Dynamic Distant Objects LOD - DynDOLOD 2.27

[sheson]

A newer version of DynDOLOD is available

 

DynDOLOD 2.22/2.23/2.24/2.25/2.26/2.27 minor version update post | Major version update Post | Skyrim Special Edition

 

What’s New?

 

This update includes general performance and stability improvements for DynDOLOD.exe, TexGen.exe and LODGen.exe. See change log below for more info.

 

There is no need to update LOD generated by earlier versions just because the tools have been updated. See Full update post for 2.xx update instructions

 

---

 

TexGen.exe now offers changing the texture output formats for advanced users. Leave at default for typical use. To change the texture format of the texture atlases created by DynDOLOD.exe edit its INIs. See docs\DynDOLOD_TexGen.html for more info.

 

DynDOLOD.exe and LODGen.exe now offer to generate LOD Level 32 static object LOD without billboard trees, which can be used for the map. See docs\trees.ultra\DynDOLOD-Trees.html for more info.

 

All tools have been updated to support Skyrim SE. This is in beta and limited for obvious and well known reasons. It should only be used by experienced DynDOLOD users. See docs\DynDOLOD_Manual_SSE.html for more info. It explains the key differences and similarities, as well as the new features introduced by Skyrim SE and its bugs/problems.

 

---

 

Skyrim

 

Mods Requiring DynDOLOD

Enhanced Landscapes - Winter Edition - Includes billboards and LOD textures that need to overwrite vanilla billboards and DynDOLOD Resources - Core Files textures. If LOD textures are generated with TexGen.exe, they should always overwrite everything else.

Winter Aspen Billboards

 

Verified working out of the box - added/updated meshes and/or textures

Helarchen Creek

Realistic Boat Bobbing

Skysight - Simply Bigger Trees - Billboards

Dragon Bridge

 

---

 

DynDOLOD 2.26 - Download from Mega | DynDOLOD 2.26 - Download from Mega

 

DynDOLOD Resources 2.22 for Skyrim - Download from Mega

 

DynDOLOD Resources SE 2.22 for Skyrim SE - Download from Mega

 

DynDOLOD Patches 2.23 for Skyrim - Download from Mega

 

---

 

[spoiler=Changelog DynDOLOD 2.22]

General performance and stability improvements - for real

DynDOLOD.exe - fixed sometimes using wrong glow LOD when using original LOD assignments

DynDOLOD.exe - added RemoveUnseenZShift to ini for same setting in LODGen.exe export file

DynDOLOD.exe - added Level32 switch to ini for same switch in LODGen.exe export file, see docs\trees.ultra\DynDOLOD-Trees.html

DynDOLOD.exe - added FlatLODVertexColor to ini to set vertex color of flat LOD, see docs\trees.ultra\DynDOLOD-Trees.html

DynDOLOD.exe - added FlatLODColorVariance to ini to randomly change vertex color of flat LOD, see docs\trees.ultra\DynDOLOD-Trees.html

DynDOLOD.exe - added StaticLODDiffuseFormat, StaticLODNormalFormat, TreeLODDiffuseFormat and TreeLODNormalFormat to ini to set texture atlas formats

DynDOLOD.exe - added TreeLODAverageColor to ini to replace black transparent parts of billboards with the average tree color - works only with alpha channel output formats

DynDOLOD.exe - added TreeLODBackgroundTexture to ini to replace black transparent parts of billboards with a texture - works only with alpha channel output formats

DynDOLOD.exe - shrink normal map texture atlas to 4x4 pixels if all pixels are identical

DynDOLOD.exe - added beta support for SSE, start with -SSE command line argument

DynDOLOD.exe - added a check to verify DynDOLOD Resources for the current game mode are installed

TexGen.exe - sync updates with DynDOLOD.exe

TexGen.exe - added output format options for diffuse and normal textures

TexGen.exe - fixed cases of not consequently using lowercase for comparisons

TexGen.exe - added generation for riftenstonewall02lod.dds

TexGen.exe - added generation for tundradriftwoodbark01lod.dds

TexGen.exe - fixed generation of rubblepilelod.dds

TexGen.exe - fixed generation of fxdirtmound01lod.dds

TexGen.exe - removed the need for temp files in game data folder

TexGen.exe - added beta support for SSE, start with -SSE command line argument

TexGen.exe - added fallback to Texconv.exe for reading in case DDS format is not natively supported

Texconv.exe - new - custom silent version, prints errors only

LODGen.exe - added support reading SSE LOD nif

LODGen.exe - added export Mode=SSE

LODGen.exe - added support for BSA version 0x69

LODGen.exe - added lz4 decompression

LODGen.exe - added GameMode=textureslist to generate a list of textures with UV in between atlas tolerance

LODGen.exe - added command line parameter gamemode to overwrite gamemode in export file

LODGen.exe - updated lz4 package to latest version

LODGen.exe - better error message in case required Redistributable is missing

LODGen.exe - added Level32=True, uses *.nif from LOD level 16 if 4th entry is not set to create LOD Level 32 bto

LODGen.exe - added RemoveUnseenZShift=[float] to adjust terrain height when removing unseen faces

LODGen.exe - added vertex color support for flat LOD, column 8 and 9 in FlatTextures file

LODGen.exe - some minor speed improvements and clean up

LODGen.exe - use assembly version in log

DynDOLOD_Manual.html - all docs updated for new game mode

DynDOLOD_Manual_SSE.html - new

DynDOLOD-Shortcut.txt - new

DynDOLOD-Trees.html - added info about static object LOD level 32 for map

DynDOLOD-Trees.html - added info for vertex colors for 2D tree LOD in static LOD for Skyrim SE

DynDOLOD Resources - updated/added meshes/textures for better compatibility with mods

DynDOLOD Resources SE - new - meshes in new Skyrim SE format - removed options/assets that currently do not apply to Skyrim SE

DynDOLOD Patches - fixed a typo in Wizard.txt

 

 

[spoiler=Changelog DynDOLOD 2.23]

DynDOLOD.exe - fixed some default INI settings

DynDOLOD Patches - update Beyond Reach billboards to be also for arnima.esm

 

 

[spoiler=Changelog DynDOLOD 2.24]

DynDOLOD.exe - check LODGen log and write result to DynDOLOD log, so it is more obvious if something went wrong

LODGen.exe - fixed error reading BSTriShapes with no vertices/triangles

LODGen.exe - apply UVScale and UVOffset shader values to model before merging

 

 

[spoiler=Changelog DynDOLOD 2.25]

DynDOLOD.exe - fixed a memory corruption sometimes causing nasty things

DynDOLOD.exe - fixed an error trying to check a non existing LODGen log

LODGen.exe - fixed FO4 export mode not working correctly

LODGen.exe - updated lz4 package and supporting libraries to latest version

 

 

 

[spoiler=Changelog DynDOLOD 2.26]

LODGen.exe - fixed a crash caused by a missing serialization

 

 

[spoiler=Changelog DynDOLOD 2.27]

DynDOLOD.exe - fixed trying to check LODGen logfile after wait times out

DynDOLOD.exe - fixed not reading billboard txt file from BSA

LODGen.exe - updated lz4 package and supporting libraries to latest version

LODGen.exe - fixed sometimes not reading BA2 files correctly

 

 

 

 

 

See Full update post for full changelog, fully detailed update instructions and updated compatibility information for Skyrim mods.

 

DynDOLOD 2.21

 

Skryim typos may be intentional as long as Skyrim SE has severe visual and game breaking bugs

[elwaps]

As I can't edit my first post anymore...

 

Without corrupted DynDOLOD Skyrim was stable and smooth and even with DynDOLOD it seemed to be mostly stable but had some regions where it would CTD or where LOD trees wouldn't work.

 

So I've added another few mods from the Campfire family, a few textures and some random stuff and just re-run DynDOLOD. This time I got a 'stopped working' at about 6 minutes while creating the biggest bunch of LODs, almost identical to the one from the screenshot but it crashed at about 5900 instead of ~4200. Also, the entire process was way faster. DynDOLOD finished after about 13 minutes without any further errors.

[sheson]

As I can't edit my first post anymore...

 

Without corrupted DynDOLOD Skyrim was stable and smooth and even with DynDOLOD it seemed to be mostly stable but had some regions where it would CTD or where LOD trees wouldn't work.

 

So I've added another few mods from the Campfire family, a few textures and some random stuff and just re-run DynDOLOD. This time I got a 'stopped working' at about 6 minutes while creating the biggest bunch of LODs, almost identical to the one from the screenshot but it crashed at about 5900 instead of ~4200. Also, the entire process was way faster. DynDOLOD finished after about 13 minutes without any further errors.

LODGen.exe (LodgeneratorCMD stopped working) probably trips over a full model tree nif it can not read properly.

If you bring the LODGen.exe cmd prompt window to the front (it will have an icon is the taskbar) you might see a more meaningful message telling us the problematic nif filename.

 

Screenshot that.

 

Otherwise see if it runs through with TreeFullFallBack=0 as a start to narrow down on possible causes.

Edited April 11, 2017 by sheson

[elwaps]

Alright, ran it again with TreeFullFallBack=0.

 

Details

Activated all Plugins

Ran LOOT

Deleted WTF Random Encounter Zones Output

Deleted FNIS Output

Deleted DSR Output

Deleted DynDOLOD Output

Deleted TexGen Output

Deleted iActivate Patch Output

Deleted Bashed Patch Output

Ran WTF Random Encounter Zones

Ran FNIS

Ran DSR

Ran DynDOLOD @ TreeLOD=0, All Worlds, Candles checked, Tile Size 2048

> Worked fine this time. During the critical phase DynDOLOD used about 1.2GB of RAM and about 5% of CPU, LODGeneratorCMD used about 1.6GB of RAM and about 20% of CPU. The Former peaked at 2GB RAM and 90% CPU later in the process, the latter decreased to 10% and 1.2GB.

Ran TexGen @ 1024

> Worked fine too - but always works fine anyway

Next running iActivate Patcher through TES5Edit, then recreating Bashed Patch, then testing 

 

Gonna try TreeFullFallBack=1 again next time.

[elwaps]

Update (seems I've missed the edit-deadline again)

 

I've playtested for about 90 minutes with lots of outdoor time in the Rift. As expected my 1080 is at its limit under certain circumstances but everything is running stable and CTD-free. Oh, well, and everything looks fantastic, of course.

 

So before fixing some stuff concerning iActivate (doesn't seem to work properly atm) and inns (3DNPC, RRRE, ELFX and More Tavern Idles seem to fight each other) and re-running DynDOLOD with TreeFullFallBack=1 I wanted to ask what exactly this option does. To my understanding it avoids using 2D billboards entirely and instead falls back to using the full scale 3D model, leading to a dramatic decrease in fps once a tree mod without 3D LODs is used. But in exchange makes every single tree mod visually compatible to the fantastic 3D LODs of Enhanced Vanilla Trees.

 

Is that correct? And is there a chance to use this option for an actual playthrough, performance and stability wise? I currently got ~45fps in the Rift with ENB, ELFX, 2K+ textures, Enhanced Vanilla Trees with 3D LOD and Verdant. How dramatic would the frame-impact be if I added, lets say SFO? Or would Enhanced Landscapes (which I'm already using) be enough to kill my framerate once I got fallback activated? I only avoided using other tree mods than EL because of the visual difference until now. Enabling this option would allow for so much more individualization...

 

Thanks so far and thanks in advance :)

 

Edited April 11, 2017 by elwaps

[sheson]

I wanted to ask what exactly this option does. To my understanding it avoids using 2D billboards entirely and instead falls back to using the full scale 3D model, leading to a dramatic decrease in fps once a tree mod without 3D LODs is used. But in exchange makes every single tree mod visually compatible to the fantastic 3D LODs of Enhanced Vanilla Trees.

 

Is that correct?

That is correct.

 

And is there a chance to use this option for an actual playthrough, performance and stability wise? I currently got ~45fps in the Rift with ENB, ELFX, 2K+ textures, Enhanced Vanilla Trees with 3D LOD and Verdant. How dramatic would the frame-impact be if I added, lets say SFO? Or would Enhanced Landscapes (which I'm already using) be enough to kill my framerate once I got fallback activated? I only avoided using other tree mods than EL because of the visual difference until now. Enabling this option would allow for so much more individualization...

Performance you need to test yourself and decide for yourself. However, it will increase the need for heap memory even further. It depends on other mods, but the game will probably be close to the maximum memory limits. Even with maximizing memory patch it has a good chance of ILS/CTD or in case of crash fixes, stop with out of memory messages.

 

Personally, I would just use vanilla trees and tree mods that have optimized 3D LOD trees. That requires a chunk of memory already, but can be handled with some careful tweaking of LOD distances. Full model trees are a magnitude beyond that.

[elwaps]

I am actually using Crash Fixes and to me your post reads like 'Keep blowing your Skyrim up until you actually get memory related errors, once you've managed to fill those 8GB (instead of those cute 5GB you got atm) go for the 1080Ti with its 11GB'. Aye Sir, thats my plan! But before I'm going to run out of memory I guess I'm going to run out of GPU power, once you've used some heavy ENB presets and ELFX you can't go back, not to speak of all the polygon count-increasing clutter mods like ETaC, JK & EL... another pro 1080Ti argument. Such a pity Skyrim got a really poor SLI scaling... 

 

Just ran DynDOLOD again (without fallback) and it finished without any crashes or errors. I wonder why it crashed before, to my understanding the fallback-option means less work for the LODGen-process. Gonna try it with fallback again when changing the next few mods to get rid of some nasty incompatibilities... thanks for your help!

[sheson]

I am actually using Crash Fixes and to me your post reads like 'Keep blowing your Skyrim up until you actually get memory related errors, once you've managed to fill those 8GB (instead of those cute 5GB you got atm) go for the 1080Ti with its 11GB'. Aye Sir, thats my plan! But before I'm going to run out of memory I guess I'm going to run out of GPU power, once you've used some heavy ENB presets and ELFX you can't go back, not to speak of all the polygon count-increasing clutter mods like ETaC, JK & EL... another pro 1080Ti argument. Such a pity Skyrim got a really poor SLI scaling... 

 

Just ran DynDOLOD again (without fallback) and it finished without any crashes or errors. I wonder why it crashed before, to my understanding the fallback-option means less work for the LODGen-process. Gonna try it with fallback again when changing the next few mods to get rid of some nasty incompatibilities... thanks for your help!

The thing is, a 32 bit application can only use about 3.1GB of memory on consumer versions of Windows. So you will run into trouble sooner than later.

 

I still think LODGen crashed because it encounters a tree nif it doesn't know how to read. It is supposed to produce a nice error message and skip over it, but you never know.

[Kinrah]

I'm currently having a consistent crash when running DynDOLOD. Running about 242 esps, the program runs fine until it completes the LOD generation for Tamriel, at which point it starts LOD generation for Solstheim and immediately crashes at the message "Building Trees LOD blocks: DLC2SolstheimWorld "Solstheim" [WRLD:04000800] Processed Records: 0". I've run the program a couple of times to the same result.

[Kinrah]

Don't see any way to edit that last post, so I'll tag this on the end: this seems to be caused by whatever world it tries to load second. I tried disabling processing for DLC2SolstheimWorld, and the program crashed at the same point when processing MarkarthWorld.

[sheson]

Don't see any way to edit that last post, so I'll tag this on the end: this seems to be caused by whatever world it tries to load second. I tried disabling processing for DLC2SolstheimWorld, and the program crashed at the same point when processing MarkarthWorld.

See if  updating the couple files from the test version from this post works better. Otherwise check that thread from top.

Edited April 13, 2017 by sheson

[Kinrah]

See if  updating the couple files from the test version from this post works better. Otherwise check that thread from top.

Tried updating, and running both with and without the FasterBase and FasterCreate tweaks from elsewhere in the board. While they're set at 1, it's a tossup whether it freezes while loading Tamriel's trees seven seconds into the process or when it reaches Solstheim. Set at 0, it freezes in the same place as before the update. It actually got a little further into the process set at 0 with the old exe, but only as far as actually generating Solstheim's LOD.

[sheson]

Tried updating, and running both with and without the FasterBase and FasterCreate tweaks from elsewhere in the board. While they're set at 1, it's a tossup whether it freezes while loading Tamriel's trees seven seconds into the process or when it reaches Solstheim. Set at 0, it freezes in the same place as before the update. It actually got a little further into the process set at 0 with the old exe, but only as far as actually generating Solstheim's LOD.

Post the DynDOLOD\Logs\DynDOLOD_[TES5|SEE]_log.txt to paste bin or upload somewhere. If no log because of crash, make a screenshot.

Edited April 13, 2017 by sheson

[elwaps]

LODGen.exe (LodgeneratorCMD stopped working) probably trips over a full model tree nif it can not read properly.

If you bring the LODGen.exe cmd prompt window to the front (it will have an icon is the taskbar) you might see a more meaningful message telling us the problematic nif filename.

 

Screenshot that.

 

Otherwise see if it runs through with TreeFullFallBack=0 as a start to narrow down on possible causes.

Just had the error again with TreeFullFallBack=0. I tried to bring the window to the front to screenshot it, unfortunately this is all I could capture, the window can't be maximized or increased in size. As before, the process ended a few minutes later with 'Error in unit 'functions' on line 390: 'end' expected but End of File found.'.

 

Edited April 14, 2017 by elwaps

[sheson]

Just had the error again with TreeFullFallBack=0. I tried to bring the window to the front to screenshot it, unfortunately this is all I could capture, the window can't be maximized or increased in size. As before, the process ended a few minutes later with 'Error in unit 'functions' on line 390: 'end' expected but End of File found.'.

 

You need to bring the LODGen.exe command prompt window to the front right after it is spawned so you can watch it do its thing before anything happens.

 

See if this LODGen version works better, just replace the files with the same name in DynDOLOD\Edit Script folder.

 

You can ignore the DynDOLOD error, it is meaningless.

[elwaps]

Thanks. I've used the files you provided and everything worked. Can't tell if it was due to the new files tho, as the error isn't perfectly reproducible. I'll try with fallback and the new files the next time I'm generating.