I'm working on a large worldspace mod from a wiki article that mentions removing vwd flags with TES4Edit. Why would these need to be removed?

Thanks!

The article mentions removing vwd flags - which i'm assuming refers to "viewable when distant" flags. I've searched the internet via google and haven't found any references to this except for a post on these forums from which the Wiki article was created. I'm sure this is not the first attempt at creating new world spaces in Oblivion, and was wondering if anyone had any more insight on this.

Thanks

I've never done worldspaces, but I'd have a look at the tutorials on http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/forum/82-esiv-oblivion-classes/. They have a lot of good info in there and I've found that they describe all the settings in various dialogs, whereas the Wiki doesn't. You have to join, but it's really worth it.

Thanks for the reply. I looked at the forums there. It appears the Worldbuilding section has yet to be built. :happy: I've figured out most of what there is to know about creating worldspaces up to the tail-end of region generation. I've just about re-written the entire article on the CS Wiki on the subject from my experience - http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Creating_Large_Worldspaces. I'm just concerned with doing something wrong that I'll have to come back to and fix later in my mod.

Actually, I'm pretty sure what I'm doing is going to work fine. I'm building a conversion worldspace - so players won't interact with the vanilla Oblivion world. I don't think vwd flags will be a problem for me since my mod will pretty much rule the 01 Index. I just don't want to make comments about vwd flags in the article until I'm certain about what the issue is with them in worldbuilding and the 01 Index. I've Googled it, searched these forums, and searched the Wiki and all the comments are pretty vague. What I'm doing might work for me, but I don't want to edit the article in such a way that I lead another modder astray. I'm concerned too that the information in the Wiki article is either obsolete or over-cautious. Most of what I've edited in the article has been exactly that. When I first read the article it was very discouraging. But I've since found that the author wrote a bit on the cautious side, and so I have my doubts about his concerns with vwd flags.

Thanks!!

Yeah, I admit that I didn't look too closely at that part of the forums. You might try posting your question on the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1158602-tamriel-worldspace-modding-project/ thread - maybe onra or someone else could answer your question. Their stuff is for Tamriel, but they might have a better understanding of what some of those flags do.

I'm starting to believe this whole vwd flag thing is a myth.

I don't remember the details but it had something to do with the esm's load order and LOD trees. If your esm loads in the 01 spot, your LOD is fine, but if it loads anywhere else, you end up with 'floating (LOD) trees' from the 01 esm. (Or something to that effect.) I never got around to testing it myself, but Vagrant0 is a pretty meticulous modder so it's worth checking into. It's basically a compatibility issue for people playing with multiple worldspace (esm) mods.

Yeah, I'm in the midst of using Vagrant0's Wiki article right now. I've been editing his article as I work. It still read a lot like a forum post and wasn't clear on a lot of things. I left him a message on the forums and haven't heard back from him yet.

I noticed that the http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1158602-tamriel-worldspace-modding-project/ uses .esps for their world spaces - and they are HUGE worldspaces. But the instructions in their forum post say to convert the mod to an .esm when modding it and then to convert it to an .esp for publication. I was wondering if maybe the 01 Index issues disappear when a worldspace mod is converted to an .esp

Like I said before I'm wanting to clarrify this not only for myself, but also for the Wiki article http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Creating_Large_Worldspaces (Vagrant0's article to which I've done a lot of work on).

VWD flags are used on statics (buildings, etc) to mark them as visible when distant. They are only of value if you intend to generate your own distantLOD files via the CS. Otherwise you don't need them, since people should be using tes4lodgen to handle that on a per-user basis since it adjusts to whatever their load order happens to be. Further, it only works if you have _far.nif files to go with the real meshes. If you're using custom models and they don't have matching _far.nif files, the VWD flags won't do you any good.

The CS automatically marks all references from the "trees" folder as VWD and there's nothing you can do about that, nor should you try removing the flags from trees and bushes in TES4Edit. The game might react badly to that.

The issue that's most relevant is the LOD landscape. A worldspace's LOD only functions if the mod can be certain to occupy the 00 or 01 index. This is virtually impossible given the number of mods out there, even if you make it an ESM.

So you're left with the other solution: injected worldspace IDs. You can accomplish this easily with TESGecko. It has a "move worldspaces" function which solves this problem neatly. Your mod can then occupy any index it wants to and your landscape LOD will work properly. It accomplishes this by assigning your worldspace an ID in the 00 index, which is called injection. Once you've done this, then you can use the CS to generate your landscape LOD meshes and texture files. They'll have the proper worldspace ID that way and you won't have to worry about it.

Thank you very much for responding to my questions. This information will be most helpful.

I've got a question, I know you're more familiar with Elswyr than I am and the size of that mod. How would one split a mod when the master has VWD's as well as three separate support mods that consist only of Regions and Worldspace data. Knowing that I must continually add to a split mod where the VWD's reside after splitting, size is a major importance to me if I want to be able to organize and clean this mod. For example: My master has VWD's, esp1 - esp3 (3 in all) has nothing but VWD's. The 3 dependent esp's can be merged but only to a point of file size limitations so that I can use tools, plus they do not reside in the [00] index. Can a master actually have multiple splits? Are the 3 support mods considered split and if not what kind of structure should I use?