TES Construction Set: Modding Tips

Landscape Editing

In this section I've collected some useful tips that may help beginning modders. It was never intended to be a full-scale tutorial.

Geography

Finding a good location for a mod is important. Morrowind has a well-organised system of geographic regions, and there's nothing good in spoiling it. An island in the middle of Azura Coast with textures and objects from Bitter Coast or Ascadian Isles will never look logical.

If you are creating an island somewhere far from mainland, you are free not to take regions into account. However, the Inner Sea is not too wide to place a whole continent between Vvardenfell and Tamriel. Map on the left was taken from Arena and does not show details (correctly), but it gives the idea of how Vvardenfell is aligned in general. I'd recommend more detailed map available on Tamriel Rebuilt project site, this map also includes location of Bloodmoon and Firemoth. You don't want to create new land incompatible with official plugins, do you?

I also advise to explore the whole island in the game itself before modding terrain. It's no secret that most mods are placed in Ascadian Isles/Balmora/Bitter Coast region. But other regions may also prove interesting.

Always rename Wilderness cells that you modify. When you assign Weather Type to a region, it automatically becomes renamed, luckily there's no need to enter each name manually.

Cells

After you've chosen the location, you should choose the exact sells where your mod will be located. See Tamriel Rebuilt map for details. TES uses "B" hotkey for displaying borders between cells.

Important locations are usually named to be clearly seen on world map. In original game, these locations include towns, both large and small, Imperial forts, old Dunmer strongholds, Tribunal Temple sacred places, some Daedric shrines and Dwemer ruins, and a few other places. It's highly recommended that an object that takes up one cell will not interfere with neighboring cells. For example (see picture on the left), door 1 will lead "to Your Town", and door 2 "to Bitter Coast" - quite strange. Cells in Morrowind are quite large and objects as big as shown in the picture are rare. So if you are building something like a town or Imperial fort, with many doors, try not to take up more cells than required.

Many players use FPS Optimizer program that increases line of sight considerably. This may also cause problems like the one I encountered while working on Kiranann. On the next picture, Player won't be able to see anything further than the middle of Cell 2. However, with FPS Optimizer he will be able to see as far as Cell 3, but Cell 3 won't load until he reaches Cell 2. If there's a large object 1 (a tower, for example) in Cell 3 and attached objects (windows) are in Cell 2, windows will load before the tower, and player will see them floating in the air. This can be fixed by moving all the objects a bit further to Cell 3 so they load simultaneously.

Landscape

Change Land Sensitivity Multiplier in Preferences window to speed up landscape editing. You won't usually need to decrease it below 1, but increasing may make life a lot easier. Changing falloff % is also helpful in some situations, particularly when you need some kind of spiked landscape.

Water height level is 0, the land initially starts at -2,000. You can only change water level in interior cells. The highest place in Morrowind is about 19,000 units high.

The best way to raise large portions of land for an island is to raise land above water somewhere near the middle of your future island and then use Flatten Verticles tool. After the island outline is complete, smooth the shores. Many, if not most, parts of the island will now be underwater again, but now you'll have a natural-looking island foundation.

Creating high mountains is interesting, but if the slopes are too steep textures won't look nice. Morrowind terrain is one large mesh; for each vertex, you can edit only Z coordinate, or height. Steep slope will make distance between vertexes too long, and textures will stretch, making the whole landscape look ugly. Avoid stretching unless you know exactly what for are you doing this.

Smooth landscape if you want it to look natural. "Natural" means "Like in the original game". The developers spent a lot of time making smooth and logical landscape. If you are doing plugin for public release, it's a good idea to do the same. Most of Vvardenfell is a good example of high-quality terrain editing. The best way to smooth terrain after making changes is to set Edit Radius to a half of what you were using to edit. So if you raised a hill with 16 editing radius use 8 to smooth. On the other hand, note that smoothing can be harmful for minor terrain changes you've made, so use it with care.

Smoothing tool won't work precise enough if you need to make some minor changes to landscape. In this situation, switch to wireframe ("W" hotkey) and set Edit Radius to 1 (one vertex radius). Then edit each vertex manually. It's a good way to fix minor glitches after terrain editing is complete or create interesting effects.

Texturing

Texturing land is comparatively easy (apart from finding the texture you need), but there are a few things to remember. First, keep in mind geographical regions. Only a few textures are universal, all others were created for one and particular region. Combine them with care. Molag Amur lava will not look good near Ascadian Isles clover. Note that shores and underwater areas always have specific texturing.

Only 2 textures look perfect hitting the same spot. It was written in the original helpfile. Still some people forget that this rule exists. Morrowind landscape textures DO NOT look good if you use many of them in one place. If there's no other choice (road textures and other cases) hide areas like shown on the picture by stones and other large world objects.

Most well-known way of achieving "good" texture combinations is placing small portions of more interesting textures inside the common one. For example, in Ascadian Isles clover texture is placed inside of large grass areas.

Vertex Coloring

Coloring is the last stage of landscape editing. You should only start vertex coloring when you've finished placing terrain objects, plants, buildings, containers etc. It's difficult to explain what you should color, to find out just load any existing exterior cell and delete all objects. Don't forget to switch off bright light ("A" hotkey).

Try to avoid bright colors. The most common color is dark grey (not black). Using other colors except grey, black and brown is rare in the original game. But it doesn't mean that you shouldn't experiment.

Using TES Advanced Mod Editor

TES AME is a very useful program, but it may do a lot of irreversible harm to your mod if you don't know what is safe to delete. Luckily, AME makes a backup of each file you open, and you can restore your plugin after unsuccessful cleaning. The backup is stored in tempfile.tmp file.

First of all, never delete textures unless you know for sure that they are no longer used in modified cells. In other words, never delete textures. It's difficult to explain, but that's the way it is.

Next, before deleting a cell make sure that you didn't change anything there or you don't need any of these changes. It may sound commonplace but if you don't follow this advice your mod may end up with a bad cell bug that neither TES CS nor Morrowind game are able to track. Particularly true about exterior cells.

Good modding!

If you think that this article contains wrong information:) or have something to add please contact me via e-mail.

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