Distances in Skyrim

[LuckyLucianoO]

Hello everybody

 

Probably a stupid question but my curiosity is big enough :).

 

I was wondering how big is Skyrim? Is is possible somehow to calculate the distance between Riften and Markarth in kilometers for example?

 

Thanks in advance ;)

[xlcr]

Skyrim's heightmap is rectangular and uses 119 x 94 = 11186 in-game "cells".

Skyrim's engine uses the same cell size as in Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas: 57.6 metres (63 yards) to the side, 3317.76 m² (3 969 square yards) of area.

Full map thus has an area of about 37.1 km² (14.3 square miles).

 

Around a quarter of this is not playable, stuck behind invisible borders.

Playable area is roughly the same as the one in Morrowind and Oblivion and less than one thousandths of Daggerfall's size.

In addition, the game features a good part of the surrounding area of Tamriel as low-quality "fake" terrain meshes.

 

Most of Oblivion's heightmap is not playable, while most of Skyrim's and all of Morrowind's map can be visited in game.

For comparison, the heightmaps of Skyrim (courtesy of Lightwave from Bethesda's forums):

http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/39338/how-large-is-skyrim

[RedRavyn]

This is actually easy to figure out. Skyrim's map is 3808 x 3808 units in size (from loading it's heightmap into any program that can read it, such as Lightwave). One unit is six feet in ground-scale (same as it was in Oblivion). Multiply it out and covert units and you find that the Skyrim map, which includes inaccessible areas, some of which are actually in Cyrodiil, comes out to about 11.7 square miles. In other words, is a square that's not quite 3.5 miles to the side -- hardly even the size of a respectable U.S. city. In Real Life, I can walk that distance in just over an hour and not even break a sweat on a warm summer day. There are city parks in this country which are larger than that.

 

Given those numbers, and a paper copy of the map, you should be able to measure distances and make appropriate unit conversions to figure out the distance between any two points.

 

 

Edit: Hmmm ... looks like xlcr beat my post and our numbers differ somewhat, since the calculations appear to have been done somewhat differently. I could be wrong, but the numbers actually come out fairly similar.

Edited May 8, 2012 by RedRavyn

[xlcr]

hi RedRavyn, yeah i do not really trust my figures completely, it's hard to believe Skyrim's actual game world is so tiny; but,

i guess one should take into account how much more vertical Skyrim's geography is compared to other earlier TES worlds.

@LuckyLucianoO, so i guess that would make the distance between Riften and Markarth about 3+ miles as the crow flies on paper lol.

(3 mi. = 4.82803 km)

how embarassing for Bethesda lol, must be why they didn't include a scale on the in-game map..

[JesterKing]

Skyrim feels vast to me because you can't fast travel everywhere at the start. I only have Oblivion to compare it to, though. Also it feels larger because there are areas with different art. And the verticality too makes the game feel vast. :thumbsup:

[bpestilence]

Now, would anyone REALLY want the size to be realistic? So it takes 20 ACTUAL hours to travel from Markath to Riften? Nobody would play that game.

[RedRavyn]

Well, I, for one, would love to have a realistically-scaled Tamriel. At one time I did a little work, putting togther a lot of different things related to real-life geography and ecology and figured that all of Tamriel is probably about the size of Australia. Even at that there are a few oddities, such as the extreme cold in the north while Leyawiin County in Cyrodiil is supposed to be semi-tropical (at least in Oblivion). Bethesda changed this for Oblivion, though, since that part of Tamriel was steamy jungle in earlier games, or so I understand. It's rather difficult to balance everything and maintain a realistic Niben Basin.

 

At any rate, to run Skyrim, properly scaled in real-world terms, would require a super-computer, and nobody has yet to release one as a desktop PC. Skyrim and Oblivion are so tiny because they've been scaled for game-play on console machines, which would totally choke if they had to deal with the complexity of environments and simultaneously-running AI scripts that a moderate to high-end PC could handle with ease. So, don't look for any changes from this in future games.

 

Now, given a few tricks, though, it might be possible. Our gameworlds are flat. What if they were realistically curved? If Nirn were the size of Earth then the horizon would be about three miles away for an average sized human standing at sea-level and looking out across the sea. Ignoring the refractive index of air, the distance to the horizon if the observer is about 100 feet above sea level is approximately twelve miles. From an altitude of about 1 mile (a typical moderately sized mountain) it's about 90 miles away.

 

Since the world-spaces that Bethesda gives us are bounded by either mountains or ocean this could be manageable with a dynamically-scaled LOD. Most of the time an observer within the game would likely be able to see no more than a mile or so in any given direction, anyway, and both Oblivion and Skyrim already have such vistas.

 

Unfortunately, it would take an eternity for Bethesda's team to flesh out a map the size of Australia without the help of some sophisticated (and probably non-existent) algorithms to create height maps and then place vegetation and rocks and carve out realistic waterways. With such a tool, though, the designers could spend their time creating interactive content and just tweaking the environment where needed to fit that content into the world seamlessly.

[mothergoose729]

Play.Minecraft.

 

That is all

[eodx9000]

Well, I, for one, would love to have a realistically-scaled Tamriel. At one time I did a little work, putting togther a lot of different things related to real-life geography and ecology and figured that all of Tamriel is probably about the size of Australia. Even at that there are a few oddities, such as the extreme cold in the north while Leyawiin County in Cyrodiil is supposed to be semi-tropical (at least in Oblivion). Bethesda changed this for Oblivion, though, since that part of Tamriel was steamy jungle in earlier games, or so I understand. It's rather difficult to balance everything and maintain a realistic Niben Basin.

 

At any rate, to run Skyrim, properly scaled in real-world terms, would require a super-computer, and nobody has yet to release one as a desktop PC. Skyrim and Oblivion are so tiny because they've been scaled for game-play on console machines, which would totally choke if they had to deal with the complexity of environments and simultaneously-running AI scripts that a moderate to high-end PC could handle with ease. So, don't look for any changes from this in future games.

 

Now, given a few tricks, though, it might be possible. Our gameworlds are flat. What if they were realistically curved? If Nirn were the size of Earth then the horizon would be about three miles away for an average sized human standing at sea-level and looking out across the sea. Ignoring the refractive index of air, the distance to the horizon if the observer is about 100 feet above sea level is approximately twelve miles. From an altitude of about 1 mile (a typical moderately sized mountain) it's about 90 miles away.

 

Since the world-spaces that Bethesda gives us are bounded by either mountains or ocean this could be manageable with a dynamically-scaled LOD. Most of the time an observer within the game would likely be able to see no more than a mile or so in any given direction, anyway, and both Oblivion and Skyrim already have such vistas.

 

Unfortunately, it would take an eternity for Bethesda's team to flesh out a map the size of Australia without the help of some sophisticated (and probably non-existent) algorithms to create height maps and then place vegetation and rocks and carve out realistic waterways. With such a tool, though, the designers could spend their time creating interactive content and just tweaking the environment where needed to fit that content into the world seamlessly.

 

Do you think this would necessarily be the case if Bethesda used zones to separate the different regions? There's already precedent for it since you have to zone-in to enter the big cities anyways.

[NoobusExtremus]

If map size is an issue, why not scale everything else down by .5 or .75 - buildings, trees, critters, characters, etc. - so the "world" looks bigger and takes longer to walk around in? Kind of like a miniature town on a scale-model train set set up in someone's basement. Edited May 9, 2012 by NoobusExtremus