I'm still in the early stages of experimenting with distant terrain. As I mentioned in my previous problem (which CardinalSims very kindly solved for me), I wanted to create one which was perfectly flat. I have adapted Hydrangea's tutorial in order to make a really simple mesh (plane with a square hole in it), that has a texture on it.

In case it's relevant, this is my mesh and the square hole should accommodate a small world. The texture will be changed later, I know it looks bad:



When I try to import the mesh into TSRW (cloning from a custom DT I downloaded), I get the error message "Value was either too large or too small for a Ulnt16".

I'm pretty sure I'm just being dense and my mesh is way too small or something, but Hydrangea was able to clone a similar size mesh from China DT without any issues so I'm a bit confused.

How can I successfully turn my mesh into DT, ideally without having to install World Adventures for the China DT?

Update: I realised my new mesh had far more vectors and faces than the mesh it was replacing, so I un-subdivided in Blender to bring it down to a more acceptable level.

Now I get a new error message telling me "Object reference not set to an instance of an object", which implies I might have fixed the first issue but there's still an underlying one.

I would suggest trying a non-CC terrain as your clone, as all kinds of unsuspecting gremlins can come about from using files that have already been modified. 'TerrainDistant' should be Sunset Valley's.
If you're importing as .wso like in the tutorial, try importing as .obj instead (or vice versa).

As an aside, was there a reason the mesh was subdivided to begin with? Surely a perfectly flat mesh only needs about 8 faces to make that shape.

I decided to install WA and clone from the China terrain. Still no success but I have work today so won't be able to fiddle with it until later.

I seem to not have the option to export the file to .wso as Blender can't do it and it won't open in Milkshape (I have the free trial; maybe that's the issue?). I can theoretically export to .s3m2b from Blender but in practice this doesn't actually save the file anywhere, it just says it's been saved. I can import .s3m2b to Blender without issues.

The issues are twofold: struggling to export to desired formats, plus the object reference errors TSRW is still throwing up.

Thank you so much for your help and advice and I'll see if I can make any changes at all that may fix my problem.




Lack of common sense on my part.

It seems like this is a CAW thing? Might change the title to include that it's CAW, or move it to CAW to attract attention of the CAW guys?

Thank you for the suggestion, I've updated the title. Not sure how to move it to CAW though - possibly a job for the moderators?

Just as an update on this, it looks like the WA DTs are giving me exactly the same issues as the Sunset Valley DT did (which I forgot to mention in the OP as I'd put it down to Sunset Valley DT being notoriously awkward) - unhandled exceptions, objects not set to object references and so on. I can't even import them to TSRW, let alone mess with their files and stuff. Have tried cloning from both S3OC and TSRW but nothing is working. Tried a different version of TSRW and that didn't work either.

CC terrains open in TSRW but I can't import my .obj file and Milkshape can't load any object more complex than the default Blender cube.

I don't want to give up but it's not looking too great if I can't even get myself started.

At the end of the day, distant terrain are just big objects. Any correct object creation steps will work for a DT, though TSRW is very crash-y with these files so it may require a bit of brute force.

What may be happening here, based on your previous post, is that a lot of the different tools and plugins you picked up may be stepping on each other's toes
If you aren't following a tutorial to the letter, you may be missing important steps required for what you're substituting or you may even be working with formats that aren't compatible with the software you're trying to use them with.

.s3m2b for example, is Cmomoney's format for working between S3PE and a very old version of Blender. It is designed for a very specific workflow, and it's also unfortunately very outdated. It still has some utility, but is incompatible with a lot of objects and isn't designed with TSRW in mind.
Meanwhile, Hydrangea's steps are for Milkshape and TSRW's .wso format.
To mix and match isn't always valid, at least until you're more familiar with the how's and why's of every option.

Here are some steps that worked for me:

• In TSRW version 2.0.86, Create New Project, change the dropdown under Browse to .package - I used the China DT included with Hydrangea's set up file.
• In the Mesh tab, export and change the dropdown to .obj, named the file 'reference'.
• In Blender 2.93, import Wavefront Object - it may look like nothing imported, but this mesh is big. If you have a keyboard with a number pad, press 7 to go top-down orthographic and zoom out.
• Add menu > Plane. Switch to Edit Mode, A to select all, press S and type 1000 to scale by a thousand, click to confirm. Press S again and manually scale again with the mouse to be the size of the DT.
• Press I to Inset Faces, line it up with the existing hole (or smaller, depending on the size of the world you're making- you may have to fight TSRW for a while to export references for other sizes of world). Delete the inner face, select all, CTRL T to triangulate. A crisp 8 faces total. You can delete the reference now.
• Switch to Object Mode, select the plane, Export > Wavefront Object. Very important step here, to resolve the import error- in the export options, tick Selection Only and as OBJ Groups and untick as OBJ Objects.
  
• This successfully imported back into TSRW. Replace the material as in HC's tutorial. It'd be great to be able to preview it at all, but it's simply too far out of bounds- but the info in the Mesh tab seemed correct.

For additional understanding, it's not usually this easy to cut out Milkshape and just go between Blender like this. More complex objects usually require MS at some point. Distant Terrain have no bone assignments and only one group to work with, so it's fine to work with .obj the whole time.
I can take screenshots of any steps if I summarised too much.

Hydrangea's China DT is opening for me in a way the game file version isn't, but I keep getting "outside the bounds of the array" errors when I try and import the final mesh to TSRW.

I ran a test by re-exporting the terrain exactly as I found it and trying to import it back into TSRW but this has also given me the same error. TSRW doesn't seem to like me importing at all, even when nothing's been changed. I ticked / unticked the boxes I was supposed to.

I'm running 2.0.88 because I can't find where to download .86, but I don't know if that's the error.

Thank you for taking so much time to try to help me, by the way!