Mod Bloat!

[DavidBudreck]

I was helping a friend move a Large Castle. It was in an interior cell.

 

I copied one of the random Oblivion Planes to create a new worldspace, and started copying the castle a few pieces at a time.

 

When finished, I realized that doing this seemingly simple thing had increased the size of the .esp file from 73.5 KB to 4.85 MB!

 

Does anybody know what could possibly have caused this? Or, more importantly what I could do to fix it.

 

I tried, vainly to use TES4 Gecko, but I have NEVER been able to clean a mod with it. It gets 75% through loading Oblivion.esm, then runs out of memory every time.

 

Would using TES4 Gecko to export the worldspace help?

[LFact]

Having world space can increase plugin size. If TES4Gecko doesn't work well, you can use TES4Edit to check details and mod cleaning-up.

[DavidBudreck]

Thank you. TES4 Edit is a very nifty tool.

 

You aren't kidding about increasing plugin sizes. I looked at a couple of mods that I knew had their own worldspaces, SweetspringIsle is 2.0 MB, and CastawayIsles is 594 KB.

 

I saw nothing in TES4 Geko or TES4 Edit that would explain the size. The mod is Squeaky Clean.

 

So I tested the original 73.5 kb file again, this time by simply duplicating OBRD003 Worldspace to see what would happen. The file it created is 4.88 MB in size.

 

Worldspaces, apparently, simply take up a lot of room. I had thought of OBRD003 as being "small" in size, only 36 x 36 cells or so.

 

Apparently a worldspace of 36 x 36 cells is not so small after all.

[RyuDoppler]

Editing of worldspaces using thirdparty tools can be a bit finicky, and from my experience seems to have the effect of messing with the file's size to some extent. From pretty much every tool I think, although don't hold me completely to that statement (I always have problems trying to do any sort of edits worldspace-wise with TES4Edit it seems).

 

Without getting too deep into it, I honestly think your file should be more something along the lines of 300-500 kilobytes in size, rather than 5 megabytes. Experiments I've done before suggest that the size of a ESP containing an empty 4 quad worldspace can be around 800 kilobytes to 1.4 megabytes (and that's empty as in only landscape data; no objects/items).

 

And unfortunately, I don't believe I have a solution to reversing the filesize irregularity. The whole function of how bytes are being saved in a file certain ways is more of a programmers forte than mine. :(

[Vagrant0]

Without getting too deep into it, I honestly think your file should be more something along the lines of 300-500 kilobytes in size, rather than 5 megabytes. Experiments I've done before suggest that the size of a ESP containing an empty 4 quad worldspace can be around 800 kilobytes to 1.4 megabytes (and that's empty as in only landscape data; no objects/items).

Just to add to that, a worldspace containing between 30 and 40 cells, fully textured, with objects added will only be 800kb to 1.2mb depending on how much of that is deadspace.

 

But, a 4 quad worldspace, generated from heightmap, which contains landscape changes and nothing else can easily be over 5mb with only about 30% of that area used, and well up to around 15mb with 100% of that area used, depending on complexity. I have the empty worldspaces to prove this.

 

My guess would be that at some point you used the heightmap editor, generated cells, and forgot about it. Or the world you copied from was generated to use all 4 quads.

 

At any rate, the best solution I can offer is to just make a new worldspace from scratch, copy the revelant settings from an Oblivion worldspace, but only create the cells you intend to use, and only use the landscape editor for altering the terrain. If you are annoyed with the landscape editor seeming too slow, both the wiki and an article tied to my name can provide some suggestions to make work alot easier. Once made, and objects copied over, you can delete the old worldspace using TES4Edit, TES4Gecko, or the native "ignore" function in the CS.