Hi. I've started on a large worldspace. There are a number of towns and cities planned (on paper only so far) and I have about 20 buildings that are slowly making up a dock area.

There are as yet no NPC's, trees, rocks or grass regions, just plain ground and a small edited area of the current city docks.

The esp file is already tipping in at just over 5 meg!

Is this right? If the file grows exponentially from here then the end result could be almost as big as the oblivion.esm file!

Is this size simply because of the size of my worldspace? Its kind of on par with the Oblivion worldspace in that respect, but like I said, its so far pretty empty. Are there any ways that I can make this file smaller or am I stuck with this file size?

cheers

MVK

That's normal.
The size of the mod depends on things it contains. You can add hundreds of items to interior cell and mod will get bigger by few KB only. The mod increases in size the most while there are changes to terrain like height edits, texture and vertex painting, etc. Other "heavy" things are texts especially in great numbers - books, long scripts, and dialogues.

For some reason when you convert the esp to esm it will become smaller. I guess it's because the esp saves all the small changes you make while the esm only includes the 'final product'. For new worldspace mods it is generally better to work with an esm, you just need to make sure that you don't alter anything from the Oblivion.esm. You can use esps for that.

If testing it in a .esm form, you should make sure it's loaded in the 01 index otherwise you will experience even more missing landscape issues due to how Oblivion handles VWD objects. You can fix this eventually should you decide to release the mod as a .esm, and it will never be a problem with a .esp version, but it can give you the impression of more things being screwed up than there are while you're still working.

HUGE? No it isnt huge, dont fret about it, the size is immaterial. People can generally download 1MB in a couple of seconds and that will only get better over time. My Mesogea mod has a 900MB landmass, now thats huge (for now anyway). Dont worry about the size of the thing, make it the best you can, regardless of size.

Thanks guys - I was getting a little worried - the size doesn't seem to be bloating much at the moment, but there was a sudden increase that I was concerned about.

Cheers

MVK