[LE] Room Markers give me grief!

[cumbrianlad]

I don't think I need advice here, unless someone tells me that room markers can overlap without the world coming to an end. No, I'm just writing it to amuse you and maybe serve as a warning to anybody like me who's new to CK and might come to grief like I just have.

 

So...I get the creation kit and get started.

 

I decide that it's just sensible to follow the tutorials that are provided...except that I don't, quite. No. In my infinite wisdom I decide that I'm not happy with the layout of Lokir's tomb, as set out in the tutorials. My tomb (renamed Ketilbjorns Frest, meaning Bear-Helmet's Respite in ancient Norse*) has a total of six rooms and a cave, together with hallways, a winding secret passage, a cave section and two sets of spiral stair-wells linking upper and lower levels.

 

It all writhes about like a basket of snakes...it looks cool, though and it's fun to run through in game. I've even got a room with a load of draugr sitting on benches like pews with a hard levelled boss addressing them from in front of an altar. I'm working on getting another draugr to be mining from an ore vein in the cave using a model lifted from Ansilvund, though I haven't cracked that one yet.

 

With some help along the way from videos and NexusComa, it was all going brilliantly...until I got to the section on room markers.

 

Here I found out that my room marker boxes should not intersect each other at all.

 

The secret passageway, which I spent so long weaving over and around my other hallways is impossible to enclose in a room marker without that marker conflicting with at least two other markers...doh!

 

There is a solution to the problem but it involves moving at least three rooms and extending the connecting hallways. Possibly I may have to move another couple of rooms, too. Then I'll have to clean up any seams caused by moving multiple objects, adjust the navmesh and add a bit more clutter.

 

When I do another tomb, I'll certainly not make this mistake again.

 

I'd better go 'cause it looks like I'm going to be busy...you live and learn.

 

* I found this on a couple of sites of Nordic names and an English to Ancient Nordic dictionary...sweet. Ketil can mean kettle (the old type which was just a big pot) or helmet. Bjorn means bear. My tomb is definitely not called 'Bear-Kettle's respite'. If you didn't already know, draugr is a genuine Viking word meaning 'un-dead man' or 'ghost'.

[NexusComa]

The best advice you can get when starting the CK is to start out lined up with a grid ...

Move to 0,0 with your 1st object and go from there ...

I can't even stress how helpful being on a grid can be with your rooms.

[cumbrianlad]

True.

 

The other thing that I'll bear in mind for any future creation kit work is to have an idea for a plot in my head before I put in the first floor piece.

 

Since KetilBjorn's Frest sort of evolved as I went through it, I added stuff like the secret passage as an after thought.

 

What I should have done is what I always do as a mechanical design engineer: Eatablish what's needed, work out how to fit it together, sketch a layout on good old-fashioned paper and only then would I start the engineering drawings. It's the same with this I Think.

[NexusComa]

I guess I don't really understand what you mean by "room markers" are you talking about the blue box vs the teleport box.

If so, I always put my teleport box a bit in front of my room maker box ... so as the followers don't pile up on the players

back as they enter the room together.

Edited December 18, 2016 by NexusComa

[Shurugar]

From the Wiki, maybe it helps you:

 

• Multiple rooms can be joined and treated as a single Room Marker. This allows coverage of irregular room shapes, and is especially useful for areas with several off-grid transitions. To join rooms, select each Room Marker and press the "Join Rooms" button: Joined rooms are indicated by a double-ended blue arrow.

 

Don't know the layout of your dungeon, but as long as you have a small gap between the meshes there shouldn't be a problem. It'll get realy messy, but it should be accomplishable.

[cumbrianlad]

Shurugar,

 

you're a star! I'd seen the join rooms button but didn't know how to use it.

 

Believe it or not, I've decided to scrap my first version of Ketilbjorns Frest (at least I've removed it from my data files). There were so many things that I hadn't done to my satisfaction that the nightmare of sorting out the room markers just wasn't worth it. Even if I had known how to join rooms it would still have meant a whole raft of work.

 

What took me a week to accomplish first time around was done in a couple of hours yesterday.

 

I now have the entire tomb laid out with room markers all in place and snapped together properly. I'm much more happy with the new layout.

 

I had just checked that my first portal was working fine when I saw your post. I'll definitely merge two pairs of room markers together because it will reduce the number of room markers and ensure that I never have more than two rooms being rendered at once.

 

If I ever get the mod tested and uploaded for others to use, I'd like to think that it was optimised as well as It could be.

 

NexusComa, yes, it was the big blue boxes that contain the rooms, halls etc that were the problem...or rather I'd set the tomb out in such a haphazard way that it was impossible to put the markers in without them overlapping, or having too many portals in line of sight of the player.

 

In my opinion, the time to do this part of the optimisation is immediately after the basic layout of the level is finished. The room markers are much easier to add and it's an easy fix at this stage if there are problems adding room markers. Also, the room markers add very little to the size of the esp file, so they don't slow down saves like a navmesh does...and they can be hidden. Also, for a biggish tomb like mine, you don't run into performance issues when testing, once all the clutter has been added to the tomb. Maybe I'm wrong about this but it seems logical to me.

 

I know that I may have to tweak the room markers in places after I've added lighting effects, if the light's radius goes outside the box but that's no great trouble.

[Shurugar]

Glad I ways helpful.

 

I believe it, I too already "lost" 70 hours because i scrapped 3 cells and reworked them completly from scratch while working on my mod..

 

Hope you'll finish and upload it, always love to see new dungeon/worlds.

Edited December 21, 2016 by Shurugar

[cumbrianlad]

Thanks Shurugar.

 

It's well worth scrapping because I'm so new to this I can now do things that I wouldn't have dreamed of a few days/weeks ago.

 

As one instance, I've added a ruins shelf to the first room, made the top shelf into a potion rack linked to a renamed chest so that the player approaches it and gets the option to "Loot Ketilbjorns Potions" Inside the hidden chest are all the levelled potions that they'll have to survive the dungeon with.

 

To me, little details like this make all the difference to a player.

[NexBeth]

Well, you don't have to use room markers. You also don't have to have every area in your work optimized either. I wouldn't necessarily dismantle an area to accommodate optimization.

 

http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php?title=Bethsoft_Tutorial_Optimization

[cumbrianlad]

NexBeth,

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

I did it anyway and started afresh. I treat my very first attempt at a tomb as a (steep) learning curve.

 

My new tomb was laid out with room markers in mind, since it's fairly big. The room markers and portals went in without a hitch, first time. It's laid out so that there is never more than one portal in the player's line of sight, so I guess that for low end machines that leaves me able to add a fair amount of eye candy to each room.

 

I guess that for very large tombs (not mine), a better way to do it would be to use multiple cells and have loadcell doors to link the sections together