Trees, Buildings and LOD

[Huw Janus]

I have a new worldspace, fairly large, with a large and sprawling open city.

 

Work has been going on for a while and I decided that Id like to test the whole thing out and see what it all looks like now.

 

I generated LOD from the heightmap editor, then used TES4qLOD to generate textures and distant objects.

 

The city walls show up nicely, but I have to be really quite close for the buildings in the city to show up, and that includes the cathedral, which should be visible from some way outside the walls. There are also ships in the dock that do not show up from very far away. To make this worse I have already added trees around the city, generating them in the regions editor, but out of four regions around the city, only the trees in the first region I generated actually show up from a distance, while the others snap into place as I get closer.

 

Any idea why this might happen (and what to do about it!)

 

Huw

[Vagrant0]

For meshes to work as Visible When Distant, they need a mesh with a _far suffix. Meshes which don't appear may be lacking this. As to why there's a problem with the trees, my only guess is that you are either not waiting long enough for it to finish generating, or have too many trees within that area. Using non-speedtree trees (custom meshes) can also account for this problem.

[Huw Janus]

For meshes to work as Visible When Distant, they need a mesh with a _far suffix. Meshes which don't appear may be lacking this. As to why there's a problem with the trees, my only guess is that you are either not waiting long enough for it to finish generating, or have too many trees within that area. Using non-speedtree trees (custom meshes) can also account for this problem.

Hmm thanks.

 

Iv hunted through and it looks like the buildings all have a far nif - the cathedral most notably has one and yet remains invisible until the player is close.

 

"either not waiting long enough for it to finish generating, or have too many trees within that area"

 

I dont know about waiting long enough. it finished generating anyway, and I didnt know that the region generation could generate too many trees. maybe removing a few might work. Im not using any custom meshes for trees so its not that. How many trees is the limit in a cell?

[Vagrant0]

I dont know about waiting long enough. it finished generating anyway

There should have been a clear " you can close this window now" kinda thing. If not, it might have just finished with that one quad and displayed a misleading message.

How many trees is the limit in a cell?

When you generated the terrain, did you use one of the standard regions, or did you make your own? Rather than going around counting trees, you might want to move to some location near the center of the quad that has working VWD, then use tfc to look near the edges to see if it suddenly stops in some cell (if you've found a spot, make note of where it is, turn off tfc, move closer to that spot (a couple cells in that direction), and use tfc again to see if it's still there).

 

I don't know of an absolute limit, but if you're using your own region settings, you may have too many. The generation process for VWD objects goes cell by cell in a specific pattern for each quad, so you should hopefully notice the point where it breaks.

[Huw Janus]

Okay thanks Ill look into that. The trees generated were from (off the top of my head) the Great Forest region(?). it was taken as a data copy and renamed.

 

now that iv said that I just thought of something else - because creating the forest is easier to do in little bits I then made data copies of my newly named region (that was itself the original data copy), and i remember getting an error about it not being unique or something.

 

Coudl this have been the cause of the problem? should I make data copies of data copies or should each one come as a data copy of the original (just to note that I'm not creating settings myself, just using the vanilla ones that are already there).

[Huw Janus]

Right. So I started the game, used tcl to fly up above the city, and the demarcation line between trees that are showing and trees that are not is clearly visible.

 

Using tfc I then moved toward the line and reached it (eventually). I am near to a coastline so I was able to accurately pinpoint the location where the trees vanish. I can even click on the last tree to be visible in the editor, and compare it to the one next to it that was invisible, but I cant see any difference.

 

The trees that are visible were generated in one region, and the ones that are not visible were generated in several other regions.

 

I have to assume that these regions are in fact faulty in some way, but I dont know what to do next. Should I remove all the items in those regions, delete the regions and start again, or is there a less painful way to go?

[Vagrant0]

Right. So I started the game, used tcl to fly up above the city, and the demarcation line between trees that are showing and trees that are not is clearly visible.

 

Using tfc I then moved toward the line and reached it (eventually). I am near to a coastline so I was able to accurately pinpoint the location where the trees vanish. I can even click on the last tree to be visible in the editor, and compare it to the one next to it that was invisible, but I cant see any difference.

 

The trees that are visible were generated in one region, and the ones that are not visible were generated in several other regions.

 

I have to assume that these regions are in fact faulty in some way, but I dont know what to do next. Should I remove all the items in those regions, delete the regions and start again, or is there a less painful way to go?

Unfortunately, since the objects are created in the worldspace, and are no longer tied to the region, there is no way to fix this in a less painful manner. This is essentially the main downside to using regions to generate terrain. If the problem is caused by some sort of region bug, there may be no way to resolve the problem without having to go back to an earlier version of the mod that was saved prior to region generation. Once objects for a region are generated and saved, they can't be ungenerated.

 

I would however like to take a more specific look at your mod to see what the problem might be before settling on this solution. As objects which are generated should no longer be tied to anything related to that region, they should still exist without the region, and still generate proper vwd data. If you can upload your mod somewhere so that I can poke around a bit, I might atleast be able to offer an idea as to why this might be happening.

[Huw Janus]

Right. So I started the game, used tcl to fly up above the city, and the demarcation line between trees that are showing and trees that are not is clearly visible.

 

Using tfc I then moved toward the line and reached it (eventually). I am near to a coastline so I was able to accurately pinpoint the location where the trees vanish. I can even click on the last tree to be visible in the editor, and compare it to the one next to it that was invisible, but I cant see any difference.

 

The trees that are visible were generated in one region, and the ones that are not visible were generated in several other regions.

 

I have to assume that these regions are in fact faulty in some way, but I dont know what to do next. Should I remove all the items in those regions, delete the regions and start again, or is there a less painful way to go?

Unfortunately, since the objects are created in the worldspace, and are no longer tied to the region, there is no way to fix this in a less painful manner. This is essentially the main downside to using regions to generate terrain. If the problem is caused by some sort of region bug, there may be no way to resolve the problem without having to go back to an earlier version of the mod that was saved prior to region generation. Once objects for a region are generated and saved, they can't be ungenerated.

 

I would however like to take a more specific look at your mod to see what the problem might be before settling on this solution. As objects which are generated should no longer be tied to anything related to that region, they should still exist without the region, and still generate proper vwd data. If you can upload your mod somewhere so that I can poke around a bit, I might atleast be able to offer an idea as to why this might be happening.

thanks Vagrant - Ill try to sort things out and upload it - its about 20meg though.

 

This is essentially the main downside to using regions to generate terrain

Is there another way to generate large areas of trees and rocks etc? I thought that the region editor was where you were supposed to generate that stuff. You say these things cant be 'ungenerated', but there is an option to remove the items created with a region. is this the same thing? If I used the region editor and remove all those items, deleted the region and started again with it have they been removed from the mod, or are they still there, just not being used or something?

 

im going to make sure that its okay for me to upload the mod and ill find somehwere to put it for you thanks

[Vagrant0]

Is there another way to generate large areas of trees and rocks etc? I thought that the region editor was where you were supposed to generate that stuff. You say these things cant be 'ungenerated', but there is an option to remove the items created with a region. is this the same thing? If I used the region editor and remove all those items, deleted the region and started again with it have they been removed from the mod, or are they still there, just not being used or something?

The way regions work is that they merely say what objects are to be placed within that region when the region is generated. After the region is generated and saved, the objects are no longer attached to the region, and instead exist within the individual cells. Removing regions and the objects, or using the "obliterate" button will not affect objects which have already been generated and saved within the .esp. As it stands, you could just delete all the regions from your worldspace, and the objects would still be there. There is no way to remove objects which were already generated and saved short of going cell by cell and deleting them manually. If you generated a region, saved it, closed the CS, and tried to generate objects within the same region or an overlapping one, you would have some doubling of objects in cells as more generated objects are placed in a cell which already contains objects.

 

Regions are the only way to quickly populate areas with land textures and trees, but can often create problems if you make mistakes along the way.

[Huw Janus]

Right. I have a problem. Sort of.

 

i found a place for uploading the mod file and then decided to go back a version to a mod that had no trees generated and just to generate them again and see what happens.

 

now both these mods are the same, one was just a backup when I started filling in the trees and stuff.

 

well it worked properly! I used the same regions and everything and i know i did the same things as before because i write this stuff down as i go. so now I have the same mod twice but only one of them works.

 

So i thought "ill try this again" and I did. Keeping a backup of the original with no trees I then created several more copies and generated trees in all of them. the results are odd to say the least.

 

I did this five time in all, following the same route each time, and I got 2 mods with trees that worked and three (4 including the first one) where the trees vanish in the distance.

 

im confused!

 

Is this just something that happens when generating stuff like this, or is there perhaps somethign else that I could look into?