Talk:World Menu

World LOD Findings

Hi, Elijah Houck here, creator of Alton, IL for Fallout 3. I've been experimenting with LOD generation, and I've got to say, I love what I've found! Kudos to Bethesda for finally allowing us to utilize all of our processing cores during mesh generations- I was able to generate a full worldspace in only 16 minutes, which is amazing. The added ability for us to be able to actually view full LOD in the CK itself is also incredibly impressive, and even makes it difficult to distinguish between in-game and CK screenshots. Again, kudos!

What I'm confused about, however, is terrain texture generation. No matter what combination of terrain texture options I choose, the CK crashes immediately as soon as I hit the generate button. I might try extracting the textures from the BSA's later, as it may not be reading them correctly or something. Does anyone have any suggestions?

--ElijahHouck 13:14, 8 February 2012 (EST)

As I've now discovered, it was the fact that I had the worldspace loaded that was crashing the CK. Oddly enough, though, texture generation takes much longer than mesh generation (seeing as it isn't multithreaded).

--ElijahHouck 22:42, 9 February 2012 (EST)

To anybody having trouble with purple mountains upon object generation: Make sure you set "HD LOD Diffuse" and "HD LOD Normal" (both located in the Worldspaces menu) to point to these textures:

Data\Textures\Landscape\Mountains\MountainSlab02.dds Data\Textures\Landscape\Mountains\MountainSlab02_n.dds

--ElijahHouck 16:05, 22 February 2012 (EST)

Beginner's Question

Forgive me if this is overly simple, but a lot of these pages are just full of tons of terms that don't mean a lot to a raw beginner who doesn't already have an understanding of how to work all these features. My question is, is it possible to increase the playable area of the Tamriel worldspace? There are a lot of basically blank cells labelled Wilderness outside of Skyrim that you can't actually walk into normally. Can this be changed? If it can, then what would you have to do to start giving it some proper landscape? If this can't be done, then if you wanted to create a seperate area (like part of High Rock, or whichever province), how is this done exactly? Sorry if this is a little basic, but I am just confused about where to even begin. I am sort of getting the hang of basic dungeon building with the tutorials, but I'd much rather add some new content to a whole new area than over-clutter Skyrim (which has plenty of stuff already). I just need a little help to get started.

Death From Above 13:19, 16 February 2012 (EST)

Yes, you can absolutely change the playable area in Skyrim. You'll need to edit the Tamriel worldspace's border region by going to World->Regions. I can't remember the exact editor ID of the region, but if you find one with "BorderRegion" or something similar in the name that has a border drawn around Skyrim, that's the one. Then from there it's the standard worldbuilding stuff.

--ElijahHouck 13:59, 17 February 2012 (EST)

I found the border region on the list. But edit it, how exactly? I'm not sure how to use this screen, just a coloured grid on the screen that I don't understand how to work. The view doesn't even seem to change based on whatever region you pick from the long list. It has scroll bars on the side of the grid that you can't even move to get around the whole space, how do you even get around in this? Right clicking just brings up some options that don't look right. Left clicking just puts down a red X on the grid. Do I just uncheck the checkbox next to Border Region, above the coloured grid? Would that just disable the whole thing?

I know I am going to look back in a few weeks and feel silly about this.

The current World Menu page just links to a definition of what a region is under World > Region, but nothing about this menu or how to work it at all. Hopefully some material explaining all these sub-menus comes out in the near future, that's of course still ongoing. Lots of stuff still under construction all over the Wiki.

Death From Above 13:28, 18 February 2012 (EST)

Yep, just unchecking the Border Region checkbox seems to do it, at least for heading east out of Skyrim from Riften. Of course then I discovered that if you keep going east far enough you eventually seem to run out of cells (though it looks like there is lots of land ahead) just fall through the drawn land and into the ocean because the land stops being solid, lol. I guess I have some reading to do about how to fix that, assuming it can be done. Going to be plenty of work I know but would be fun. It's not like I think I'm going to pull off a one man Tamriel rebuilt thing, but maybe a city and a few dungeons. For now.

Also, the minimap boundaries don't seem to change when you disable the border in the game, any clue how to change that? It could be problematic expanding the space if the map doesn't come along for the ride.

Death From Above 14:11, 18 February 2012 (EST)

I could be wrong, but I believe it may be the Cell Coordinates under the "Use Map Data" section in the Worldspace window. This used to control where the map image was placed in FO3/Oblivion, and I'm guessing they reworked it to limit the camera view.

--ElijahHouck 17:16, 18 February 2012 (EST)

Having some issues

Hello all, and I have been having some trouble with the World LOD. Okay, so I made a World Space using the 3rd party utility, TESAnnwyn, but I seem to be having a Problem. When I try to generate Terrain Meshes, they generate, but do not appear in-game at all. While I do have some(Albeit minimal) experience with Elder Scrolls/Fallout modding, I have never decided to Generate LOD for my Worldspaces until now (Largely because it would take FOREVER to generate LOD for a World Space the size of Vvardenfell), and I want to have functioning Distant land. If someone could help me, I would be most grateful. BlackRaven117 20:11, 19 February 2012 (EST)

Check these two things:

1) Do you have a bunch of .btr files in Data/meshes/terrain/worldspacename?

2) Does your worldspace have a .lod file in Data/LODSettings?

3) Did you generate terrain textures? If so, do that. Keep in mind that terrain textures can take quite a while. Terrain meshes took me 20 minutes thanks to my quad core processor, but textures took me probably an hour or more. Unfortunately, textures don't use multithreading (i.e. taking advantage of multiple cores), but meshes do.

After you generate textures, make sure you go to Source/DDSTextures/Terrain/Worldspacename and copy them to Data/Textures/Terrain/Worldspacename. The Source folder is outside of your Skyrim folder, usually in the Steamapps/common folder.

My world is from TESAnnwyn as well, and it's generating fine (with the exception of trees).

--ElijahHouck 13:12, 21 February 2012 (EST)

Okay, so in Data/meshes/terrain/TESVMorrowind, I have Quite a few .BTR Files named after the worldspace (TESVMorrowind) with Numbers after the name. (e.g. TESVMorrowind.4.0.0.btr), and I have no folder in Data named "LODSettings". I also generated both Textures and Meshes at the same time, but during Generation, the CK Crashed, so that may be the culprit. Also, I copied the textures over, and they seemed to overwrite textures already there. Doing that didn't work though, quite sadly. Thank you for you help though! --BlackRaven117 18:39, 21 February 2012 (EST)