Working with outdoor cells

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I'm currently in the planning stages of a mod that introduces a new outdoor area that's completely seperate from the Wasteland. What's the best way to go about doing this? Can I duplicate a texture that's already there, or will that not work? And if that won't work, how do I create a ground base and implement sky, invisible borders etc, and then connect adjacent cells together? And as I work the process, are there some important things I should be considering?

 

I've looked around for tutorials and none seem to cover this sort of thing...

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[pkleiss]

Here is a tutorial on the subject. I can't say that i have looked through it, so I don't know how good it is.

[Leadpipe]

This tutorial Is what I used when I started screwing around with additional worldspaces.

 

Here's a couple of things I found while working with worldspaces:

 

1) You'll have to generate the terrain mesh at least once. You can do this through a heightmap, but there are tools within the GECK to alter the landscape once you've got it, so don't worry too much about getting the heightmap perfect. Be prepared to wait a VERY long time (the tutorial says it can take up to 12 hours, but I've had it go as long as 5 days).

 

2) Water level is something you'll have to play with. My first four attempts at creating a worldspace resulted with everything under water. It's a simple thing to go into the worldspace properties and adjust the water level from there.

 

3) You can extract the existing terrain meshes from the meshes.bsa file. I forget the directory exactly, but it should be something like landscape>LOD. There are a few worldspaces in there, most of them flat. From there it's a matter of renaming the folder to match the name of the worldspace you created in the GECK (see tutorial for more info on that). From what little duplicating worldspaces I've done, it would seem it copies objects and landscape texture painting, so you'll have to spend a LOT of time removing things.

I haven't experimented with this, myself (maybe someone else can fill me in) but you could be asking for a world of hurt playing around with this approach. I understand that the game doesn't tolerate a lot of deleting from vanilla cells.

 

4) Be mindful of how much stuff you cram into a small space. At the top left of the window it will tell you how much of available memory you're using, and the border will change color (first to yellow, then to red) as you approach and breech the threshold. This can lead to CTDs when entering certain cells in your worldspace and a lot of headaches (which is what I'm fighting now).

 

I think that's all I've got for now. I'm sure more will come to me as I work on my mod again later tonight.