I've decieded to reinstall Oblivion after upgrading my PC.

One of the main things I want to do is make it so there is grass everywhere, maxing out the draw distance (Dont worry my system can handle it)

Ive been looking through the oblivion ini and are these the only main commands?

iMinGrassSize
fGrassEndDistance
fGrassStartFadeDistance


Im currently using:
iMinGrassSize=1
fGrassEndDistance=200000.0000
fGrassStartFadeDistance=200000.0000

But I still get popin of grass and there still is not grass far out in the distance aswell.

I took two screenshots to compare, If i walk a little bit forward the rest just pops in all of a suddern:


http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/8805/71041832.jpg
http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/2860/28937616.jpg

Grass Will Render only has far has your UGrids Settings is set to and modifying the ugrids beyond 5 is a bad idea ..So the max distance for

fade distance 11, 000
end distance 12,000

We had a thread about the subject but it disappeared.

.

It's always going to end up popping in like that when it's that far out too.

Are you using any mods for grass in those screenshots? Looks extra diverse but it might just be the particular spot it was taken.

Why is anything above ugrids 5 bad?
Ive been playing with ugrids 11 ok....

uGridsToLoad should never be set above 5 because it introduces the "bouncing landscape bug" which if it catches you off guard will prevent you from being able to move, in addition to being highly irritating. There may be other issues with raising that value as well, not the least of which is that regardless of how powerful you think your PC is, the game will bog down to nothing with that much data loading.

If you've been following one of those tweak guides out there to set this stuff, the best advice would be to drop the ini file you're using and let the game make a fresh one. After the last official patch, the default ini is about as good as can be expected.

I really doubt that.
Surely there must be a way to balance it in the ini to get the maximum grass distance and making it playable?

There's nothing you can do, past a certain point it's always going to pop in like that. I'd love to be able to play with grass all around as far as the eye can see but I've tried all kinds of values and it will only go so far. And if you have ugrids at 11 and it's still limited like that, there must be some hard limit to it.

Suit yourself, but the collective experience on the matter says the default ini is fairly well optimized and messing with it rarely improves things. You can easily do more harm to the game than good by following outdated tweak guides that came out in 2006 and haven't been updated since then.

If you want to risk the bouncing landscape bug and whatever other problems come from doing that, that's your choice. You can push the grass as far as you want, but you've already seen that it isn't helping one bit to make it render past where the engine wants to render it. It also will not render in LOD, ever, the system simply doesn't support that.

Also, I have uGrids at 5, and grass distance set to some absurdly high value, and it probably goes out as far as it does in the second screenshot of the original post. So I could be wrong but I'm going to say that increasing uGrids higher than 5 doesn't help when it comes to drawing grass at farther distances. There really does seem to be some hard limit. I haven't messed with it in a while but I remember spending time tweaking it and coming to the conclusion that it was only going to go so far.

You'll get better looking results by making sure your start fade distance is closer than your end distance for the grass, and set it all much lower. This is less pretty at distance but eliminates pop-in of grass. Mine looks like this (taken from Wrye Bash ini edits):

fGrassEndDistance=5000.0000
fGrassStartFadeDistance=4000.0000

Agree about ugrids above 5 in Oblivion. It is problematic.

Just to confuse things it was apparently fixed for FO3 and FONV as I run is set to 9 in both with no issues. YMMV.

Don't touch this setting!:

uGridsToLoad=5

However, you can fiddle with the default falue of:

uExterior Cell Buffer=36

I have mine at 72, but you can probably try double that.

Note I also have:

iPreloadSizeLimit=268435456;256MB * 1024 * 1024

Increasing the exterior cell buffer will result in longer loading times, though, and I don't think it affects grass in any way. I'm really not sure what the benefit is besides the game spending more time loading things, I've never figured out what positive things it does, maybe it's good if you're running really quickly through the wilderness and your hard drive can keep up, I don't know. And I haven't heard about increasing iPreloadSizeLimit having any effect on the game, I know when I tried it I couldn't notice any difference. All of these tweaks I've seen passed along from that one tweak guide didn't seem to do much when I tried them originally, and I don't think I've heard anyone explain any benefits since then. Sorry, heh

Increasing iPreloadSizeLimit is necessary because of the number of mods that I usually play with (maxed).
This setting was also referred to by dev_akm in an FCOM tweak guide.

I am also using OSR with dedicated 1024MB heap replacement so I don't know if that setting has any considerable effect now.

About the uExterior Cell Buffer, it loads more cells around you.
One example: you look down from far away, say from a hill, and spot NPCs doing their stuff at a considerable distance.

With the default value of 36 you could spot NPCs with the maximum distance you set them to appear (menu -> video settings) but they stand still because they are on cells not yet loaded.

I've seen road travellers pretty far away, I'm not sure if I had it at 72 at the time though, but since switching it back to 36 I can't remember any time I've seen an NPC standing still far away, only ones nearby who have AI issues because of too many NPCs loading. I'll switch it to 72 and see if I notice more NPCs in the distance, but I always thought there were other values in the ini that cover that. Like, I can remember increasing the distance for light sources really far, and I assumed there was a similar value for NPCs somewhere, I don't know.

It seems that, aside from that light setting, most everything I've tried to modify in the ini has no effect. Shadows don't draw beyond a certain distance, I don't know what the Specular or EnvMap values would affect (I mean, I get based on the name what they would affect, but does changing them actually do anything?), and I have no idea what changing any of the LOD values (objects, actors, trees, items) does. Basically I don't trust the ini, haha.

Not to hype anything but I know that Oblivion can have NIFs that can fade in and out the triangles from a set distance; the problem though is that I don't know how it's done... But I do know it's possible since I have a hair mesh I tried to convert that somehow does this and I'm trying to get rid of that effect.

Raising the cell buffer size does nothing unless you also raise the uGridsToLoad, which of course you don't ever want to do. This is the problem with trusting tweak guides written by people who say they understand it's function but have no concrete way of testing it. The end result is usually that you edit a setting and it does absolutely nothing, so you may as well not bother.

Raising iPreloadSizeLimit is not recommended in any situation, because it's one of the few things that does something. That something ranges from drastic increases in load times to running yourself out of memory for no good reason. You'll get FAR better mileage leaving that one alone as well and instead using OSR with LAA and the heap size set to 1024. This one I know from personal experience because I've tried iPreloadSizeLimit only to curse the game for taking ages to do anything productive and then crashing because it's out of memory. OSR + LAA was the only true solution and it works perfectly with a big load order. The drawback of course is you need a 64 bit OS and at least 6GB of physical RAM to take real advantage of it.

4 gig works good too. Personal experience.

Yeah, I've got 4gb and I've only seen Oblivion go over 2gb once, when it went up to 2.6 or something, with the patch applied of course. Why is 6gb necessary?

Also, anything conclusive about patching obse_loader.exe? I had patched it, but then upgraded to a newer version of OBSE and haven't patched it again, but I've noticed no real difference in my game. Though I imagine it'd be hard to tell even if there was some effect, so I'm going to guess there's no conclusive evidence it improves anything. Might as well do it since it doesn't hurt anything, of course.

You don't have to patch obse_loader since it's merely used to inject the dll. It does no harm either.

The reason I say 6GB is because using LAA allows a 32bit program to consume up to 4GB. If you only have 4GB, your OS wants some of that. Therefore you won't generally see the advantage unless you're a stickler for clean boots. 6GB and up allows the OS to roam free while having little to no impact on what the game wants for itself. Me, I have 8GB, so I don't run into issues with memory anymore when playing.

There's conflicting reports that patching the obse_loader.exe helps and doesn't help. So who knows. Some people swear that LAA does nothing unless the patch it, others swear it's useless. The one thing that's absolutely certain is that you have to patch Oblivion.exe or it's definitely pointless. Patching the obse_loader.exe file is harmless, so even if it's not accomplishing anything, it's not hurting anything either.

So what you're saying is that with my 4gb the OS is usually going to take up enough memory that what's left for Oblivion is not much more than the original amount of memory the game would run into problems at without LAA, ~2gb? Perhaps I misunderstand what you're saying or what LAA accomplishes, but that's how I'm understanding it, and it makes sense. Technically in my case right after rebooting I can play Oblivion with at least two-thirds of my 4gb free, but that's an ideal condition.

With uExterior Cell Buffer=36 I can spot distant NPCs that stand still . They suddenly "awake" when I walk towards them at minimum distance.
Increasing it allows me to see them doing their stuff without any AI mod, at longer distances. A value of 72 is enough to see the max distance set with the menu -> video -> actor distance option.

I've been using 4GB memory and yet to crash my game due to prolonged play-through (4+ hours) - crashes usually come from mods that make some nasty edit.
iPreloadSize is setup like that since more than a year ago, even before OSR and 4GB patcher. To each their own setup I guess :happy:

Speaking of nasty edits, I've got this giant landscape tear between Bravil and Leyawiin, http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/194608-huge-landscape-tear/, and I was going to make a new post about it with load order, etc. but smartly decided to test some more. It's weird because I've been pretty opposed to adding/changing any land or buildings or anything outside of the forts this game (I'll do UL later). Could be something WAC did. Anyway hooray for not cluttering up the forum index, when I can just clutter up this thread which has strayed from its original mission. But walking through that tear, which had me drop down into water only to magically appear at the top of the hill in front of me after traveling forward in the water a bit, I was just shocked the game didn't crash. You'd think it would have taken advantage of the opportunity

@palidoo; its definitely not related to Better Cities. You know, there is an ImpeREAL Forts thread on here, and it'd be nice if you could tell me that something has a rather major conflict with Unique Forts that hasn't been discovered yet.