making a new land in Geck

[DJNInja88]

ok i have no idea if this has been explained in any other post if so PLEASE post a link explaining ....but how does one create a new land with the Fallout new vegas Geck...i have done many searches in google i can find one for creating a new land in fallout 3 but wasn't all that good not mention that was for 3 not new vegas and im under the impression that both are different so please some help would be nice :) i have 2 wonderful ideas for mods...one is awesome manor type home and the other is a whole town and when finished i hope to post on here myself

[SKYZOO]

I believe it is almost identical to creating one in FONV as it is creating one in FO3. I never saw any drastic differences during my creations, so you can probably follow that too.

 

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=geck+create+a+new+world+space&tbm=vid This is just a google link for different youtube videos involving the processes that you use.

 

http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php?title=Category:World_Spaces This is a link to the official GECK site for all things modding related to FONV and FO3, but this in particular is for worldspaces only.

 

It truly is a simple process. Create a new plugin named myworldspace, and open it using whatever masters you wish to use. All you have to do to start is go to world>worldspace and right click to choose to create a new worldspace entry. Give it a name, and follow the "data fields" guidelines in the second link, to customize it to your liking (water / land height, climate, size etc.). Click ok and save.

 

Open the new worldspace in exteriors in the cell view, and double click "wilderness 0,0" to go to the middle of your exterior worldspace in the render window. Now use the tutorials to learn how to alter the landscape terrain textures and varying hills and lakes, along with a lot of useful information about LOD generation and Navmeshing boundaries.

 

Hope this starts you in a proper direction, I'd do a picture tutorial but I don't have the time today. Good luck.

 

Edit: Here is a link to some photos of a worldspace I built, LOD'd and Navmeshed in about an hours time. (Just exterior pics for now)

http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/images/93932/?

Edited July 25, 2015 by SKYZOO

[madmongo]

New worldspace creation is pretty much the same from FO3 to FNV so tutorials for FO3 are ok for you to use. I never found any good tutorials. I pieced together bits and pieces from various tutorials and just plugged through it until I figured it out.

 

SKYZOO makes it sound a lot easier than it is. If you are making a very small worldspace, it can be done fairly quickly. But if you are making a larger worldspace, it becomes a very slow and tedious thing.

 

Also, the worldspace parts of the GECK are among the buggiest and most difficult to use parts of the toolset. Save often, and make backup files often just in case the GECK totally hoses your mod and you need to revert to an earlier version.

 

As SKYZOO said, the first step is just creating the world space. Click on world -> world spaces in the GECK, and when that form comes up, just click new on the left hand side give your new region a name, and fill in the blanks. Exit out of that, and save your mod, because the next step will usually crash the GECK. You might be able to avoid the crash if you save the mod, exit the GECK, and restart it. I dunno.

 

The next step is to create a heightmap. A lot of people skip this and make small, completely flat world spaces, and use things like cliff objects to do the majority of their landscaping. That's ok for things like a small base surrounded by mountains or something like that, but if you are trying to create a town or something it looks amateurish.

 

Warning - If you basically default the heightmap, it will crash the GECK. Seriously, sometimes I think the GECK is a Vault-tec experiment designed to test modder frustrations. The reason for this is that the GECK doesn't like it if the landscape is too low. So the first thing I do is create a random landscape that doesn't have much randomness to it, so that what it ends up doing is creating a basically flat landscape. The settings I use under the random generator are a frequency of 100, an amplitude of 50, and a base offset of 6000. The base offset is extremely important since if you don't set it high enough, the GECK crashes.

 

If all is well so far, save your heightmap and save your mod. If you didn't restart the GECK earlier, chances are that right here is where the GECK will crash. The second time through this it usually works.

 

Now re-open your heightmap, and use the editing tools to create your mountains, rivers, lakes, etc. You can play around with the default water settings in your worldspace to get the water to line up with where you want it on your landscape. If you used a base offset of 6000 when creating the heightmap, a water height of about 3500 tends to work fairly well. When you are editing the heightmap, make very small changes. If you make changes that are too drastic, you basically tear the landscape and the GECK can't figure out how to fix it and it ends up with a broken landscape that either crashes the GECK or crashes the game or both.

 

What you probably have at this point is a landscape that has mountains and plains and rivers and lakes and whatever. Save your heightmap and save your mod. If you were to go and look at it though, it will probably be very flat and unrealistic looking. You can add in some randomness to your heightmap to fix that. The settings that I tend to use are a frequency of 2000, an amplitude of 200, a base offset of zero, and this is very important, make sure you click additive and subtractive. If you don't check the additive and subtractive boxes, it will create a new random heightmap instead of just adding a bit of randomness to your existing heightmap. Now you should have something that looks a lot more realistic. Again, save your mod. The GECK likes to crash for no good reason a lot when doing worldspace stuff.

 

Now you can go to your cell view form, and change interiors (where it says world space) and select your new world space. It will put you right in the center of your new world space. And you'll run into yet another GECK bug. If there is nothing on the landscape, and the GECK hasn't ever focused on any kind of object, the GECK will usually display water instead of your landscape, so you end up looking at a big solid grayish-green blob on your render window instead of looking at your landscape. If this happens to you, select interiors in the cell view, double click on some static object, let the render window display that cell, then go back to your new world space. Sometimes just moving around using the arrow keys will get the water blob to go away once you move far enough to change cells. Once you have objects in your new worldspace you won't have this problem any more, as long as you first go to an area that has objects when you select your new worldspace when you start up the GECK.

 

Now you can tweak and paint the landscape to your heart's desire, and add objects and do all of that fun stuff. Unfortunately, you have only two basic tools for editing landscape. You can use the landscape editing function in the render window, which limits you to a maximum brush size of 15, or you can use the heightmap editor. If you are trying to make something the size of a small pond, the landscape editing makes you feel like you are carving out Mount Rushmoor using a hand chisel, and using the heightmap editor makes you feel like you are trying to do brain surgery with a chainsaw. There's nothing in between. The heightmap editor is also a bit quirky. It tends to leave big black square splotches just outside of the view on your render window, and those don't go away when you close out the heightmap editing box. Even if you move away from that area using the arrow keys, the splotches stay there. You can only make them go away by selecting another area from the cell view and then going back to the area where you were.

 

Buggy buggy buggy. That's the GECK.

 

There's an auto navmesher, but that is buggy as all heck. I've found that it works reasonably well on wilderness landscapes containing simple objects like trees and cactuses. It often completely fails when the cell contains SCOLs and doesn't work well at all if there are a lot of complex objects inside the cell. That means that you end up having to hand navmesh a lot of cells. If your new worldspace only has a few usable cells, this isn't a big deal, and you can navmesh all of them in a few hours easily. A worldspace has basically 64x64 cells, which is 4096 total cells. You can auto navmesh three or four cells per minute, and once you get experienced at navmeshing, you can probably finish a fairly complex cell in a few minutes. If you figure an average of one cell per minute (being a mix of hand navmeshed and auto navmeshed), that's 4096 minutes to navmesh the entire worldspace. That works out to a bit over 68 hours. If you navmesh for three hours per day (because you have a job or go to school or do something that takes up the rest of your day) then it will take you roughly 23 days to navmesh the entire worldspace.

 

LOD generation is similar. It's not too bad if you only have a few cells, but for a large worldspace it takes darn near forever.

 

This is why you need to decide ahead of time if you want to create a tiny worldspace that you can finish in a short amount of time, or if you want to create a major sized worldspace that will take you a huge time to complete.

 

There's a reason that you don't see too many mods with worldspaces on the nexus. It's difficult to figure out, and buggy as all heck. It also takes a huge amount of time, which is why the few worldspaces that you do see tend to be small and simple. I've been working for months on a mod that has two huge worldspaces. At the rate I'm going, the mod will be done just after everyone has switched to Fallout 4, so no one but me will ever play it.

 

One other thing. If you do try to make a huge worldspace, you can use the regions to add a lot of landscape items like cactuses and trees. This is a huge time saver, but be forwarned. If you have ever clicked on an object in debug mode, you'll notice that the object has an 8 character ID, something like 4100D236 (a completely made-up number). This is a hexidecimal number. The first two digits will be the number of your mod (41 in this case), aka its mod index. Fallout gets 00, and the different mods are assigned numbers as you add them into your mod list. On my system, dead money is 01, honest hearts is 02, old world blues is 03, etc. You can see the mod index in FOMM if you use that. So if you add another mod and it ends up loading before this one, that 41 could get bumped up to 42, for example. Now here's the important part. That xx00D236 part means that you have a six digit hex number for the ID. This corresponds to the file offset in your mod. The largest 6 digit hex number you can have is FFFFFF, which is 16,777,215. If the size of your mod's file is larger than this number, then any objects added after this length will cause the GECK and the game to crash. The GECK will give you no errors at all when it saves your mod, but when you try to load it again, it will lock up the GECK. That means you can't use the GECK to fix it. If you are making a small worldspace, then you probably don't have to worry about this at all. If you are making a large worldspace and are adding tons of landscape objects (cactuses, trees, etc) then you can run into this limit and it will break your mod.

 

I hope that you find this helpful.

[madmongo]

A few other things I thought of after submitting that.

 

The auto navmesher will often not navmesh across roads. However, it will usually navmesh through fences. So be prepared to hand navmesh any cell that contains a road or a fence.

 

Use the b key in your render window to show cell boundaries. You'll want to arrange buildings and structures and other things so that you can easily do the navmeshing. You wouldn't want a building's door to be straddling a cell boundary, for example.

 

Some folks use things like geological survey data to generate their heightmaps. I've never done it but if you poke around on the forums you'll find the basic procedure for it.

 

There's also an auto generate navmesh button under regions. Don't use it. It is very very very very broken. I've made it work under some circumstances but it is incredibly buggy.

Edited July 26, 2015 by madmongo

[SKYZOO]

madmongo just gave you a sufficient guide of pretty much every important tutorial out there. Yes, I did make it sound easier, but it is in the general form of what you are asking, and it was a correct start. It IS a complicated and tedious, hate and rage filled GECK crashing process. The link I provided was a mod I'd made for a friend that will be released soon, and that is just a small arctic base compared to the much larger world.

madmongo's advice is what you should follow to a tee, even if confusing at first you can use the links I provided for at least some general knowledge of the process.

@madmongo Thanks for providing a great tutorial, I personally think your two posts could be combined (Sans my name) and posted as a sticky for new and old modders alike to see. It is not only informative but well versed. +1Kudos and cheers.

Edited July 27, 2015 by SKYZOO

[DJNInja88]

thank you so very very much! not sure when ill start..both my mods need planing and i want them ready before i actually begin making them...kinda wish i had a little help lol i may or may not share my ideas with you guys later