xLODGen - Terrain LOD beta 129 for FNV, FO3, FO4, FO4VR, TES5, SSE, TES5VR, ENDERAL, ENDERALSE

[sheson]

28 minutes ago, RainingTacco said:

Ok thanks for explanation, so it is an intended effect. I thought that that the noise textures presented were a suggestion and not something that is mandatory to have a similar color of lod brightness ingame as in the vanilla game when using xlodgen. Is there any setting in xlodgen, or planned feature to introduce things like brighter snow LOD, without brightening the overall LOD? I would for example want to leave the lod generated by xlodgen as it is, except for snow, which i would like to make brighter. I know that i can always use photoshop and do it by hand, but its very time consuming, and the process could be better off automated. Right now its impossible to do that, if you use brighter noise.dds every part of terrain gets brighter, not only snow. Similarly if i use brightness setting while generating LOD it will brighten WHOLE texture and not just snow. So an option to make snow brighter without brightening the rest of terrain would be most welcome in new xlodgen versions if possible! And no, you can't use contrast for that without messing other stuff, even if you decrease brightness it still is off.

Also, the very knowledgeable user of yausd in reddit claimed that lod 8/16/32 dont use mip-maps and its a waste to genereate them. Is that true?

 Not changing the color or brightness of textures is not an effect.

The vanilla terrain LOD is not matching the vanilla full terrain or the object LOD that uses the same textures. If you want the same wrong effect, use the brightness, contrast or gamma settings.

The first post explains how to have matching snow between full terrain, terrain LOD and object LOD by turning off the "improved" show shader to make things match and work like they do in Skyrim LE. Terrain LOD and object LOD can not use the "improved" show shader. It is impossible to have terrain and object LOD ever match that messed up effect. Hence the suggestion to disable it.

If you want a specific texture to different for terrain LOD generation only, then replace that full landscape textures with a changed version for terrain LOD generation only. There are no plans to add impossible or nonsensical features that are contrary to making terrain LOD textures that match the full terrain texture perfectly already.

The game only uses mipmaps of diffuse LOD level 4 for the fade in the active cells.

[heheloveer]

Wow, that's a lot of yelling. Guess communication really is hard. In my experience LOD32 textures generated with xLODGen default settings can indeed look pretty dark on the map, but for all intent and purposes tampering with the brightness settings will likely result in some color mismatch somewhere. Of course you can just push fSplitDistanceMult all the way to the top so that you'll probably never going to see LOD32 terrain outside the map. Another way out is using paper map mods, but that's a different story.

As for my own z-fighting problem, I tried several Optimize Unseen values but the flickering remained pretty obvious. Also on a closer look I'm pretty sure even some large reference full models and object lods near the water are affected as well. In the end I just decided to copy Step Guide's Optimize Unseen values and call it a day. I think with their settings the flickering was not as prominent, but I could be wrong. In any case I'm done with this.

One last question for now: with the mesh quality of all levels of terrain lod set to 0, would there still be a visual/performance impact when I adjust the fSplitDistanceMult value? Aside from the texture size differences, I mean.

[sheson]

52 minutes ago, heheloveer said:

Wow, that's a lot of yelling. Guess communication really is hard. In my experience LOD32 textures generated with xLODGen default settings can indeed look pretty dark on the map, but for all intent and purposes tampering with the brightness settings will likely result in some color mismatch somewhere. Of course you can just push fSplitDistanceMult all the way to the top so that you'll probably never going to see LOD32 terrain outside the map. Another way out is using paper map mods, but that's a different story.

As for my own z-fighting problem, I tried several Optimize Unseen values but the flickering remained pretty obvious. Also on a closer look I'm pretty sure even some large reference full models and object lods near the water are affected as well. In the end I just decided to copy Step Guide's Optimize Unseen values and call it a day. I think with their settings the flickering was not as prominent, but I could be wrong. In any case I'm done with this.

One last question for now: with the mesh quality of all levels of terrain lod set to 0, would there still be a visual/performance impact when I adjust the fSplitDistanceMult value? Aside from the texture size differences, I mean.

Let me repeat this one more time: When the brightness, contrast, gamma are left default, then the generated terrain LOD textures have exactly the same brightness and color of the full textures. They are not darker and not brighter. They match the full terrain in the active cells. Whatever discrepancies or issues happen in the game is because of Skyrim/Skyrim SE shaders after effects. Adjust the related INI settings and/or used overlay textures, map weather etc.

The game uses LOD level 32 terrain LOD for both distance views and the map. If one LOD level is different in brightness, it is typically very obvious in the game unless it is pushed out beyond the max render distance with custom settings. https://dyndolod.info/How-LOD-Works (the image at the bottom uses ultra settings and as you can see the terrain LOD level 32 is visible), https://dyndolod.info/Mods/Maps-And-Map-Mods

https://dyndolod.info/Help/Terrain-LOD-and-Water-LOD
fSplitDistanceMult=multiplier of object LOD Levels

Skyrim INI settings do not affect terrain LOD generation. The INI settings controls how far the terrain LOD distances are shown. Showing lower LOD levels further will have an impact on performance and resource usage.

[heheloveer]

6 minutes ago, sheson said:

Let me repeat this one more time: When the brightness, contrast, gamma are left default, then the generated terrain LOD textures have exactly the same brightness and color of the full textures. They are not darker and not brighter. They match the full terrain in the active cells. Whatever discrepancies or issues happen in the game is because of Skyrim/Skyrim SE shaders after effects.

The game uses LOD level 32 terrain LOD for both distance views and the map. If one LOD level is different in brightness, it is typically very obvious in the game unless it is pushed out beyond the max render distance with custom settings. https://dyndolod.info/How-LOD-Works (the image at the bottom uses ultra settings and as you can see the terrain LOD level 32 is visible), https://dyndolod.info/Mods/Maps-And-Map-Mods

https://dyndolod.info/Help/Terrain-LOD-and-Water-LOD
fSplitDistanceMult=multiplier of object LOD Levels

Skyrim INI settings do not affect terrain LOD generation. The INI settings controls how far the terrain LOD distances are shown. Showing lower LOD levels further will have an impact on performance and resource usage.

I said LOD32 textures generated with xLODGen default settings can look dark on the map, not that they are not supposed to be like this. Some people may find them not to their taste (not me, I'm perfectly happy with those textures), so I said they could try to increase fSplitDistanceMult to, like you said, push LOD32 out beyond the max render distance so these textures are essentially only used on the map.

As for the latter, it's not a question about generation, it's just about how that setting affects things in-game exactly. Nice to have some confirmation though.

[RainingTacco]

Anyway to generate only LOD32 when running xlodgen?

[sheson]

15 minutes ago, RainingTacco said:

Anyway to generate only LOD32 when running xlodgen?

Terrain-LOD-Readme.txt
Use the Chunk option to generate only specific LOD files, especially when testing higher resolutions or other settings.

Check Specific chunk and set the drop down to 32 and leave W and S empty.

[RainingTacco]

Thanks, the chunk wording made me thought i can only generate only certain world cell/part.

[RainingTacco]

Does xlodgen works properly with terrain textures which use complex parallax? I assume that xlodgen doesn't take alpha channel of terrain texture into account?

[sheson]

38 minutes ago, RainingTacco said:

Does xlodgen works properly with terrain textures which use complex parallax? I assume that xlodgen doesn't take alpha channel of terrain texture into account?

In a beta users test things and report any problems if something does not work as expected. Nobody ever reported any related problems.

[TimeLemur6]

Hey sheson (or anyone else willing to help),

I'm running into a bit of a brick wall trying to use this tool, the background loader finishes, followed by the "please wait" dialog, and then nothing. A bugreport.txt is created, along with the log file, stating that an attempt was made to convert str '' to an int. This occurs without any mods involved (for testing purposes), I'm running xLODGen directly from the command line.

I've done some digging through this thread, and I can verify that I am not running an overclocked CPU or custom memory timings.

Any suggestions?

bugreport.txt SSELODGen_log.txt

[sheson]

54 minutes ago, TimeLemur6 said:

Hey sheson (or anyone else willing to help),

I'm running into a bit of a brick wall trying to use this tool, the background loader finishes, followed by the "please wait" dialog, and then nothing. A bugreport.txt is created, along with the log file, stating that an attempt was made to convert str '' to an int. This occurs without any mods involved (for testing purposes), I'm running xLODGen directly from the command line.

I've done some digging through this thread, and I can verify that I am not running an overclocked CPU or custom memory timings.

Any suggestions?

bugreport.txt 46.45 kB · 1 download SSELODGen_log.txt 58.01 kB · 1 download

Fix the invalid command line arguments.

Put quotes around the output path
-o:D:\Games\Modding\xLODGen\out should be -o:"D:\Games\Modding\xLODGen\out"

Fix the -d argument
"-d:D:\Games\Steam-Library\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data" should be -d:"D:\Games\Steam-Library\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data"

Remove invalid LOD settings from C:\Users\tim\AppData\Local\Skyrim Special Edition\Plugins.sseviewsettings
Open the file in notepad and remove everything under [SSE LOD Options]

[TimeLemur6]

25 minutes ago, sheson said:

Fix the invalid command line arguments.

Put quotes around the output path
-o:D:\Games\Modding\xLODGen\out should be -o:"D:\Games\Modding\xLODGen\out"

Fix the -d argument
"-d:D:\Games\Steam-Library\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data" should be -d:"D:\Games\Steam-Library\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data"

Remove invalid LOD settings from C:\Users\tim\AppData\Local\Skyrim Special Edition\Plugins.sseviewsettings
Open the file in notepad and remove everything under [SSE LOD Options]

Some of that, at least, I can blame on PowerShell. Forgot it likes to eat quotes; was running:

.\xLODGenx64.exe -sse -o:"D:\Games\Modding\xLODGen\out" -d:"D:\Games\Steam-Library\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data"

...but that's obviously not what it passes to the process. Clearing out the LOD settings worked.

 

Thanks for the pointers, and for all the work you do for the modding community!

[bill8872]

I think I am doing something wrong. When I generate my LOD, Sancturary's bridge textures are missing. Its there when I walk over it, but I can't see it.

[sheson]

27 minutes ago, bill8872 said:

I think I am doing something wrong. When I generate my LOD, Sancturary's bridge textures are missing. Its there when I walk over it, but I can't see it.

Zero information. No question was asked.

Check the first post. Check the included readmes. Check https://stepmodifications.org/forum/topic/17508-fo4lodgen/. Check the log messages.

[bill8872]

50 minutes ago, sheson said:

Zero information. No question was asked.

Check the first post. Check the included readmes. Check https://stepmodifications.org/forum/topic/17508-fo4lodgen/. Check the log messages.

The information is after I create my LOD Sanctuary bridge, the main bridge to Red Rocket is missing. NO textures to see it, but I know its there when I walk over it I hear my footsteps. 

I have read that page and I have the beta version.

I have read everything I have found, including from here, FO4LODGen - A Guide on how to generate LOD at Fallout 4 Nexus - Mods and community (nexusmods.com)  This and the mods listed are not pointing me to why Sanctuary's bridge textures are missing.