to make sure L3DT could still do so (it could), but of course such a map could not all be loaded in T3D because it doesn’t dynamically page terrain blocks. Here are a few quick screenshots in Sapphire without textures, just to give a sense of scale for how big this map is. For the first shot, the camera is flying at 3750 feet altitude, with a view distance of ~5 miles. Note that the white box indicates a 512x512 region of the heightmap, equal in size to the textured screenshots in my earlier post. The second screenshot below shows the heightmap detail at ground level inside that 512x512 box. The whole map is equal to 27x21 of those boxes.
In a fit of pragmatism I tested the limits of what will actually render in T3D, and settled on 2048x2048 pixel heightfield with 8192x8192 pixel texture [
The next size up, 4096x4096 with 16k x 16k texture, may render on some systems but is not guaranteed]. This size is still some 1/35th of the total Skyrim map area, but generating a larger map is kind of pointless if you want to render it in unmodified T3D (and to be fair, GarageGames never promised T3D would render gigantic terrain maps.)
The images below, taken in T3D, are all shots in different directions of the same 2048x2048 pixel heightfield with 8192x8192 pixel texture. I hope you'll agree it's reasonably big, or at least, a good start.
At the moment I’m working on making it easier for you and other users to export these sorts of high resolution maps to T3D. The current release doesn’t provide detail maps to T3D, which makes the terrain look awfully bland, so for the above images I’ve had to manually hack the T3D material script files to add the detail maps. To make this all work nicely and automatically, I’ve had to make quite a few changes to the structure of L3DT’s materials, required new texture images, one or two new control windows, and a whole lot of testing and validation. I’m not quite finished yet, but when I am I will include all this in a new beta release and post all the relevant settings and instructions for making the above maps.
I will post back here when it is ready for testing.
Best regards,
Aaron.