First Steps

First Steps

Start up the CS. When it's booted, go to File>Data from the menu bar. Double-click "Oblivion.esm" and click "OK" to load the Oblivion master file.

If you choose to load any additional files, do not set any as your active file.

The active file should always be the plugin you are making changes to.

When you load with no active file, the CS will prompt you to create a new one the first time you save.

Depending on your PC's configuration, it may take a while to load. Now would be a good time to get a beverage.

Once the CS has loaded up, several windows will populate your screen. The first of these we are concerned with is the "Cell View" window. The major features of this window are World Space, Cell list, and Object List.

• World Space
  • This drop down allows you to choose which world space you're working in. For now, we want to work with interiors, which is the default selection.
• Cell List
  • These are all the cells contained within the world space, listed by Editor ID.
• Object List
  • This is a list of all objects contained within the selected cell.

If any windows are not visible when you load, use the "View" menu in the CS toolbar to see if they are hidden or not.

Duplicating an Existing Cell

The easiest way to create a new cell is to duplicate an existing one. In this example, I'm using FortStrand01, but you can use anything. To do this, right-click on any cell, and choose "Duplicate Cell". Go ahead and rename your new cell by clicking on the Editor ID and leaving your cursor still for a moment. Let's call this cell CreepyCave01 for now.

Double-click your new cell to load it. Once you're sure you've got the new cell loaded, we'll delete all the old objects so we can start from scratch. In your Object List, select the first item, and press the shift and end keys on your keyboard to quickly select all objects in the cell. A quick stroke of the delete key, and you've got a clean canvas to work with.

Before we start on the layout, we have a little more prep work to do. Right-click on CreepyCave01 in the Cell List and select "edit". This view lets us quickly view some basic properties of the cells in our current worldspace, and has three tabs.

• Common Data
  • In this tab, we want to restrict fast travel, and set the music type to "Dungeon". You can also toggle water on/off here and set the Z-height of it, as well as choose the water type. The "Hand Changed" check box is useful for exterior cells that have been edited and should not be affected by procedural generation.

The Cell Properties Window

• Lighting
  • Here we want to set the ambient light and fog levels. For dungeons, good RGB values for light are between 20 and 25, and fog between 25 and 30. Also, under fog; set "Far" and "Clip Dist" to 3,000 (three thousand). When in doubt, try looking at the settings in other dungeons and copying those. Remember that dungeons should be generally darker than public areas, but still visible without a torch. Also remember that your dungeon will be brighter and darker on other monitors besides your own.
• Interior Data
  • Here we set the name as it will appear in-game. Change it to "Creepy Cave" for now. For our dungeon, leave all other boxes in this tab blank or unchecked.

Note that when you duplicate a cell, the lighting information is cleared, and you will have to set it manually.

Now that we've got the basics taken care of, we'll start actually assembling our dungeon.
Using Building Blocks and Navigating the Render Window