Hi!

I recently started toying with the GECK, and I ran into a problem.

Here's two screenshots so you can see what I am dealing with:

http://www.bilder-hochladen.net/files/7bmf-2x-jpg.html
http://www.bilder-hochladen.net/files/7bmf-2y-jpg.html

first is a screenshot from the GECK, second is in-game.

can someone tell me where the additional grey polygones come from, and more importantly, how I can get rid of them?

thanks,
M

That blotch is a close-up of the "Distant Land" texture.

Based on that screenie, it looks like you significantly lowered the terrain in that area. You'll need to modify the LOD data. I don't know how to do it, sadly...

true, I lowered the terrain quite a bit. Strange thing is though that if this blotch is the original (higher) terrain, there should be much more visible than what you see on the screenshot.

I will look into modifying the LOD data, thanks for the input!

cheers,

As near as I can tell from my own testing, it works like this: the low-resolution, long-distance "LOD" ground isn't just displayed when you're far away. It's just a few feet under/inside every object in the game, all the time. To test this, go anywhere in the wastes, type "tcl" into the console ("toggle clipping"), and sink into the ground - you'll see the ugly version of everything just below the surface. A (by default) 5x5 cell square of up-close models and data is loaded around the player and placed on top of the LOD textures, which is enough that you rarely notice the transition in the distance, so long as the devs are careful about how they build terrain.

But if you edit the ground, this can be a problem. If everything you make is higher than what was already there, then it shouldn't be a big issue when you're close by - the under-textures won't poke through. However, note that from further away than that 5x5 cell square, the player will see your area as it was before - particularly noticeable if you've added a large building. If you LOWER the ground, though, things get nasty: the LOD textures poke through like you're seeing in that screenshot.

So the solution is to rebuild the LOD information, generated a super-low-poly and low-rez version of the wastelands from special pre-defined textures and simplified geometry. And this is where my I stopped my inquiries and decided my town would be an underground vault, because as near as I could tell, you have to rebuild by zone not cell - as in "WastelandNV." Which means changing anything in the wastes means recalculating the ENTIRE wastes, which the Geck claims is a 10+ hour process (and who knows how much that would increase the size of your mod). I hope I'm wrong, though - if that were the case, how would two mods that both add wasteland changes co-exist?

Having heard from people who've done it, 10+ hours would be the in-house time, with everything set up perfectly and possibly some distributed computing going on a la render farms. We don't have any of that, so we have to recostruct the data the LOD system asks for (including converting all the .dds textures back to their original .tga format, etc). If you really wanted to do it, a lot of that work has been done and is available http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1137545-nv-lod-essentials-pack, but it's probably not worth it for a small mod.

Whether or not you can part the LOD after generating it to have only your small section which is compatible with other LOD changes I don't know, but I'm extremely doubtful in any case.