Custom Worldspace from scratch

[Mcdoye]

To those that are good with making custom worldspaces from scratch please share any tips you have.

 

 

I am trying to create a large island around 300 game miles wide. having trouble at the start with land height and water errors.

[madmongo]

If I remember correctly, the maximum map size is 128x128 cells. It might be 128x64. Weird things start to happen if you go over that size.

 

Keep all land height above 14,000 or you can have LOD issues.

 

If you are using the landscape editor, be gentle. If you try to shape the landscape too quickly, you tend to create landscape tears.

 

When you first create a worldspace, immediately afterwards, save your mod and exit the GECK and reload your mod. If you don't, as soon as you go into the landscape editor you'll crash the GECK.

 

If you have water (which I assume you do since it's an island), don't forget to add a water texture in your worldspace. Data\Textures\Water\wastelandwaterpotomac.dds tends to work well for many different water types (river, lake, etc). I've never tried to make ocean water with it though.

 

If you ever get an error where it says that part of the landscape height is out of bounds, the GECK will helpfully tell you that it can fix it. It can't. Your landscape is totally hosed at that point. Hopefully you saved an earlier version of your mod to go back to.

 

If you make an ESP larger than 16 MB and you add something with a reference ID number of some sort to it, you will break your mod. The GECK will NOT give you any error whatsoever when you do so. When you try to load your mod, you'll crash the game. When you try to load the mod in the GECK to fix it, you'll crash the GECK. Hope you saved an earlier version of your mod somewhere that you can go back to.

 

There are several ways to avoid the 16 MB bug.

 

The first is to create your landscape first, then place all objects into the worldspace, create all interiors, etc. After all that is done, then paint your landscape, add navmeshes, conversations/quests, etc. Landscape painting, navmeshes, and quest things can all be safely added above the 16 MB boundary. This works well enough for fairly simple mods. A worldspace and its landscape will typically take up at least 12 MB though, so if you add a lot of objects, like a forest with a bunch of trees, you can easily exceed 16 MB just from that.

 

The second way involves setting your GECK up in networked developer mode, which is not how most people set it up. This has instructions for setting your GECK up in networked mode. There are some errors in these instructions, but as far as I am aware, they are the best instructions you'll find anywhere on the net.

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

 

In networked mode, the 16 MB bug still applies. So create your worldspace, check that in to version control, then add stuff, and check those changes in. When you do this, the GECK will automatically place ID values below the 16 MB boundary. I'm sure there are still size limits in there somewhere, but I have yet to hit them using this method, even in mods that contain multiple worldspaces.

 

The GECK tends to crash when working with larger mods anyway, so keeping the bulk of your mod checked in to version control and only working on small bits of it helps fairly dramatically in preventing GECK crashes.

 

In the regions section of the GECK, there is an option to automatically navmesh the entire region. You may find this tempting, but DO NOT EVER USE THIS FEATURE. It is the most broken thing in the GECK that I have found yet to date. I did actually get it to correctly navmesh a region once. And only once. It was a fairly simple landscape and there wasn't much on it yet. SCOLS make the navmesher crash. Sometimes it will navmesh inside the region boundaries, sometimes, for no reason whatsoever, it will navmesh OUTSIDE your region boundaries instead of inside. Either way, if it screws up, it completely borks your entire navmesh for the entire worldspace. It also tends to crash in an endless loop constantly popping up a box with the error message "Get Jean!" over and over until you kill the GECK in the task manager.

 

Instead, the best you can do with navmeshing is to use the automatic navmesher for a single cell. When you click on the navmesh toolbar to bring it up, the cell auto navmesher is the first question mark from the left, just to the right of the finalize checkmark button. In the navmesh dialog, click the check box to enable height map generation mode, uncheck remove overlapping and remove thin areas, and you'll get about the best performance that you can out of it. A 64x64 worldspace is 4,096 cells. If you can use the auto navmesher to do 4 cells per minute, that's 1,024 minutes, or a bit over 17 hours just clicking on the navmesh button over and over and over and over. If you don't use heightmap generation mode, the navmesher has a tendency to fail to navmesh across bumpy roads and easily walkable surfaces.

 

The GECK will not render your worldspace unless there is something in it. But it's really hard to put something in it if you can't see anything. It's kind of a catch 22. I usually drop the little airplane into it, which I delete later. After that, go to an interior cell so you can get the render window to work properly again, then go to your little plane, and now finally you can see your new landscape. When editing your new landscape, always go to a part of your worldspace that has something in it first. If the first thing the GECK has to render is a section of worldspace with no objects in it, it goes right back to the render bug where you don't see anything except a gray blob (I think it's actually rendering water everywhere, stupid GECK...).

 

If you paint your landscape or use the raise/lower tool in the render window (not the worldspace height editor), you can end up with black squares just outside of the area you were editing. Those black squares will be persistent, in that you can move away from them and they'll still be there when you come back, but they aren't really there. It's just yet another GECK bug.

 

Welcome to the buggiest parts of the GECK. Save often. Keep backups.

Edited July 8, 2019 by madmongo

[Mcdoye]

Thank you very much madmongo. I do have a question, if I wanted to create the entire island to be equivalent to an island the size of 300 miles could I create multiple worldspaces and esp"s? And load all the esp"s together to create a main esp. Could I merge it all together into an ESM?

[madmongo]

If you are going to have multiple worldspaces, you really need to put the GECK into networked mode. You'll end up with everything in one big ESM.