xLODGen - Terrain LOD beta 132 for FNV, FO3, FO4, FO4VR, TES5, SSE, TES5VR, ENDERAL, ENDERALSE

[Mephitic]

I am a bit overwhelmed. I have tried, truly, to understand the options and recommendations in this topic but I have reached something of an impasse.

I think these settings reflect the optimum settings for the latest version of xLodgen (I'm using it for Skyrim SE) but it is difficult to tell whether these are for this version or are from an earlier guide.

I am not unhappy with these settings, the LODs look good in game -- but could they be better? My rig is quite capable though I don't use a 4k monitor.

The settings in the attached image were drawn from "xLODGen Terrain Settings Compare" in this forum but, again my apologies, I can't tell what version of the guide (1, or 2, or ?) to which the topic refers.

I would rather be able to RTFM and figure out optimum settings but I am quite afraid I am out of my depth here and instead will beg for help.

If one of you kind souls would look these settings over and make recommendations I will be eternally grateful (my second- and third-born are available).

Edited October 5, 2021 by Mephitic

[sheson]

2 hours ago, Mephitic said:

I am a bit overwhelmed. I have tried, truly, to understand the options and recommendations in this topic but I have reached something of an impasse.

I think these settings reflect the optimum settings for the latest version of xLodgen (I'm using it for Skyrim SE) but it is difficult to tell whether these are for this version or are from an earlier guide.

I am not unhappy with these settings, the LODs look good in game -- but could they be better? My rig is quite capable though I don't use a 4k monitor.

The settings in the attached image were drawn from "xLODGen Terrain Settings Compare" in this forum but, again my apologies, I can't tell what version of the guide (1, or 2, or ?) to which the topic refers.

I would rather be able to RTFM and figure out optimum settings but I am quite afraid I am out of my depth here and instead will beg for help.

If one of you kind souls would look these settings over and make recommendations I will be eternally grateful (my second- and third-born are available).

This is the xLODGen terrain LOD beta thread. It does not belong to any guide or particular game. Whatever questions you have about specific settings for a guide found outside the xLODGen/DynDOLOD forum you need to ask those authors/forums.

The "best" settings for a worldspace of a load order and setup depend entirely on personal preference between quality and resource usage.

In order to find the "best" personal results, compare different settings.

For terrain LOD, read the explanations of the first post and the Terrain-LOD-Readme.txt included in the download. Also hover the mouse pointer over an option for a hint.

Then ask specific question what a setting does in case something needs more explanations.

[Mephitic]

With all due respect that was spectacularly unhelpful. The xLODGen terrain settings I included did indeed come from this very forum. If I could interpret the settings and understand their effects, I wouldn't need to ask. I did ask because these settings were presented by z929669 as optimum settings and I wanted clarification because it is quite unclear whether they are applicable to the latest version of xLODGen.

[sheson]

1 hour ago, Mephitic said:

With all due respect that was spectacularly unhelpful. The xLODGen terrain settings I included did indeed come from this very forum. If I could interpret the settings and understand their effects, I wouldn't need to ask. I did ask because these settings were presented by z929669 as optimum settings and I wanted clarification because it is quite unclear whether they are applicable to the latest version of xLODGen.

Maybe you are confusing this xLODGen terrain LOD beta thread with other sections of the STEP website or forum?

xEdit and its tool mode xLODGen is a multi-game CK replacement tool to edit plugins and/or generate LOD.

From the first post: "I am only able to give generic guidelines and hints to send you off to find and test for yourself and share your results. My main interested is that generations works correctly and without problems for now."

This thread is about the tool itself. You wouldn't ask the developers/help of Word how to write a novel. You'd query the help/developers how to change a font or if there is a problem doing so. I might have suggestions for which font to use, but in the end I am not creating/testing modding guides for any of the supported games.

To find the "best" settings for your setup and preference you have to compare yourself. There is no single simple answer that applies to every load order, setup and everyone. I can help explain what the settings do, but for that you need to ask specific questions.

You probably want to read/post here: https://stepmodifications.org/forum/topic/15184-xlodgen-terrain-settings-compare

[z929669]

8 hours ago, Mephitic said:

I am a bit overwhelmed. I have tried, truly, to understand the options and recommendations in this topic but I have reached something of an impasse.

I think these settings reflect the optimum settings for the latest version of xLodgen (I'm using it for Skyrim SE) but it is difficult to tell whether these are for this version or are from an earlier guide.

I am not unhappy with these settings, the LODs look good in game -- but could they be better? My rig is quite capable though I don't use a 4k monitor.

The settings in the attached image were drawn from "xLODGen Terrain Settings Compare" in this forum but, again my apologies, I can't tell what version of the guide (1, or 2, or ?) to which the topic refers.

I would rather be able to RTFM and figure out optimum settings but I am quite afraid I am out of my depth here and instead will beg for help.

If one of you kind souls would look these settings over and make recommendations I will be eternally grateful (my second- and third-born are available).

Those settings are out of date, and we have learned much more from our continued use of the tools and from sheson's feedback.

Can you point to the forum post so that I can modify for posterity?

In the meantime, these settings are much more up to date, although it's still a WIP. Terrain LOD will never look 'great'. It's just a background for the landscape really. A 'good' result is when you don't notice anything 'bad' in the distance with respect to terrain (no flickering textures, LOD terrain color matches full terrain color, no holes or other artifacts, etc.). I am happy with my terrain LOD when it is not obvious to me in game.

EDIT: If you are NOT using Cathedral Landscapes, then the gamma setting in those I linked above should probably be 1.00 or closer to that at least. CL requires a slight increase in terrain brightness, since they package specific terrain LOD textures that only are activated during terrain LODGen.

[Mephitic]

Thank you very much z929669 - if I can find the post again I'll edit this and link it here.

[DodoEgg]

I'm having a similar issue to @z929669 as above, where my SSELODGen just stops whatever it's doing at a seemingly random point. It goes to 0 % CPU usage, and eventually task manager just considers it suspended, resuming the process doesn't get LODGen going again either. Particularly Tamriel and Sovngarde seem to be problem spots, as smaller vanilla areas like Japhet's Folly and Markarth seem to work fine, unfortunately it seems to stop in a different place each time so I don't think it's a specific cell causing a problem.

So far I've tried:

• Clean reinstalling LODGen
• Running outside of ModOrganizer only on vanilla files (still stopped working)
• Running with nothing else in the background
• Turning down settings according to the "first time" description on the download post (I was initially using settings from The Phoenix Flavour guide)
• Turning off antivirus and security
• Moving output folder to my NVMe drive (original location was on a HDD, everything related to mods and games is outside of UAC folders)
• Renaming executable to SSELODGen (removing x64)

Unfortunately, because the process never "crashes", I don't have a bug report, though LODGen_log always ends like:
Log ended at time
Code: 0

With time being whenever it stopped running, whether it ran for 17 minutes before suspending or for half a minute.

CPU usage sometimes gets high above 70% but never stays that way for more than a second. My CPU is a Ryzen 5 3600, and I have 16GB of RAM, so I don't think it's due to a lack of processing power.

I've seen a few posts with similar issues to mine, but none of the given solutions have helped me yet.

 

[sheson]

16 hours ago, DodoEgg said:

I'm having a similar issue to @z929669 as above, where my SSELODGen just stops whatever it's doing at a seemingly random point. It goes to 0 % CPU usage, and eventually task manager just considers it suspended, resuming the process doesn't get LODGen going again either. Particularly Tamriel and Sovngarde seem to be problem spots, as smaller vanilla areas like Japhet's Folly and Markarth seem to work fine, unfortunately it seems to stop in a different place each time so I don't think it's a specific cell causing a problem.

So far I've tried:

• Clean reinstalling LODGen
• Running outside of ModOrganizer only on vanilla files (still stopped working)
• Running with nothing else in the background
• Turning down settings according to the "first time" description on the download post (I was initially using settings from The Phoenix Flavour guide)
• Turning off antivirus and security
• Moving output folder to my NVMe drive (original location was on a HDD, everything related to mods and games is outside of UAC folders)
• Renaming executable to SSELODGen (removing x64)

Unfortunately, because the process never "crashes", I don't have a bug report, though LODGen_log always ends like:
Log ended at time
Code: 0

With time being whenever it stopped running, whether it ran for 17 minutes before suspending or for half a minute.

CPU usage sometimes gets high above 70% but never stays that way for more than a second. My CPU is a Ryzen 5 3600, and I have 16GB of RAM, so I don't think it's due to a lack of processing power.

I've seen a few posts with similar issues to mine, but none of the given solutions have helped me yet.

 

I assume you mean while it is generating terrain LOD textures. How is that similar to the crashes without bugreport that only show up in event log?

Post the xLODGen log which is saved when closing. If it does not save it, mark and copy/paste from the message log window.

[DodoEgg]

58 minutes ago, sheson said:

I assume you mean while it is generating terrain LOD textures. How is that similar to the crashes without bugreport that only show up in event log?

Post the xLODGen log which is saved when closing. If it does not it, mark and copy/paste from the message log window.

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough about it, it seemed quite similar from my view, down to the process sometimes not even showing in task manager at all despite literally running behind the task manager window. I've attached the log file, for info, I closed LODGen at 23:30 (so it basically stopped doing stuff 12 mins before I decided to close it). This time it didn't even get to the textures, though sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

LODGen_log.txt

[sheson]

9 hours ago, DodoEgg said:

Sorry if I wasn't clear enough about it, it seemed quite similar from my view, down to the process sometimes not even showing in task manager at all despite literally running behind the task manager window. I've attached the log file, for info, I closed LODGen at 23:30 (so it basically stopped doing stuff 12 mins before I decided to close it). This time it didn't even get to the textures, though sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

LODGen_log.txt 174.58 kB · 0 downloads

This is the LODgen log form generating terrain LOD meshes. It shows that terrain LOD meshes were generated without error.

Upload the xLODGen log with the message printed to message log window. The x stands for TES5/SSE etc.

Generating textures uses ..\Edit Script\Texconv.exe make sure it also is not prevented from file access. If you choose settings like BC7 max it will take a while to convert textures. Texconv uses the GPU and xLODGen may have to wait for it to finish and will have 0 CPU in this time.

[DodoEgg]

4 hours ago, sheson said:

This is the LODgen log form generating terrain LOD meshes. It shows that terrain LOD meshes were generated without error.

Upload the xLODGen log with the message printed to message log window. The x stands for TES5/SSE etc.

Generating textures uses ..\Edit Script\Texconv.exe make sure it also is not prevented from file access. If you choose settings like BC7 max it will take a while to convert textures. Texconv uses the GPU and xLODGen may have to wait for it to finish and will have 0 CPU in this time.

I've attached the SSELODGen, but it only seems to have last updated when I had an .ini issue after verifying files on Steam. Refreshing my .ini on BethINI fixed that. I don't think it's a time issue, I'm running on BC7 Quick for today's runs, most recent one it stopped at 3 mins, I left it on for 40 mins after that, zero change. Seems like a 50/50 chance now if it even gets to textures, and when it does, it'll run through several just fine, then at some point just stops at any random texture.

 

My GPU is a 3060Ti, so unless Phoenix Flavour was made for absolute 1% spec, I don't think it should be giving up on this so easily.

SSELODGen_log.txt

[sheson]

1 hour ago, DodoEgg said:

I've attached the SSELODGen, but it only seems to have last updated when I had an .ini issue after verifying files on Steam. Refreshing my .ini on BethINI fixed that. I don't think it's a time issue, I'm running on BC7 Quick for today's runs, most recent one it stopped at 3 mins, I left it on for 40 mins after that, zero change. Seems like a 50/50 chance now if it even gets to textures, and when it does, it'll run through several just fine, then at some point just stops at any random texture.

 

My GPU is a 3060Ti, so unless Phoenix Flavour was made for absolute 1% spec, I don't think it should be giving up on this so easily.

SSELODGen_log.txt 1.09 kB · 0 downloads

Typically the content of the log messages window is saved to the xLODGen log file.

If that doesn't happen, mark, copy and paste the log message from the messages window before forcefully terminating the program.

[DodoEgg]

2 hours ago, sheson said:

Typically the content of the log messages window is saved to the xLODGen log file.

If that doesn't happen, mark, copy and paste the log message from the messages window before forcefully terminating the program.

I'm not sure if this is the log window you meantlog.txt, but it's the only one I could see (I wasn't able to see the command window for Texconv). I've replaced any part that had my name with "name".

[sheson]

1 hour ago, DodoEgg said:

I'm not sure if this is the log window you meantlog.txt, but it's the only one I could see (I wasn't able to see the command window for Texconv). I've replaced any part that had my name with "name".

This is it.

So it just works for almost 3 minutes and then just kind of stops adding new lines to the log and sits there and waits forever  > 5 minutes?
You see any Texconvx64.exe in the task manager?

[DodoEgg]

1 hour ago, sheson said:

This is it.

So it just works for almost 3 minutes and then just kind of stops adding new lines to the log and sits there and waits forever  > 5 minutes?
You see any Texconvx64.exe in the task manager?

Basically yeah. I do see Texconvx64 in the task manager. Usually it shows up like in the attached image, but sometimes it won't show up under apps, instead under background processes. Occasionally there's also a command prompt window under xEdit (in task manager, I never physically see the other command prompt window).

Yesterday the timing varied pretty massively, first run it went for about 17 mins, other times only a minute. Today's attempts all seem to stop at around 2:50-3:00, though once again, never at the same specific cell.