Lod Mods

[sean1984]

Good lord!! What kind of system is need to play these mods? Mine is pretty decent and I ran several sppedboosting programs including Game Booster and something else which let's Oblivion use more processer and RAM memory and I still only get around 10-15 FPS when I'm moving around in large open areas. The views are absolutely unbelieveable but I can't paly with them on due to the constant half second lag. Can anyone offer suggestions? My relevant system and mod specs follow.

 

System Specs

OS: Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP2

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 920 Processor 2.80 GHZ

Ram: 8.00 GB

Video Card" NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275

 

Mods

Qarl's Texture Pack III

Better Cities Complete

Unique Landscapes complete

Unique landscapes compatibility patches

[LFact]

MTAEVWD is not recommended for (practical)playing. If you read the comments under, you'd know that it can bring almost all computers of this day to their knees.

[Megatarius]

You have 8 GB of RAM and you still stutter with these? Damn, there goes my idea....

 

I don't know how powerful that video card is. How much memory does it have? My card is a 9600 series with 2 GB of memory. I also have a faster CPU.

 

 

I have pretty bad stutter because of this mod, and I went through and deleted a lot of the meshes.

 

That's the only thing I can suggest to you.

 

First, delete every _far.nif in the rocks folders. That's just stupid to have LOD for that. Next, delete anything with "door" in the name. You're not going to suffer if you can't see the doors from across the valley. All the meshes are named according to a naming convention. Take your time to learn it. I recommend even downloading Nifskope and opening up each _far.nif to see if it's something you can part with. About half the meshes in these mods are useless beyond looking pretty. The main point of this mod for me is so I can simply see what's ahead of me. I don't care if a few pillars and staircases pop into view, I just don't want an entire fort to jump out of nowhere.

 

 

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the author of these mods just went ahead and duplicated all the meshes into new _far.nif meshes, high polys and all. They could be low poly, but I'm guessing he had the system of the future and just filled his game world with polygon after polygon because it's less work than editing every mesh.

[forli]

MTAEVWD is not recommended for (practical)playing. If you read the comments under, you'd know that it can bring almost all computers of this day to their knees.

 

Really? So Oblivion isn't so old, if even new PCs have troubles.

Only a PC like the one of the Argonne National Laboratory can run it without probems: 160.000 processors (No joke, it really has 160.000 processors) and his graphic cards can render the explosion of a supernova!!!

[LFact]

MTAEVWD is not recommended for (practical)playing. If you read the comments under, you'd know that it can bring almost all computers of this day to their knees.

 

Really? So Oblivion isn't so old, if even new PCs have troubles.

Only a PC like the one of the Argonne National Laboratory can run it without probems: 160.000 processors (No joke, it really has 160.000 processors) and his graphic cards can render the explosion of a supernova!!!

 

If you want to read....(Ignore spams)

[sean1984]

What is NifScope?

[Megatarius]

NifSkope is a program to edit the node tree information in the mesh files used by the game.

 

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/NifSkope

 

 

Don't worry about all the technical stuff if you're not interested in modding or modeling for the game, but you can use it to view each .nif file to see what you could delete to speed up your game. It will look blank white in the program, but you can generally tell what it's supposed to be, and whether or not you want it. Just don't delete too many at once, and then see all these half objects in the distance.

 

It's possible to use these mods and still have a good frame rate, you just have to work at it a bit.

[BFG99]

Thanks for the tips on deleting the rock and door _far nif files. I have to admit I'm having the same problem with RAEVWD and haven't spent much time trying to tweak it.

Are there any other groups of _far meshes you would recommend deleting? If not I'll just go through the folders with NIFSkope like suggested.

[Megatarius]

I can't remember any more what I deleted, sorry. Anything with sm in the name is a small object, like a small rock or a small wall. All the little tiny ruined fort walls that are waist high by the roadside, these are usually named like that. I like to leave the Rune Stone _far.nifs though. Basically my rule of thumb is, anything that has a map marker should have something viewable in the distance. However, I have also gone through and deleted all the cave entrance _far.nif files. I figure cave entrances are more or less part of the natural world, and it's okay if they blend into the forest. Forts and Alyied ruins though; those should be sticking up through the trees.

 

I also deleted the Alyied Ruin statues' _far.nifs.

 

I think of it as a gameplay balance as well. From a realism standpoint, I'd want all the rocks visible of course, but that's just plain gluttony to have a computer that fast unless you use it for graphics work. (I built my computer for graphics work and I can't even run all that.) But from a gamplay standpoint, it makes sense to see cool stuff to explore from far away, but stumbling upon surprises is always fun too. Wayshrines and Aylied Wells are supposed to lost and forgotten. It's kind of fun to suddenly come upon them. Giant forts on the other hand should be beckoning to the player. I kept the chapels and farm houses as well, so I can see where villages are, and sewer entrances. I could probably stand to delete a few more things, but right now I've reached a balance between seeing things and being able to move semi-smoothly.

 

 

Just be careful. It's easy to delete the main body of something, and have the roof still there, so there's a hovering disc in the distance that turns into a fort later. Some stuff in NifSkope looks like a small piece of something, but it's actually a big fort mesh, so be sure you're sure what you're looking at. You can extract the textures from the BSA into your Data folder and then they should show up in NifSkope.