Unable to solve pink landscape issue (missing normal maps?)

[jaime74]

Hi everybody,

 

after migrating my modded Oblivion from my old WinXP system to a new Win7 installation, I am facing ugly pink landscapes.

When switching on the "Distant Land" option, any distant landscapes (not the ones of the current cell) appear pink, but not completely pink: The surface is still there, but it is covered by a pink, semi-transparent layer.

 

I have tried to find the cause of this by checking the following possible reasons, but without success:

 

1. Missing landscape meshes/textures, especially normal maps?

--> I checked the following folders and ensured that their contents exactly match the contents of my backup from the old system:

Meshes\Landscape\

Meshes\Landscape\LOD\

Textures\landscape\ (contains lots of "*_n.dds" files, so normal maps are apparently present)

 

2. Missing LOD files?

--> I checked the follwing folders (same procedure as above):

DistantLOD\

Textures\landscapelod

--> I regenerated all DistantLODs with Tes4LODGen

 

3. Some strange shader problem on Win7

--> Can't help myself much in that. All I know is that I have installed the latest NVIDIA drivers and haven't touched any settings.

 

Nothing of this helped.

Does anybody know other reasons for that?

 

Any help appreciated!!

[Hickory]

You migrated from an old system, including your oblivion.ini? Delete your Oblivion.ini and restart the game from the launcher to re-initialise your hardware and ini settings.

[jaime74]

You migrated from an old system, including your oblivion.ini? Delete your Oblivion.ini and restart the game from the launcher to re-initialise your hardware and ini settings.

Thanks for this hint, Hickory! Though it turned out not to be the cause of my issue (see below), I had completely missed to check the ini file. By having Oblivion Launcher regenerate it and merging it with my original version, I managed to detect and erase even other possible sources of errors.

 

But concerning my landscape issue:

I solved it by finding out what was causing it, but I still don't really understand what was going on.

 

Basically, there was a difference in the Data/Textures/landscapelod folder compared to my former WinXP installation. Prior to creating my backup for the migration, I had uninstalled several landscape lod replacement mods. I had completely forgotten about that! :wallbash:. It's actually those textures that were obviously missing, because after restoring them manually the pink is gone! Furthermore: While copying, I found that the existing contents of the landscapelod dir where much smaller in size (lower resolution?). So I suppose that they must have been either from another mod or from the vanilla installation (in fact, I had installed the vanilla game before copying all my backup files back to the fresh Oblivion installation dir, overwriting everything).

 

In brief, it seems that I just messed something up during my migration, and by copying some files back I somehow fixed it. It's not the ideal solution, because I'd still like to understand why the vanilla files weren't loaded automatically after accidentally uninstalling the replacements, but anyway... I am still in the progress of tracking down several other strange effects (sporadical crashes etc.), but I am still hopeful that I will get it to work instead of having to install everything from scratch (including approx. 230 mods! ;)).