Difference between revisions of "A beginner's guide, lesson 3 - The external world"

 

 

 

Preamble

Both Are found in the My Documents/My Games/Oblivion folder.

This is ideal to produce screenshots to illustrate your mod. It’s also handy as a way of create visual reminders when you spot something in game you’d like to investigate more.

Because the world is so full, space is at a premium. It is inevitable that mods will clash. I know of at least three mods which use the same space close to Anvil, and two which use the little island in Cheydinhaal.

These follow the standard (x, y) co-ordinate form we all remember so unhappily from school math lessons. The origin cell (0,0) is a bit of wilderness due South of Weye, Weye lies on the Y-axis. All cells to the East of Weye have a + x (plus x) coordinate, all cells to the West have a – (minus x) co-ordinate.  

  Anvil (-46,9)

  Cheydinhaal (29,22)

  Skingard (-17,0)

[If you have a copy of the map that came with game, you could draw a line East to West through Skingard Cathedral and North to South through Weye. You will notice these cross quite along way South close to the Elsweyr Border.]

- The containers are generic base objects set to respawn. If you want to change this you are going to have to edit the base and give each container a custom name. You can then empty or fill them safely to meet your requirements.  

The toolset divides into three distinct functions.

Height Editor

Terrain painter

Terrain shader

Doing it this way we can add interior doors. Look for doors mark animated or INT. There is one called "Skdoormiddleint01", which is ideal for this set. You don’t link these doors. Instead they open for real to reveal the room inside. This is great because it maintains the illusion and avoids loadscreens. The big problem is it increases the number of objects in the cell. The game appear to try to remember the location of every object in a cell all at once, even if it's three stories above you and out of sight. The more objects it needs to remember the slow the update that can cause slow-down and stuttering.

This particular set was used in Summitmist Manor, which is part of the Dark Brotherhood Quest line. Have a look at the cell for the lower floors. It has three doorways. One leads outside, one links to the upper floor, and one goes to the basement. However, in the original building object there is no doorway set aside for a basement. The designers have just stuck a door against a blank bit of wall. They used the Skingard modular door that is great because it comes complete with a doorframe. A few of the doorways are like this. It means if you want to add a basement, you can, even if no real doorway exists. If you want to add a basement, go ahead.

The final thing we need to do is add a map marker to our house. It is found under statics. Drag this into the render window, position it and F key it. It looks a red version of the door link markers. This is where you teleport to when you fast travel to this location. Remember people might fast travel on horseback, so be sensible. The large circle around the marker denotes the area you must enter for the location to show up on the map.

Finally

You should now be in a position to start to get creative and build some impressive mods. Remember there are lots of housing out there. Look for gaps in the market by all means but most of all MOD FOR YOURSELVES.

In the next set of tutorials, we will examine NPC's Quests, and Scripting.

I off to do my research.