I need help

[Rennn]

First, I'm not a noob. I halfway programmed a Browser MMO in months past, but I scrapped that eventually because I knew from the start that I'd never find a playerbase. It was mostly practice for programming in php and c++. Mostly php, since I avoided learning c++ as much as possible, aside from what was required. I also made a few textures for Oblivion, for private use, and I'm working on an hd *shifty glance* female body retex for Skyrim. But moving away from that, since that's not the point of this post (this was generally just to say that I have some experience and I have an idea of what's genrally involved in coding and the like), I need Construction Set advice.

 

I'm planning on starting an ambitious project for Oblivion (I mean aside from my planned Mysterious Dungeons Mod that'll now be fused with this project). It'll introduce new lore and new lands, and it'll be a total conversion. There will be little vanilla-Oblivion content. I also don't really plan on including a quest journal at all, nor quests. I much prefer the Dark Souls or King's Field style of questing, where you get a hint pointing you in one direction, and it leads to a new hint, and pretty soon you're neck deep in plague rats in a swamp you never knew existed wondering what dark God has forsaken you. To do this, I need to know some simple things about the CS:

 

1. How do I edit landscapes? When I click on a region I only get a bunch of barren cells with nothing in them labelled 'wilderness(22,6)' or 'wilderness(12,3)'. Where do I find the real landscape, and, if I already found it, why is it so empty?

 

2. If I create an .esm, and it loads after the Oblivion.esm, will it overwrite the Oblivion.esm while it's enabled?

 

3. Where can I find a good tutorial on Oblivion's scripting language?

[DrakeTheDragon]

Can't help with most of this, but I advise having the CS Wiki handy for reference at all times.

This and the OBSE docs is all I ever needed while programming my scripts.

(Well, and the occasional request to the team for a new function addition to OBSE, that is, to stay with the truth.)

[Rennn]

Thanks for that, but if someone else reads this, I'd still like to know about 1 and 2. :)

[David Brasher]

(1) To edit landscapes, you go to the cell you want to edit. Go to the "Cell View" window and specify what Worldspace your cell is in. Dungeons and insides of buildings are in "Interiors." The landscape in Cyrodiil in between towns is the Tamriel worldspace. You can add, remove, and edit positions of objects and actors in the render window after you load up a cell. If you want to edit the contour, texture, and shading of the ground, click the icon with green mountains, blue sky, and white clouds. To build an entirely new worldspace, click on the icon with a world globe. (You need a lot of RAM to use this function, and you need a lot of time and patience.)

 

(2) Your new .esm will have to load after oblivion.esm. Oblivion.esm always loads first. Your .esm could edit things in oblivion.esm to make the game different, but you have to be careful. You can break the game. Like if you tell your .esm to place an object in a Tamriel worldspace cell, or tell your mod to edit the landscape contour, texture, or shading in Tamriel, then when you load up the game, terrible things will happen. Like the ground won't be there and all the people and loose objects will be falling. Alternately, the ground will be there, but the world will be empty and there will be only a few objects like doors and actors. So in general, you should try to build .esms that don't edit anything that is in oblivion.esm. If you make your own .esm, it should be for new content only. Because of the problem I mentioned above, you may not place a door from Cyrodiil to your new world. The ground will disappear. So what you will likely have to do is teleport people to your new world via script in your .esm, or else also create a small .esp which has the door between worlds (even if you put everything else into your .esm.) You can make .esp files edit oblivion.esm all you want.

[Rennn]

It looks like that's all the information I need, thanks for the help. And I was planning on using an esm to change just about everything... that wouldn't have ended well, lol.