366 replies to this topic

[metalictempest]

It looks great and all but it has absolutely killed my frame rate. 30 down to 2.

Im working the kinks out but this just seems like it adds (for some reason) even larger versions of every object ever and makes it viewable when distant. I mean, this is crippling... And it seems it would be to almost any system.

[ElminsterAU]

metalictempest, just running TES4LODGen on it's own should produce DistantLOD data that is almost identical to the DistantLOD data that already ships with Oblivion and as such does NOT lead to any reduction in performance.

If you've run TES4LODGen and see such a massive drop in performance then the reason for that is that you have a lot and/or very poorly done _far.nif's in your data folder which now get picked up by TES4LODGen and are now suddenly visible at a distance (which is exactly the purpose of TES4LODGen).

What you need to do is make sure that you only have _far.nif's in your data folder for objects that you want to be visible at a distance. And that the _far.nif's you have are of high quality (meaning low poly and using low res textures).

Your problem sounds as if you installed something like MAEVWD and now got a huge number of high poly _far.nif's around that get picked up by TES4LODGen

[akmatov]

I have to disagree. Running TES4LODGen on a totally clean reinstall dropped my fps from 61 to 47. The only files present were the original Oblivion files.

Also, when I have added some textures and Natural Environments to it, the fps drop is from 58 to 30 plus objects are solid black unless viewed at just the right angle. Love the idea, but doesn't work for me at all.

[VinlandViking]

I went from 79 FPS to 15-25 FPS after using this.

[LarryT]

I know this mod is still in beta but it does some strang things with land meshes and seems to reduce the detail so trees can appear to be floating until you get close enough for the land mesh to change back to the normal detail (ie: the land gets raised back up to its normal height). This is most noticable when looking up at a hill from a distance. Has anyone else noticed this and is there a way to fix it?

[jochem100]

hello elminsterAU

since you seem to know a lot about vwd,
i have a small question for you.

ive modded a section of the tamriel worldspace (outside the border) and create water. how do i get the LOD water to show up??

tnx, and great mod, i use tes4lodgen as essential.

[pimpskinny]

ElminsterAU - great mod. I've got a suggestion. Like many people, even after reading the readme and all the comments here and at the TES Forums, I remain confused about exactly what this mod accomplishes, but I think I might finally get it. If I'm right, you might want to add this to your readme/description:

A quick description of two important terms:

_far.nif: A nif is the 3D model type used by Oblivion. Objects that are supposed to be viewed from a distance such as city walls come with _far.nifs. The _far.nifs are simplified versions of the objects you see up close. The purpose of this is to allow you see important landmarks from far away, but use simpler 3D models for them to prevent your PC from being crippled by loading so many intense graphics at once.

DistantLOD: This is data used by Oblivion to display these _far.nifs in the right place. Basically, the _far.nif is the thing you see from far away, and the DistantLOD data allows you to see it.

Many mods that add landmarks such as castles and ruins come with _far.nifs and DistantLOD data, but if two mods both change the same area, then you will not be able to see all the correct objects from a distance.

TES4LODGen fixes this. Running TES4LODGen every time you install a mod that adds a new distant-viewable object will generate DistantLOD data for all the objects added by all your mods so you can see all of them from a distance and in the right place. But for this to work, the mod(s) you installed must already include _far.nifs, because TES4LODGen does not generate _far.nifs, it only generates DistantLOD data, and uses _far.nifs to do it.

Many wonder how this works with the AEVWD mod and the variations of it eventhough AEVWD does not add any new objects to the world. AEVWD works by providing _far.nifs for many vanilla objects that did not have them. It also provides the DistantLOD data. But using TES4LODGen to generate this data instead of using AEVWD's data will allow new additional objects to show up too.

(OK, that's it. Some of that might be wrong. Fair warning.)

So, as I understand it, running this utility without any mods installed will change nothing about your game. And any mods you get that don't include _far.nifs will not have any DistantLOD data generated by it.

[Megiddon]

thanks for the description pimpskinny

[gemcast]

Yes pimpskinny, that is a fair summation of TES4LODGen. If I might add; _far.nifs are a low poly version of the original nif. Bethesda included a limited number of these with the game. Mods like AEVWD or my personal favorite Really AEVWD http://www.tesnexus....le.php?id=20053, added a bunch of additional _far.nifs. Problems with fps hits most often occur when VWD mods do not reduce the poly count in the _far.nifs. This is what happen with Tamriel VWD v.05.

WZ created Generatefar.exe http://www.oblivions...hp?f=32&p=73165 a utility that spits out low poly mesh versions of nifs.

It is important to remember that only statics have _far.nifs. I have run into many a modder that believes anything they tick vwd in the reference box should show up. Which brings us to the point of TES4LODGen. As stated in the readme, TES4LODGen ignores the vwd box that may or maynot be checked in the CS. This vwd box is rather pointless anyways, because checked or not, nothing will show up in the distant terrain if the model does not have a _far.nif. The DistantLOD data needs to be updated whenever you add a mod that drops statics with _far.nifs into an exterior cell. The CS has a feature that does this. However, it is unstable, slow, and cumbersome if you just dwnlded someone elses mod and want to run a quick update. TES4LODGen looks at all the mods you have loaded and checks all the exterior cells of those mods for statics that have _far.nifs. Then it updates the references for those exterior cells, and presto in the blink of an eye you have your DistantLOD data showing up. Now keep in mind that any fps hit is a reflection of the number of polys in the _far.nif, so if you created a bunch of high poly _far.nifs by simply copying the original object mesh and renaming it, your in for some slowdown.

[ElminsterAU]

Yeah, sorry about that rotation bug.

Sometime between 1.1.43 and 2.2.0 I changed the record definition code so that the rotation of REFRs is displayed in degrees instead of radians.

When I rebuild TES4LODGen with the updated backengine code from TES4Edit I didn't take that into account and ended up writing degree values into the .lod files where the game engine expects radians.