[luke trodden]

Wilde,

You have two sets of things I've never messed with:

iSafeZoneX=15
iSafeZoneY=15
iSafeZoneXWide=15
iSafeZoneYWide=15

I have no idea what these do, the defaults are 20 for each one.

fLODMultActors=10.0000
fLODMultItems=10.0000
fLODMultObjects=10.0000

Unlikely these have anything to do with it, but I'm curious as to what they're supposed to do. The defaults are all 1.0000 instead of 10.0000.

Nothing unusual in your load order other than bad placement for the two UL Skingrad files.

[sarah]

I seem to have solved my landscape LOD problem. In hindsight the variable in the ini is obvious, though I'm still uncertain why the default value was causing me problems. Changing this:

fLODQuadMinLoadDistance=65536.0000

to this:

fLODQuadMinLoadDistance=262144.0000

immediately gives all the landscape I need irrespective of what uGridDistantCount is set to.

You have two sets of things I've never messed with:

Thank you for taking the time to look at my problem Arthmoor. I have no idea why the fLODMultA variables were set to 10 rather than 1, but I've changed them back to the default. The iSafeZone variables control how far to the edge of the display the HUD should use. So reducing those values from 20 to 15 moves HUD elements a little farther to the edge of the screen.

[Nina Mccormick]

Hi, both BBC and UL does big chances to Cyrodill. What this mod do around it? Besides the two City Plugins, is it recomended to avoid some of the options of RAEVWD? I'm thinking of diferent heigth lands, extra placed or removed statues/stones/ruins, etc. I'm already using it, and it's 11 out of 10, but still want this extra clarification...

[Peetay]

Hi, both BBC and UL does big chances to Cyrodill. What this mod do around it? Besides the two City Plugins, is it recomended to avoid some of the options of RAEVWD? I'm thinking of diferent heigth lands, extra placed or removed statues/stones/ruins, etc. I'm already using it, and it's 11 out of 10, but still want this extra clarification...

It seems that you are a little confused about what RAEVWD does, but then that's why you asked for a clarification

Firrst, RAEVWD doesn't affect the landscape at all, only the objects placed on it. Furthermore, RAEVWD doesn't place a single object in the game, it only makes lot of objects possible to see in the distant view. To actually see them, the distant objects must be placed into your game, and that is done by TES4LODGen. So after installing RAEVWD you must run TES4LODGen. When TES4LODGen runs, it reads your mod list, finds out exactly where objects are placed and uses the files from RAEVWD to create those objects.

So with BBC and UL making big changes, TES4LODGen will see this, and place the distant objects correctly according to those changes. Thus if a UL mod moves a statue (or adds a new), those will be placed correctly by TES4LODGen, but only if you have installed distant statue meshes with RAEVWD.

You may still encounter distant objects floating in the air, or partly buried. This is not because the objects are incorrectly placed, but because the distant land is incorrect. Unfortunately there's no solution to this.

[Jonathan Egan]

You may still encounter distant objects floating in the air, or partly buried. This is not because the objects are incorrectly placed, but because the distant land is incorrect.

Thats the motive of the whole question, but if there's no solution... ok, we can live with it. Also, tried to question further, and got all the answers wanted. Thanks! Til the next...

[michael danso]

Sadly there's no utility out there to generate better quality landscape LOD even though it's desperately needed. So it's either regenerate them in the CS or live with the crappy ones that come with the game. Either way it'll never rise to the accuracy that's needed to fix floaters.

[Jacob Phillips]

Sadly there's no utility out there to generate better quality landscape LOD even though it's desperately needed. So it's either regenerate them in the CS or live with the crappy ones that come with the game. Either way it'll never rise to the accuracy that's needed to fix floaters.

Arthmoor,

Presumably, given the desperate need as you rightly say, talented folks like you have looked at the problem and would have tried to build such a utility. Is the constraint that there is no automated access to the detailed landscape heights needed to generate the terrain LODs, or something else?

There's a mod you're probably familiar with called 'Optimized Distant Land Max' that recreates the distant terrain LODs using a more efficient technique. That only reduces the LODs, I assume because it's using the vanilla LODs as the input it's trying to optimize rather than the "real" landscape heights. So this also seems to imply that the problem is access to the detailed terrain, rather than a problem generating terrain LOD meshes.

If that's the case, though, there would be access to the position of the objects on the landscape (I would think TES4LODGen has to have that information to do its wonderful work) and that implies (perhaps loosely) a landscape coordinate. Now clearly the scattered VWD objects aren't going to give a uniform or perfect set of information to recreate the underlying landscape, but there are a very large number of them and it is additional information on top of the vanilla landscape LOD meshes.

I wonder if it would be possible to create optimized lands using the same technique as Optimized Distant Land Max, but optimizing off an input mesh defined using both the vertex coordinates from the vanilla distant terrain LODs together with the implied land coordinates form all the objects that exist on the land. Clearly there may issues that would have to be thought through, not the least of which is that many objects don't sit on the land, but it might at least be something worth thinking about.

Wilde

[Charlie Sarson]

I was under the impression that distant landscape was generated from the standard landscape heightmap, just taking less points...

From what I read apparently they are .nif files but reassure me, the actual "close" landscape is generated from the LAND records right?

edit:
Sorry if it's all a bit out of topic but at least I bumped this very good mod from page 10 .

[Kim Kay]

I was under the impression that distant landscape was generated from the standard landscape heightmap, just taking less points...

This is correct.

From what I read apparently they are .nif files

No. The nif files (or rather the _far.nif files) are not at all used to generate the distant landscape, but to generate the distant objects, i.e. walls, buildings, ruins, etc. So RAEVWD + TES4LODGen doesn't affect the distant landscape at all. They are resources and tool respectively for generating the distant objects.

but reassure me, the actual "close" landscape is generated from the LAND records right?

Right

[Vicki Gunn]

Thanks a lot TheNiceOne, I thought it was going mad for a moment .

I was confused by this(named by wilde, I looked it up):
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15278

It clearly shows optimized landscape in the screenshots, not objects and the author states that they are .nif files...

[Markie Mark]

Presumably, given the desperate need as you rightly say, talented folks like you have looked at the problem and would have tried to build such a utility. Is the constraint that there is no automated access to the detailed landscape heights needed to generate the terrain LODs, or something else?

There was a single effort made at one time with a project called LOD2 ( or something ) but it was abandoned. It took an entirely different approach to things. One which is probably feasible but I'd have no idea how to go about coding it. My coding skills don't go anywhere near being able to decode landscape data from a proprietary format, let alone turning that into a giant _far.nif file.

There's a mod you're probably familiar with called 'Optimized Distant Land Max' that recreates the distant terrain LODs using a more efficient technique. That only reduces the LODs, I assume because it's using the vanilla LODs as the input it's trying to optimize rather than the "real" landscape heights. So this also seems to imply that the problem is access to the detailed terrain, rather than a problem generating terrain LOD meshes.

The opimization method the guy used on that involved 3D modeling and a whole lot of patience. 3D modeling and me don't get along, so again, not much I could do about it. I've tried loading a landscape LOD into Blender before and while I was able to do that much, trying to figure out how to do anything constructive with it was another story. It was entirely too large to be worked with from what I could see.

So yes, it's possible to do what you're describing. There's just very few people around with the skill and patience to pull it off.

[Kevin Jay]

after installing your mod and running TES LOD Gen I go into my game and ALL distant objects have dissapeared. Plus, distant objects is turned on in options

Any help?

[Elizabeth Lysons]

Hi there. I've recently began playing Oblivion again, and I'm aiming to play a more outdoorsy character so this mod seems to be a good choice.
I have a Geforce GTS 250 w/ 512mb VRAM, so my question is, which mods should go along this one to get best visual quality vs performance?
I'm currently using QTP3 Redimized and vanilla landscape LOD. The author mentions QTP3 Reduced Lite and Optmized Distant Land Max. Is there a specific install order or I can just load them altogether? Thanks.

[lydia nekongo]

RAEVWD can be installed independently of those in any order. Though you might want to consider that your video card may not have the umph to handle QTP3-Redimized AND RAEVWD at the same time.

[josh evans]

This business with the 3d distant landscape models intrigues me.

The landscape for the whole game is determined with heightmaps, which are sampled to create the large scale models for the big LOD models right? If that's right, are the heightmaps 1:1 with the big models? (one heightmap per LOD chunk)? If that's the case, wouldnt it be possible to then use the heightmap data to deform a planar 3d model into the right shape? Once the model is the right shape, optimization can be applied to keep some of the extra detail in while not having a retardedly huge LOD model.

Edit: I also realized that if I can get it to that stage, generating distant LOD normal maps would be a much more accurate process.

I only really care because there's some floating rocks outside of anvil and I can see them inside the city and they piss me off.

(I'd also like to see if that whole business with the TES4LODGen program taking a more detailed sampling of height data could be done, but I know a lot more about 3d models than i do about code)

[Nathan Barker]

Edit: I also realized that if I can get it to that stage, generating distant LOD normal maps would be a much more accurate process.

I only really care because there's some floating rocks outside of anvil and I can see them inside the city and they piss me off.

You know, if you were able to come up with an app of some sort that could do this, there would be a whole bunch of people very happy to help test it, especially if it could generate load order specific results. Maybe get together with the guy who did the Land Magic system and see what you can come up with?

[Nymph]

I'm not the guy to do that. I'm the guy who will sit there, subdivide a plane, import the heightmap, deform the plane according to the heightmap, copy that and move it elsewhere, optimize the the mesh to something reasonable, then bring the one that i moved back in to generate a normal map, do that for every chunk, make sure the edges match, blah blah blah. I know pretty much nothing about oblivion modding and scripting. I have some C++ and Java knowledge, and a lot more 3d modelling knowledge. I will probably be learning Oblivion stuff as I go along, if at all.

What format are the heightmaps in? Are they a grayscale image? How big are they, and what size area do they cover? I really don't know any of this. The problem is I also don't know where to look to find out.

[Jhenna lee Lizama]

What format are the heightmaps in? Are they a grayscale image? How big are they, and what size area do they cover? I really don't know any of this. The problem is I also don't know where to look to find out.

Heightmaps are stored in the esp/esm as a 33x33 grid of offsets. If you look at the VHGT section, http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Mod_File_Format/LAND has a reasonable explanation of how it's stored. They cover one cell, which is 4096x4096 game units.

[ONLY ME!!!!]

and how big of an area is 4096 game units? I get the feeling that it's much smaller than one of the LOD chunk models.

Edit: Also, it does store height data with a range of 1089 bytes, which is more than can be represented by any sort of heightmap (ok, not any sort at all, but not any sort that anyone actually uses, thats for sure). i guess it would be necessary to convert that data directly into a model rather than have an image-based intermediary step. could probably do it in one of the scripting languages, like MaxScript, if the data is organized in some way.

Edit2: actually I read that wrong, it would go in a regular heightmap, but another part of the file stores normals, so to preserve those it would probably be best to figure out how to read the file directly into a 3d modelling program.

[Scott Clemmons]

Is anyone else having a problem with the new rocks added in Lost Coast 1.6.4? They keep turning yellow when I look at them.

[Dominic Vaughan]

and how big of an area is 4096 game units? I get the feeling that it's much smaller than one of the LOD chunk models.

It is. 4096 game units is one single cell. An LOD mesh covers a quad - an area 32x32 cells large. 1024 cells in all. A pretty significant sized area.

@Death's Grip: I'll double check those rock LODs but I don't think the defect causing your problem lies with them. Chances are another _far.nif mesh from another mod is contributing to the problem. Yellowing is almost always caused by a _far.nif with leftover specular flags.

[Gisela Amaya]

I just installed RAEVWD in in bain and ran it through TES lod and it is an amazing mod I have a full hd 108-p monitor with hdmi cable and it makes the game pop. I have a 256 ati graphics card with 4gram I was wondering about frame rate . I did lower in thin to 20 and I also run without the city architure stuff only frame issue is in the imperial water front.. From what I'm reading that seems normal when I went into the elven gardens it was fine . Please help explain this and could i add the other plug ins or would that continue to degrade my frame rate thanks in advance.

[SWagg KId]

Explain what exactly? I can't make sense of what you're asking.

[Laura-Jayne Lee]

And I'm not sure it's all that wise to run RAEVWD on a 256MB graphics card...

[Cathrin Hummel]

Provided he's not using QTP3 it could be squeezed in. RAEVWD doesn't take up a heap of VRAM using strictly vanilla graphics.