Hi. I have created a new worldspace (The second one, for some reason the first one has the holes problem in reverse and there are 'spots' of land! http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1083873-new-worldspace-sections-missing/).

Anyway, things are going fine and a small town is growing up. The problem if it can be called that, is when I want to test the mod. Don't get me wrong, it starts and does exactly what its meant to do, however, the distance that can be viewed in game is rather small, presumably because Iv done nothing at all with LOD so far.

However, Iv read through the Wiki article on this and it seems that the best thing is to deal with the LOD stuff when you have placed pretty much everything in the game, and that wont be the case for some considerable time. Is there a quick and simple way to update the LOD on a temporary basis during testing, and then do the final LOD creation when everything is finished?

I might have this all wrong, but it seems pointless to deal with the LOD and then add a whole bunch of new stuff to a town because the new stuff will not appear until the LOD is updated, but following the Wiki article it appears that this will take a long time, too long to do every time you want to test something.

So far I have only generated a small region of trees and build a small town. Id like to see this properly from a sensible distance, but I don't want to spend ages sorting out the LOD each time I test it.

Advice or comments anyone?

Cheers

MVK

You could use http://projectmanager.f2s.com/morrowind/Home.php to quickly generate lod textures and object lod. It has an option to make everything VWD that has a _far nif, so you don't even need to check the vwd flag on the meshes in the CS. It has a command line interface, but you could make two batch files to make generation of textures and object lod a matter of two double clicks.

For generating the lod meshes you'd need to use the CS, but it doesn't take very long if your worldspace isn't huge and you probably don't need to constantly update the mesh. Actually you don't need to update the textures constantly either most likely.

EDIT: TES4Edit has an option to generate object lod as well for all meshes with a _far nif. There is also http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15781, which is the same thing as the option you have in TES4Edit afaik, only as a separate program.

Cheers Phitt, Ill look at those links.

MVK

Generating LOD doesn't take that long once you're familiar with the process. I have a 7x7 cell world space with thousands of trees/rocks/buildings and regenerating the LOD meshes, textures, and far nifs only takes me about half an hour on my old rig. Just make sure you delete all of the old LOD data before regenerating it: the CS won't regenerate some files if it finds existing ones.

I typically regenerate LOD data every couple thousand references just to see how it looks and to get an idea what the final release will look like.

Getting to know how the process works and what files are generated and where they go is useful to know in any case, so doing it a few times will quickly consolidate that knowledge for you.

Thanks Phitt. The TES4qLOD programs works fine. I'm not worried about command lines so that suited me down to the ground.

Magician: Having just done this for the first time I'm actually shocked how fast TES4qLOD actually is. I have a fairly large worldspace and it was handled in a couple of minutes! Now I know how to do this Ill be able to do it again quickly when Iv made any large changes that I want to check.

Cheers all

MVK