You were right, it does re-focus on the install button. I have re-installed it dozens of times. If the dog was near enough I'd kick him but I'd settle for any Bethesda programmer who worked on the CK, who would earn a kick for every muck up!!

Anyway, on to the next step.

Well unfortunately once complete I went into the game and typed "cow mesogea 0,0" appeared in the game world and damn if it doesnt work!!!!! It works ok, I just saw Mesogea in Skyrim, only numerous times bigger. To test the LOD over distance I decided to go "cow mesogea -200,-20" and saw the sea at the farthest southern shore, well almost bar another thirty or so cells. Yes LOD appears there too. I am just producing a sample movie to show that a 512x512 worldspace can be made with L3dt (which I intend to buy now when the trial runs out), TESAnnwyn and Oscape. There is a long way to go yet as we need something that will produce LOD trees, buildings and the like, but anyway, this shows there is a beginning and that 3rd party tools, unless Bethesda care about TESVI, are the way to go.

There are disappearing distant objects issues, as you will see mountains in the far distance fade out when looked directly at. Odd indeed, because looking obliquely at them they re-appear. The video will show what I mean. That may be an ini setting or likewise, or it may be something else (suspicion is an ini issue). However main points are:

L3dt can make a viable map, with practice, its cheap and help is available here to get over the basics.

TesAnnwyn can port a heightmap to a Skyrim esp.

TesGecko can create a master file for Skyrim from an esp.

Oscape can produce LOD meshes and ground textures (but needs polishing - has the possibility of being a real powerhouse of a tool if it can do distant trees, buildings and the like)

The Bethesda tools are $hizer. (have the possibility of being all singing, all dancing but for a bit of effort and commitment from B.)

yep, I delete all the LOD stuff before I opened the CK.

I have the LOD terrain meshes generating fine, the LOD terrain textures look good from far away, but I have strange lighting issues (very dark shadows) on the mid-range landscape, LOD objects are generating, but the textures are not being mapped properly to most of the LOD objects (in the first screenshot, the farmhouse is correct, but the silo and the castle in the second screenshot are borked). This problem existed in the GECK as well, so I'm assuming it's the same or a related bug. Haven't started on trees, yet, but I'm going to be a cynic and assume that we're going to have the same problems with LOD trees that we've had since forever.

http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/lodTest02a.jpg
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/lodTest02b.jpg
http://www.truancyfactory.com/images/misc/lodTest02c.jpg

Edit: All of this is generated in the CK without using any external applications.

Edit 2: Remember to grab the LOD object texture atlas from Source\DDSTextures\Terrain\name of your worldspace\Objects and put them in the Data\Textures\Terrain\name of your worldspace\Objects folder to avoid the purple texture bug. It works the same as FO3.

hmmm...okay thats weird. Must be just me that's having the problem with LOD textures only generating once....

On my tests I also get the darkness in the mid range....you're not alone there.


woot....I found my problem. It was generating textures in that steamapps\common\Source\DDSTextures\Terrain folder, those I weren't deleting (since I didn't know they were there).

I havent the time to test, but it seems like that was the problem.

I'm getting the same darkness issue at different ranges; appears cell-based, not actual distance based though. Makes me wonder if maybe it's a lighting issue with the LOD meshes, not an issue with the textures themselves...
Example: http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/1027/screenshot5od.jpg, http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/2471/screenshot6wm.jpg
For some reason, even when I use oscape to generate the textures, I get the purple texture error. Not sure what's going on with that, but it means I can't really confirm whether its the colors, the normals, or the mesh...
The darkness at range isn't really at range; its just certain cells. TheMagician's worldspace is too small to see the full effect.

edit: just generated LOD colours as .png's in Oscape and looked through them; looks like some are actually being generated black. no idea why this would be.

That being said, I don't think the CK's tools are quite as broken as they seemed, given TheMagician's success - they just start to break down quickly at larger sized worlds (which of course still isn't excusable...)

I think you guys are really close to having a workable solution, all done in, what, one week? Super impressive.

It's not a bug, that is actually the limit of any LOD display. It was the same in Oblivion, but the distant fog was 100% thick eventually so you never saw it. In Skyrim the fog is far thinner, you look a lot further in the distance. In the vanilla game the "limit" of the LOD display from your position isn't obvious because you surrounded by mountains practically anywhere. The "border land" does appear at the sides of your screen because of the way the 3D engine works, while it doesn't show in the middle.

My suggestion is to implement weather types with a very thick fog as it approaches the LOD display limit.

Does anyone know if the 'black areas' on the LOD textures are http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php/Landscape_LOD_Tutorial#The_Black_Texture_Bug? I never had this problem with Oblivion, but maybe it's the same thing.

If the black areas are completely square, then perhaps. If it's just an odd shadow, your normal maps are messed up.

ok so i am new at modding with skyrim and didint really start until the CK came out. here is what i am trying to do below:

i am creating a mod that basically adds a city to the game, much like solitude and whiterun. It also has a castle for the player to call home and by the time i am done i want to also include quests and interaction with the townfolk. i am putting alot of attention to detail with this game. The castle has a courtyard with waterfalls and flora....

The contemplation i am having with how far I have come is whether or not to create this city, in its own separate world space, and if i do could it be possible with how the town is set up? the player is allowed to walk along the castle walls which allows him to look over on the outside. if it was a separate worldspace could i set up LOD to display on the outside of the wall? or would i have to go through the effort to make the outside of the worldspace look exactly as it is in Tamriel? is there a way to copy the height map from the location my mod is at in tamriel and copy it to my new worldspace?

Also, would it even improve on performance if i put it in a seperate world space versus keeping it free roam with the tamriel worldspace?

I have been messing with how to do LOD and it is to my understanding that the height mapping feature (generating LOD) is broken and needs work in the creation kit so I have used Oscape 2 to do that which is no issue.

now the other questions i have with this is.... Worldspace .LOD file: what do i do with it once i have it? how do i get the LOD to display for the world i create? how do i flag that it inherits the terrain LOD?

How can i make this world match up as best as possible with its counterpart in the tamriel worldspace?

Alright, figured out the black texture issue.

If you open up the generated textures in photoshop (need the .dds plug-in first) you'll notice only one chunk of the image actually has texture on it; the rest is black. By hand I went back and manually filled in each image (took way too long), and now they're all looking good. http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/4097/screenshot8im.jpg. I'm not sure why the CK only half-way generated the texture maps. Did anyone have success with the CK generating textures without the black parts?

That python script might be fixing that automagically - if so, that would be way easier than what I've done.

As you can see, there's still an issue with it; the LOD textures are considerably darker than the non-LOD. Maegfaer, is this the normal map issue you're talking about?

No that's not a normal map issue. Seems like it's the good old black texture bug again.

I recommend using the PNG trick with Oscape, or tes4qlod for your LOD textures for now. Read about them earlier in the thread (or in the previous one).

Maegfaer, it actually was the normal maps - mainly the lack of them! Looks like i forgot to actually stick my normals generated in Oscape into my tex folder... The PNG trick with Oscape probably would accomplish the same thing as my manual editing, but since over half of my Oscape generated colours were completely black, I didn't try it. Might be worth a go, though. Tes4qlod generated by 8s, 16s, and 32 just fine, but the 4s were turning up purple. No idea why that was - hence why I had to go back to CK generated textures for the 4s.


Anyways, my island is now fully working.
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5646/screenshot9aw.jpg

Thanks for all your work on this everyone.

Can you check if the 4's have mipmaps? If they don't, then I suspect that is the issue. Try resaving the DDS with mipmaps enabled, see if it shows up then.

Well im pleased to report that the region generator is ralatively bug-free and functions as it is expected to, it also seems a lot faster than oblivions generator. The main bug i found, is that the density controler for terrain textures seems to change the opacity of the texture, rather than the chance of it appearing at each point of the terrain, which results in a smudgy mess.

Here is a little screenshot of a region generated in the CK
NOTE: this is all generated, nothing was done by hand.
http://i.imgur.com/nQiGn.jpg

Looks excellent, that's good news about the region editor. That would have been the deal breaker.

Does tes4qlod work in Skyrim? Has anyone tried using it for distant objects such as trees and buildings?

So I've followed the instructions to the dot.. yet whenever I try to import my .raw file in the heightmap editor, the application crashes, without fail. Any hints?

Edit: Also, I haven't seen any instance of the .dds files people keep mentioning.. Are they created by Osacpe?

Woot! Textures are generating now.

I am getting a black line bug:

http://tesalliance.org/forums/uploads/1329007078/gallery_108_44_409441.jpg

It does seems like each cell has a black border around it.....any suggestions?



The textures do not have that black line. On a previous texture gneration I dfid have the 'half black' textures problem, but re-generating fixed it.

EDIT: Does anyone know what to do for the Object LOD? We have to place the textures in that Source folder.....?

bethesda, i am still dissappoint.....

Dont import your RAW to the CK directly, use TESAnnwyn to make it into a plugin first, then convert the esp to an esm using TESGecko.

Update on the LOD: This is a youtube video, sorry for the Sepia tone to it, a muck up in Windows Live movie maker. You dont need colour because there are no coloured textures. The video shows LOD for various areas of Mesogea, including the deep south which shows LOD renders over 16x16 quads as Maegfaer pointed out.

You can see the issue with LOD fading out in a weird way as the mountains seem to ripple out of view then ripple back in again, odd.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FnNK4jMkDk

Very nice mate!


Read this?

ok so i am having issues with my mod. i created a worldspace that is basically a city on top of an existing mountain in skyrim. i followed all the instructions to create the worldspace and the LOD, but when i try to test it out in game, anytime i even get near the mountain the game crashes.

here is a link to info on what ive done so far: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1346455-new-world-space-using-lod-of-tamriel/

Can anyone help?

Sorry for the late reply here in this thread, but I found it during weekend only. I announced some weeks ago a GUI for TESAnnwyn in http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1311730-release-tesannwyn-and-tes4qlod-for-skyrim/page__view__findpost__p__20058485, and it is almost finished. I also made 2 pictures of the http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/images/41447-1-1329062673.png and http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/images/41447-2-1329062674.pngGUI tab. Hope that it is still of use....


With TESAnnwyn it is possible to use a fixed formID via the -F option (see also picture above), if not a random number based on the system time is used.

It's all in the tutorial link I sent you for FO3: http://www.truancyfactory.com/tutorials/fallout3/fallout_lod.html#lodObjects. The folder has a different name (TGATextures vs textures TGA), but it is the same process: unpack the LOD textures, convert them to .tga, put them in the right folders, generate and voila. Problem is: there is still a UV mapping problem with the texture atlas it produces. We had that problem in FO3, too. Some objects render okay, others the textures don't map properly.