LOD2: A doomed DistantLand Replacement ...

[Lightwave]

I was making good progress on LOD2, a DistantLand replacement system which used automatically generated and automatically placed full quality VWD statics of any landscape. You can see some alpha screenshots of Vvardenfell, mainly concentrating on Balmora. The grid-lines are a minor texture problem with my UV sets, the meshes themselves are perfect representations.

The biggest problem I'm hitting is that the TES4 game engine appears to have a limit on how many VWD statics it will load (and possibly cache) in any game session. Once the player moves outside the immediate zone that the game has managed to load, no new VWDs are loaded which means no new DistantLand appears. I haven't yet found an Oblivion.ini option to increase this and without it this DistantLand replacement project can go nowhere.

So I think I'm going to have to look at beating Bethesda's landscape mesh optimizer, which won't be easy. I believe I can fix the join problem at the quad edges easily enough, but trying to get an adequate version of the landscape using just 3% of the vertices is quite a challenge, though Bethesda's generator only seems to use about 2% of the available vertices, so there is room for improvement. Like LOD2 was, this system is another gamble, and like so many other things I won't know how well that'll work either until it's finished ...

Lightwave

[Dave_91]

I've actually tested some landscape out what I've been working on for the past week after just finishing it, and there's a non-existing LOD island covering quite a large chunk of land, it looks ugly, but I can put up with that. Your program looks very interesting, it would solve those ugly errors with the CS LOD generator, right? I hope you can iron out those issues you're having, this looks like it can be an excellent program. :goodjob:

[KuKulzA]

thank you Lightwave for all your help so far, let us know how this goes :yes:

[OblivionMon]

Originally posted by KuKulzA
thank you Lightwave for all your help so far, let us know how this goes :yes:

Nice avatar KuKu! Also Lightwave I wish ye luck, infact we all wish ye luck on this and I hope we get to see balmora in full good LOD glory.