Is this possible?

I'd like to replicate Quarry junction, as an enclosed area, just the size of those 3 or 4 cells.

[img]http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/8839/egege.jpg[/img]

This is possible in a way but, you had better have a professional (game designer level!) high end machine,, a lot of time on your hands and, quite a bit of patience. :brokencomputer:

I'm not an expert but, I'm among the few of us modders who have actually pulled off generating LOD, I've tried to share my limited knowledge on the subject with the community. I have duplicated many worldspaces in FO3 to use as backdrops for my "Glass Windows cells" in DCInteriors. I have 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors, 16 GB 667 MHz DDr2 FB-Dimm, (ram), 4, 1 TB internal Hard-drives in my rig and, I would have never considered trying to duplicate the entire wasteland.

The big problem with duplicating that specific cell is it is part of "WastelandNV" worldspace. You can duplicate the entire "WastelandNV" by going to World\Worldspaces finding "WastelandNV" in the list of worldspaces and, right clicking on it. Next you'll hit duplicate, the new worldspace will exist. You can't only duplicate the cells you want because they are a part of the "Wasteland worldspace" and, rely on adjoining cells. even if those cells are only dummy cells.

The problem comes in when you realize you've just duplicated the entire wasteland, meaning everything out side of say the strip, Freeside and several other worldspaces. Not the end of the world, you could simply Wall off what you need or, want with collision markers and, make your custom edits, right?

Thats when the realy big issue hits you like a supersledge to the nuts!!!!!!!!! :banghead: You'll need to regenerate the LOD for the entire wasteland! :swear: If you decide not too, your mod will have countless graphics glitches, distant objects won't appear until the player gets close enough to them. People could see blue funky objects as the object gets closer to them and, they want to render.

Generating LOD is time consuming and, complicated under the best circumstances. Given your working with a somewhat small worldspace it can take several hours, when you start the process you'll get a worning saying something like "Generating LOD may take up to 10 hours or, more. Do you want to continue." If you have every needed mesh and, TGA texture in there appropriate directory, you don't run into any errors, it could be pulled off. One error means a complete redo, start over "Don't collect your two hundred caps for passing Go!"! :swear: :banghead: :swear:

Some upper echelon modder or, dev. may have an easy answer or, Idea of how to pull this off but, I'll be curt, maybe a little blunt. Give this idea up, it's not worth your time, effort or, frustration.

If your daring enough to try to attempt this, look at my signature, snag my LOD essentials pack from FO3, it gives a basic tutorial on the LOD generation process and, descriptions of what the errors you'll inevitably encounter mean.

cev

You did see that he wants to make it an enclosed area, right? No sarcasm, just asking. I can understand that you'd need some LOD for a set of cells that size, but if you were able to LOD small bits for your mod, I would think he'd be able to as well?

Yeah Cev saw it, and _everything_ he said about LOD is absolutely true. I've seen modders quit the Fo3 modding scene over it twice. His advice is spot-on, proceed with caution.

I have to do this with NV eventually, but I plan to put it off to the very last before release. CevSteel and TheMagician are the house experts on LOD as far as I'm concerned, so I'll go with what they recommend in such cases.

Miax

As Miax said, "Yes", I did see that but, it's not possible to only pick certain cells in a worldspace to duplicate. He wants to try to duplicate only those cells, He can't! He has to duplicate the entire thing. I was able to do this in FO3 because I chose the small worldspaces to duplicate. Georgetowne, L'Enfant Plaza, Takoma Park, Mason district and, Seward Sq, I still had to duplicate everything that was in the worldspaces. Seward was the largest of the lot and, if I remember correctly it took over four hours to Generate the first step of the process, the LOD meshes.

I'm sure it would be fairly easy to duplicate Freeside or, the strip because they are relatively small. The WastelandNV Is massive in comparison. I most likely will duplicate Freeside and, parts of the strip, at some point to have Glass windows cells for my upcoming NVInteriors Project.

I wasn't trying to be mean, rude or, anything like that. I was trying to give him a proper explanation of the troubles he will inevitably run into. What a complicated, time consuming task it will be. I could have simply said no but, I took the time to write a proper explanation on how to do it and, what to expect.

cev

Ah I see. I understand. I just wasn't aware you used different worldspaces for your mod.

Holy. I'm happy I got your post before I attempted any LOD generation. Honestly, this engine is ridiculous. I now have so much respect for the developers for actually being able to design a game in something so inefficient XD Having to extract every texture and mesh is a pain too, why can't geck browse in the BSAs?

In the future, I will be putting out a "Chucks NV LOD Essentials Pack". I know for a fact, (Because, I'm so, OCD,) I'll be trying to create duplicated worldspaces, to build glass windows cells. Give me some time and, I'll share as I did in FO3.

With some patients and, time on your hands the process is not as bad as it sounds. Keep it relatively small, know the limitations of your rig, it will be fine!

Don't think of trying to duplicate the entire worldspace, unless you don't want to go near your computer for a week! :rofl: Start the process, go to bed! Go to a movie! Get lucky! :drool: Come back and, start the second step. Rinse and, repeat my previous suggestions. :dance: It will finish eventually! :celebration:

cev

Are you referring to not being able to do small areas, or the LOD generation as a whole? I can't say whether the algorithm is efficient or not, but we are talking about a very large amount of geometry and textures here. I'm not up-to-date on the last few years of program releases, but as an artist to actually be able to trust a computer to output a usable LOD is not an insignificant thing. If it calculates the silhouette from various angles for every object in the game world to decide what can be removed or anything like that I'm not at all surprised it takes that long.

What your talking about is not really the core issue! The real problem is that the Dev's, (At least, in FO3) didn't use a standardized file naming convention for the essential files needed to compleat the process. :brokencomputer: Why on earth would anyone who works with computers, programing wouldn't choose to use a standardized workflow, is beyond my comprehension!

We don't know what all of the necessary files, names are! Compounding this issue is the fact that the Textures need to live outside of Data\textures. The need to be in (and this is from FO3, I haven't attempted this yet for FNV,) Fallout 3\source\Textures TGA\ "Then there appropriate directory". (And in the TGA format, Not .dds, meaning once you find all of the nessisary LOD textures, you still have to convert them to TGA's and, place them in there appropriate directory inside of the source folder.) After finishing the LOD process you need to move the newly created .dds's back to Textures\landscape\LOD\"your worldspace". We also need to include with our new mods Data\LOD\ "your worldspace" and, Data\meshes\landscape\LOD\ "your worldspace" with our mods for them to work properly! :brokencomputer: Which are all generated during the LOD process!

As, I have said, GENERATING LOD IS "COMPLICATED AND, TIME CONSUMING UNDER THE BEST CIRCUMSTANCES!"

The time it takes is irrelevant, I've already given some ways to pass that time but, it's all of the other little complications that get in the way. :swear:

cev

Thanks guys.

Yea i have used the contruction set quite a lot (in Oblivion) and i have never come across it done, so i assumed it would be because of how difficult it would be.

Thanks for the explanation.

Edit; Just to clarify, the cells that i would dupilcate would be walled off to height that the player would not be able to see anything but sky, so i don't know if that makes LOD no longer an issue? I't basicly just the arrangement of items and quality of the terrain that i want to replicate, together.

Not to rain on your parade but, after you duplicate the wasteland you would still need to go through every cell and, delete all navemeshes, encounters, quest markers and, so on. When you started to attempt the LOD process it would still look at the entire game! :brokencomputer: Biting you in the Ass!

I by any means am not trying to turn you off from modding the game. I'm only trying to give you some insights into my experiences, I tried to do something similar myself!

just saying as independent modders this is well beyond us. :facepalm:

Edit, try it in a test .esp, don't expect good results but, it is possible that the spaces don't need LOD! If you run into an LOD issue then KILL IT! :banghead:

cev

Curious: when you create a new worldspace, can you select a size for it? If so, Assuming we have access to the main terrain heightmap, you could make a smaller worldspace and copy that section of the heightmap to a new file for it, then copy+paste all of the references to the new worldspace?

You can choose the size of the worldspace you want to create. I don't know for a fact if we have access to copy parts of the hight map though. Well at least in a way you could copy and, paste the landscape. you could copy all objects from a cell and, paste them into your new worldspace but, I think you would then have to try to recreate the hight map.

cev

Hmm, wouldn't TesAnnwyn do that?

http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/TESAnnwyn.html

It stated that it works with FO3 so hopefully it would work with NV too.

Wow! This is nice to know. I only played oblivin on PS3 and, only started modding in FO3 as, I've said I'm no expert. This could be very useful! :celebration:

Thanks for the link.

cev

This will move the Landscapes and create images of Landscapes that we can use for LOD, but it isn't going to physically move all of the static and placed references from one world-space to another. I do think it's an awesome program though, and may be of use as we need to move landscapes. It explodes on my Windows 7 x64 system, I may have to play with it to get it to work right with New Vegas, but not exactly the tool needed here.

It may be possible to copy a worldspace from one plug-in to another, but it's still going to be in the same worldspace that it was in. What is really needed is an ability to inject Worldspace placement records from Cell X,Y in Worldspace #1 to Cell A,B in Worldspace #2. I played around with this in NVEdit some, changed the cell coordinates of the worldspace cells themselves but could not ultimately succeed in moving content from my own worldspace to a cell in the WastelandNV world space. It _may_ be possible if the content in X,Y is moving to the exact same X,Y in the new worldspace, but I have not yet been successful here.

TESfaith might do the job though, I'm checking that out for the first time on http://www.projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/index.php. I'm going to try that, but it's very old and sure to be missing Form Types (unless it just grabs Everything and changes it's X,Y). We'll see!

Miax

It seems TESfaith would be the perfect tool for the job, but it's crashing when trying to read the New Vegas files on this bit of code:

			if ((or = (void *) malloc(size)) == NULL			 || (nr = (void *) malloc(size+4096)) == NULL) {				fprintf(stderr, "Unable to allocate %d bytes of"					" memory to store TES file record: %s\n",					2*size, strerror(errno));				exit(1);			}			fseek(fpin, -16, SEEK_CUR);			if (fread(or, 1, size, fpin) < size) {                      <-- Break Point				fprintf(stderr, "Unable to read entire marker record"					" (%d bytes) from %s into memory: %s\n",					size, argv[argc-1], strerror(errno));				exit(1);			}

Timeslip's comment about that bit was:



It's not happy about something in the NV format, I'll try and figure it out, it should be possible to get faith working for NV plug-ins.