» Sat May 28, 2011 5:46 am
Use TES4Gecko, convert the mod to a .esm, then base all further work on that mod as a .esp with both that .esm and oblivion.esm loaded. Merge with TES4Gecko.
Keep in mind that within a .esm you cannot have any changes to a vanilla worldspace (even placing a door in a vanilla exterior) without causing the landscape to get screwed up. Once you have trees and other stuff, you will also need to clear out all the VWD flags for your worldspace using TES4Edit in order for your worldspace to show correctly when loaded anywhere other than the 01 index. You would need to do this cleaning after every change which adds more trees, but thankfully, you only need to clean out those things which were added/moved.
When it comes to blending the landscape from 1 four quad group with another, you should probably do this in the landscape editor rather than edit the two bordering quads within the heightmap editor. The reason being that it saves you from having to fix holes which form in already finished areas, and makes the .esp to be merged a more manageable size. The general method of editing should involve smoothing the terrain along that border (in landscape editor) so that both sides are within no more than 4000 units of eachother and there is no rip between quads, then use the standard raise/lower tool to get the desired result. You can increase the landscape sensitivity to make movements faster within the CS options (same tab as grid settings), but this can often lead to jagged looking terrain, so may need some selective smoothing with a smaller tool before region generation.
Before doing region generation, make sure you have a backup of the .esm, and have merged all terrain that you planned to do. As you setup your regions, it is suggested that you do some small test patches (4 cells 2x2) with that region to see how it will texture and place things. Once you have a region to your liking, remove it and all objects generated by that region within the same CS session, and move on to testing the next region. DO NOT SAVE YOUR MOD WITH ANY GENERATED ITEMS IN YOUR WORLDSPACE AT THIS TIME, ALWAYS CLEAN BEFORE SAVING. Before defining actual region borders, save your mod, open it with TES4Gecko, and remove any entries which refer to edited cells. Merge this region mod so that the settings are contained within your .esm and can be reverted to later. Make a backup. Now, start a new .esp for your region borders. Only define the region borders DO NOT GENERATE THEM.
This mod will have some small cell changes, so is not as easy to clean, which is why you did this as a separate .esp. Make sure it has no placed objects, then merge it.
There are two very important things to keep in mind when generating regions:
1) Larger regions mean not only more time spent generating, but also larger .esp size, and depending on system specs and density of items, can lead to frequent crashing (why we're using a .esm). The only thing you should be doing while working on region generation is generating objects for that region. Leave ALL other structures and statics until after you've generated EVERYTHING as these structures can often get buried during generation.
2) Once an object has been placed in a cell from region generation, and once that session has been saved and ended, the object can no longer be removed by that region. Meaning that if you want to change any settings related to region items, or have overlapping regions, you would have to manually remove them cell by cell if you've already saved the mod and started a new session. To make life easier, you should adopt a rather simple method of avoiding this problem all together. After every region you generate, select every bordering region and select "remove objects for this region". Even if you havn't generated that region yet, the region you generated placed objects slightly outside its border, and once saved, these objects may be doubled when that bordering region is generated later. This will leave only the space which exists only within the one region you generated as having items (the remaining parts will be mostly generated with those other regions. Save the mod, merge, and work on the next. For small regions, you can do more that one region per .esp, but should avoid generating regions which are near eachother within the same .esp. For larger regions, you should keep it to a single .esp per region.
No doubt you're staring at this a bit confused. Just take your time and work through it one region at a time. For a 4 quad worldspace which is entirely generated, it is to be expected that you will be spending no less than a week doing little else other than generating objects if you are using several regions and region types (took me a little over 2 weeks when I did one 4 quad worldspace simply because I had to figure out most of this stuff and deal with crashes when the CS ran out of memory). For larger worldspaces, significantly longer. The downside however is that in order to make the landscape work right as a .esm without requiring it to be loaded in the 01 index, you will have to go through a few thousand tree entries in TES4Edit and remove the vwd flags. It's not as bad as it sounds since most of the work is just lots of clicking on the little + boxes and expanding cell information, but there isn't any sort of automated script which does this to my knowledge. You would also need to use TES4LodGen to generate distant objects afterward, but that's a fairly quick thing.
