Longer view distances

[Sorgren]

Yeah I was tinkering with the .ini and it let me set longer grass distances, enable more reflections on water, make lod distances longer, but all that with a limit, and the terrain still looked awful, how could I make the view distance longer before it goes to crappy lod? I am sick of sprite trees and ugly terrains, I also wish to see buildings at longer distances, and towns aswell, like if you fly on the akatosh mount I would like to see each town with it's respective cathedral, and all the way shrines and such..

i've a potent graphics card trust me, I handed out 120 euros for it, Geforce 9600GT 1GB

[Vagrant0]

Nobody can send you a .ini containing that sort of stuff because each .ini is generated based on your system.

 

Before telling you what you can change to improve view distances, you should be aware that anything other than simply improving the look of LOD landscape requires far more than just a 1gb videocard. If you don't also have fast processor, or more than 4 gb RAM installed, the game will often crash, collision data in new exterior cells may not load, and you will likely have issues with water bugging out.

 

Installing some LOD mods is usually the best way to go at any rate, not only does it make things look better in the distance, but has far fewer problems associated with it. You may want to try using:

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=20053

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15781

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=17300

Even if you still plan to change your .ini file, you should still probably download and setup these to work so that you can see how much of a performance hit you are looking at.

 

Open Cities style mods are also suggested as an alternative to .ini changes, but can have conflicts in certain cases so it not open for everyone.

 

For .ini changes, make sure that you're editing the one located in My Documents\My Games\Oblivion folder. You should also make a backup of this before you change anything because even a small change can make the game unplayable. This is not something that is suggested for people who are squeamish about editing files, making small settings change mods, or don't feel like spending 5-6 hours of going in and out of the game trying to find the best settings for your system. Most of this is trial and lots of error, so if you're just wanting a simple improvement, you should read no further, and stick to the mods mentioned above. If after applying the LOD mods above, you're below 20 frames a second, you should read no further.

 

What you are doing with the .ini is effectively making it so that more cells are loaded as active at once. While this does result in being able to see much further, by nature of what it does, it can make loading times longer, screw with any script mods that make use of onload blocks in exterior objects, and exponentially tax your system more and more. It can also cause water to look bugged, and cause newly loaded cells to have a slowed havok response (bounce when you enter the cell). If you don't like the sound of this, just for the sake of appearances, read no furtner.

 

 

 

The main settings:

uGridDistantTreeRange=15

uGridDistantCount=25 - Controls how far away LOD trees will appear. Doubling or tripling it is one of the safer things you can do to improve the look of distant areas, but can also cause slightly more system strain.

 

 

uGridsToLoad=5 - Default is 5. This should always be an odd number, determines the number of cells around the player which are loaded at any given time. The setting of 5 means that from the center cell, where the player currently is, there are 2 other cells on all sides which are also loaded (25 total). Increasing this to 7 results in 49 cells total being loaded, essentially doubling the resources needed to process and maintain the scene. Increasing it to 9 results in 81 cells being loaded. Increasing this value beyond 11 (121 cells) almost always causes water to become bugged. Increasing it past 15 (225 cells) will cause most systems to crash, and still bug water.

 

 

uInterior Cell Buffer=3

uExterior Cell Buffer=36 - Is automatically adjusted based on above setting.

 

 

If you experience issues with water becoming bugged below uGridsToLoad=9, you will need to lower some of the settings related with water display quality. First, ingame, switch to use lower detail water, you can keep reflections on, but can't use the high-detail water type. You should also change the water settings to the following

uSurfaceFrameCount=24

uSurfaceFPS=12

 

If you still have problems, you will need to change

uNumDepthGrids=3 - change this to 2 or 1.

 

For the havok problem, you will need to make the changes so that havok is processed quicker. This can be extremely taxing, and is one of the main reasons why so much fuss was made earlier.

 

iNumHavokThreads=1 - Change this to 2 or 3.

 

 

Further information can be found here, but most if it has already been said.

http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/Feature/36546,...livion-v20.aspx

[Sorgren]

Great! Thanks! I am going to use both the .ini and the mods, I will change the ini considerably but without stressing my computer too much, I am also planning on updating it soon (motherboard, RAM and processor) I will post back to tell you how it goes.