Vvardenfell 2x screenshots with LOD

[Lightwave]

Thought I'd start a new thread.

I've managed to generate the LOD for the 2x Vvardenfell landmass (screenshots).

For those that are testing the landscape, you can download the LOD files.

Just copy the contents of the Data folder to your Oblivion game directory (there'll already be a Data directory there obviously). Then go in to the Oblivion\Data\Textures\LandscapeLOD\Generated folder and double-click on the 'VVD-2xGen.bat' batch file; this just creates multiple identical copies of the basic texture file for all 36 quads, it saves me having to distribute an extra 50Mb of duplicated textures.

LOD doesn't appear when you visit the Vvardenfell worldspace unless Vvardenfell2x-LW2.esp is loaded as your first mod. This is a game bug (I don't think anyone has a work-around yet). Alternatively just unload all other mods solely for the purpose of this testing.

The CS, being the buggy tool it is, seems to produce some join problems along the meshes (each mesh is 32x32 OB cells - i.e. one 'quad' in size), the most notable problem shows up along the Balmora river. There are fixes somewhere for this, but I have to research them, I might ask on the main forums. The LODs can be reproduced at any time, they don't take too long (maybe 20-30 mins for all the quads).

The texture generation was also rubbish in the CS, half the texture was jet-black, a known bug mentioned in the Wiki. Since the entire landscape is just one texture at the moment, I manually generated the texture from the working half and write a batch file to duplicate them for all the other quads. This saved about 2-3 hours of pointlessly clicking in all 36 quads just to produce identical files.

Like the MGE distant land generator for Morrowind, visiting the land with LOD is an entirely different experience. Sometimes it looks awesome. Sometimes Vvardenfell just looks plain weird. It will of course look a lot nicer with other textures on the landscape, the grass I used looked almost like sand from a distance. If someone has a better texture they'd like me to apply, just tell me the name of it (the dds name from the landscape editor window).

LOD takes away some of the mystery of Vvardenfell, which is a mixed blessing, but it'll help provide a good perspective on how much land there is to fill and how one might go about carving sections up.

Lightwave

[TheImperialDragon]

Was this generated from the TES3 landscape? Or did you make it entirely on your own?

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by TheImperialDragon
Was this generated from the TES3 landscape? Or did you make it entirely on your own?

A direct double scale replica from the TES3 landscape (see the other thread on TESPort). It's still to be determined whether Bethesda will allow such a thing though. However it has already gone through various conversion processes to produce (TES3 gradient map to RAW heightmap, offsetting, scaling, interpolation, re-offsetting, cell shifting and conversion to a TES4 gradient map format), it's not a simple copy, but essentially it's still a perfect scaled up replica.

[InsanitySorrow]

I't looks nice, is there any texture on the land, if not you could set a pre-set texture for the program to use.

It would help the guys here if this could be used, but i think its against Bethesda's copyright isn't it.

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by InsanitySorrow
I't looks nice, is there any texture on the land, if not you could set a pre-set texture for the program to use.

The landmass ESP (see near the end of the TESPort thread) already has a 3D grass texture applied. The LOD has inherited this texture, but the LOD textures produced by the CS are quite low detail, just 1024x1024 images for every 32x32 cells. i.e. The CS only generates one LOD texture pixel for each point on the landscape so if the landscape is all one texture, the LOD texture is all one colour.

I've tried 2048x2048 LOD textures and the game will display them, so theoretically if one wrote an application to generate the textures from the ESP, one could gain a much more detailed LOD than that used in Oblivion. I pasted 2048x2048 maps of Vvardenfell on the Vvardenfell LOD, a bit perverse, but it seemed to work fine.

I've found the source of the LOD mis-join (which causes the odd barriers across Balmora river only when seen from a distance). There are some spooky very deep-cuts in the original sea-bed in NE Vivec and when scaled x2 they are simply too dramatic for TES to render, the effect is carried on through the rest of the LOD mesh. I'll have to smoothen them before extracting and interpolating, the 2x scale is too unreliable to render much in the TES4 CS (2Gb memory constraints). But the current LOD still gives a good impression overall.

Lightwave

[Dave_91]

Hmm, I cannot seem to get the LOD file link to work in your first post.

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by Dave_91
Hmm, I cannot seem to get the LOD file link to work in your first post.

Woops, thought I'd checked that. It should work now.

[Alasdair]

How many quads is it?

[Lightwave]

Originally posted by Alasdair
How many quads is it?

That sounds like an echo from the TESPort thread.
Its edges extend into 36 quads, 6x6 from the centre.

The RAW image was 5376x5632. Taking out water cells it's about 29 square miles.

[sandor]

It looks great. :goodjob: