Can't create a new worldspace

[AllThingsTrivial]

Hi,

 

I'm having a problem creating a new world space for my mod and it's very frustrating. I can't dupe an existing worldspace (idk why) and if I use a new one I just get a massive black square - I haven't seen any tutorial where this happens so I'm guessing my GECK, or I, am messing up. Does anyone know how I can create a new worldspace? It's driving me mad - I sometimes think the GECK is social experiment to test patience, it really is the weirdest modding tool I've ever used.

 

Cheers

[madmongo]

I've often said that the GECK is a vault-tec experiment designed to test modder's frustration levels. :smile:

 

Making a new worldspace is only slightly less painful than repeatedly banging your head against concrete. This is going to take you into some of the buggiest parts of the GECK.

 

The first thing you need to do is go under worldspaces and create your new worldspace. This is straightforward enough.

 

Now save your mod, exit the GECK, and reload. If you don't do this, the next step will crash the GECK and you'll be forced to reload anyway. Stupid GECK.

 

Now that you have reloaded your mod, you need to create a heightmap for your new worldspace. The heightmap tool works, but like a lot of things in the GECK, it's not terribly intuitive and doesn't work particularly well. One key here is that if you assume that you can just take the default heightmap and landscape it to your desire, you will crash the GECK. Welcome to yet another bug in the GECK. You need to get all parts of your landscape above a certain height or the GECK will crash when you try to save it. What I typically do is generate a random landscape with very little randomness to it so it comes out almost flat, but I give it an offset so that the overall height is up where it needs to be. If you don't have any trees, you can set your offset to about 6000 or so and that works fine. If you have trees, you will run into LOD bugs if your landscape and trees are below a height of about 14,000 or so. Bump the height up to about 20,000 and you won't have a problem with tree LOD.

 

Now sculpt your landscape. It is best to do things gently. If you are too aggressive with your tools, you can create landscape tears that the GECK can't fix. Sometimes it will tell you that there's a heightmap problem and it will say that it is fixing it, but in my experience your heightmap is pretty well borked at that point and nothing the GECK will do will ever fix it.

 

Anyway, what I typically do is sculpt the mountains and valleys and such. When I have all of that done, I add in some randomness to make the terrain look more realistic.

 

Save your heightmap, and save your mod again. Save often. The GECK likes to crash a lot for no reason when working with worldspaces.

 

When you go to your new worldspace to start adding objects to it, make sure you go to something else in the GECK where it can render something on the render window first. if you don't, you will likely get a big gray blob of water rendered on your new worldspace with no way to see through it, no matter what you set your default water height to when you created your worldspace (yet another GECK bug). Once you start placing objects, whenever you go to your new worldspace after reloading your mod, always go to someplace that has objects so that the GECK has something to render first. After that, the render window will usually work fine.

 

When populating your worldspace, there's another GECK bug that you can run into. The GECK and FNV in general can only place objects within the first 16 MB of the file. This is because the object ID is the file ID determined by your load order (1 byte) followed by a 3 byte offset into the file. For example, in the original game, purified water happens to have an ID of 000151A3. The first two digits (one byte) are 00, which means it is part of Fallout.esm. The remaining digits are 0151A3, which is the hex offset into the file. This has a maximum value of FFFFFF, or 16 megs (16 megs minus 1 if you want to get technical).

 

What this means to you is that you need to watch your file size. Once you get over 16 megs, you can't add any more objects or you will break your mod. If this happens, the game can't load your mod and the GECK can't load it either, so if you didn't save an earlier copy of your mod somewhere, it's forever broken. Fallout.esm is significantly larger than 16 megs, so Bethesda/Oblivion obviously have some way of packing the data in so that they don't get this problem. But the GECK that you and I get to use can't add objects to a mod that is more than 16 megs in size. You can paint landscapes and add navmeshes and such which can take your mod well beyond the 16 meg limit, but as soon as you add an object to a mod that is larger than 16 megs and save your mod, you just broke it. The GECK won't tell you that it is broken, either. You won't find out until you try to reload your mod in the GECK or if you try to use it in the game.

 

I have had to split mods into multiple files to get around this.

 

Landscape painting is also a bit buggy. If you use the landscape tool in the render window, the GECK will often completely bork up nearby textures and will often leave big black squares all over your landscape. Scrolling away and coming back usually doesn't fix the problem. Usually, going to a completely different area of the map (by double clicking on the cell name) and then coming back will make it render ok.

 

Good luck, and let me know if you have any more questions.