What does it take to make a copy of worldspace Wasteland which has only retained the statics and the landscape?

Or - -even JUST the landscape with nothing else.

I have not made any attempts at it, just wondering if anyone knows in a straightforward way what sort of things get done.

It almost seems like a GECK operation but....... see GECK copies EVERYTHING when you do a worldspace copy.. and I can't say that maybe FO3edit doesn't have a better way.. I donno.

I think you can export the .RAW hightmap files from the heightmap editor and then import them into a new worldspace.

So yeah I see what you mean.

I'm looking at the heightmap editor and, it's cool!!!!

I wanna make landscapes now!

heh.

so much geck, so short a lifetime, sorta

Darn... the GECK is crashing right on it's ass when I try to do the import portion of this.

Edit: google found a post on Nexus where someone else's efforts to do exactly this thing have failed the same way, and someone else had success by trying over and over and over again to get it to "take" sorta, instead of crash.

http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/226324-fallout-3-heightmap-worldspace-creation/

weird.

So, seeing what a gigantic pain in the ass it is to import heightmaps in the GECK for the wasteland worldspace, I decided to give something a shot ... I did a straight-up duplication of the wasteland worldspace in the GECK.

My PC's been sitting here for.. quite some time... churning and thinking and doing things... no crash, tho.

I don't THINK the GECK is locked up because the CPU usage is fluctuating around. It looks like its doing stuff.

The GECK is NOT multithreaded, apparently! Its peaked my #1 CPU core and, sorta just keeping it near 100% usage. My other CPU core is sitting on its ass. pff.

I wonder how long I have to let this thing sit. I guess I will go walk my dog or.... something.

What a beast. I wish it would use both of my CPUs. That is clearly a bottleneck in this harsh torture I'm putting the GECK and my PC through.

Tarrant,

Working on a few options with Fo3Edit to see if I can do it. Few questions:

1. Do you care about Navmeshes?

2. Is there anything in the wasteland that you want Left behind? River Water? Bridges? Or is empty land good enough?

Tried a few things without success, right now I've deep-copied the Wasteland worldspace into a blank plug-in, which worked, and I'm now going to see if I can wack all the items without it killing me in the process. Edit - nope, ran out of memory. on to Plan D.

Edit2: Gah this thing is so friggin big - I can't get any of the bulk operators to work on all 183740189734019823 cells, hmmm.

Edit3: LOL I keep exploding Fo3Edit and the GECK, this really is a GIANT worldspace :ahhh: No wonder the Bethesda team is making a new engine more suited to huge worlds. I have plenty of Ram, I need to PM Elminster and find out if I can allocate more memory with a run-time parameter. If I can get enough memory going, I _think_ I can do it.

Miaximus result will probably be the best since it will retain the landscape textures and what not.

If you end up having to do it in the heightmap editor, these are some resources I've been using while I play around.
http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/224954-height-map-creation-and-editing-tutorial/
http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Heightmap_Editing
http://bmp.thefloatingwidget.net/heightmaps/ (might have to "paste -> enter" the url if the links shows nothing)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b_denOxkTc (it's in German which I don't speak, but I'm still able to kind of follow along)

I was able to import the New Zealand heightmap, but I got all sorts of errors when I tried to load it because some angles were too extreme. Never realized how "smooth" the wasteland was until I imported a real heightmap

Innnteresting.

Empty land would be nice. But, I'd happily take the statics. Water would be a bonus but not all that necessary or amazing to have. The statics would make what I'm doing with my hummer mod a breeze. Bigtime breeze.

My attempt at a geck copy... I'm not so sure it is going well. I just can't tell, it's taking so long, it seems disporportionally so. I guess I will end task it and opt for an FO3edit approach.

My system only has 2 gigs of memory atm.

Edit: Per FO3Edit: Out Of Memory

*Cough*

Edit2: pretty much everything I am trying, FO3edit is telling me I can take my puny 2 gigs of ram and put it where the sun don't shine.

fo3 devs probably seeing this thread and laughing at me. 2 gigs of ram + wasteland worldspace BAAHAHAAHH yeahh yeahh

if I could get the import to happen, it would be alright. I got it to export the Wasteland .raw files. But that import back into my own worldspace instantly crashes the geck. It doesn't pass go, it doesn't collect 200 dollars. It just blows up right away.

Edit: I have been looking at these tutorials, and I can see where like you say, even if I succeed, the landscape textures won't come over doing it this way. I do want those too kinda.... bah.

Try this, though I'm not sure if it would work. Have a clean esp (only load Fallout.esm), and then copy the wasteland. Then save and load your new esp in Fo3edit. Then delete all the changes except your statics and landscape. That should leave you with exactly what you want, right? Then if you want it to be part of your prexisting mod, just merge it in.

That's what I started doing - up until I realized that even in Fo3Edit I still had to go cell-by-cell (and there are thousands). Every cell needs to at Least have the "Landscape" object that Tarrant was referring two - it shows up as one Record per Wasteland cell. I sent a message to Elminster asking about how to solve the issue and/or increase the memory allocated to Fo3Edit using a command-line switch (2 gigs may be enough, need to increase what Fo3Edit can use if possible).

The only way right now that I could see to do it would be to empty each wasteland cell by hand of everything But the Landscape object (lol). If I had that nural-impact I've been dreaming for, this would not be a problem. But as I am still just a puny human with a keyboard, this task is impossible. Hopefully Elminster will have an idea or two.

For me, there is Death by Out Of Memory before that process is complete. Miax seems to have a ton of memory in his system tho...



My own stuff can't even start on that part.

Also - I tried the Geck equivalent. It sat and churned its brains for a long while, and eventually I saw some kind of windows swap space error, and then its amount of used memory went down to almost nothing and I presume it was kinda a broke process at that point.

It will be great if this turns out to be succesful! Many thanks from me for sure.

My own PC can't touch the process of the initial creation of this thing, apparently, so I'm grateful that you're giving it a try.

I talked for quite some time with Elminster about this, and he has tried some things.

He is suggesting I/we wait until he's got the FO3Edit codebase moved into a form where he can compile it in his lastest version compiler, and then he feels it's fairly easy for him to edit FO3edit to make this sort of worldspace available.Without some edits he's saying it cannot quite do it right. He's saying to remind him this coming weekend.

That sounds like the prime plan, to me.

Sounds good to me as well, and we won't have too terribly long to wait either.

I'm not surprised now that I couldn't make it work with the current Fo3Edit if he can't either! I think having an empty "landscaped" worldspace would be an excellent test platform for alot of things.

It's even a hair better than that, potentially...


hm.. ok... once I can write code for it, I can get you a full copy of the wasteland, minus navmesh and any active (creatures, NPC) spawns


Sounds like he's able to leave the statics. But he cautions this...


the wasteland worldspace is 227.9MB out of the 282MB that's Fallout3.esm
navmesh is still in that
also creature spawns and stuff


hehe.


I do think that an empty version of wasteland could be popped up as a legitimate modders resource. Could either include or exclude the navmesh, I bet most people want it.

I have interesting things to report on this.

Elminster created an .esp which contains a form of the entire Wasteland worldspace. It took him making special-purpose code for it. Mercifully, he did the actual work in using the software instead of sending me a download link and telling me to try it myself (that would have been one giant pile of 'fail' on my part).

I downloaded it to my wittle hard drive, and learned a few things.

First thing is - - - you don't load a worldspace as big as this into the GECK as though it is a modder's .esp file. Even though the file itself is less than 200 megs, what it does to the GECK's brains is more. Apparently the way to work with this is, you load it as an .esm and you mod with it in a similar way to how you mod fallout3.esm itself. Then, when it comes time for you to make a release of sorts, you use FO3edit to merge your mod content with that of the worldspace, and then you have one file.

I only just started messing with this, I haven't even seen this loaded up with fallout3.exe yet. If there is a limit to what's expected in the size of an .esp (as opposed with .esm) I will bet you this has exceeded it (I don't know if such exists).

So, I'll post back in a bit about how this works out in practice. I'm expecting this form of Wasteland will end up going out in its elminster-released form as a modder's resource. I should mention that this exact version has no navmesh (that was because I asked for it to be removed for my particular application). And Elminster said something about LOD maybe not being there, and copying a .nif being necessary for that. I'm not so familiar with that aspect of it.

:goodjob: Elminster is a real wizard! This is a very interesting resource and I can't wait to try it out. :liplick:

Thats great that he was willing to spin some code for this!

Its awesome that he is still willing to help with custom situations, I felt the same way when we spoke about converting my mod work to NV (though we have to wait for it to know how far we can do it). I look forward to taking a peek at that resource, could be very handy!

Thanks for sharing the updates.

Miax

So far this thing is working out really well. I've got it as an .esm and I am modding it within my .esp to add the items I need, etc. There's no bad surprises in how the worldspace works alongside of my .esp.

You hear the ambient sounds of the area. You see the statics and water and landscape and like, dripping water if it is there. You do not have the longest-range vision in this version, I understand what Elminster means, now. Like from Rivet City water caravan area, you cannot see any part of Jefferson Memorial, but in normal wasteland you can. It could be for the best to get that nif set up sometime, if its really just an easy copy sort of operation.

It only loads with one tiny geck error, it can be fixed pretty easily (there's one object in the world somewhere which should be set to persistant ref).

Its neat as heck.