LOD Generation Troubleshooting

[ManehattanProject]

So I'm trying to run a test LOD generation (just for the main one, the terrain, not objects, trees or textures) of our worldspace. However, whenever I start it (even with the GECK Power Up V1.4), It gets stuck on the first chunk.

 

When I pull up the worldspace in FNVEdit, I get the following Blocks:

 

-1, -1

-1, 0

0, -1

1, -1

 

(I removed three extra blocks, all of which had objects that ran away from me accidentally while working. :P)

 

So unlike previous attempts, it appears that this worldspace is only 4 blocks. (However, I just realized it doesn't have 0,0, so it might not actually be square...)

 

It goes through the various progress bars until it reaches "Decimating the mesh..." (On Chunk 4/336) and then sits there. In addition, nothing is appearing in meshes\landscape\LOD\<worldspace>. I've left this going for at least an hour now.

 

However, My memory usage is showing at 4.93-5.89 GB (I'm using the 4GB GECK "hack") and it's showing Processor 2 as working pretty damn hard (between 90/100%) in Windows Task Manager and Resource Monitor.

 

I'm running this on a iMac 27" (Late 2013) with Windows 7 Ultimate (Boot Camp), 8GB RAM with a Intel Core i7 3.4Ghz. It's going directly to a USB 3.0 External HD (I don't have room on the partition for this).

 

I'm running it off of an .ESM (not an .ESP). I've also run error check in FNVEdit (no errors) and no errors I can tell for the Worldspace itself using the GECK Power Up (There are a few with textures/meshes and one dealing with a SCOL, but nothing directly relating to the worldspace that I can tell).

 

From everything I've read, I should be seeing a least some progress within 30 minutes, especially considering the size of the environment. But I'm seeing nothing aside from my computer working hard. I've read through as many guides as I could, from the Fallout 3 one from Truancy to the GECK WIki (less than helpful :P) to various other threads, but haven't quite found the answer I'm looking for, though I'm likely going right over it.

 

I know I'm likely missing something obvious and providing way too much information, but I want to be thorough.

 

If someone could point out my error, I'd appreciate it.

 

(I also dearly hope it isn't something MASSIVE to fix. Frankly, I'd rather add new "blank spaces" making the worldspace larger to get to the 8x8 than having to move entire cells around.)

 

Thanks for your time folks, as always.

 

---

 

I'm providing this in case this information is helpful. These are the rough cell "boundaries" of the player-viewable space. I used a fair amount of large hills and cliff faces (the entire area is supposed to be a series of valleys and canyons). What I need is to be able to actually see it in game to figure out if what I'm doing is working or if it feels cheap. I know I'll likely need to redo this at least once more before we finally ship, but I want to get this troubleshooting out of the way now before we go any further.

 

Boundary West -15, 9 (Topaz Lake Structure)

Boundary NorthWest -7, 14 (Passes)

Boundary North, 5, 12 (Entrance)

Boundary NorthEast 19,18 (New Appleloosa)

Boundary East 13, 3 (Stable 16)

Boundary South 8, 0 (Stable 16 Quarry)

Boundary South 3, -1 (Citrine Lake South)

Boundary SouthWest -12, -3 (Rock Farm SW Corner)

[RoyBatterian]

Is your worldspace a square devisable by 16? The terrain lod will crash if it's not square afaik.

[Nimboss]

Hi!

LOD generation will not crash if not square, unless something other that GECK needs is missing when it runs generating internally.

But afaik it DO introduce visible errors (I noted creating water worlds will get strange "holes" if not square) in the LOD if you have stray cells and not exact lined cell borders of your new worldspace. Roy has messed with this more than me I believe and to base it of a power of 2 number like 16 sounds good.

 

 

Also when testing a big new worldspace I noted that GECK generates in chunks, it can be hours between new LOD chunks created if you check in the output folder for the LOD of the new worldspace. If you can let it run that long that is.

 

 

A good sign is if one processor runs at 100% continuously, maybe jumping to another core, but still one at 100%. Then GECK still working, and if after hours there really are new files put in the output LOD folder for your worldspace you have a BIG worldspace and might need days in worst case to complete.

 

 

Just empiric notes from own tests, what really controls how fast/bad/correct LOD is generated I can't tell I just seen it makes difference.

[Nimboss]

I'm to tired, just some more notes from your worldspace

 

Your world have 336 chunks, that's the exact size of the DLC Old World Blues to give you a picture. Also noted it seems to be exact square with 16 as a divider, perfectly placed in the exact middle of worldspace, funny I just grabbed after something to give you a size of your worldspace compared to something else.

 

I made a simple water world of 72 (bad number I know, needs cleaning) chunks it took 2.5 hour to LOD generate on a CPU O.C to 4.2GHz doing nothing else, just give you some figures.

 

 

If your world is centred you should have a -1,-1 -1,0 0,-1 and 0,0 Block. What makes it more pain is all the sub-block you have under the major blocks, these are the ones one needs to filter to make the worldspace square. For a little world totally square with 16 chunks (256 cells, note the power of 2 for the numbers) you will delete anything bigger than sub-block matching the major block number.

 

 

IF your world is bigger you need to clue out the coordinates of all sub-block you need to keep, and what to delete. It's maths based logically after the word cell coordinates and put in sub-blocks.

 

Again DLC Old World Blues have for Block 0,0 16 Sub-Blocks ranging from 0,0 up to 3,3 with world space coordinates up to 31,31 you start to get the picture?

One could argument that 3,3 and 31,31 is not power of 2 numbers, but we start count from 0,0 not 1,1 since this is based on programming and zero is a number also.

 

That's why Block -1,-1 and the Sub-Block most far away from origo is not 3,3 like before but -4,-4 zero is already taken.

 

So just don't delete blindly, and keep lot of backups of your mod GECK eats mods for breakfast.

 

Now I must sleep...

[RoyBatterian]

The terrain LOD gen will crash a lot, also... it takes a VERY VERY VERY long time, it may take over a week (!!!) to generate the terrain meshes for a worldspace that large.

 

If it crashes, just start it up again without deleting anything, it SHOULD continue where it left off.

[ManehattanProject]

Thank you all for your extra information. Let me add a little more to it.

 

To my surprise, the LOD terrain mesh generation actually worked. It ran for an hour until the Power Up came up with some error I don't remember at the moment. Of course I was asleep at the time, so I didn't start it until around 2PM the next day. However, in all, it took a total of twelve hours. I decided to just test terrain, as I didn't want to screw with meshes, trees and objects, since this was a proof-of-concept test.

 

The only issue now is that I'm having the strange "patchy water" problem, where while the water environment shows up when you take a swim, it doesn't show the surface for most of the area. (There are two large lakes and a smaller one).

 

Thankfully, our team is huge on iterations, so we have backups going all the way back to the original version.

 

Nimboss, I think you may have nailed it. I did a bit more checking and I got this result.

 

-1, -1

-1, 0

0, -1

0, 0

 

So that looks good. However, when I go to the subblocks, that's when the math doesn't work.

 

-1, -1: 8 Subblocks going from -1, -1 to -3, -2

-1, 0: 14 Subblocks going from -1, 3 to -4, 2

0, -1: 12 Subblocks going from 3, -1 to 0, -3

0, 0: 16 Subblocks going from 3, 3 to 0, 0.

 

I should also mention that the cells aren't the same across the subblocks either.

 

So it looks like I need to add some subblocks.

 

So here's the million bit question:

 

What's the most effective way in the GECK to add the subblocks needed to make this thing square? I'd honestly rather add areas cells, even if they're only just random landscape than delete them, even if it takes longer to generate. I only see cells when working the GECK. Or is there a way to add "blank" subblocks directly using FNVEdit?

 

Finally, one more question. I have my New Vegas directory located at G:\Steam\SteamApps\common\Fallout New Vegas. I've found the LOD addition available on Nexus Mods (the one where the alphas have to be manually added, I think...I can't remember the name at the moment). I've been hanging my head against it reading through the Readme and other guides...can someone tell me exactly where to extract the contents of that so I can do the object generation? I really don't want to manually convert all of the needed .DDS files to .TGA (Seriously, utterly terrible design there).

 

Here's an actual picture of the listing if it helps.

 

http://gardensofequestria.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Screenshot-2015-07-29-15.33.20.png

Edited July 29, 2015 by ManehattanProject

[rickerhk]

The block/Sub-Block format for grouping/displaying cells is just that - a display method. Those numbers don't actually exist in the plugin/Geck/Game.

So to make your world space square, add cells in the Geck after figuring out what cells you need.

The sub-block numbers are generated by xEdit based on the formID of the cells underneath them. Can't recall the actual rule used.

[Nimboss]

Regarding strange "patchy water" problem:
What I seen and it's daunty to fix is that this normally is caused by missaligned cells regarding hightmap at borders of the cell. If close zooming in at cross sections between cells in GECK and have cell grid showing (B key) and turn on wireframe (W key) you probably notice gaps. I think you could do similar in game with console TFC/TWF and examine land under water close.

What I did in those cases was to use the inbuilt Landscape Edit tool (H key) and try raise/lower/soften in combination on problematic section. But if it is bigger sections this can be very time consuming.


About the million bit question:
Well it depends how you guys created the worldspace, directly in GECK or by importing a hightmap?
I presume you imported a hightmap, and in that case I would try to expand the world in the tool used to create it, import again. And like told afterwards open and cut of sub-blocks not needed with FNVEdit to get it square.

Also note that "patchy water" in this case can be because the tools you use at some points exceeds allowable hight limit between two hightpoints in the map. Depending on the workflow at some point the tools try to correct this and it introduce misaligned cells.


For LOD textures and placing:
You did read this? http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php?title=World_LOD
Read the section about LOD textures carefully. Some other info are outdated, but for LOD textures it's not.

I started with this mod http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/36693/? by chucksteel
But as mentioned in comments alpha channels are lost.

Files needed have _LOD in it's name I have around 264 items, but I think more are needed spread in all those folders from textures.bsa not following this name structure.

Actually I had lot of space and was lazy so I found myself some graphic tool with alpha support (can't recall the name) that had batch converting function and converted the whole texture.bsa of files to .TGA format and slammed all the files under source folder. Totally overdone (13GB), but I think I never had any missing .TGA when LOD creating.

[RoyBatterian]

As for generating object LOD, use FNVLODGen. There's no need for the targa files as it uses the .dds's directly. It has other features like supporting a larger tex atlas too.

 

Zilav also made tools to create billboards for things like bushes and the yucca plants, they are on the skyrim nexus so you can use treelod for those. I'm pretty sure he included the resources for these with FNVLODGen.

 

Bear in mind that Tree LOD is not to be used for anything but stuff like that because it's partially broken in New Vegas, for larger objects you should have object LOD do the job.

 

You can of course make your own LOD meshes too, the vanilla ones are often pretty terrible and the textures are too.

[Nimboss]

IF someone still would want to batch convert things not only .DDS to .TGA but for a lot of other graphic formats try DDS Converter, made a check and I think it was this one I used at the time. Just read the details and posts, it needs some tweaking for Win7.

 

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/8698/?