Just a crazy thought I had. Can it be done?
Instead of piecing together a dungeon using the cell modules, could it be feasible to draw a heightmap that carves out the dungeon, then it need only be capped?
I think this might work. If so, immense (albeit rather generic) dungeons could be created pretty easily. At least the rough landscaping.
One drawback would be that you couldn't have rooms or tunnels that pass underneath others though.

Silly idea?

there is one big flaw....

heightmaps deal with land....interior cells (like dungeons) dont have land.....

Yes. I'm talking about making a dungeon in it's own worldspace so it would have land.

How would you then do the ceiling?

Doesn't http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23153 have huge dungeons spaces?

But that would be a land only (floor and walls), you still will to have to create ceiling there from rocks or cave pieces ;]

The dungeons would be trenches in the landscape. You just cover them with something like piles of boulders. Or just flat black squares if the ceilings are high enough.

You can make huge dungeons using cells, but you have to piece together the whole thing.
With heightmaps, I think you could make a massive labrynth or something rather quickly.

Yes that could most certainly be done. The only potential problem I can think of, is that the walls of the tunnels (being the landscape records rather than meshes) might need to be quite steep to prevent the player or in-combat NPCs/creatures from climbing out - and this can stretch the land textures so that they don't look so good. But most of the time land textures do handle such treatment fairly well.

Forgive a silly question.
So you can't use the same meshes for exterior cells as for interior?
I too have been mulling about doing caves in an exterior cell. But thinking about it now I know that I can get the same effects that I was looking for using an interior.

Cheers!

I think you could use the same meshes in an exterior cell.. Never tried, but I don't see why not.
The cave meshes and stuff are only one-sided though. You would have to put some sort of a shell around your cave.

This is probably really bad practice but how about intentionally creating a land tear as an entrance, cave meshes 'underground' for the cave interior and rocks etc to disguise the joins at the entrance?

I like that idea. You could hollow out a mountain then.

Bad practice? I think it is a wonderful idea :dance: One cover up the land tear with rocks and stuff so there wont be any falling through or sudden height changes for NPC's and the PC.
And there are land tear's in the original covered by rocks anyway so...

EDIT - Can't be to big or long cave since the light of the weather will affect lighting. Or you could have activators in the cave that changes the weather to a special one that is dark. END EDIT
EDIT2 - The only worry is if one gets teleported to the surface while being "under" the land. Needs some experementing. END EDIT
Thanks for a great idea!