Increasing Construction Set Exterior Cell View Distance

[Dollparts]

Okay, haloo! I am Dollparts and this is a quick tip/tutorial on how increase the number of exterior cells the render window loads in the Construction Set.

I have been working on a new landscape mod recently, I won't shamelessly plug my mod, but needless to say it is a massive external area. I would frequently say to myself, "I wish I could view more cells than the render window actually displays". I found a solution. Here is what I did:

By default, the Construction Set loads an area of 5x5 exterior cells. Meaning it will load 25 external cells in the immediate view of the render window. So if you were to load an exterior and zoom all the way out, you would see something like this:

This is an image of the area occupied by my mod, Cherry Brooke Grove, fully zoomed out to show the full extent of the exterior cells loaded upon selecting, and loading the exterior area. The cell I selected and loaded is located at -21,27 and is the center of the 5x5 grid. Depicted below as the 'X' in the center of the grid.

1 1 1 1 1

2 2 2 2 2

3 3 (x) 3 3

4 4 4 4 4

5 5 5 5 5

*As a tip, when in the render window, hitting the 'B' key will enable those little yellow and black dotted lines indicating the size/boundries of each individual cell.*

Therefore when I load my cell, located at -21,27, the Construction set will load in total 25 cells in a square around my location at -21,27. For some purposes that might be sufficient but for others it clearly is not enough when you find yourself trying to view on a larger scope the area you are working with, whatever your modding purposes may be.

Now, if you were to open up your Construction Set ini, making a backup of it first before you tinker around with it of course, and find the line uGridsToLoad you can change how many cells are loaded. Make sure the Construction Set is not running before you tinker okay? By default the value is set to 5, hence the 5x5 grid or 25 cells. You can change that value to something a bit larger to reach the desired effect we are after. Here is where it gets tricky however.

I, out of curiosity, set the value to 100. Ignorant to the fact that the Construction Set would try to load a 100x100 grid. That is 10,000 cells. Obviously that is an extremely large area and after several minutes of my Construction Set "Not Responding" the bloody thing crashed to desktop. "Blood hell you stupid girl!" Was what ran through my mind. Okay.. it wasn't as G-rated as that but that's not the point. <.<

After some trial and error I found, for my machine, a value of 17 worked wonders for me however for this tutorial we will use something a little smaller to ensure that everyone, from low performance machines to very high performance machines can utilize this. So let's go with a value of 11. Change uGridsToLoad=5 to uGridsToLoad=11. Now save the ini and launch the Construction Set.

For whatever reason the ini will only accept an odd number so if you were to change the value to 10 or 12 it would automatically be rounded up to the next odd. So, 11 or 13. Since we went with 11 we are fine.

Again, using my mod (Cherry Brooke Grove) I loaded up the same cell - Located at -21,27. Zooming out to the max distance you can so that every cell loaded is visible you should see something like this:

A 11x11 grid of 121 cells with -21,27 being at the center of it.

At this point, as you can see from the image above, we have quite a large area loaded in the render window. 121 cells to be specific. This probably is only really useful if you need to view a large area when creating an exterior for your modding purposes, making world spaces, or just seeing what is around the cells you are working with so you know what is where. I do not recommend running with your Construction Set ini's uGridsToLoad value set higher than 11 because a few people I have discussed this with did notice performance changes with their machines, such as their fan kicking in and computer temperatures increasing. It is a lot to load and this is perhaps why by default the value is set to 5. Nevertheless, it can come in handy for those moments when you need to look at a large area, such as what I required when I was viewing my 39 cells large landscape.

I hope this tutorial thingymajig has been helpful and made sense. Feel free to leave comments in this thread and discuss this topic. To the best of my knowledge this information is correct but I have been wrong so if anyone finds anything to be in error or untrue please let me know and I will correct it ASAP.

My name is Dollparts and thank you for reading my little turotial.

In the infamous words of Tigger...

TTFN

Edited June 14, 2011 by Dollparts

[donnato]

Nicely done...thank you sis...

[_echo]

Should add a note about memory usage. Loading 11x11 requires a LOT of RAM.

[DsoS]

Very well done Dolly.

Told you that you could do it

[therealneraverine]

Thats very useful for editting exterior locations. I liked how conversational the tutorial was.