[An Lor]

Minimally updated copy of Da Mage's post. We are now on thread #4

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1343497-heightmap-editing-and-world-editing/
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1345519-creating-new-worldspaceshow-to-get-around-the-broken-ck-features/
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1348239-creating-new-worldspacesdiscussion-thread-3/

If one of the developers see this! The LOD generator in the CK is completely broken and useless to us, it does not create LOD texture files properly.


Rundown of bugs with the Creation Kit LOD generator:
- Textures generated have black parts on them....sometimes around the cell borders, somethings just covering half the texture.
- Tree LOD does not work. The LOD meshes do not dissappear when you get close, you can see them sticking out of the trees.
- LOD objects are often not UV mapped correctly leading to bad LOD.

Bugs when importing heightmaps:
- Clicking on the overview asked if you want to save the current texture, which causes a crash 100% of the time.
- Crashes for most people.


Tools some people are using to get around using the CK for this:
Oscape Thread: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1320917-wip-preview-oscape-landscape-lod-generator/
TESAnnwyn and TES4qLOD Thread: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1311730-release-tesannwyn-and-tes4qlod-for-skyrim/

I haven't used them yet, so you'll have to follow some other instructions on how to use them. Maegfaer and thekarithian, can you put up some updated information?

And some proof of LOD working now from Maegfaer and the MERP project:
http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/6223/2012021300018.jpg
http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/7513/2012021300011.jpg
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/5659/2012021300012x.jpg
http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/156/2012021300013.jpg
http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/1994/2012021300019.jpg


Onto copy-pasted info from the past thread:

Creating a Worldspace:
Create your worldspace in the worldspace menu....its pretty easy. Fill in the data as needed (look at other worldspaces for what is required) and refer to the wiki: http://www.creationkit.com/World_Spaces


Heightmaps:

Wiki: http://www.creationkit.com/Heightmap_Editing

Most people have only had success by creating heightmaps outside of the CK and importing in the .RAW image/s. The .raw image represents a Quad which is 32x32 cells. THe default viewing size for a quad in the CK is 4 on the screen and the position 0,0 of the map is location at the center point between quad; -1_0, 0_0, -1_-1, 0_-1. So if you want to build around the 0,0 point of your world, you will need 4 quads of heightmap. See this diagram for more infomation:http://cs.elderscrolls.com/images/8/80/Overviewgrid.jpg

To import a .raw, you need to put it in your Skyrim/Data/HeightField Folder (make it if it doesn't exist). It must then be named for whatever quad it is supposed to fill. For my world of 4 quads I imported -1_0.raw, 0_0.raw, -1_-1.raw, 0_-1.raw

.raw files also need special fomratting as per the wiki: Use 1024x1024 16-bit RAW format images with Raw Option settings: Header: 0, Non-interleaved Order, Count: 1, Depth: 16 Bits, Byte Order: IBM PC.

Once you have your files in place, load up your mod iwth the CK, and open it in the heightmap window, go file -> import and a loading bar will start. WHen you get a "File in use error - Waiting" bow come up, click cancel each time. Once complete close the window. Your hieghtmap should be imported, load it in the render window to be sure.

I would also suggest removing the .raw files from the folder then (put them somewhere safe) as it sort of looks like the CK auto-imports them when you open the heightmap editor.

Now remember, this tool is very resource intensive and if your computer isnt fairly beefy expect crashes. A soon as you can, save your mod. I am able to (though I hear others just get crashing) to use the other tools in the hieghtmap and then click 'save' to save my changes. However I am running an i7 (2600k) with 8 Gigs of RAM, less hardware may not be able to handle it.


Regions:
Regions still work the same as previous games, and seem to be fairly bugfree, though can be a bit crash happy when you generate.

Since its the same, these tutorials from Fallout and still aply:
http://www.truancyfactory.com/tutorials/fallout3/fallout_regions.html

I've also found the GECK WIki to be useful:
http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/Regions


Worldspace .LOD file
Every worldspace requires a .lod file that says how big it is. The CK will generate one for you, but you must have a lodsettings folder in your Skyrim/Data folder for it to work.....for some reason if the folder isn't there for it ot put the file in, it does not make the file.


Creating the LOD:
This is where it gets tricky. The CK's built in LOD generator is broken, it does not make the textures properly for the LOD meshes. It will also destroy your heightmap if you try to generate LOD textures and your working in an .esp.

For that reason, Maegfaer has written this guide to using Oscape to create the LOD.

[pinar]

There is no esp/esm incompatibility, Oscape only sees colour textures when they exist as forms in the same plugin as the worldspace. You can workaround it by merging your landscape textures into your plugin containing your worldspace, and only using those.

So u made oscape ? Nice program seems to work for me untill the vertex color map is loaded in game and th brightness in the close land does not match the oscape generated one ... I can provide u the files if u want a vertex color map loaded intesanwynn esP esm or what u need ... Let me know ...

[Nathan Maughan]

Okay, so I guess I've changed my mind. Oscape no longer works for me... at all. Even if all I generate are meshes, nothing shows up in game. This utterly baffles me, since it seemed to work before. I'm generating NIFs and I've tried both the Oscape installer and hand-placing them... am I doing something wrong?

[Danger Mouse]

for meshes? I just generate the meshes and place them in the data/meshes/terrrain/yourworldspace/ directory. Oh yeah take em all out of the LOD-800292 (or whatever they're called) folders and bundle them all in the same folder (yourworldspace). Then again I found the CK generates meshes just fine if you go into the menu World>World LOD> and select just the "Distant Terrain/Water" option under Meshes (nothing else ticked in the window). Set it to high priority if you've got a beastly CPU too. I think Oscape can make higher res meshes mind, but I don't think you necessarily need them if you just want to work on your mod while seeing into the distance.

[Jack Walker]

I fixed the texture-lookup by masking the top byte of the referencing FORMID (0x02?????? -> 0x00??????). I understood from past discussions, that that byte is dynamic and related to load-order plugin-assignment. I assume it's a safe approach?

Additionally I think I nailed down a sane approach to handling land&sea level values. This makes Oscape's RAWs incompatible with TESAnnwyn I think, the RAWs will be 231 units (16bit RAW units) lower on Tamriel than TESAnnwyn's. RAW 0 will be at -(1024 - landlevel / 8), Tamriel's landlevel is -27000, so RAW's 0 is at -4399 16bit units, or -35192 global units. That is -landlevel minus another 8192 safe-guard. This is also the bottom limit of the ocean: 8192 global units below landlevel. This behaviour is coherent with Oblivion heightmaps. Ocean's bottom is maximum 8192 units below sealevel (in Oblivion sealevel and landlevel coincide at 0 and is non-configurable). Without the "basin"-option in the generator the sea-floor is capped at 512 global units below sea, I think there was an engine limitation causing this, I just took it over from some discussion, but made it optional.
If you don't understand anything, doesn't matter. Simplified: landlevel == lowest height-value, sealevel == level of implicit ocean. RAWs are unsigned (positive numbers only), so land is moved up when creating the RAW, then back down again when reading from the RAW.

I'll upload the new version when I verified on Alex's WS, MERP and Tamriel that all is well.

[WYatt REed]

I fixed the texture-lookup by masking the top byte of the referencing FORMID (0x02?????? -> 0x00??????). I understood from past discussions, that that byte is dynamic and related to load-order plugin-assignment. I assume it's a safe approach?
*snip*

I'll upload the new version when I verified on Alex's WS, MERP and Tamriel that all is well.

Awesome! Have you by any chance done anything with the whole colors and mipmaps thing? I still have to generate PNG's and convert to dds using nConvert or they dont load ingame. Though, maybe the texture-lookup fix will also fix this issue?

[Lalla Vu]

So that means the textures with oscape will load properly from an ESP with standard skyrim.esm-based textures now? Cool. Although I do wish I'd checked this an hour ago haha. Since I'm currently halfway through testing a workaround I might as well continue I guess.

[Lil Miss]

I would like to state that Ethatron has provided me with a sample he generated with the new and improved Oscape, and both distant Default-Level water and far away textures now work 100%!!!

About Tree LOD:

I recently began QA testing on my land, having finished all the ground work, and was startled to find that my testers were experiencing the tree LOD issue. This appears to be client-based and to have nothing to do with the mod itself... I, and several testers, had NO issues. LOD disappeared as you approach. But others reported the issues some of you were having, where LOD tree's never disappeared, even after the full model ones were loaded in.

What could this mean!?

[Thema]

I would like to state that Ethatron has provided me with a sample he generated with the new and improved Oscape, and both distant Default-Level water and far away textures now work 100%!!!

This is awesome, if only because the Oscape I have (beta 2.0) keeps crashing halfway through texture generation and it's driving me nuts! Shame too because I was right and creating duplicate textures in the CK is causing it to generate the correct colour maps too. It's just unstable and dies every time it attemps it about halfway through the process. I'm guessing Ethatron will be wanting to mess about with it for a bit but I eagerly await a beta of this! EDIT - without fail, regardless of settings, when "calculating tile {64, -4} colors".. wierd. I'm sure my map doesn't even HAVE that coordinate!

[Lauren Denman]

I fixed the texture-lookup by masking the top byte of the referencing FORMID (0x02?????? -> 0x00??????). I understood from past discussions, that that byte is dynamic and related to load-order plugin-assignment. I assume it's a safe approach?

Additionally I think I nailed down a sane approach to handling land&sea level values. This makes Oscape's RAWs incompatible with TESAnnwyn I think, the RAWs will be 231 units (16bit RAW units) lower on Tamriel than TESAnnwyn's. RAW 0 will be at -(1024 - landlevel / 8), Tamriel's landlevel is -27000, so RAW's 0 is at -4399 16bit units, or -35192 global units. That is -landlevel minus another 8192 safe-guard. This is also the bottom limit of the ocean: 8192 global units below landlevel. This behaviour is coherent with Oblivion heightmaps. Ocean's bottom is maximum 8192 units below sealevel (in Oblivion sealevel and landlevel coincide at 0 and is non-configurable). Without the "basin"-option in the generator the sea-floor is capped at 512 global units below sea, I think there was an engine limitation causing this, I just took it over from some discussion, but made it optional.
If you don't understand anything, doesn't matter. Simplified: landlevel == lowest height-value, sealevel == level of implicit ocean. RAWs are unsigned (positive numbers only), so land is moved up when creating the RAW, then back down again when reading from the RAW.

I'll upload the new version when I verified on Alex's WS, MERP and Tamriel that all is well.

Hi Can I test it too?... did you fix the color difference in the creation of the lod textures?

As for the tesannwyn incompatibility how then would we be able to create a precise heightmap ingame with out raw files or other files ?
Would be possible to skip the esm part so that it can read directly esp?

soes also mean that now we can create landscapes that do not necessarily need to be placed at -14000 sea level and relative height scale of land?

[Jessie]

I sort of have this working now - thought I'd mention a couple of things since I don't know if they were covered in the notes about Oscape above -

First I noticed Oscape would crash while generating the color map at the same place every time with my map, which was set to -32, -32 as it's bottom-left coordinate. Re-generating the exact same map with the coordinate of -64, -64 seemed to work absolutely fine with no issues in oscape. Not sure if I'm just going mental here or what but it fixed the issue and maybe someone has some idea of why that might be.

My method for generating LOD was this -

• Load up worldspace.esp/Skyrim.esm in CK
  
• Find the textures you want to use in Miscellaneous>LandTexture, duplicate and rename them (I went with the same names but with AANEW as a prefix, just to find them quickly)
  
• Open them up and make a note of the Texture Set they use - it's normally just the same name but with "Landscape" as a prefix instead of "L"
  
• Go to Miscellaneous>TextureSet and find the texture files your LandTexture was using. Duplicate this also and rename it with an easy-to-find prefix - since the TextureSet directory contains stuff other than landscape textures I just left the first bit and added AANEW after the word 'Landscape'.
  
• Go back to your LandTextures directory, open up your copied textures and point them at the copied TextureSet files.
  
• Use your new custom texture duplicates (and only those, although if you want you can do the above for all 58 of Skyrim's land textures) to paint some colours over your landscape.
  
• Save your plugin and exit the CK (I generate landscape/water LOD meshes (not textures) in CK at this point but you can just as easily use Oscape I suppose)
  
• Load up your plugin in Oscape, generate .png textures for normals and colors.
  
• Use Nconvert to convert all the .png textures to .dds and throw them in the data/textures/terrain/yourworldspace/ directory.
  
• Load up skyrim, go to the cells you painted and you should now have colour LOD textures.

This is what I got - http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/710/screenshot12gl.jpg/

However, one problem - http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/36/screenshot13yr.jpg/

The colours only seem to sort of correspond to the textures once you get to a certain range, then they cut off and are quite a bit darker. Not sure why this is, maybe someone could give a suggestion on that?

[Yung Prince]

Okay, not to derail, but I am having some newbish trouble and I need to ask again.

When I create a new worldspace, and I coc to the new worldspace in skyrim, the world just ends at the edges of whatever cells have chosen to load. It seems very random which cells load and don't load, but in common with everything is that I do not have an infinite amount of landscape tiles spreading off in every direction, I just get a few, then the world ends at the edge. Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong to cause this?

This is coming into play long before I start needing to worry about heightmaps and lod issues ( of which there are obviously many ).

So again, should a new worldspace, when loaded within the game, be "infinite" in all directions? I understand there is a size restriction, but I am ultimately loading 0,0 and then walking to the edge where 0,1 should be, and there is nothing there. Have I missed a step in creating the new world space?

[Abel Vazquez]

Okay, not to derail, but I am having some newbish trouble and I need to ask again.

When I create a new worldspace, and I coc to the new worldspace in skyrim, the world just ends at the edges of whatever cells have chosen to load. It seems very random which cells load and don't load, but in common with everything is that I do not have an infinite amount of landscape tiles spreading off in every direction, I just get a few, then the world ends at the edge. Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong to cause this?

This is coming into play long before I start needing to worry about heightmaps and lod issues ( of which there are obviously many ).

So again, should a new worldspace, when loaded within the game, be "infinite" in all directions? I understand there is a size restriction, but I am ultimately loading 0,0 and then walking to the edge where 0,1 should be, and there is nothing there. Have I missed a step in creating the new world space?

Did you JUST say 'New Worldspace' then go ingame? When you make a worldspace from scratch, until you load into it IN the CK, it is only one cell. (0,0) Once you load into it in the CK, it creates the new cells that load within view. (If your load grid is 5, upon loading in it immediately creates the 24 new cells around 0,0) Or, if you load or edit the heightmap, it creates all needed cells within that heightmap.

Are you just making it then loading ingame instantly?

[Scared humanity]

no i'm loading the cells in the ck, so at some point many hundreds of cells are being created within the kit. i'm saving that and loading it in skyrim.

I was keeping it simple for explanations sake, but i have tried hundreds of variations, with water height above land, below land, with crafting the landscape with the brush tool, of adding items, regions, lod and navmesh.


but i want to start small, so I am trying to figure out, if you were to make a brand new worldspace, and load it in skyrim, could you theoretically walk forever? shouldn't it tile the land out in all directions? Or is there some step that has to be done before this will be the case... why does the tamriel worldspace, for example, consist of many hundreds or thousands of wildneress cells that you can walk between, but my stupid worldspace i only get frigging 0,0.

I feel like i am missing something extremely basic, but I cannot figure out what. I just get half a mountain in 1 cell and the rest is cut off.

[laila hassan]

It would be nice to be able to load a vertex color map as well in oscape so ... As well as a pixel color map with a lookup table to give at each ID of thexture the correspondent pixel color this would allow use if external landscape texturing tools that would allow a massive speed up in texturing the geology of a terrain with precision ... I would really be glad to test this feature if could be implemented like :


1 liad the esp and get the geoligy info of the rerrain

2 liad a vertex color map to texture the color tones and brightness variations ov landscape vertex coloring

3 load a pixel color map coded with a lookup table making a cirrispondence of texture ID to RGB or hex code so to allow insta texture positioning

[Kelsey Hall]

Okay, update http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=4727.

[Eire Charlotta]

Did u read my post?

[Olga Xx]

Okay, update http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=4727.

Just wanted to say, this worked flawlessly for me. I'll have to do some more testing with it, but the water LOD generated just right, and my world map finally looks exactly like it should. Thanks for the update.

Somewhat related question - does anyone know how to generate just water LOD for the vast, vast area around the worldspace that isn't being used? To get rid of that ugly sharp drop at the edge of the worldspace, I mean.

[jasminε]

Just wanted to say, this worked flawlessly for me. I'll have to do some more testing with it, but the water LOD generated just right, and my world map finally looks exactly like it should. Thanks for the update.

Somewhat related question - does anyone know how to generate just water LOD for the vast, vast area around the worldspace that isn't being used? To get rid of that ugly sharp drop at the edge of the worldspace, I mean.

I think the solution here (as I have the same issue, making an island) Is to add an extra ring of maybe 5 cells around the edge of your worldspace. Then when you generate LOD it will generate out to that as well, then the weather should have a fog limit preventing the player from seeing the edge at all, or it will at least cover it up. There is actually infinite water off the edge of your worldspace, but it does not generate infinite LOD.

Okay, update http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=4727.

Also, downloading. I'll give this a swing and report back after school!

[nath]

I enlarged the size of the world image to 2048 when was a 1024 with the island beeing on a 896.

[ZzZz]

That's it! I was able to make the proper lod with the new version of Oscape. Thanks Ethatron!

[Vicky Keeler]

Just having a play with it now - water height is spot on, although png textures from the .esp I created using only skyrim.esm textures are still generating a whole load of brown and black for me. They do seem to fade out a bit nicer mind. I'm going to try generating some straight to .dds and see if that helps.. yep, still brown. If anyone else is getting non-brown distant land without using custom textures I'd be interested to see what your settings are.

[sophie]

There are times when I seriously hate how quickly these forums move. *sigh*

Anyways, I split this off into it's own http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1354500-possible-scripting-solution-to-the-x-axis-bug/ to avoid cluttering others and to keep it from getting lost again.

"It" being the possibility of a scripting solution for the x-axis bug.

[celebrity]

There are times when I seriously hate how quickly these forums move. *sigh*

Anyways, I split this off into it's own http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1354500-possible-scripting-solution-to-the-x-axis-bug/ to avoid cluttering others and to keep it from getting lost again.

"It" being the possibility of a scripting solution for the x-axis bug.

There already a thread on fixing that issue here: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1352988-fixing-the-64x64-cell-havok-bug-for-when-you-just-want-a-bigger-world/
It's been on the front page constantly, so regardless of how fast the forum moves you should have seen it... Perhaps look next time?

I also get brown textures still...

[Heather Stewart]

There already a thread on fixing that issue here: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1352988-fixing-the-64x64-cell-havok-bug-for-when-you-just-want-a-bigger-world/
It's been on the front page constantly, so regardless of how fast the forum moves you should have seen it... Perhaps look next time?

I am well aware of that thread, I have a number of posts in it. Perhaps you should look next time? (a smiley face does not make a comment not snarky by the way)

The point of making a separate thread was to focus on that possible solution. There was another reason as well, and if you actually read that thread, you'll see that one of my posts was edited by a moderator... because I referenced "The Mod That Shall Not Be Named" and a scripting solution that handled moving between world spaces fairly cleanly.

So.. new thread, because of new thoughts based on other that and other threads with other thoughts all leading to trying to get a solution to the issue.

EDIT: removed my [snark] comment. Not needed, doesn't help, unproductive, and unprofessional of me. My apologies to everyone for it.