Building Large Worldspaces - Issues: possible workaround

[Zehryo]

Ok, I was starting to feel juuuust a bit frustrated.....

I really want to build a huge worldspace to set the TES world on a more realistic scale. Now.

It's well known that CS crashes whenever you go any further than 4x4 sections, which is actually a modest size, to me.

I've tried using a third party software to....dont laugh please.....set the LAA flag in CS so that it's allowed to go beyond the limit of 2GBs memory usage. Well, didnt work.

Now I might have found a working solution for big worldspaces, but I'm still testing it. I'll edit this post if it'll work.

It's based on a hint I've read on uespwiki about converting the initial .esp to .esm with Gecko, without any heightmap loaded, just the bare file. Then re-opening this file in CS as .esm and adding the heightmaps in batches and saving each batch as a separate .esp. Once the map building work is over, again through Gecko, merge the plugins between them and then merge the new .esp to the .esm. This way we'll have a .esm containing the whole map and we'll be able to open this very large file with CS without crashes.

I've noticed, though, that loading heightmaps in separate plugins and then merging the .esp files can give tears in the terrain. The best thing to do is to load the 1024x1024 slices in batches keeping track of the coordinates.

I've managed to make a 8x8 map by uploading it in two batches of 32 elements. Doing this I've got just a minimal tear along the Y axis throught the 0-0 cell. Knowing where the tear could happen makes corrections just a matter of scroll-n-click.

If this thing works as intended up to having a perfectly working map, I'll edit this post with a more detailed walkthrough.

ANYWAY!!!!

Anybody who can tell me why I cant see the map I've created, when I hit F4 ingame? I see my character-pointer and I can scroll around, but the map is totally blank. I've read about a bug in CS not writing the map's path in the right way, which can be solved through a hex editor to open the .esm/.esp file and manually modify it. But I couldnt find that damn string!! >.<

Now, why doesnt CS embed the map inside the .esp/.esm file? Ok, maybe it's a pointless question, since we're talking about CS.

I've read the tutorial here on TESA, but it doesnt cover any possible bug and seems to take everything for granted......any particular expedient that I missed, beside saving the image as a square shaped DXT1 DDS file with no mipmaps?

The CS shows it in the file preview, when I load it up, but then.....I get nothing, in game!! =p