There is no issue, I was just curious.
As far as I know tes4lodgen generates textures for distant landscape so it must parse through the BTXT/ATXT/VTXT to generate the final texture.
I just wondered what the behavior of tes4lodgen was when an ATXT had a null formID, if there was any purpose to them(my parser displayed at least a dozen only in sub-block 0,0 so they must be quite a lot, doesn't seem like errors to me).

Hmm just saw that the author hasn't logged in for 5 months, guess I will never get an answer .

Oh, no. tes4lodgen has nothing to do with generating landscape textures. This is used only for generating the distant LOD information for buildings, ruins, etc.

Strange, I could have sworn it also generated LOD landscape textures, my bad .

edit:
So I'm the first to encounter this ATXT issue, YEY !
edit2:
For those curious I'm working on a Oblivion heightmap parser/display thingie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpzzziydTjs
This is subblock 0,0, the ratio height/size of cell may not be perfectly right and there are still some errors in the calculation of the heightmap(visible as the different cells don't join perfectly).
I'm having trouble with the textures atm, in fact more with dx10 than with Oblivion format itself .

There's a similarly named app, tes4qlod, that will generate distant landscape textures. That's probably what you're after. I don't have a link to it handy.

We should probably jump to a dedicated thread, but this parser you're working on. Is it for the purpose of generating more accurate landscape LOD height?

Nop I just looked at the intro video of Oblivion and thought "hmm I wonder if that could be done in realtime" and started coding(ok I admit, I was bored ).
As for more accurate landscape LOD I don't know if it's possible.

As I understand it Oblivion takes only a small sample of the normal heightmap for its lod landscape(thus resulting in inaccuracy), dunno if there is anything that can be done without modifying the program itself.

Yes, it takes a poor sampling of the actual height data, but I don't think modifying the engine would be necessary to get better ones. A way just needs to be found to produce more detailed LOD from the existing LAND records that are loaded. Someone commented awhile back that the CS is producing about a 1-2% detail mesh from the data loaded into memory. They also said pushing that to 3-4% would make a huge difference in quality and might be all that's needed. Fallout 3 apparently pushed that to around 5% and the distant land in that game is almost flawless.

Funny, I was just wondering about the same thing. The vanilla DistantLOD files seem to work fine for me, but even running TES4LODGen on a plain install of Oblivion gives me the dreaded "floating trees". As has been mentioned before, the location of the LOD trees, etc was accurate, but the landscape itself was not. Could this be due to the inaccuracy of the process used to generate the DistantLOD meshes? If so, what needs to be done to improve the quality of the meshes as Arthmoor said? I'm assuming that kind of functionality is not built into the CS?

That's interesting, so maybe the placement for the distant objects was generated for the distant landscape in vanilla.
And tes4lodgen generates it for an accurate landscape.

That would explain this issue, could be fixed in tes4lodgen probably.

Stop and consider too that Bethesda has a CS with functions we don't get so they probably have an easy way to get distantLOD information to behave the way they want. Perhaps even down to hand-placement of the individual objects. I've never tried to generate LOD using the CS, so it's possible even what we get to play with can generate accurate placement.

Nope, the CS is no better at LOD generating than TES4Lodgen. In fact, because of its tendencies to eat up resources, crash and disapprove in general of having to load all active mods for proper LOD generating, the CS is worse.

Well anyway since Tes4lodgen is closed source I think we're stuck with what we got .

I'm curious though, are those lod files generated from the visible when distant grup of exterior cells?
Or does it look up every single object in the temporary(ie visible when close) and looks if the _far version of the mesh exists and then adds it?

edit:
Is there a file format description of those .lod files somewhere?
I may try to make something to calculate more accurate placement if there is.

It checks to see what normal nifs have a _far counterpart and writes the coordinates for those into the LOD files. That's the understandable-by-everyone explanation. As for how it does it I have no clue.

Some small questions about this mod I just rediscovered (eventually).

Actually I don't really understand if this mod helps loading LOD textures other than the ones of RAEVWD (but I think so^^).

I don't use RAEVWD because right now my game runs so smoothly (have a brand new "big" computer though) and is beautiful (playing with everything maxed except for some of the shadows, 1920X1200, and vertical sync on with no [censored]ter at all and constant FPS, using to do so of course Crash prevention, O[censored]terRemover, and Streamline (but 2.1) though) so i won't try too many huge mods since it's working so well atm.

I have however quite a few lod replacing mods, no specific ones at the moment like pure lod replacers only, but QPT3 Redimized, Unique landscapes, natural environments, improved trees and flora I + II etc.

Will in this case this mod be useful ? I seem to remember that few weeks ago, when I installed it for the 1st time (then I redid everything properly so I don't have it anymore since I reinstalled the whole game with mods) the LOD seemed much better, probably only qpt3 and or ul lods finally working perfectly thanks to this mod.

Mainly, is tes4lodgen needed to load properly qpt3, UL etc. LOD files ? These mods don't load their lod files otherwise, "alone" ?
I have to say that my lod files now are okayish, a bit better than at the very beginning, but without being great at all.

Hey, I'm having a problem: I just extracted TES4LODGEN to my desktop. Upon running it, I get this message: "Fatal: Could not open registry key: \SOFTWARE\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\"

Recently I had my computer whiped and the OS (vista) reinstalled, I have my entire oblivion with all my mods backed up and have been running it from my D drive. Any help is appreciated.

Simple: Tes4lodgen is looking for the "Installed Path" registry key.

Copy this into a text file and name the file [INSERTNAMEHERE].reg and execute it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Bethesda Softworks][HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion]"Installed Path"="D:/Your/Path/To/Oblivion"[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion\1.00.0000]

Make sure you are changing this line:
"Installed Path"="D:/Your/Path/To/Oblivion"

Hmm, tried that, and I got "FATAL: Could Not Determine Oblivion Installation Path" =/.

I changed the installed path line and everything.

EDIT: false alarm, I accidently put backslashes instead of forward slashes into the path. My mistake, thanks a ton for the fix.

I'm getting a ton of errors like this: [01:08] LOD Generator:

The program still runs, and it runs successfully, but errors worry me... should this worry me? When I say a ton, I mean a ton... like, 2103 of them.

55,-43? That's a considerable distance outside the normal land area of the game. What mod does 6800FB93 belong to?

I'm not sure... is the way I can tell via TES4LODGen?

[EDIT] That was just an example... like I said, there were 2103 errors, ranging from 6800F6E1 (52,-51) to 6D01EBF8 (-48,-20).

[EDIT again) Disregard the first comment... it's the Tamriel Heightmaps series. Errors only pop up for 68, 6A, and 6D, which are Blackmarsh, Summerset, and the Valenwood/Elsweyr patch... the VAST majority of errors are for 68 (Blackmarsh).

Yeah, in that case I'd say it's just because the areas tripping things up are so far outside the normal game boundaries that tes4lodgen is having trouble with the coordinates. It probably means any trees and other _far.nifs out there won't show up in-game.

Nothing to worry about; as you discovered, it's from the Tamriel Heightmaps ESPs, and is caused by Onra setting the scale to 0 on a large number of trees. I can't quite remember why he had to do this, but he had a very good reason.

Hi all, it looks like I have encountered a corruped *_far.nif problem as my game almost always CTDs when I go near a certain cell near ICWaterfront. Deleting DistantLOD folder "fixes" the CTD but after running TES4LODGen the same CTD comes back again.

My question is, how do I go about fixing this problem? Right now I am running the game without any DistantLOD but that's hardly a real fix...

Thanks in advance!

Well, since it is generating the bad NIF based on your mod list, you may want to look into figuring out which mod is involved in the data generation for that file. Post the name of the NIF here. You can find the cell in TES4Edit, and figure out which mods might be a part of this issue. You can also disable mods that affect cells, period, one-by-one, until the bad NIF is no longer generated. That should not take to long, as TES4LODGen does its thing pretty quickly. If you do not have to rebuild a bashed patch every time, going that route should produce the culprit without too much hassle on your part.

I wouldn't be so quick to blame the LOD for causing the issue. The IC Waterfront is a notoriously resource heavy area and you may be crashing there for entirely different reasons. Besides, from experience, if you have a corrupt _far.nif file that crashes the game, you'll lose access to a ginormous chunk of the world rather than just a particular cell.

Does setting the VWD flag on a placed Creatures (ACRE, not CREA) work?
I have one mod installed - http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=24250 - that does that to a Giant Mudcrab and a Giant Slaughterfish, but TES4EDIT thows these messages when loading the mod:
[00:07] Background Loader: Error: record ACRE contains unexpected (or out of order) subrecord XLOD 444F4C58
[00:07] Background Loader: Errors were found in: [ACRE:01008494] (places BigScaryMudcrabDUPLICATE000 "Big Scary Mud Crab" [CREA:01008493] in GRUP Cell Temporary Children of [CELL:00006091] (in Tamriel [WRLD:0000003C] at 18,1))
[00:07] Background Loader: Contained subrecords: NAME XSCL DATA XLOD
[00:07] Background Loader: Error: record ACRE contains unexpected (or out of order) subrecord XLOD 444F4C58
[00:07] Background Loader: Errors were found in: [ACRE:01008496] (places BigScarySlaughterfishDUPLICATE000 "Inspiration for Fish Stories" [CREA:01008495] in GRUP Cell Temporary Children of [CELL:00006091] (in Tamriel [WRLD:0000003C] at 18,1))
[00:07] Background Loader: Contained subrecords: NAME XSCL DATA XLOD

When I remove the VWD flag and run Check for Errors none come up, but when start TES4EDIT with the modified file the error messages come up again. I've even looked in the CS but can't find anything out of the ordinary,

If I keep the VWD falg will TES4LODGen be able to write Distant LOD files for the creratures?