I've done a couple of test mods and tutorials to get the basics, and have just started on my first "real" mod. The community web sites (wiki, tutorials, forums...) have been really helpful.

My mod includes some *local* landscape editing around a keep. I noticed last night that, standing atop a nearby ridge, I can look far to the east and see what looks like a "fault line" running exactly east-west, as far as the horizon. It varies in height from almost imperceptible to what looks like a thousand-foot cliff. It's as if two of rows of wilderness cells in the game map got misaligned somehow.

Now the funny part is that it isn't occurring near where I edited! It's well to the south of the cells I've changed. I may have accidentally touched some landscape around my mod area, but I've taken the free-flying camera and "flown" off for miles and miles. I may be a newbie, but I don't think I slipped the cursor *that* far off the mark!

This gets weirder. When I take my character to what looks like the affected spot, I see no problems at all. It appears, at least, that the symptom is only visible for distance rendering. I don't think *I* broke that, because I don't even know how to edit the distant-features part of the game yet, since it's not relevant to my local mod.

I haven't been in the global height map editor, just the local landscape editor within the CS. And I heeded the tutorial's advice and am using a brush size of 1, 2, or (occasionally) 3. The default was 5. So I don't think I have somehow had a brush of 100 and moved the land up or down. And even if I did, wouldn't that produce a slope rather than a literally vertical sheer face?

As a diagnostic, I deinstalled my mod, then all other mods, and loaded from a save that was so early no mods had been installed yet (brand new Oblivion install, in fact). I used console to put my first-level character into God Mode and headed out to find the vantage point. The bug is still there!

So I am beginning to wonder, did I cause this, did someone else's mod cause this, or is there actually a giant bug in Oblivion itself?

A good place to see the problem -- if it's in Oblivion itself and not a mod I've installed -- is standing at location -29437, 132917, 24381, and looking toward heading 94.09. This is in the Wilderness cell -8,32.

At the moment, I have only the Unofficial Oblivion Patch plus Oblivion GOTY installed, and I can see this anomoly clearly.

Any ideas? Can someone replicate this?

Thanks!

Can you give us a screenshot? Upload to photobucket or the like and link?

I had planned to do that, but the screenshot I took last night for some reason didn't get saved to disk. I'll create one this evening when I'm rebooted into Windows to work on my mod. (I run Linux for my workday and non-gaming needs, so it takes a reboot to get into Oblivion right now. I do have Oblivion running in Wine, but not terribly reliably yet, and not the CS. A new computer is being built for gaming, but I'm waiting on delivery of a couple of components.)

Sorry for the delay.

I finally got the screenshot posted. Look in the following album; at the moment it's the only image present.

http://www.4th.com/projects/oblivion

I'll appreciate anyone who can replicate this or non-replicate it, to let me know if I have a local problem or a real bug. Thanks!

You do have a bug... everyone has that bug. :shrug:

It's just a simple instance of the Landscape LOD quads not lining up properly, its a problem the game has had since it shipped, and there's no way to fix it, unfortunately.

At the very least, you can minimize the effects by turning Distant Trees on.

Is normal. Well, is part of the vanilla game and not your fault, anyway. :rolleyes:

Turn on distant trees and it won't bother you quite so much. :biggrin:


Edit: woo for posting over!

Thanks, folks. Since it doesn't affect gameplay, I'll simply ignore it. I was just worried that, as new modder, I had broken something in the CS. I feel much better now.

Syscrusher