Hey all,

I've recently begun making myself a little island paradise atop the volcano in MooCow's "Mehrunes' Wake" worldspace resource, which is progressing quite nicely. I started it in part to teach myself a little something about editing a worldspace in Oblivion, but predictably I have a few questions. Here they are, any responses are greatly appreciated!

1. When I am re-texturing the landscape using the pop-up window (for beaches, roads, etc.), I occasionally run across large squares of ground which refuse to accept the texture I want to use on them. Is there a way to set the available textures in a cell (if that's what's defining the square), or is something else going on?

2. I have been working on building a mountain-trail type thing from the top of the volcano (very tall) to the beach far below. The land is very steep, which requires pretty dramatic switchbacks, but editing the land's shape with the Landscape window is extremely slow and clumsy, leaving "sawtooth" edges that need to be smoothed out, vertex-by-vertex. Is there a faster way of doing this, or am I just a baby?

3. I have decided to make a geothermal spring inside the volcano's crater, which was surprisingly not hard to do. However, I am trying to get a specific color to my custom water type which just doesn't want to work. What I'm going for is a crystal-clear, but distinctly blue-tinted water, but what happens is either the underwater coloring is completely different from the topside, or the top of the water seen from below is unnaturally bright. Oh, and the whole thing practically glows at night. Could someone explain the controls of the Water Type window in more detail?

Thanks,
Kohdi

1) With the landscape editor active, click the render window and then hit i. This will bring up a list of textures in the cell, divided by quads. Each quad can only hold 8 textures, so if its not letting you paint simply delete one of them. You can also use this tool to replace textures (right click> replace).
2) Smooth landscape checkbox? Its not exactly precise, but it does help a lot. Steep roads are time consuming.
3) No idea on this one, but the first thing that comes to mind is just vertex shading the floor slightly blue-ish. It won't affect what it looks like underwater, but it should tint it when seen from above.

Thank you for the tips, the texturing menu really comes in handy now! ;P I suppose I'll just have to muscle through the land editing and water problems, at least I have a bit more spare time now.

Many of the controls are the same between Ob and FO3 -> http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/WaterType at the Geck Wiki.

iirc, Opacity controls the transparency of the surface texture (changes the alpha value of the texture) and Reflection color the color of the water that shows through the surface texture. Under water, the color is controlled by the Shallow and Deep color (which define a gradient) and the transparency by the Fog Distance Near and Far planes which define when the water begins to become opaque (Near Plane) and achieves full opacity (Far Plane). Before the Near Plane, water is completely transparent, which is why vanilla water types usually have a negative value in this field (so that the water is murky no matter where you are).

If the texture used for the surface of the water is transparent, you can leave the opacity at 100. (The default water has 100 opacity because the texture itself has transparency.) When all else fails, use the vanilla water types as a guide.

Note: changing the water type of cells in custom world spaces can result in graphical glitches. I discovered this problem when I was trying to create a transparent placeable water nif. Changing the water type of the cell ended up breaking my transparency in random cells, usually the one I was in: my water appeared as a flat grey color with no transparency except for a wide circle around my character which appeared normally. I'm still not sure if this is tied to my graphics card (so it might not affect other people) but out of all of the world spaces I have created I have only seen this glitch in the one world where I changed the water type of a cell and I did not have this error (but I did have different errors) in vanilla world spaces where I changed the water type. In other words: test this out before using it in your mod if you plan on releasing it. It doesn't happen every time I use the mod, so you'll have to test it numerous times to be sure that it hasn't corrupted anything.

Steep roads may not be a good idea. If you're road is too steep an incline, you won't know until you test. Try making winding roads/paths downwardly instead of straight down. If done properly, you won't have to worry about too much incline and constant testing.

Thank you both for your replies, the advice on water editing actually helped a lot. After wrestling with the settings for all those variables, you start to forget what you're actually trying to do anymore. No problem with the steep roads, I've been making them in the traditional switchback formation (at least down the cliffs) and so far it hasn't presented any incline issues (still, buffing them out remains maddeningly slow).