REALLY Almost Everything Visible When Distant - Version 1.1
-----------------------------------------------------------
A modest approach to distant viewable objects, aka LOD.
You're all familiar with the various LOD packages, right? Some provide more than others. Some ar geared specifically toward super-high end machines. One isn't even designed to be played and will cripple anything currently on the market today. For the rest of us, myself included, we'd just like to enhance the visual experience without crippling the game. None of the available packages has been fully optimized, usually with large amounts of unnecessary data still attached.
In order to address these issues, I've decided to compile into one source as many useful LOD objects as can be reasonably applied to the game from the following sources:
Almost Everything Visible When Distant: Ayleid Ruins, Forts, and Sewer entrances.
AEVWD Large: Enhanced lowres textures, Imperial City meshes, Skingrad castle meshes, and the 3 daedric shrines it comes with.
Illuminated AEVWD: LOD window textures.
AEVWD Fixes: Frostcrag Spire (requires the official DLC to be activated).
UOMP: Battlehorn Castle (requires the official DLC to be activated).
Operation Polygon Overhaul: Reduced poly rocks renamed to be LOD objects. Only the size 2080 ones are used.
Oblivion: City wall meshes only.
My own hand: Newly reduced architecture buildings, taken from UOP corrected versions where possible.
The overall goal is to provide enhanced LOD visuals while also trying to preserve performance as much as possible. This all stems from my realization that even with a high end graphics card, full detail LOD meshes and textures are simply out of the question. The VRAM usage is causing large amounts of stuttering when trying to swap out the memory and not even Streamline 3.1 can keep up. This package has brought the VRAM usage under control and has had a huge impact on overall lag and stuttering.
All of the meshes have been hand checked and had the following done:
* Collision data removed. If actual collision grids were still present, the branches have been deleted entirely. It's impossible to collide with an LOD object.
* Animation controllers removed. It is impossible to animate an LOD object, so this data is bloat.
* Geometry morphers removed. If a mesh had these, they've been removed, as they are only useful in animation.
* All NiStringsExtraData fields removed. These are nearly always associated with collision.
* All BSX Flags removed. These are nearly always used for collision and animation.
* All tangent/normal spaces removed. LOD meshes do not require these and this data is often a source of major bloat.
* All parallax flags turned off. You're too far away to see the benefits anyway.
* Where possible, all portions of a file have been assigned lowres textures instead of hires ones.
* Optimization using PyFFI after the above has been done.
The typical LOD mesh comes out the other end of this process losing up to 75% of the data it was carrying with no loss of function.
Compared with all of the other LOD options available, this is the most optimized, game friendly set of LOD objects there is.
Performance
-----------
Since I can only draw one meaningful comparison here, I shall do so. I didn't think to take a before shot of what it looked like before this project began. I didn't think I was going to offer it up as a VWD mod until halfway through this.
Tamriel VWD Enhanced, mixed in with parts of AEVWD Large, majority of it in full detail meshes+textures: 892MB VRAM @ 15FPS
REALLY AEVWD, when installed with all of its options: 710MB VRAM @ 17FPS
Shot of the scene being tested, after everything was done: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/20053-1-1222633270.jpg
As you can see, your FPS may not shift much, but the VRAM usage is astounding. And at least from where the shots were taken there's only a minor difference in detail. It will become more noticeable up close, but that's one of the limitations.
The screenshots were taken with the following system:
AMD Phenom 9850 2.5Ghz (quad core)
AMD/ATI Radeon HD4870 w/ 1GB VRAM, Catalyst 8.9 drivers.
QTP3 Redimized
Detailed Terrain (the one that edits the shaders etc)
Zaharot's 2048x2048 distant land textures.
All Natural (weather mod with hires graphics)
Open Cities Full + Blood&Mud + Leyawiin Reborn, version 2.1.1
Optimized Distant Land MAX 1.1 - further optimized using PyFFI
Other graphics enhancers
Screenshot location is on top of White Gold Tower in the Tamriel worldspace, facing west toward Chorrol. This is an ideal location for LOD testing because there is next to nothing in the near view other than the tower mesh itself. Clear weather was chosen through the console to eliminate skew from All Natural's excellent weather graphics. So what you see is 98% LOD and 2% whatever else. The VRAM savings alone are quite impressive.
There are also extra LOD objects present due to the addition of several other mods with buildings and such, Verona Bay is visible in the shot in the middle right for instance. Though not visible, the Colovian Highlands are in the extreme distance to the west and may also be playing a role.
Interestingly enough, removal of just the architecture folder brings FPS up from 15 to 35. Which I don't quite get. That reverts things back to vanilla architecture LOD, which isn't a whole lot by comparison, but had a major impact. My assumption is at this location with Chorrol and Skingrad both visible the LOD from Open Cities is contributing heavily even though you can't actually see inside either. Anvil may also be factoring in somewhat. Doing this alone will still give you all of the extra forts and ruins that are normally never visible. So it's an option to consider if the FPS hit is too much.
I think on more normalized systems that aren't as completely bogged down by massive amounts of enhancers will do quite a bit better with this LOD package.
Installation
------------
Simply unpack the archive to your Data directory. Everything should fall into place. If prompted to overwrite files, answer yes.
Or unpack to a separate location and only put in what you want, you don't have to use it all.
You can also make an OMOD of this using OBMM if you wish, to make removal easier later if you want.
No DistandLOD folder is provided. In order to actually see the results of what you just did, you need to download TES4LODGen and run it. It's a wicked simple utility that processes LOD information based on _far.nif files provided and will tailor itself to whatever mods you have installed.
Uninstallation
--------------
Manually remove the files you installed, or deactivate the OMOD if you made one.
Compatibility
-------------
The only thing this will conflict with is another LOD mod that affects the same files this one includes. Otherwise there's no issue.
Known Issues
------------
LOD for most buildings uses as houses and stores inside cities will not be visible outside the cities, except where they are used in towns and villages in the Tamriel worldspace. The Bethesda LOD houses will still be seen behind the city walls. This will not be correctable without an ESP to place copies of the buildings and delete the LOD houses. This can be done with an ESP to only do that, or if you are using Open Cities in some variety. It may also be handled by "Cities Alive at Night" though I'm not 100% sure on that one. That's where the architecture portion of this mod really shines, but at the same time really chews into the polygon count and framerates. Can't have your cake and eat it too :)
Sometimes when viewing the world at odd or extreme angles, the LOD objects will turn bright yellow or completely black and then revert to normal when you move. The cause for this isn't entirely known, but speculation has it the lowres textures may be a cause for this. It doesn't happen very often though.
When used with bloom lighting, the LOD objects may always show up as black. Provided you are *SURE* the lowres directory is in the right place in your textures directory, the only fix for this is to switch to a different lighting method. I'm not sure if normal lighting works, but switching to HDR will resolve this issue. There is no known way to fix this otherwise.
Credits
-------
Silverglade for his work on AEVWD Fixes.
Bomret for compiling the work on Illuminated AEVWD.
Igge for all his work on AEVWD Large, and the normal AEVWD.
Kivan for al his hard work on the UOP and UOMP mesh corrections.
Brumbek for providing lowres textures for the ships.
Revision History
----------------
1.0 - Initial Release
Version 1.0.1
-------------
* Corrected Battlehorn Castle to use the correct low poly and lowres file.
* Removed a corrupted node from leyawiinhouselower01_far.nif
* Added the missing Leyawiin upperclass meshes. Had to use high-poly meshes but still applied with lowres textures.
Version 1.1
-----------
* AnvilLCHouse01_far.nif was the wrong house mesh and has been rebuilt.
* Fixed the butt ugly farmhouse03_far.nif file. Whatever was wrong with it it even looked awful in nifskope.
* Substantial polygon reductions on the remaining farmhouse meshes as well.
* Fixed the Anvil dock pieces, many of them were not low poly meshes but have been scaled down to 40-50% of their original poly counts.
* Fixed the Leyawiin upperclass housing meshes which were also not low poly. They are now 40-50% of their original counts.
* Fixed the nasty looking Blackwood Company, Fighters' Guild, and Mages' Guild buildings with better reduction models.
* Fixed the lowerclass housing in Leyawiin.
* Fixed the broken cathedrals by re-reducing the stock meshes.
* Redid the Bravil buildings due to the excessive amount of holes the meshes had in them.
* Some of the buildings in Bruma were missing roof textures, which manifests as black segments in-game.
* Bruma castle's LOD mesh had no doorway showing, which bugged me.
* The entire Cheydinhal set has been redone due to seriously bad quality meshes.
* Cloud Ruler Temple had a couple of incorrect textures assigned.
* The entire Chorrol set has been redone due to bad quality meshes.
* The Anvil lighthouse and basement entry have been redone due to bad quality meshes.
* Redid the Skingrad buildings - the supplied meshes were not reduced enough.
* Redid the wayshrines with substantial reductions.
* The butcher job on the Ayleid bird statue has been repaired, which oddly resulted in a mesh with less than half the polygons of the butchered one.
* Lowres textures for the ships have been provided by Brumbek.
All of the above rebuilds on these meshes were done from UOP corrected versions when possible, which should further reduce the number of polygons started with since Kivan spent a lot of time removing parts of meshes that didn't need to exist.
New stuff, you must regenerate your LOD to see them:
* ictalosblock01house01_far.nif has been added since it's the only complete exterior IC building mesh.
* SkHouseMiddle04_far.nif was missing and has been added to the Skingrad collection.
* lowerclassroofoverhang01_far.nif has been added to the lowerclass collection.
* Discovered more missing Leyawiin houses and made reduced copies of them as well.
RAEVWD
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REALLY Almost Everything Visible When Distant - Version 1.1
-----------------------------------------------------------
A modest approach to distant viewable objects, aka LOD.
You're all familiar with the various LOD packages, right? Some provide more than others. Some ar geared specifically toward super-high end machines. One isn't even designed to be played and will cripple anything currently on the market today. For the rest of us, myself included, we'd just like to enhance the visual experience without crippling the game. None of the available packages has been fully optimized, usually with large amounts of unnecessary data still attached.
In order to address these issues, I've decided to compile into one source as many useful LOD objects as can be reasonably applied to the game from the following sources:
Almost Everything Visible When Distant: Ayleid Ruins, Forts, and Sewer entrances.
AEVWD Large: Enhanced lowres textures, Imperial City meshes, Skingrad castle meshes, and the 3 daedric shrines it comes with.
Illuminated AEVWD: LOD window textures.
AEVWD Fixes: Frostcrag Spire (requires the official DLC to be activated).
UOMP: Battlehorn Castle (requires the official DLC to be activated).
Operation Polygon Overhaul: Reduced poly rocks renamed to be LOD objects. Only the size 2080 ones are used.
Oblivion: City wall meshes only.
My own hand: Newly reduced architecture buildings, taken from UOP corrected versions where possible.
The overall goal is to provide enhanced LOD visuals while also trying to preserve performance as much as possible. This all stems from my realization that even with a high end graphics card, full detail LOD meshes and textures are simply out of the question. The VRAM usage is causing large amounts of stuttering when trying to swap out the memory and not even Streamline 3.1 can keep up. This package has brought the VRAM usage under control and has had a huge impact on overall lag and stuttering.
All of the meshes have been hand checked and had the following done:
* Collision data removed. If actual collision grids were still present, the branches have been deleted entirely. It's impossible to collide with an LOD object.
* Animation controllers removed. It is impossible to animate an LOD object, so this data is bloat.
* Geometry morphers removed. If a mesh had these, they've been removed, as they are only useful in animation.
* All NiStringsExtraData fields removed. These are nearly always associated with collision.
* All BSX Flags removed. These are nearly always used for collision and animation.
* All tangent/normal spaces removed. LOD meshes do not require these and this data is often a source of major bloat.
* All parallax flags turned off. You're too far away to see the benefits anyway.
* Where possible, all portions of a file have been assigned lowres textures instead of hires ones.
* Optimization using PyFFI after the above has been done.
The typical LOD mesh comes out the other end of this process losing up to 75% of the data it was carrying with no loss of function.
Compared with all of the other LOD options available, this is the most optimized, game friendly set of LOD objects there is.
Performance
-----------
Since I can only draw one meaningful comparison here, I shall do so. I didn't think to take a before shot of what it looked like before this project began. I didn't think I was going to offer it up as a VWD mod until halfway through this.
Tamriel VWD Enhanced, mixed in with parts of AEVWD Large, majority of it in full detail meshes+textures: 892MB VRAM @ 15FPS
REALLY AEVWD, when installed with all of its options: 710MB VRAM @ 17FPS
Shot of the scene being tested, after everything was done: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/20053-1-1222633270.jpg
As you can see, your FPS may not shift much, but the VRAM usage is astounding. And at least from where the shots were taken there's only a minor difference in detail. It will become more noticeable up close, but that's one of the limitations.
The screenshots were taken with the following system:
AMD Phenom 9850 2.5Ghz (quad core)
AMD/ATI Radeon HD4870 w/ 1GB VRAM, Catalyst 8.9 drivers.
QTP3 Redimized
Detailed Terrain (the one that edits the shaders etc)
Zaharot's 2048x2048 distant land textures.
All Natural (weather mod with hires graphics)
Open Cities Full + Blood&Mud + Leyawiin Reborn, version 2.1.1
Optimized Distant Land MAX 1.1 - further optimized using PyFFI
Other graphics enhancers
Screenshot location is on top of White Gold Tower in the Tamriel worldspace, facing west toward Chorrol. This is an ideal location for LOD testing because there is next to nothing in the near view other than the tower mesh itself. Clear weather was chosen through the console to eliminate skew from All Natural's excellent weather graphics. So what you see is 98% LOD and 2% whatever else. The VRAM savings alone are quite impressive.
There are also extra LOD objects present due to the addition of several other mods with buildings and such, Verona Bay is visible in the shot in the middle right for instance. Though not visible, the Colovian Highlands are in the extreme distance to the west and may also be playing a role.
Interestingly enough, removal of just the architecture folder brings FPS up from 15 to 35. Which I don't quite get. That reverts things back to vanilla architecture LOD, which isn't a whole lot by comparison, but had a major impact. My assumption is at this location with Chorrol and Skingrad both visible the LOD from Open Cities is contributing heavily even though you can't actually see inside either. Anvil may also be factoring in somewhat. Doing this alone will still give you all of the extra forts and ruins that are normally never visible. So it's an option to consider if the FPS hit is too much.
I think on more normalized systems that aren't as completely bogged down by massive amounts of enhancers will do quite a bit better with this LOD package.
Installation
------------
Simply unpack the archive to your Data directory. Everything should fall into place. If prompted to overwrite files, answer yes.
Or unpack to a separate location and only put in what you want, you don't have to use it all.
You can also make an OMOD of this using OBMM if you wish, to make removal easier later if you want.
No DistandLOD folder is provided. In order to actually see the results of what you just did, you need to download TES4LODGen and run it. It's a wicked simple utility that processes LOD information based on _far.nif files provided and will tailor itself to whatever mods you have installed.
Uninstallation
--------------
Manually remove the files you installed, or deactivate the OMOD if you made one.
Compatibility
-------------
The only thing this will conflict with is another LOD mod that affects the same files this one includes. Otherwise there's no issue.
Known Issues
------------
LOD for most buildings uses as houses and stores inside cities will not be visible outside the cities, except where they are used in towns and villages in the Tamriel worldspace. The Bethesda LOD houses will still be seen behind the city walls. This will not be correctable without an ESP to place copies of the buildings and delete the LOD houses. This can be done with an ESP to only do that, or if you are using Open Cities in some variety. It may also be handled by "Cities Alive at Night" though I'm not 100% sure on that one. That's where the architecture portion of this mod really shines, but at the same time really chews into the polygon count and framerates. Can't have your cake and eat it too :)
Sometimes when viewing the world at odd or extreme angles, the LOD objects will turn bright yellow or completely black and then revert to normal when you move. The cause for this isn't entirely known, but speculation has it the lowres textures may be a cause for this. It doesn't happen very often though.
When used with bloom lighting, the LOD objects may always show up as black. Provided you are *SURE* the lowres directory is in the right place in your textures directory, the only fix for this is to switch to a different lighting method. I'm not sure if normal lighting works, but switching to HDR will resolve this issue. There is no known way to fix this otherwise.
Credits
-------
Silverglade for his work on AEVWD Fixes.
Bomret for compiling the work on Illuminated AEVWD.
Igge for all his work on AEVWD Large, and the normal AEVWD.
Kivan for al his hard work on the UOP and UOMP mesh corrections.
Brumbek for providing lowres textures for the ships.
Revision History
----------------
1.0 - Initial Release
Version 1.0.1
-------------
* Corrected Battlehorn Castle to use the correct low poly and lowres file.
* Removed a corrupted node from leyawiinhouselower01_far.nif
* Added the missing Leyawiin upperclass meshes. Had to use high-poly meshes but still applied with lowres textures.
Version 1.1
-----------
* AnvilLCHouse01_far.nif was the wrong house mesh and has been rebuilt.
* Fixed the butt ugly farmhouse03_far.nif file. Whatever was wrong with it it even looked awful in nifskope.
* Substantial polygon reductions on the remaining farmhouse meshes as well.
* Fixed the Anvil dock pieces, many of them were not low poly meshes but have been scaled down to 40-50% of their original poly counts.
* Fixed the Leyawiin upperclass housing meshes which were also not low poly. They are now 40-50% of their original counts.
* Fixed the nasty looking Blackwood Company, Fighters' Guild, and Mages' Guild buildings with better reduction models.
* Fixed the lowerclass housing in Leyawiin.
* Fixed the broken cathedrals by re-reducing the stock meshes.
* Redid the Bravil buildings due to the excessive amount of holes the meshes had in them.
* Some of the buildings in Bruma were missing roof textures, which manifests as black segments in-game.
* Bruma castle's LOD mesh had no doorway showing, which bugged me.
* The entire Cheydinhal set has been redone due to seriously bad quality meshes.
* Cloud Ruler Temple had a couple of incorrect textures assigned.
* The entire Chorrol set has been redone due to bad quality meshes.
* The Anvil lighthouse and basement entry have been redone due to bad quality meshes.
* Redid the Skingrad buildings - the supplied meshes were not reduced enough.
* Redid the wayshrines with substantial reductions.
* The butcher job on the Ayleid bird statue has been repaired, which oddly resulted in a mesh with less than half the polygons of the butchered one.
* Lowres textures for the ships have been provided by Brumbek.
All of the above rebuilds on these meshes were done from UOP corrected versions when possible, which should further reduce the number of polygons started with since Kivan spent a lot of time removing parts of meshes that didn't need to exist.
New stuff, you must regenerate your LOD to see them:
* ictalosblock01house01_far.nif has been added since it's the only complete exterior IC building mesh.
* SkHouseMiddle04_far.nif was missing and has been added to the Skingrad collection.
* lowerclassroofoverhang01_far.nif has been added to the lowerclass collection.
* Discovered more missing Leyawiin houses and made reduced copies of them as well.
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