TESAnnwyn question about setting default water heights.

[hyperactivechild]

I believe I am supposed to set my default land height in the command line for TESAnnwyn (-h command), then I also go into the CK with the .esp and set the land height, along with the default water LOD and the default water. My question is: is this reversible? I seem to have set my land height a little too high, when I dig down with the terrain tool, I hit an immovable barrier of 'not-water'. I can go past it with the camera and see water below, but I can't seem to move or remove the barrier. The only way I have tried is through the 'world > world space > settings', but no luck to far. Would not be a real big deal to run my .raw back through TESAnnwyn and then Oscape, but if I can fix this in an easier way, it would be very cool.

[GrindedStone]

In past games default land had to be set above 13,000 units to allow autowater to work. Then default water set to -10,000 units in order to have it culled (hidden). The developers wouldn't have to worry about this because they use a full studio of pipelined SDK. So ignore their settings, because we don't have anything even near that. Then later bring the water up cell by cell where you want to have water. Autowater is kind of like speedtree or facegen, it's software built into the engine to perform a task rather than wasting time programing the engine to do it, which is expensive.

[hyperactivechild]

In past games default land had to be set above 13,000 units to allow autowater to work. Then default water set to -10,000 units in order to have it culled (hidden). The developers wouldn't have to worry about this because they use a full studio of pipelined SDK. So ignore their settings, because we don't have anything even near that. Then later bring the water up cell by cell where you want to have water. Autowater is kind of like speedtree or facegen, it's software built into the engine to perform a task rather than wasting time programing the engine to do it, which is expensive.

 

 

Well, I was following a really well written tutorial on getting heightmaps to work in game (http://hoddminir.blogspot.com/2012/02/from-heightmap-to-worldspace-in-skyrim.html), because I was making a mess of things, so now things are working for me, but I am still confused a lot of the time...I thought when creating a world separate from the Tamrial world, you had to set default or base water and land heights.

[GrindedStone]

How big is the world? What kind of CPU do you have?

 

What I said deals with using the CS. When I learned some people used the CS an others used RAW. If you choose to follow that tutorial you will have to follow it exactly. When he says it's harder to do with the CS, he means that it crashes a lot. This isn't because of the CS it's because you don't know how to use it so you don't follow the steps in the correct order. If you have created a worldspace before it's very easy an won't crash. It's also all contained inside one application.

[hyperactivechild]

How big is the world? What kind of CPU do you have?

 

What I said deals with using the CS. When I learned some people used the CS an others used RAW. If you choose to follow that tutorial you will have to follow it exactly. When he says it's harder to do with the CS, he means that it crashes a lot. This isn't because of the CS it's because you don't know how to use it so you don't follow the steps in the correct order. If you have created a worldspace before it's very easy an won't crash. It's also all contained inside one application.

 

the base image is 4096 x 4096..I haven't had any problems with power (quad core 3.7 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Radeaon HD 4870 X2 card). Yaya, I understand about the Kit crashing, the only thing I actually did with the kit, which the tut said to do, was to load the freshly created .esp into the kit and load the defaults water LOD height, land height, and water height, then save it and go on to Oscape for the meshes and textures. The other way the tut gave to do that part was by using FNVEdit, which I don't have. BTW thanks for taking time with me on this, very cool.

[hyperactivechild]

Specifically what I am doing or attempting to do is grab heightmaps from http://seamless.usgs.gov/, and run them through Geocontrol, etc for use in the game. I've been successful in different ways on different maps, but never had one map come together with all of the successes at once...lol

[GrindedStone]

The LOD generation will take weeks of non-stop processing. You understand this right? I can't comment on RAW usage other than it's pretty stupid. The way I understand it is that the CS needs to see a bunch of 1024 RAW files that are named on a grid to import. The built in editor would allow you to mostly auto generate any hills an run off from rain even. Selectable areas to dig ditches along with hand painting. It's fun once you figure it out.

 

TES fans are a different breed of modder/gamer though from the last 4-5 years of Fallout watered down Oblivion uberness. So you might no be up for anything less than god himself comming down to distrubute content. If you want that you should talk to the tutorial creator. I tend to lean toward what is easy to create an most rewarding by measure of how fun it is. Nowdays I tend to use the endless amount of already created worldspace that's in the game.

[Zehryo]

Just to report my own experiences with worldspaces creation.

 

To create RAW heightmaps you can use terrain generation tools like L3DT or, even better to me, World Machine 2.2.

 

The heightmap can then be converted to a plugin (.esp) file with TESAnnwyn that, for a 4x4 quads worldspace, can take like....few minutes.

 

Then you it's to set the default water and land heights along with water height. Dont ask me why, but it seems Bethesda has set default land height to -14000 units and, if they did it, there must be some good reason. This means that water heights (both headers) must be set to something that is equal to [actual height + (-14000)].

 

That's all you need.

 

As a last note, be aware that a full white area in your RAW map will be interpreted as a 7471 (7466?) meters elevation. That's why hand-crafting your RAW heightmap with a graphical software like Photoshop is not a good idea: because you'd end up with a heightmap that's just a guess of what it will look like in-game.