Pretty much giving up on this, I think. There are just too many bugs. I can't even get the CK to generate visible LOD terrain meshes anymore, something I've done numerous times now without trouble.

Here's something interesting that I noticed on one botched attempt: http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/blackStripeBug.png Notice how the LOD terrain has been flattened but the different elevations create a ramp between them? Notice how the shadow on that ramp looks suspiciously like the shadows that appear on the LOD terrain in-game? It's almost like the LOD landscape texture generation flattens the heightmap and then takes a picture of it, including the ramp shadows.

Also, the CK does not generate LOD tree textures (as far as I can tell). I ended up using the Tamriel tree LOD dds file and renaming it. That got my LOD trees to show up, but notice the awesome way that the LOD tree billboards stick out of my trees: http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/treeLod.jpg.

Between these issues, the navmesh bug, the incorrect UV mapping to LOD objects via texture atlases and the way it likes to destroy my heightmap whenever I generate textures, I'm pretty much fed up. Every single phase is broken in some way, and even the parts that I had working no longer want to work for me. Which means that either the CK is now buggy (maybe verifying the files will help) or my mod (which I've spent dozens of hours on in the last week) is now buggy. Awesome.

Here's what I don't get: everyone agrees that the world of Skyrim looks awesome. Custom worlds are about the most awesome (imo) kinds of mods you can make. What's the one type of mod you really can't create: a custom world. What kinds of mods do they want us to make?

I'm really really demotivated by all this as well. Unfortunately (I guess...) for me I'm trying to get a job with BGS so quitting is not an option.

And the game & ck will automatically interpret the .esm as LOD?

Has anyone messaged Gstaff about this? If not I bloody will. They really need to know, and I honestly think they just are unaware and would fix the issue since this is now FAR beyond their 'unsupported' heightmap editor being broken. This is LOD generation/display, height map importation, all sorts of important stuff. They made all this work for them, they never tried other stuff and if a bug arose they would fix it only as much as they needed to get the CK functioning for them. I bet they would love some massive DLC scaled mods coming out, because if a mod (Like Mesogea or MERP) adds hundreds of hours of gameplay they are dramatically increasing their games life and making a huge amount of hardcoe fans.

Has anyone messaged him? If nobody says they have in an hour or so I will. It's high time we get a response of some kind on this.

I know this is probably a no-brainer, but I think that most of the issues aside from obvious application bugs and/or incompatibilities between Oblivion designed applications also has a lot to do with Computers not being up to par. I know everyone will say "yeah but my PC is the best that money can buy", but it seems it's that classic problem of application "a" not being compatible for some reason with PC configuration "b". Not only would hardware configuration play a role here but also system setup, install paths - pretty much anything you can think of.
For example, I'm having no problems at all creating a worldspace that's only 4x4 quads and even generating LODs in the CK, but anything more than that and I can't even load the Tesannwyn created esp into the creation kit without it freezing up halfway in the load process (using the same RAW data btw - just a smaller version). No matter what I do, Oscape won't do LOD water for me and always generates pink landscape. Either I'm missing something obvious or it's also bugged.

I'm not quite ready to give up yet. I remember when Oblivion came out we had issues with LOD too until it was fully understood how things work. I think it's just a matter of time until the right tools come along and the current issues have been ironed out.

~DE

p.s: apologies if this is a totally redundaant post

Well after days of problem solving, I can tell you we are making progress.......most likely there is a step we are missing, we just need the devs to actually put up some information on the wiki to make this go faster.

At the moment I'm still stuck with LOD textures that have black borders around each cell.

I have a feeling that those 'missing steps' are actually bugs. There have been problems with LOD trees since Oblivion. And the texture atlasing bug was introduced in FO3 and never fixed. I have a feeling there is no way (short of a 3rd party tool) to fix the tree issue (or it might just mean: don't ever rotate a tree). The texture atlasing issue might be fixable by hand (at least editing the image will affect what you see in-game). I am more optimistic about the black patches issue, if only because tools already exist that deal with LOD textures.

Well nobody said anything so I'm gonna pop Gstaff a message, see if I can't get SOME kind of a response out of someone.

I sent one alerting them to the big unoffical bugs thread.....of which this is included


But its the weekend, so no reply yet.

Anyone know why my exterior buildings are disappearing half the time?

Seems anything large is just disappearing for no reason, sometimes it works fine, sometimes not. This happens in Both the CK and Ingame.

Can someone using TesAnnwyn please check this out?

For me saving in worldspace work, that issue happened to me when i save in workspace, convert esp to master then reload. But that's normal i guess because after if i re-reload it works again.

Give me ten minutes and I will try. So far I have made two saves inside Mesogea and every time I have gone into the game with them they worked fine. One thing I learned with Oblivion is that in order to work the saves properly for Mesogea I had to re-start the game and get just outside the Imperial sewers then save. I could play on in Oblivion but if I ever wanted to start in Mesogea I went to the first save and from there. There was no problem from that point on going in and out of Mesogea via saved games. I remember the earlier CS before the update, if I went to Mesogea at any time using cow mesogea x,y all the doors would be missing, lots of the buildings etc would be in the air and a mess.

My current steps:

L3dt map
TESAnnwyn to esp from RAW map
convert esp to esm using Gecko
run CS and load skyrim and mesogea esm's
run Oscape to create LOD
adjust file mesogea.lod as Maegfaer states
load game and run.
go to a very early and basic save game from Skyrim, earlier the better if its same as unpatched CS
cow mesogea 0,0

Ok, I re-ran the game. I have since making the mesogea.esm saves and going back and forth to them, loading mesogea into the cs with skyrim etc and made a horse esp at mesogea 0,0

I ran the game with the new esp dependent on mesogea.esm. I could load the mesogea save game. I went to 0,0 as you will see on the video I am just uploading, I appear somewhere in the south of Mesogea as per the save. I then teleport to 0,0 and find the horse. My character cant climb onto the horse (is that a Skyrim glitch) and every time I press E he slides through it. After pressing E for about the fourth time he climbs on. Then I ride for a bit, then save. I exited the game and re-ran the game. Loaded the save and it worked fine.

I have just PM'd ethatron to give him the video link and to ask he carries on with Oscape, fingers crossed. Looks like for now at least, no third party tools, no mods for many of us. I honestly cant work out why Bethesda would leave so much work half done and not made for the wider market. Its short sighted. Maybe I am bias being a large world maker, but I would suggest new land is a massive part of the longevity of Oblivion.

Without large worlds thats me an TES finished, and I know several friends/acquantances on other forums and in person who are just gobsmacked by the state of the CK that had months to be tested and re-tested.

Could you perhaps try a savegame with just Skyrim.esm and Mesoga.esm?

I know this may be a silly question....but previous to all this I had never built worldspaces.

How do you make a world bigger? I can only get 4 quads in.....


EDIT: I'll just mention, I want to put more world in so that there is a lot of LOD for outside the zone I want to use.

Tesannwyn, you could go up to 4096*4096.

Deleted all my LOD from yesterday and started over again. Made sure to use my .esm this time (I did tree LOD with my .esp, I think) and made sure not to load my worldspace in the CK; just started the CK and went straight to generating LOD.

When my textures were finished, I opened them up in Gimp and http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/editingTextures.png from the texture all the way down to mipmap 6 (and then forgot to 'save as' and save with mipmaps, so make sure you remember to do that). Notice how http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/lodTest03a.jpg http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/lodTest03b.jpg? Those shadows seem to be generated by black areas in the texture. Easy for me to fix with only a handful of textures; kind of a PITA for someone with thousands...BUT, you probably only get this effect from textures made using cell data that has no texture information (ie. along the outer edges of your heightmap)...that results in the black areas in the texture. (The thin lines that are still visible are from the steep drop off along the edge of my landscape that I didn't bother to fix in the DDS, you can see that in the Gimp images.)

You'll also notice the LOD trees in the background, but now http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/lodTest03d.jpg.

The only problem really seems to be the LOD objects with their crappy UV mapping. I'm going to take another stab at this and see if there isn't some way to fix that as well.

http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_edit?ns=1&video_id=VqaOQX9evEw

CK Mesogea video with save tests.

I wasnt talking about the texture size.....I mean with the world size, including more quads on the map.....i can only fit the 4, no idea how to make more appear.

Are you using TesAnnwyn, and Oscape to produce stuff?

@maegfaer: Tried saving just skyrim and mesogea esm's. seems to work ok, took a while to load up the save but it ran ok.

heh, not at the moment no.

Might be an idea to try them, using the CK has had me pulling my hair out, its flogging a dead horse I think.
Try putting the whole thing in using Annwyn and Oscape, I have a 512x512 cell world and LOD appears well outside of the 4 quad limit the CK apparently has.

BTW I have also sent an email to Gstaff. That this is bugged is utterly unacceptable. The heightmap, well I can live without heightmap editing if I must, but being able to generate the map 4 quads at a time is better than this supposed improvement of LOD. It just beggars belief that they catered for themselves and though "stuff em" when it came to making the same functions available to the broader public.

Just to be sure, are you saying this because you only see 4 quads in the heigthmap editor ? If so, you can adjust your position with the overview window (the one that pop up on the right when you open the heigtmap editor).

Yeah, they obviously used something else, Skyrim has LOD outside the 4 Quads, but the CK cannot access it in the heightmap (I tried, couldnt move out of the middle 4 quads).