A Land Far Away

While AL has been sorting out the custom skills corruption, I've been fixing a few minor problems with TSM. A few have some grief attached however, and so Rick, please bear with me.

First up, please understand that the priority has been to achieve the following, in this priority:
1. Get the module working
2. Get it hosted
3. Add new content

To achieve that, this is what we've currently got.

- Unfortunately there was significant corruption in various areas added by Rick primarily due to the Obsidian grass deletion bug. The areas were also effectively doubling the size of the module with this grass bloat. I've had to remove these areas, and once Rick has deleted all the grass, exported the areas from his existing mod and imported it into the new mod (which I'll upload in a day or so), these areas can be added back in. The areas included in this removal include:
All Highways
Silverwood

- 4 areas were being used to simulate the surrounds of Silverymoon, but I've removed those and added a single area with a shrunken wall exterior of Silvy that will do the trick and save 120MB of module space. A big part of module instability was its enormity, weighing in at 2.1GB.

- A Travel Map system has been added that links all previously built regions, which include:
Rivermoot, High Hold, Rauvinwatch Keep, Silverymoon, Quaervarr, Settlestone, Fourthpeak, Lhuvenhead, Hilltop, Jalanathar, Moon Pass, Sundabar and Silverymoon Pass.
The map is a single 32x32 and simulates travel most remarkably.

- Quests are not all working yet, and some have been removed entirely, including all Rivermoot interior quests. Kadalion offers some quests, but converting them from my old version to the ALFA standard is not fully completed.


And now let me make myself absolutely clear, because Rick's been tremendous is keeping TSM moving and I greatly appreciate his work.

All I'm doing is meeting the priorities listed above. I don't want to change or influence Rick' vision for the module at all, and everything that I've done can be undone without any trouble. My goal was to get the module working and hosted. While I've done this, I sincerely regret that it's been achieved only with removal of corrupted areas bought about by Obsidian's grass bug, all of which happened to be Ricks.

And while I have re-added areas that Rick has chosen to remove (Settlestone, Hilltop, Jalanthar, Sundabar and a few others), I did so for the benefit of beta testers, and to demonstrate 1, the Travel Map system pioneered by Teric and 2, that in the absence of grass, a module can cover vast amounts of territory and still remain a reasonable size. Even with the re-introduction of the Highway regions with minimal grass, the module will unlikely come too near to 2GB.

The module is now at 1.4GB and runs stably on my server. I should point out also that the module hosted by AL contains none of the modifications listed above, but does contain the fix for the Custom SKills corruption, something I added to my version this morning and am grateful for.

Rick, I hope this is ok with you. Once I hand it back the module can remain in beta and you can add to it at your leisure.

Remember, any terrain updates will require an updated PWC file for testers to download, so you will need to familiarise yourself with WorldGate.

For the sake of current and future builders, do we know what causes the grass deletion bug?

Are there any building processes that should be avoided or closely monitored at this time, like the placing of grass perhaps?

What about RauvinWatch Keep, is that still in? Hopefully, because that is a key area and one of the coolest forts I have ever made Please, if you can, salavage that one.

Personally, I am starting to think that my vision of a scaled map of TSM is unworkable due to the size and toolset bugs. Since the community tends to be going with the travle map idea, perhaps in the interest of getting the mod live, this is what we should go with.

There are many many interior areas, dungeons, etc, that can substitute for highways and all the stuff I made.

I would like to redo Silverwood forest, howver, once I figure out how to get around the grass bug.

I am also hoping all the items and NPC's I created are still intact.

Thanks Indio, whatever we can do to get SM live

Darren, the key to avoiding area corruption is essentially *never* to delete grass....if grass is used sparingly, very sparingly, the need to delete it becomes obsolete. The toolset will crash in corrupt areas if you delete grass twice in a row. This is worth avoiding until Obsdian sort it out, as it's their bug (and yeah, they know about it).

Rick, your item should be in the mod but your NPCs won't be. I needed to import a set of NPCs from prior to the Custom Skills bug in order to not get errors loading the module. However, here are ALs instructions for fixing that:

if you open the area using the skills.2da in the override in one module, delete him, then export the area, you should be able to safely import it into a clean module

Now presumably the case is the same for extracting NPCs.

Thanks for the understanding.

Oh, and yeah, oyour awesome version of Rauvinwatch Keep is still in. It never occurred to me to put the castle on that spot, but thhe improvement is vast.

Haven't tried much with NPCs- you'd be safest opening an older version of your module (that hadn't been opened using the 1/20 alfa_2da.hak), and exporting the NPCs from there. I wasn't noticing errors from blueprint/spawning NPCs in the module though, so might not even be necessary- I'd not worry too much about recovery until/unless we spot specific problem for now.

I thin the NPC's will be fine, but I'll check them - Indio, let's go with the travel map and all your original areas plus possibly a few of my areas - I'll redo Silverwood.

Also, I wanted to ask about the two North Road areas (North of High Hold), those were cool. They can be attached to the MoonWood. There was grass in them, but they were smaller than my highway areas. Hopefully they can be incuded in the mod.