Ewarre

Finally got my mod released, but it still had a few bugs to shake out ..... My mod contains all pre made LOD [3 versions] and does not use the dynamic feature of DynDoLOD, but it turns out I also needed to distribute elements of your resources pack, to prevent a CTD near Whiterun [maybe other places, not sure]. Anyway I read your "free to use clause" so I guess this is more of a courtesy note and to thank you again for your efforts. mod is here https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/83982/? PS how many pictures do you want ?

Yes there will be a mod bringing new premade LOD for TS, ..... about a month off. Initially just the standard 2D BB type, and at that time the BBs will be released too. I am still tinkering with the new 3D LOD models and will hold back any "3D LOD mod" till I'm happy, plus on deeper inspection of the BTOs there is something that makes me want to play around a bit more when I have time. If I do return later with more questions it will be with a truck load of pictures, logs & stuff. I recognize it's just too easy to waste your time with out all the back up information readily at hand. You have been most helpful, and as always I learn a lot from your comments. There are a couple of things on my mind .... 1/ My mod will probably have something to say on LOD INI settings and the compromise users need to make between visuals and performance. Your doco and S.T.E.P. have some great pieces on this and how LOD works, and I will reference this, but I would also like to quote some of this too if I may. 2/ At this stage I plan to release the TS BB LOD mod with out turning on dynamic LOD to keep things simple, ... I would be interested in your opinion of this. 3/ The 3D LOD mod I had also intended to release [when ready] as pre made LOD, and from tests it should be around a 1Gb download when compressed. However Im not sure I want to release the LOD models and possibly precipitate extra "forum activity" here at STEP after I have been run over at my end, ..... so to speak, .... any thoughts ? What I mean is if your up for it then I will probably release them once I am certain they work as intended . This mod would be stand apart from the other BB LOD mod and aimed more at the experienced user with good hardware and come with full warnings and like.

Many many many apologies sheson, it was working, I just did not know ! I was working on the mistaken belief that as I use TFC , what I saw was what was setup from where I started to TFC from, ie my real location, but in fact TFC must keep throwing up fresh LOD4 as the camera approaches, hence me thinking it was all LOD4. But the BTOs tell the story, Tamriel.16.16,-16 contains only BB tree LOD and that area at Fort Amol is full of the big trees I have new models for. Thanks again, you will have pics when I stop tinkering, and when I learn how to do video that as well, TS will look very impressive with static 3D no pop LOD !

Thank you for your prompt response, but still no joy at this end. Fixed my poorly named STEAM folder. So thanks for that tip, though I must confess I did run Steam verify before launcher. Tried the new names *passthru_lod_0 & *passthru_lod_1 but it made no difference. Then just for my 3 new trees I removed their overrides from the TropicalSkyrim ESP so the game could use instead the vanilla models and your new hybrid passthru NIFs [just those 3], still no joy, I just had your hybrids all the way to worlds end, they do look good. For this test I had the catch all tree rule as LOD4/BB/BB. Next I set up a brand new vanilla game folder with nothing but TS and DynDoLOD [sKSE & PapyrusUtil3.3] ... same result, and I would assume by now some one has used the advanced rules set in Windows 10 so I can rule that out too ? But I might just throw it at Win7 to see if have better luck. Is it possible that TS does not play well with the advanced part of DynDoLOD wrt using LOD4 or LOD8 in the rules ? ? I only ask this because one of the trees I am working on, the anvil_palm_trunk which is used to override 3 vanilla trees, [18A02, 5C071, B8A74] has only one of the 3 records placed in the DynDoLOD esp and gets the "has distant lod" flag set, the other 2 records are not in the ESP - the flag was not set. There are over a dozen occurrences where TS uses the same model to replace more than one vanilla tree, ie a many to one match, regards Base records to NIFs. Other than that I am at a loss as to what it could be !

I run Tropical Skyrim and have been experimenting with "lighter" tree mesh, full model and LOD mesh, to the point where I now have almost seamless transition on the near grid to full model on the worst 3 trees. But I have a problem, the LOD4 does not go to LOD8 in FarGrid nor billboard, it keeps going as far as the world is rendered. :D I had rules set up to use my feather light LOD8 models [still 3D] but the models never show nor does it give me 2D billboard if I put that in the rule for columns LOD8 & LOD16. All other trees are shown correctly as std billboard LOD, and as I have replaced most of the overly heavy mesh on all common trees the game is stable and rarely drops below 40 fps unless in combat, even though I have this massive "dead weight " of extra LOD4 everywhere. Naturally this is not a desirable situation. All trees except 3 are setup for std 2D BB and that is all fine...and I can easily make the "new" tree models be std 2D BB LOD as well by placing their BB entries in LODGen or I can make all trees static 2D BB via the INI switch. So it must see the passthru_LOD.nif for the LOD4 mesh to appear, but the passthru_lod_flat_2.nif model never appears. Nor when I request BB in column LOD8 or LOD16 for the new models do I ever get any 2D BB for them, only when I force it via the first mentioned actions above. The only explanation I can think off is the actual LOD generation process is disconnected from what I do in the advanced rules panel. On re reading again your doco I note you say to place the DynDoLOD Standalone Folder outside of steamapps, .... I have mine placed in the Skyrim folder. Do you think this would explain the above ? It was put there to solve another problem and until I started to play with LOD4 & 8 models my workaround solution was fine. I have made many successful generations of LOD, but always as std BB LOD. I have a special character in my steam name directory that is an upset to DynDoLOD, so just prior to generating LOD I rename the steam folder, then switch it back afterwards for in game testing. I am now committed to fixing this, but up to this point I had been deferring the job as I can see it being a real pain to reconnect everything. In attempting to validate if the folder location was the reason for the "disconnect". I moved it out of steam and temporarily renamed the steam folder [minus the special character], but DynDoLOD.exe now stops with the error "..no plugins.." because its still sees "PathName" as the old name, and naturally because of my rename it is not there. Where does it retrieve the PathName from and can I easily [/temporarily] alter this ? Sorry for the word wall, and thanks for your time .

Thank you for your replies Sheson, I meant to reply sooner but RL overtook me. On rechecking what I did as my fix, I realize I omitted something, I was also experimenting with the palms billboards. These 2 trees are the only 2 billboards inside "Tropical Skyrim.esp" within the LODGen folder. These palms are placed in the world as overrides to the vanilla static object CoastDriftWood01/2/3 on the "Placed Object" records in all applicable cell-blocks. I can opt for these two palms to have either regular tree LOD only, or your new static LOD only, or both at once. The best method was to run DynDoLOD with all billboards "in" then do a second tree LOD only run with the palms not "in" , so no standard tree LOD is generated for them leaving just your new static LOD which then changes seamlessly as you approach because they are already shown at the correct angle of lean. Alternately to not have the palms billboards in for the initial DynDoLOD full run, then put then in for the second tree only run, leaves me just regular tree LOD for them. That is the palms are shown as straight, no lean, and clearly not as good as the first way. If I'm doing it wrong, I honestly cannot see what that could be, every thing else is perfect and was so from the very first run, and to be honest I have my "fix" and am very grateful to you for DynDoLOD. I post this here as my "wrap up", and am content to move on rather than take up more of your time, however I remain ready to help however I can if you so wish.

another possible ..... just had look and noticed the 2 palm trees have "has Distant LOD" flag , that is probably my doing from earlier fiddles

Still digesting what you just said, .... my normal mode of operation is to rename old Trees-BTTs & Object-BTOs folders & move in the new as is.

my bad, the 3rd para should read "TES5Edit build LOD [trees only]" not "Zilav's TreeLod.exe"

@Sheson Many many thanks again for this fantastic toy DynDoLOD. I now have it playing nicely with my Tropical Skyrim and all the rest my mod collection, but it was a bit of a push to get there. I made so many test runs I recon you are probably the only person who has done more DynDoLOD runs than me. :D Even with a massive load order, a complete "Tamriel only" everything in run takes under 7 minutes, I am very impressed with your tweaking ! I'm guessing you also did a run on TS as I got "tripped out" on having the TS-Birds ESP active, so I know others have gone before me. But there is a certain coastal palm tree [has 2 versions] that is a NIF swap on a STATic object that continually threw a double image while in LOD range, ie the TREE LOD image and your new generated LOD for STATic objects. If I removed its billboard then I got no LOD at all. I guess there was a way to turn off one of these via special rules, but was getting a bit tired and just as an experiment I did a quick tree only run using Zilav's TreeLod.exe and it was all good --- only the orthodox tree LOD was painted up, which became 3D as you approach. So now I run your BTOs and Zilav's BTTs. As a minor thing that you probably already know, the program LODGen.exe does not like special characters in the file path name. I have used the "=" prefix on several of my Steam Libraries since Windows XP and never had issue before, and I have used just about all the tools on NEXUS-Skyrim with no problems including TreeLod.exe. Depending on how you call LODGen, you can get a return code of 1 [or maybe it was -1 ?]. DynDoLOD will give "sucessfully completed" in its messages but without LODGen working it did not produce any BTOs, but naturally the BTTs & atlas files were all good. I only mention this here in case others have fallen victim to this, and maybe if you add it in your FAQs .... as in, do not do this. :)

Great work you guys are doing ! You were asking for some feedback on the performance hit of SRO on "lower end' rigs. This my HW.... -->> Duo E8400 @3Ghz, 8G ram, GeForce GTX 550Ti(1G), display=1024x768@75Hz (its a 14 yo 17" !!) I tested with the 3 top SRO option selections in (fires,falls,creeks) but no swamp, and a second time but with no extra selections (all 4 out), the impact as to be expected is highly variable, I tested in 2 open areas one near WesternWatchTower with long views all sides and the second near Riverwood Bridge with mixed views , for a total of 9 readings. With "fires,falls,creeks" in , I lost a total of 60 frames over the 9 views, for an average 6.7 fps drop, and with no special selections at all the hit was a total of 37 frames over the 9 views, for an average 4 fps. For what I gain the 4 fps hit is well worth it and this mod is now a must have, but I decided to not use any special selections since I already have most of what I want, its just the missing grass now, that is left to "pop in". The fps numbers were (FORMAT = pre-SRO , SRO with no selections, SRO+fires+falls+creeks ) ..... 56,53,48 48,45,44 63,57,55 47,43,38 48,45,41 58,53,50 58,52,52 65,58,57 75,75,73 Mod-Mix Backround... I'm running well over a hundred mods, but nothing script heavy, as my CPU is at full load always, GPU gets it easy sitting generally around 60% give or take. Using many texture packs , mostly 1k outdoors (some 2k) and all 2k indoors/caves/mines/dungeons. Performance (prior to loading this mod)...... My fps indoors never drops below 60 and usually sits at 75, outdoors in open areas its pretty constantly in the 50 to 60 range except for tree areas (lots tree mods) where its more like 40s, and towns (lots mods here) where its likely 40s. Stutters in busy outside areas are rare and very brief, fps may drop to 30s then recover. My game settings are mostly ultra except for shadows=med, and AA=2 , But my video card is running AAx8, and lots other stuff not done by game engine, did much reading & testing on this and I get a better quality image and a measurable performance improvement. My ini settings are vanilla with following exceptions ... fLODFadeOutMultObjects=20.0000 was 15 fSkyCellRefFadeDistance=250000.0000 was 150k fGrassStartFadeDistance=10000.0000 was 7k fGrassMaxStartFadeDistance=10000.0000 was 7k fTreeLoadDistance=100000.0000 was 75k bTreesReceiveShadows=1 was 0 =off bDrawLandShadows=1 was 0 =off bShadowsOnGrass=0 was 1 =on fShadowBiasScale=1.5000 was 0.3 More ......... not meant to be read.... In case you are wondering why im still using and old VDU.... I'm broke !! or why I'm still using 1024x768, cus thats what I started out with, and when I get thru building my mod list I will go back and review it. But to be honest I did not expect my frame rates to hold up as well as they have given the mod mix I now run, and what I read about Skyrim being such a demanding game. I have owned the game for over a year but only started to play and mod about 2 months ago, and it takes a lot of time to individually load, trial & bench each mod before I lock it in, and though my mod list is well over 100 I have discarded at least that many in the process . But I now have a game that plays smooth as, no CTDs and looks stunning....starting to think its going to be my all time #1. Oh, and I'm also running on a new install Win7, its very lean & fast. PS. I'm still learning, but if any of you more knowledeable guys out there want give feedback on the above feel free to do so, I can take it !