Get rid of DistantLOD\*.lod and cmp

[glowplug]

At only a few months of development my mod has 1000 files in DistantLOD.

Even with a bsa it makes a very slow install on NMM.

I have to ask what it does to overheads such as load and travel?

 

Tamriel does not need these yet does have the LSData folder, are they related?

While I've found no information on creating these files the Construction Set Wiki mentions some mods come with them.

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[Surilindur]

Oblivion does have DistantLOD folder and the *.lod and *.cmp files inside it. I have not looked into it much, but they are in the Oblivion - Meshes.bsa archive.

 

When running TES4LODGen, it generates those files. One might assume they contain information related to distant objects. If I recall correctly, terrain and object information are separate. Oscape, tes4ll and similar tools generate distant terrain meshes and textures, but TES4LODGen generates lod files for objects. You can test it: temporarily rename the DistantLOD folder and see what happens. I could be mistaken, too.

 

Is it a slow install even if you pack the files inside a bsa archive, because if that is true, then it definitely sounds odd? Maybe NMM does something funny with the archive? I use Mod Organizer myself so I do not know how NMM works.

 

Edit: BSAopt is a great tool for managing archives, and it also makes browsing an archive's contents easy. I use the Beta 2.0.0 (16 December 2012) one myself: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/247

 

Take the time to go through all the options before using it, though. Selecting game and compression level usually help avoid any issues when packing things into an archive. And when extracting individual files from an archive, select the root ("/"), tick "show recursive", click the button to unselect all, then untick "show recursive" and proceed to select the individual files you want to extract. All files in an archive are selected for extraction by default (for some reason, and people in the comments section do not seem to get it).

Edited December 6, 2016 by Contrathetix

[glowplug]

Thanks for your help once again Contrathetix.
I'm not sure how I missed Oblivion - Meshes.bsa\DistantLOD when viewing in BSA Browser.
The other mistake I made was packing the Sound folder into it.

I found DistantLOD, Meshes and Textures can go into one bsa.
I think I'll stick with 'ModName - meshes.bsa' and 'ModName - textures.bsa'.
That installs on NMM nice and quickly.

FX + Voice work in 'ModName - sound.bsa' but I'll cross that bridge if and when it becomes necessary.

[Surilindur]

No problem. And I assume I will also be here asking questions about generating distant terrain things for a completely worldspace at some point. I have a project that features (will feature, actually, nothing is there yet :P ) a new worldspace for the mod's contents, and the plan is to one day finally start working on that project properly.

 

Good luck with your project. :thumbsup: