What we really need is a Dev to stop by and let us know how LOD is generated.....it is a new system compared to past games, and they haven't written anything about it on the wiki.

How LOD is displayed* you mean? Generating is obvious.

But it doesn't show up in-game.

No luck with LOD so far. It didn't crash when building without textures, but the terrain was invisible. Building again with diffuse/normals after clearing the scratch files crashes at 93.5/93.8% early in Level 4. Building individual chunks doesn't seem to do anything either.

Here's the stats I recorded for the generation without textures:

i5-2500k, 4gb ram

Level 1 - 0.125s average, 13:46-13:48
Level 2 - 0.235s average, 13:48-13:50
Level 4 - 1.250s average, 13:50-13:51
Level 8 - 1.5s average, 13:51-13:52
Level 16/32 - less than 10 seconds

6 minutes total

Oh happy fun times.....

I have now tried twice in a row at generating LOD. Full thing, land and textures at once from scratch. Both times it generated junk and flattened my heightmap.


I then tried making just meshes, that worked (though without textures they dont show up). Then I tried textures, flattened my heightmap again.


Is it just broken? Cause it seems like every time I try and make LOD with textures my heightmap gets flattened.

EDIT: Something is definitely broken....when I make textures, by themselves or at the same time as meshes, it causes the heightmap to be flattened and cell heights corrupted. Tested multiple times now, same results.
So either we wait for a third party made LOD generator, or we wait until the generator is patched....

Can anyone generate LOD on an exsisting worldspace? Whenever I try it give me an error about the difusse and normal maps not being the same size.

It may be that it just wont generate using the tools we have been provided. Oscape is still out for me, I have just booted up my custom build which is Windows 7 on a quad core that will fingers crossed give me a working oscape list.

Yeah I even launch it directly from the directory.

However since it doesn't crash at all for you, that leads me to believe it isn't just straight-up broken, it's just having an incompatability or something... I may try reinstalling it... Because I can already edit, so if we can save that solves one issue. And I'm SURE a developer will address the LOD thing, since that isn't an 'outdated tool', it's all over their [censored] game.

Okay, happy update.

To stop the LOD texture generation from destroying your heightmap, your mod must be an .esm


SO now I have completely generated LOD meshes, no error,s textures and meshes. However they do not show up in my game/CK Render window.

There must be another step!

It works for vanilla worldspaces though, so only the modders with new worldspaces are affected by it. We're a minority.

Regardless, it's a feature they full well use and should support, and it is either broken or we don't know how to use it. Therefor, they shall either fix it, or explain to us how to use it...

So, correct me if I'm wrong, but so far we have; Figured out how to import heightmaps, and a very few of us can save in the editor without it crashing. The only issue remaining with adding new worlds, is that LOD does not show up ingame?

From my research so far I get the distinct impression there is some info in Worldspace headers that determines the displaying of LOD. The problem is that no application exposes it in a readable form, the old modding tools like FNVEdit for example doesn't recognize most of the header data, and neither is it exposed in the CK. If you convert the HEX data to strings it's not readable either.

Basically.....you need a fairly beefy computer in order to get the heightmaps in and save them.

The region editor appear to work correctly from the pictures others have posted.

Its just the LOD....none of the in-game options have any effect on making the LOD show up

I just had a look at comparing the header on my world and the header for Tamriel......why does Tamriel's have so much more information in? and many more different types of data.......something is definitely missing.

There appears to be an update to the CK, so Bethesda have developed the ability to update the CK to error snag. It would be nice if they could take the heightmap and LOD issues into account, or give us some idea of where to go with this. I have only just fired up my windows 7 desktop rig and loading up Skyrim etc onto it, so it will be a few hours before I can start poking around with the LOD.

It seems LOD is the key now, we can import via TesAnnwyn to obtain a plugin with the heightmap included, we can region generate, so once LOD is sorted we will be a long way forward. Are any of the third party tool devs able to take a look at the LOD issue.

As mentioned, LOD generation itself is not the problem, but rather how the engine handles custom worldspaces. Hopefully someone can shed some light on this. Once we know more about how worldspaces are handled, it's probably only a matter of time before third party tools will be able to generate proper working LODs.

thekarithian, did you get Oscape running properly now?

~DE

Can anyone post an idiots guide to getting a working heighmap into the CK? I'm trying with L3DT and TESAnnwyn, but I get horribly corrupted heighmaps

All I want is to make a little worldspace

How little? You don't need a heightmap if the worldpsace is small enough.

Well, little compared to mesogea and MERP.

About 30x30 cells.

I figured it out guys, I have LOD working for custom worldspaces!

I'll post about it in a minute, I still have a little more research to do to properly explain.

Woooo

Do you have Photoshop? Just save as a 16-bit RAW, non-interlaced, IBM. You'll have to name it something like "0_0.raw" and have it inside Data\HeightField. You can import it from inside the CK.

See here - http://geck.gamesas.com/index.php/Heightmap_Editing


I hope so. I'm itching to make Scotland properly

You sir, are a genius. Just changing the filename got the RAW importing.

Thank you! A million times thank you!

Thank god! I was beginning to worry that Skyrim-MERP would never see the light of day..

LOD display is controlled by *.lod files inside the Data/lodsettings folder. Look in the Meshes BSA for the ones for vanilla worldspaces. Simply copying Tamriel.lod and renaming it to your worldspace will show up LOD.


EDIT: Rest of post removed.