FO4edit ... possible to find Z level of landscape at given X/Y coordinates of a cell?

[Dillenger69]

I'm googling it myself, but in the meantime I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask...

 

I'm working on bulk item placement and I want to pepper in things here and there without having an original reference to base the X/Y/Z on, and without hand placing them with the CK. The CK is useless when it comes to working on large scales. It takes too long.

 

Is there any way with FO4edit (the pascal scripting ... NOT papyrus) to find the "ground level" Z coordinate when you have a known X, Y, and CELL?

[DeathMotif]

I have a similar idea that requires the same information as you. To date I've had no luck finding an answer. Hopefully you fare better.

[zilav]

http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Tes5Mod:Mod_File_Format/LAND

 

Turn of Simple Records in xEdit's options (realod required) to access decoded LAND data.

[Dillenger69]

wow, thanks Zilav. From what I can tell, that's exactly what I'm looking for. It looks pretty complex but not indecipherable. I just have to wrap my brain around it.

[Lisselli]

I would attempt it, if I knew enough math. Getting the z value at the ground level would have been extremely useful in Skyrim, but especially more so in Fallout 4 where terrain height varies drastically.

Edited April 30, 2017 by Lisselli

[zilav]

While it is possible to make automatic placement with xEdit, I don't recommend doind that. There are several problems you will need to solve.

 

Each cell consists of 32x32 grid of height points (the 33rd point is the copy of previous cell), considering 4096 game units cell size, each point covers 128x128 units area. Mind you the human height is also 128 game units, so that's quite a large area. To accurately place something in between you'll need to perform smoothing calculations between neighboring points.

 

Also each grid point can elevate from -1024 to +1016 so slope detection is also needed. Then you need to adjust the placement using object's collision, probably using object bounds OBND values.

 

This is a lot of work, trials and errors for something that can already be done automatically with CK's Region Generator

 

The only problem is that it places only statics, moveable statics and plants iirc, so if you need to place something else, you'll have to trick it. Make a static record using the nif model you need, place it using region generator, then replace base object record of REFRs with xEdit script which would be a trivial task.

[BlahBlahDEEBlahBlah]

Zilav's region generator idea sounds good.

Could probably skip the FO4Edit part though too, by using ctrl+f when in CK and choose 'entire world' (or something like that, it'll be obvious when there).

[Dillenger69]

bleh, I didn't think there was quite that much math involved. I'll check out the region generator. Unfortunately, what I'm trying to place is lights, not static objects.