Background: For reasons that would take a long time to explain, I have unpacked ALL bsa files, such that all of my Oblivion game files are loose. I use a special defragmentation program called MyDefrag to avoid/minimize what would otherwise be horrendous performance issues from this.

Current issue: When I run TES4LODGen, it of course clears the DistantLOD folder and starts over. However, I have noticed that a few of the vanilla LOD files do not get replaced, and are reported by BAIN as being missing. This leads me to two possibilities:

1) These files are unnecessary or otherwise redundant, so TES4LODGen doesn't bother making new ones.
2) TES4LODGen doesn't expect the original vanilla files to get cleared out, and while it doesn't make new ones for some reason, it still expects the originals to be available to the game from a BSA.

I'd appreciate it if anyone could tell me which of these is true .

From the vanilla meshes BSA:

distantlod\oblivionrd004_15_15.lod
distantlod\oblivionrd004_16_15.lod
distantlod\oblivionrd004_16_16.lod
distantlod\tamriel_-16_38.lod
distantlod\tamriel_-24_33.lod
distantlod\tamriel_-40_-14.lod
distantlod\tamriel_-40_-15.lod
distantlod\tamriel_-54_-1.lod
distantlod\tamriel_18_35.lod
distantlod\tamriel_19_40.lod
distantlod\tamriel_20_40.lod

From the Shivering Isles meshes BSA:

distantlod\seworld_14_7.lod
distantlod\seworld_7_10.lod
distantlod\seworld_9_20.lod

Thanks for any help .

Chance are it's just a case of there not actually being anything to make LOD for in those cells, so when they got deleted, there's nothing to replace them with. It shouldn't actually cause any issues if you've moved the original BSAs out of the way.

Honestly I have no idea why you'd unpack them all to begin with because plenty of us have done so before and in every case ran into terrible performance as a result of all the disk thrashing. Including using specialized defraggers.

Basically it's for purposes of mod evaluation, not long-term play. Once I have everything tweaked to perfection I'll re-pack things into BSAs, but I found that some mods were replacing vanilla files with versions that turned out to be _worse_, not better. Now that I have everything unpacked, BAIN can more easily track and report to me which things are new, and which things are replacing vanilla content.

Of particular note, I found that the Mythic series of creature retextures includes normal maps which seem to have been automatically generated from the new textures. Problem is, they were of poorer quality than purpose-designed normal maps, and even when the old normal map would have matched perfectly it was replaced with a much smoother version. I went through and compared all the normal maps to the originals, and in cases where the originals were sharper and still matched I moved the new ones to a new BAIN subfolder in the respective Mythic package, which I then didn't select.

Similarly, I was surprised to run across a Fine Steel Longsword the other day which didn't seem to have the engraved script on the blade. I tracked this down to Really Textured Normal Maps for Vanilla. I had already given Bomret's pack priority over RTNM, but I hadn't expected there to be issues with giving RTNM priority over vanilla. I performed other comparisons of RTNMfV vs. vanilla normal maps and I was quite surprised at the results. Basically, RTNMfV makes smooth surfaces more pebbly/detailed, but it also loses a great deal of detail for things that were already detailed in the original normal maps. It's almost like everything's been averaged towards a middle ground of light to moderate pebbly-ness. In this case I uninstalled RTNMfV entirely.