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These are some alpha screenshots of LOD2, a mostly working Distant Land replacement system which uses full quality landscape meshes placed as VisibleWhenDistant (VWD) statics to give a 100% accurate detailed landscape mesh. The game's original Distant Land system suffers from some design flaws and accuracy limitations which reveal unsightly bugs on some landscapes; this is largely because the maximum detail in a landscape LOD mesh can only be at most 3% of the original landscape mesh and Bethesda's algorithm rarely tries to use even this capacity; most meshes use only between 1.5-2% of the maximum detail. LOD2's meshes are generated using TESAnnwyn and the textures using TES4qLOD. In order to get the meshes to always display next to the heightmap mesh, the largest size I could make them is just a single cell. The meshes and textures are broken in to subdirectories to make loading performance much greater, but the game's Oblivion\Data\DistantLand cannot. For a large worldspace such as Tamriel or Vvardenfellx2, there are more than 16,000 .lod files for the game engine to seek for and for each of these it has to load a mesh and then the texture. The resulting initial load time suffers a sligthly longer delay than the MGE's initial distant land for TES3: Morrowind. Once loaded, the in-game performance is not as bad as one might expect, even with the maximum quality meshes. But the biggest problem appears to be a cache limit on how many VWD meshes the TES4 game engine can load at once. It appears that once too many meshes have been loaded, the game refuses to load any more, despite my attempts to fiddle with the settings in Oblivion.ini. So as the player moves to new areas, where the VWD hasn't already been loaded, then no new distant land appears: This VWD limit really seems to sink the idea of LOD2 and overall my efforts may have come to naught. The following LOD2 screenshots are of the heightmap from the TES4:Vvardenfell project using the default quality textures (i.e. the lowest quality used in stock TES4). The profile of the landscape is totally accurate and avoids the glaring bugs of the original DistantLand system, such as gaps, mesh joins, barriers that block valleys/rivers and triangles you can walk through. It is far easier to understand the lay of the land with LOD2. The cell-grid lines you can see in these pictures are not mesh (vertex) errors, but a small bug in my UV sets algorithm, so the edges of the textures are not displayed correctly, something I will fix before releasing this system, though as I've outlined, I don't think anyone will ever use it (for DistantLand anyway). |
Balmoras multi-tiered profile is now instantly recognizable again.
In the game's original Distant Land, the left bank is virtually a constant slope, with no levels, it's barely recognizable.
Looking upriver towards Balmora. No dams block the rivers any more.
Balmora, at ground level.
The Ascadian Isles. Some texture loading bugs start to appear (game or graphics card) and the mesh limit is reached; no more meshes are loaded.
The Fort, just over the hill, west of Balmora.
It's much easier to understand the paths around RedMountain up here.
The true shape of Red Mountain.
The VWD loading limit is reached again. The grazelands are to the left.
The grazelands, again with the VWD limit reached. Is that graffiti on the landscape? ;)
The original Distant Land; a Dam stretches between both banks and the West side of the town has no levels.