Cells losing height data

[DirtyOldMan]

I was modifying a mod, saved my work, ran TES4LODGen on it, then fired up the game to check my work. To my surprise, the cells I was working on showed up just fine, but any cells not modified by this or other mods suddenly had big holes in the land. I traveled my character around, visiting places I had no modded, and saw that most every cell not modified had dropped to sea level or below.

 

Of course I rolled back the modification, but the problem persisted. I removed the mod, and several more, but the holes continued. Loading previous saves showed they too were missing data. Most rocks and bushes seemed to still be there, but the land textures had plummeted. It seemed every cell not modified had lost its data. I hit my rig with BOSS, then tried again, in case faulty load order was the problem- it was not. BOSS made a few changes to load order, but the problem persisted. Not even removing a good many mods fixed the issue- I am pretty sure it is not load-order related, though I could not remove all mods - Oblivion refused to load when all were removed.

 

I created a new mod, specifically for a small section of these cells, and edited the height in a one foot radius by adding or dropping a few inches. That seemed to alleviate the problem for those cells.

 

I would rather not have to do this for all five thousand or so cells. Does anyone have any idea what went wrong, and how to fix it? I tried all I can imagine, from Recalc Land Normals, to creating a Heightmap for the whole of Cyrodiil. This fixed the height problem on some, but removed objects like the entire Waterfront. I also copied Oblivion.esm and the Oblivion game files from another computer and pasted them into my computer's TES4/Data directory. No help there (thus probably not a corrupted file there. Bit-count checked out).

 

 

Is my only option delete and reinstall? Or does someone have a relatively easy fix for this?

 

Any help appreciated.

[fejeena]

I don't know what can cause such an bug,  but not TES4LODGen .

 

TES4LODGen writes the LOD files in Oblivion\data\distantlod

It does not change meshes and textures and have no effect to the ground in game. It change things you see from distance ( city walls, houses, trees... ).  In the world cell you are at the moment you can not see any of the changes, only in cells far away.  So TES4LODGen can not cause such bugs.

 

With Landscape LOD generator TES4ll  you write new  meshes for ground you see from distance ( in folder data\meshes\landscape\lod )

These ground meshes you see only far away, not in the cell you are.

And this ground does not have collision, you can not walk on it. And it have very washed out, blurry textures.

 

LOD objects can disappear if you have a esm and a esp for a Mod and in a world cell in the esp you add a new "Visible when distant" object.

Then the game shows only the "Visible when distant" objects from the esp but not the ones from the esm.  And you will not see the far-object and the "real" object. Yes you stand in front of a city wall and there is no wall.

You can fix it by copy all "Visible when distant" objects in the esp.

 

And missing ground  in the world cell you are and from distance,  you can only have with Mods with esm.  And ONLY in new world spaces ! Not in changed Tamriel world cells.

Some Mod readmes tell you the Mod esm must be the first after the Oblivion.esm.  Then all is fine, you see the Mod world ground.

But if you load the Mod lower in Load order you will have no ground in the Mod World ( only trees, rocks, bushes, buildings,...)

You can fix it by changing the Mod esm to a esp  , OR you use TES4Gecko and change the world space in the Mod esm, it will get a Oblivion esm ID  and  is treated like a esp world.

 

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But in your game you have none of the above bugs.  You still have land but it is below water level.

Something was wrong with the Mod you created, but I don't know why the changes/bugs are still there after you delete the Mod.

 

And you say " I could not remove all mods - Oblivion refused to load when all were removed. "

Are you sure?  You can lod START your game? Then something is reallly bad in your game.

Of course you can not load an old save, you start a new game. ( You should always start a new game after you made "drastic" changes in game, add 1-2 Mods is ok. Removing a Mod can often cause problems, but you can load the save before you used the removed Mod. )

 

I would say; yes you should install the game again. But maybe someone else have a solution for your problem.

 

 

[DirtyOldMan]

Thanks. It was not exactly the answer I was hoping for, but it still helps.

 

I wish to specify. The cells losing their height data are any unmodified cell- not just in the distance (thanks for explaining that LODGen does NOTHING to existing cell data when creating the Long Distance views), but also when standing right next to one.  In cell 43, -9  I was standing on good old terra firma, looking out over the gaping hole where 43, -8 should be.

 

I ran my little test mod on that area. First I placed it at the end of the load order, to check the edit would solve the problem there. It did. I then moved the test mod up the load order, checking along the way, until it was first in the load order. Again, I had firm ground in 43, -8 all along the way. I remove that mod, the hole continues to appear. I removed the mod I was working on, the holes are still there. That is why I came here- how could a deactivated and replaced-by-rollback-to-before-the-modifications mod still affect the game?

 

Also, while generating the patch, I noticed that some of the cells were funky. 0,0 in particular- the land height on that cell went through the roof. And in 0,-31, it went through the floor.

 

I am thinking something external (a bad sector in the hard disk, or McAfee cutting in at the wrong time) might have affected the master, though the bit-count was good and I replaced the Oblivion.esm with one from a computer that is working.

[fejeena]

If you create mods use the CSE (Construction set extender). The base CS add too many bugs in your created Mod (esp/esm)

Typical bugs with only the CS: you only watch the races and have the argonian in your esp. You edit or create a interior cell and you have the Abandoned Mine in your esp. And if you work with world cell the CS often add the 0,0 cell in your esp.  I don't know how many argonians, Abandoned Mines and 0,0 cells I delete in my life during Mod cleaning.
 

 

Best use CSE 51. It can do all you need and it have less requirements than the newer versions.

Read my yellow Link below how you use CSE 51 with OBSE 21.

[DirtyOldMan]

I always use CSE- the one I got from your link, actually.

 

I found the problem, eventually. It was in a master esm for one of the mods installed- somoehow it lost 4 kbs of data. I replaced the esm from the back up files I keep and Voila, all cells had their heights and textures again.,

[fejeena]

Good to hear.

 

I had never heard of such a bug, so the bug had to be in your game files, it's always hard to find them.

[DirtyOldMan]

I ran into a similar problem again. This time it was corrupted Landscape meshes. Somehow, a bug messed up the landscape meshes.  I had reloaded the textures, but that did not solve it. The meshes did. Now not only does the area far outside the Imperial City look good, but the City Isle itself is no longer flat and empty-looking.

 

Thought I'd share that bit about the meshes. I did not realize that landscapes have more than textures.