Here's my scenario...

I recently installed UL:Snowdale along with the associated patch for Frostcrag Reborn and went wandering around in the north country to explore all the cool new things there. When looking south from certain angles, in the distance Frostcrag, Bruma, and the tower in the Imperial City are all bright yellow. Changing point of view slightly makes the yellow go away.

I've seen this behavior more rarely before when viewing the Imperial City from certain angles from a distance, but I've noticed it much more while wandering around in the north recently, perhaps because at higher altitudes there are less obstructions like trees to block the view.

I remember reading something about this in another thread where it was mentioned that this behavior was the result of some specular property being turned on which shouldn't, but I don't really remember the details or whether there was a way to fix it.

My questions are as follows:

1) Is there already a mod or .ini tweak available that fixes this type of behavior?

Barring that:

2) Which files specifically contain the "long distance" views of things like Bruma and the Imperial City?
3) What's the best way of editing these files to turn off the specular property in question here, assuming that's what is happening?

I'll admit I don't know as much about meshes and textures as I do other things, although if someone can point me in the right direction here about how I might be able to address this behavior it would be appreciated. Thanks.

The relevant portion of the RAEVWD readme lists what needs to be removed:


The good thing is, PyFFI now has a spell that can be used to perform the automatic cleanup of a _far.nif file so that it won't have any of these problems.

Thanks, Arthmoor. I think I'll give RAEVWD a try before trying to fix this myself.

RAEVWD won't fix anything if the problem is coming from meshes it doesn't supply, which is entirely possible with Frostcrag Reborn.

For Frostcrag, I believe the UOMP provides _far.NIF meshes for Frostcrag that will work (since the FR spire extensions are basically re-sized recycled meshes from it, with some odds and ends hanging off here and there. The only items that will not be affected are the dragon statue and the mage quarters [and please don't complain to me about floating supports in the VWD, those are unfixable :shakehead: ]).

For Bruma, you can either install RAEVWD city files or Better Cities, both provide VWD for Bruma. Better Cities also supplies a new _far.NIF for White Gold Tower, as well (redesigned, of course).

Oh, and out of curiosity, are you running bloom or HDR, because I'm running HDR and am not having any problems with yellow LOD (although it might just be the mods I've installed). And one more thing, I highly recommend that if you are going to install RAEVWD, you edit you ini as follows:

uGridDistantCount=25

to uGridDistantCount=20

It will seriously help your framerates with very little noticable change in the VWD graphics.

Thanks for your work on the patch file for Snowdale and Frostcrag Reborn. Yeah, I know you can't fix the floating supports due to engine limitations.

I'm using Better Cities already, although since it packs almost everything into .bsa files I wouldn't be surprised if something else I installed in my meshes directory is taking priority.

I'm using HDR.