Difference between revisions of "Creating Large Worldspaces"
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===Practicality=== | ===Practicality=== | ||
Before starting your project consider the practicality of it. Take a moment and think over what you are hoping to | Before starting your project consider the practicality of it. Take a moment and think over what you are hoping to achieve. Will you and/or your team be able to complete the project you're envisioning? Large world spaces require a lot of hours of work. The process of creating them can get very tedious at times. Unlike a basic quest mod that takes place in a vanilla world space, a large world space can require several weeks if not months of work and preparation before you can even start placing buildings, NPCs, dungeons, etc. To top all of this off large world spaces can take a very long time to load in the CS. If at all possible consider breaking your worldspace down into multiple plugins rather than creating the entire worldspace in one go. Waiting ten minutes or more for your world space to load in the CS can be very discouraging. Especially later on in your mod when debugging scripts causes the CS to crash frequently. | ||
The purpose of this warning is not to discourage you. What is being suggested here is before you start your project, and as you work on it, try to do two things. Try to keep it practical, because if it's not practical it probably won't get finished. And secondly know what you're doing. If you know how to use your tools the work will go much more efficiently. When a project is moving forward it helps motivate you to continue. If a project keeps running into delays because steps were skipped or a useful tip was ignored requiring a return to an earlier point in the project - this is what can kill a project. | The purpose of this warning is not to discourage you. What is being suggested here is before you start your project, and as you work on it, try to do two things. Try to keep it practical, because if it's not practical it probably won't get finished. And secondly know what you're doing. If you know how to use your tools the work will go much more efficiently. When a project is moving forward it helps motivate you to continue. If a project keeps running into delays because steps were skipped or a useful tip was ignored requiring a return to an earlier point in the project - this is what can kill a project. | ||
So from the start have a mindset of sticking to the important elements and trimming away the fluff. As you go through this process you should also take a look at the article [[Developing Successful Mods]] for help on making your new world space a successful project. | So from the start have a mindset of sticking to the important elements and trimming away the fluff. As you go through this process you should also take a look at the article [[Developing Successful Mods]] for help on making your new world space a successful project. | ||
==Essential Skills== | ==Essential Skills== | ||
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A sketch of all these ideas should be generated in a graphics editing program such as the [[GIMP]] (although you can also do this on paper as well). A highly accurate scale is not as important as the idea of a proportional scale. The heightmap editor works in quads which are square in shape (again see [[Oblivion Units]]). You need to draw your landmass in GIMP in such a way that your final graphic can be divided up into squares. Using the heightmap editor you will manually transfer these squares into each of the quads you plan to use. This "translation" is going to be in some ways an artistic feat on your part and doesn't need to be mathematically perfect or in any particular file format. It is something for your eyes to look at and will act as a guide so you don't get lost as you work. This is especially important if your world space will be larger than 4 quads as you will see shortly. | A sketch of all these ideas should be generated in a graphics editing program such as the [[GIMP]] (although you can also do this on paper as well). A highly accurate scale is not as important as the idea of a proportional scale. The heightmap editor works in quads which are square in shape (again see [[Oblivion Units]]). You need to draw your landmass in GIMP in such a way that your final graphic can be divided up into squares. Using the heightmap editor you will manually transfer these squares into each of the quads you plan to use. This "translation" is going to be in some ways an artistic feat on your part and doesn't need to be mathematically perfect or in any particular file format. It is something for your eyes to look at and will act as a guide so you don't get lost as you work. This is especially important if your world space will be larger than 4 quads as you will see shortly. | ||
=====Notes===== | |||
*A simple conversion to remember is 32 units equals a yard. So divide by 32 and multiply by three to covert CS units to feet. | *A simple conversion to remember is 32 units equals a yard. So divide by 32 and multiply by three to covert CS units to feet. | ||
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Keep in mind that if your new world space project will make changes to a world space located within another .esm - like for example the vanilla Oblivion world spaces located in Oblivion.esm - those changes must be kept in an .esp file rather than an esm. Otherwise odd errors and undesirable behaviors will occur in the game. (Essentially, not following this guideline wipes out all non-persistent objects in the edited world space.) So, if your world space will be saved in an .esm file, and your mod will makes changes in a world space in another .esm, your mod will require a separate and additional .esp for any changes you intend to make to any .esm-based world spaces. An .esm CAN safely link to another .esm's interior cells, and it CAN include scripts to place objects/NPCs into another .esm's world space without using an .esp - '''as long as''' these changes do not actually make edits to the world space directly. Still to be safe you should try to make all these types of changes in an .esp that will remain an .esp at release time. | Keep in mind that if your new world space project will make changes to a world space located within another .esm - like for example the vanilla Oblivion world spaces located in Oblivion.esm - those changes must be kept in an .esp file rather than an esm. Otherwise odd errors and undesirable behaviors will occur in the game. (Essentially, not following this guideline wipes out all non-persistent objects in the edited world space.) So, if your world space will be saved in an .esm file, and your mod will makes changes in a world space in another .esm, your mod will require a separate and additional .esp for any changes you intend to make to any .esm-based world spaces. An .esm CAN safely link to another .esm's interior cells, and it CAN include scripts to place objects/NPCs into another .esm's world space without using an .esp - '''as long as''' these changes do not actually make edits to the world space directly. Still to be safe you should try to make all these types of changes in an .esp that will remain an .esp at release time. | ||
*Once you have trees and other content, you will also need to clear out all the VWD flags for your world space using TES4Edit in order for your world space to show correctly when loaded anywhere other than the 01 index. You would need to do this cleaning after every change which adds more trees, but thankfully, you only need to clean out those things which were added/moved. (Note: This final note has still not | *Once you have trees and other content, you will also need to clear out all the VWD flags for your world space using TES4Edit in order for your world space to show correctly when loaded anywhere other than the 01 index. You would need to do this cleaning after every change which adds more trees, but thankfully, you only need to clean out those things which were added/moved. (Note: This final note has still not been verified in recent testing.) | ||
====Using the Heightmap Editor Part 2==== | ====Using the Heightmap Editor Part 2==== | ||