Adjusting the Water Levels

[Kurohux]

So I posted this elsewhere, & I'm definitely biting off more than I can chew here with how proficient I am with CK at the moment, but I'm beginning to think what I want to do is impossible with how the game engine's set up. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

The goal is to alter a version of Hangman's Alley to make it seem as if a deep sinkhole has opened up in the middle of it, ultimately with an elevator & a couple of structures, maybe a portion of a subway tunnel inside, with busted pipes creating a waterfall for a small pond at the very bottom. I've edited the landscape to create a large drop off, & I've started using craters & cliffside pieces to patch in the gaps & make it seem more like a proper cave.

 

The problem is the water level. By default, the cell (FensRaiderCamp) has it set to a height of like 450 & ocean water. The cell borders the river which I think is set to the global default, but none of the Hangman cell is apart of that, it just has this default water level that's well below any of the terrain. Now in CK, it let me drop it to the level I wanted (about -700 units) & let me change the type of water to murky. And once I hit F5, the changes show up & it looks pretty much how I was hoping. But whenever I open up a game, all the other changes are present, but the water level/type snaps back to the original default. Tried a fresh save even, but got the same result.

 

When I look at the worldspace data for the Commonwealth, it says there's a default height of 450 & type as ocean water. Is there some sort of global override I'm running into here that negates the individual cell data? I'm a bit leery about adjusting any global settings & have a lake or big square chunk of ocean somewhere drain. That said, I tried it for a second, putting the global water height a good 300 units beneath where I needed it & it STILL didn't work. What kills me is that it's showing up that way in CK just fine with the existing settings. And actually, the whole settlement is actually over two cells & the other one has water height that does actually go lower than the default, so I can see that it is possible!

 

Has anyone else run into anything like this before? Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Edited May 20, 2018 by Kurohux

[werr92]

What you see in game is probably the LOD water. If you toggle LOD in CK, you gonna see this mesh as well. Apart from lowering the water level (even only in one particular cell) you need to re-genertate LOD (which is a bad idea) or only precombined alongside with pre-vis if you're lucky.

[Kurohux]

Thanks. I actually tried hitting those toggles too in order to see what would happen, both in the world & in the cell itself, but got the same results. I thought LOD was more a visual distance thing though & this acts like water when you hop in it.

[werr92]

Nope, terrain LOD meshes and textures underlie the loaded land and objects by a couple of meters or so. Thus, if you make a minor landscape edit, you won't notice, but if you dig deeper you'll have to handle that. Edited May 21, 2018 by werr92

[Kurohux]

So in case this helps anyone else in the future, it turned out it was Scrap Everything. To test things, I'd turned off most of my mods but left on Cheat Terminal (on account of getting there from a fresh save), A high jump mod, & scrap everywhere, thinking if I had to select a piece in build mode to figure something out, it'd let me select more than the standard pieces..... I would've never surmised that it actually overrides the water levels. So all I ended up needing to do was swap the order of it & the mod I'm making & it worked.