Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Water

I have now made a height map I am pleased with and made LODs. Now comes the actual hard work... Populating the world with objects, generating landscape regions and fill all of those riverbeds with water. NPC and Quests, well that's a later problem.

I thought I start of with water. There are many different types of water, around 30, and that's a lot of water to chose from. To have a look at all the different waters you can find them in the Object window, WorldData, under WaterType. There are some different settings, like Color, Noice, Specular and Physical Properties. For example under Physical you can set the current of that water type under Linear Velocity. The X axis is in East (+x) West (-x) direction and Y is in North (+y) South (-y) direction.


How to change the water in a exterior cell:
  1. load your esp/esm
  2. select the worldspace in Cell View
  3. select the cell you want to edit
  4. right click on the cell name and chose Edit (Alternatively, under World, Cell, select worldspace, and the cell)
  5. here you can change water level, water type, linear velocity and angular velocity for that specific cell

The new water level may not always show up right away in the Render window, move to another cell and then back again, and it should show up.

Now this proses is slow, for a smaller world is manageable, but with Hoddminir size of 16x16 quads it feels really overwhelmingly slow.
We are thinking of making a program that would change water level height, type and perhaps linear velocity for a batch of cells at a time. This could be a help and save a lot of hour for a lot of modders.
If you would like to participate in the project, beta test it when we get to that point or even better know of a program with similar function, please let me know.

/E

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