Creating Large Scale Landmasses

[Dominator046]

Hello, I am a modder planning on doing some massive scale landmass work in Oblivion (if I can get it to work properly, or I may have to wait for the next TES game), And I have a few questions.

 

1: What programs should I use, I know already of TESAnnwyn and TES4Gecko, but is there anything else that I should get for creating large scale landmasses?

 

2: What should the size be, I believe something of 15 by 15 quads to be in somewhat order? Or should I shrink it to something less massive?

 

3: What kind of hardware would you reccomend for this kind of project, and by hardware, I mean computer, graphics card, anything specific that could help, as Oblivion has been picky with two computers, 1 I got for christmas that had Vista, and another my dad bought me as Vista was causing problems, but that isn't currently operational.

 

I would greatly appreciate some help here, an aspiring modder would give you the entirety of his thanks for assistance in any of these questions.

[exanimis]

First of all, 15 x 15 quads is huge, Tamriel is only 4x4. There is a large landmass available for download, I believe a search for middle Earth will lead you to it. If you insist on making this huge world then the construction set and TES4Gecko is all you really need. There are other programs that will do the trick but you really don't need them. Start by bringing a small circle of land above the water level in the Regions editor. Using the level tool the one that looks like a down pointing arrow, to bring your continent up to the surface. Once you have a basic shape, start adding mountains,hills,lakes and valleys. Save often because you are in for a lot of crashes. Do not save over your first esp. Save your terrain as a separate plug in and merge the two plug ins later with TES4Gecko. That will save you the trouble of messing up and having to start from scratch. My advice to you is to just start making worlds until you get used to the region editor. You can always throw away the esp's later. You are going to need a lot of practice and that's just to build the world. When you start on terrain, regions, borders and weather systems, you are pretty much on your own.

 

I have built several worlds as practice and I can tell you from experience that the CS doesn't like any world larger than 4x4 quads. You will have the CS freeze up and you will have it crash, especially when you start adding terrain. You should also consider that it took a team of people to place everything in the 16 quads of Tamriel and you probably will never get any help with your world. People like to play your mods but they don't want to actually have to work for them.

 

Oh and as far as the question of hardware goes, I can't help you but I can tell you that you should go by bben's instillation procedure. In my opinion the massively bulky and bloated windows Vista operating system sucks big time and you will have problems with Oblivion, the CS and Vista.

[TheTerminator2004]

There is an excellent tutorial on the CS wiki, called World Building 101, which is a step-by step guide to creating and importing a world into Oblivion: http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index...rldBuilding_101

 

And, as exanimis said, 15x15 quads is too big. I don't think it is physically possible to create a world that big in Oblivion, and even if it was, you would never use 95% of the space anyway. To be honest, even a world thats a quarter the size of Tamriel (under 4x4 quads) is too much for one lone modder to take on... Although it sure is fun to try :P

[Vagrant0]

And, as exanimis said, 15x15 quads is too big. I don't think it is physically possible to create a world that big in Oblivion.

Technically, you can, it just requires a much better computer than anyone currently has just to load the damn thing. Also, it can only be worked on in small sections which have to be merged into a master, so the process of just doing the very basic terrain would likely be more than anyone could handle. I believe there was a project out there that had used something like 14 quads. Although most of those quads were filled with small islands, I don't believe that project went anywhere due to the eventual complications of working with something that large. And that was only 3x4.

 

Be more concerned with the content of you mod, not the size. Moving through an empty area isn't particularly entertaining, and it would likely take years just for one person to complete even a fraction of that terrain. When it comes to generating for regions, it has to all be done at the same time, and has to be done by a single person to avoid cluttering overlap. A fairly simple 4 quad worldspace took me a whole week to generate regions for, and most of my regions were similar enough to Tamriel ones. Even after that week, there were numerous places where one region met another and the land textures were either unchanged, or were extremely blocky. And larger regions aren't the answer since these require even more time, are more prone to crashing due to lack of RAM, and of whole patches not turning out.

 

Learn to mod smaller scale, then consider doing a small worldspace to completion before even thinking about anything larger.