Has anyone had any luck with creating an esm containing new worldspaces which is load order independent?

My current mod structure is something like this:

Knights - Revelation.esm
Knights - Revelation.esp
Knights - Revelation XXXXX.bsa (several files)

The new worldspaces are in Knights - Revelation.esm and it works fine if it is on the 01 slot in the load order. As soon as it is moved to any other position, the land disappears (distantLOD land and objects are fine though).

I've tried running Move Worldspaces in TES4Gecko on the esm with placeholders followed by esp with no placeholders, but that doesn't fix the issue.

Any ideas what I could try next?


Edit: Updated tags

Ive never done it personally but I have seen it many times. If you do pull it off. I would like to see it maybe?

I'll check tonight on my setup, but I've done that successfully with the whole content in an esp, and used Move Worldspace on that. Maybe there's an issue when an esm is involved?

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks... This must be an uncommon problem... or all the modders experienced enough to have to move worldspaces have gone on to mod Skyrim instead.

I've checked the formID's of all the new worldspaces and they do indeed start with "00" so I'm not sure why the land is still missing.

We couldn't get move worldspaces to work either for Black Marsh. I just converted the main plugin to an esp and merged everything into the single plugin.

I'm told it crops up every once in a while. For some, moving worldspaces works. For others, it doesn't. Converting your master to a regular plugin will fix the issue, if it's feasible to do that.

Thanks for the tip!

I'll give it a try but I'm a bit worried as the worldspace was originally crashing every few minutes until I had converted it to an esm. Time to make a backup and see how it goes!

Success! ...but not by changing the esm into an esp.

While changing the esm into an esp did work, I was left with two separate esps which meant that if the user didn't read the load order instructions (as they never do), they could end up with ctd's instead of missing land. Which is probably worse.

So I tried merging the two esps together and ended up with a monster 35 MB esp that crashed everything it touched. Oblivion and the CS doesn't seem to like such huge esps it seems.

Re-reading the infamous "Creating Large Worldspaces" tutorial, I noticed a paragraph that didn't seem to make much sense:


Figuring it was worth a shot, I fired up TES4Edit and removed the VWD of every tree and rock in each of the 1200 or so cells. It took a good two hours, but once I loaded it up in Oblivion, there was nice solid ground under my feet! As I mentioned, it makes no sense why VWD flags would counter-intuitively cause custom worldspaces to not work. Thankfully, TES4LODGen ignores the VWD flag and generates a record for anything that has a _far.nif mesh.

For those who need to go through this exercise, I wasn't able to find an automated way to do it, but I was able to reduce the process to "almost brainless" allowing watching of TV while doing it. I filtered all the references "By Visible When Distant" and checked "only Visible When Distant". I used a keyboard macro to expand all the blocks, subblocks and cells in order to view the individual references. Once that was done, it's possible to highlight large numbers of references, Right-Click on them and select "not Visible when Distant".

tl;dr Remove all VWD flags from all objects in any worldspace in an esm.

Interesting. Thanks for the tips.

Oblivion doesn't mind huge esp's, but in your case, an esm and esp is probably the better way to go. Black Marsh's esp is almost 80 MB. If I had to clear out the VWD for all the features, I might be done by the time TES VI is released...