Some time ago I downloaded and used TES4LODGen after hearing a lot of praise about it. I didn't reeeeally know what it did - I still don't - but I trust this community enough to use it anyway.

Now I'm getting a bit more curious about it though. The description says it's a LOD generator, does that mean I can discard all LOD files that mods supply with themselves? Also, if someone could give me a little more in-depth explanation of it or point me in the direction of one, it'd be much appreciated.

It regenerates the files found in Data\DistantLOD, so if you use TES4LODGen, never install DistantLOD files from mods. It works by finding every single mesh with a corresponding *_far.nif file. Each time that mesh is placed in the game-world, TES4LODGen will ensure that the _far.nif file will appear Visible When Distant (VWD) by writing its location to the files in the DistantLOD folder. So you still need any meshes and textures relating to LOD, you just don't need to install DistantLOD files (*.lod).

As far as I'm aware, TES4LODGEN generates distant land files from all the mods in your data structure. Those files then appear in game, in the distant land - so geography and structures added by mods now show up in the ingame distance, rather than the vanilla distant land.

DO NOT DELETE the lod files provided by mods; these are what TES4LODGEN uses to generate the files. If you've ever add more mods, and want to update your distant land, you'll still need the original files; or the generator will not re-generate them with your new set-up.

As an example; you might download and install Arthmoor's brilliant RAEVWD mod - which adds distant land files for many buildings, large rocks, bridges and the like that don't show up ingame. simply adding them to your data files wouldn't add them ingame; Oblivion is still reading the vanilla distant land data. TES4LODGEN s needed to update that data, using the files provided by Artmoor; so that you can now see all the things provided by the mod in distant land.

Hope that helps (and is correct...)

You don't quite have it right. It does nothing to the land itself, only VWD (viewable when distant) objects on it.



That's not true. TES4LODGen makes all those original files obsolete, you don't need them at all. Read display name's post, he's got it right. If a mod has a _far.nif file, then TES4LODGen will update the files in the DistantLOD folder so that it will appear in game. The original DistantLOD files are not longer needed and can in fact screw up you other objects in your game if you install them. Leave all of that to TES4LODGen.



It's not an LOD generator, it's a VWD generator. There's a difference, though the two terms are quite often used interchangeably which can cause confusion. So no, you can't get rid of the LOD files that other mods supply, but you can discard anything they add to the DistantLOD folder.

This is why it would have been nice for Bethesda to maintain consistency on what they call it. It's in the CS as "Visible when distant" but in the folder structure as "DistantLOD" and then they have landscape using "LOD" as well. Would have been better to name the folder VWDObjects or something.

All further compounded by the utility that came later being named tes4lodgen when it's only dealing with VWD objects

If we ever do get a tool to generate actual landscape LOD meshes based on load order, I'll be in heaven.

Reading this and many other threads I come to the conclusion that I can delete distantlod\*.lod when making bain packages. But what about the distantlod\*.cmp files? Can they be deleted too? I use TES4LODGen and I rebuild my original BSA. Can I safely remove the distantlod\*.cmp in Oblivion - Meshes.BSA?

What is a .CMP and what does it do? Have not been able to find any usefull info about this mysterious file type yet.

Yes, you can drop the entire DistantLOD folder from your custom BSA and let tes4lodgen generate those files loose.

I don't think anyone has ever really looked into what the *.cmp files actually do, but they're part of the VWD setup. ElminsterAU probably has some idea though.

So tes4lodgen doesn't generate land for expansion stuff like Elsweyr or Hammerfell? How do you fix the distant land LOD differences (from vanilla), then?

You have to use the CS and do it the hard way. There are no 3rd party utilities available for generating landscape LOD meshes.

This, I assume, is why there are all those UL patches?

I've always been a bit confused about the LOD thing, this seems to have cleared it up.

No. Most UL patches are to fix conflicting changes to the same cell (i.e., moving a house along the x, y or z-axis a bit so that it is not floating over the land modified by a certain UL.) They have nothing to do with LOD. There are a few patches for the usage of multiple ULs that contain "merged" LOD NIFs, actual meshes with changes from multiple UL mods. That's about it.

Should an existing DistantLOD directory be deleted before running TES4LODGen? I re-run this periodically (after installing or removing mods) and I usually delete the existing directory so that I can be sure that everything is regenerated based on what I currently have installed. Is this a good idea?

I don't. I thought that we just, in the Bash thread, determined it overwrote everything.

I wasn't sure if it did or not. I was also concerned about having residuals when I uninstalled something. If it wipes the entire directory before it starts, then that's fine. But if it only overwrites files, then I may have files left over from an uninstall. I guess I could check the file dates... duh!

Edit: That was a tired comment...