Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

I think we can all agree the current situation of having Soluthis and Reich Parkeep in three (!) worldspaces separated from the landmass is far from ideal. Not only because of the cell load times when moving between worldspaces, which is annoying in its own right. But more because in some cases it means having to do the same things twice or thrice, which isn't just more work but invites little annoying discrepancies that can break immersion. Like placing houses in the wrong positions or texturing the landscape differently and things like that.

Ideally I think the whole city should be directly on the landmass. This opens up some... interesting... problems if we are going to pull it off. Firstly, the landmass inside the city is not a child worldspace of SilgradTowerLand, because if it had been then naturally the height data of STL had taken over - and everything had wound up floating or sunken beneath the ground. It would be impossible to move every vertice of the landmass with the Construction Set's height tools into the correct position, and even if I had committed to realigning every object it would have entailed as much work as if I had deleted everything and started over. I'm not going to do that, because the advantages of having the city on the landmass wouldn't outweigh modding for eight hours a day for four weeks just to get back to status quo. I did that with Reich Parkeep early on and I shudder to think of the staggering and thoroughly boring work involved in doing it on twenty times the scale.

So, in my mind (and I could be mistaken) the only recourse would be if we could somehow move the height data from the ReichParkeepREAL worldspace over to SilgradTowerLand. If that can be done, then copy-pasting the city interior over to the landmass would be a breeze. Tedious, sure, but I'm the kinda person who finds it soothing to do repetetive, mundane things by hand (especially when I have my headphones on, listening to music). I'm sure I could do that, coupled with modifying teleportation and AI behaviour to work in the changed worldspace.

The question is, is it possible to move height data in that manner, and if so how would I go about doing it?

(btw this is just an experiment at this point, if it doesn't pan out I'll abandon the idea)

It can be done (in short).

This all Height Map Editing (HME) related stuff.
You have to alter the four quads of the Reich Parkeep Real (fill in the surrounding land). Export the raws. Rename these four raws to -1_2.raw/ 0_2.raw / -1_1.raw / 0_1.Raw

Export the raws for the Silgrad Tower land and rename these as per their location on the HME grid except for the four raws as mentioned above.

Reimport the raws and copy RP in the right location and fix the seams.

The only consequence, noone can work on the Silgrad Tower land and the landscape file for RP is useless except for the city walls. Modding for Reich Parkeep and Steadhelm could continue (as long as there is no interference with the Silgrad Tower land).

The same could be done for Steadhelm.
Silgrad city will be a child (4) of the Silgrad Tower land and doesn't have these problems.

You know which hectic times we had the past few weeks. I am willing to do this, but I need a short break (from the CS). Estimated time 20 hours (including fixing all the errors). Monday or Tuesday would be ok, or perhaps even tomorrow.

If people want other changes let me know (upfront) because this will be the third and hopefully the last time I export the raw's.

Finally create a child worldspace (better fps performance) for Reich Parkeep which is linked to the Silgrad Tower land worldspace and ready you are.
It will have the same height etc. as the "original Reich Parkeep" only the coordinates are different (correct). The LOD will be working too.
When you start changing the land in the child worldspace, the child overrules the Silgrad Tower land world space (even with the textures).

I'm happy to hear it's theoretically possible :dance:

Please don't worry too much about it though. I just thought of it as a solution I could experiment on now that the release is out and the time constraints are removed. To see if the advantages outweighed the work involved. It's certainly not something I want to start working on right now, and definitely not something I would want to burden you with right now. Perhaps we can take another look at it in, say, a month?

I find it interesting that you say that the FPS performance is better by using child worldspaces. I've heard so many times that the separation of the city worldspaces Bethesda did was only because of Xbox 360's limitations, and the 'open city' mods released by the community sure seems to suggest that that's true. But if you say that it does I believe you, and that would mean a big perk of connecting the height data - letting players walk right in without cell load times - would be lost.

Well maybe. Don't forget it has to generate a whole other worldspace with lighting, weather and different calculations for the computer but I believe too that closed worlds help performance but I truly have never tested it.

It's not just theoretically possible... *mysterious smile* =)