So, what with the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1352988-fixing-the-64x64-cell-havok-bug-for-when-you-just-want-a-bigger-world/page__st__90 for the time being, and the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1354274-creating-new-worldspacesdiscussion-thread-4/page__st__60 concentrating mainly on landscape LOD and .esm/.esp issues, I thought I'd start a thread dedicated to aquiring knowledge on the current best methods for Object LOD and Region Creation/management. I feel being in a seperate topic will be helpful for people searching the forum to get their specific answers rather than trawling through 6 different 7-page threads to find fragmented info.

This is as much a question from myself as anything else, if anyone has any good methods for object LOD and creating regions, links to resources/tutorials (I know SOME of the geck/oblivion stuff is relevant but it's hard determining what still applies in the CK/Skyrim), or any known issues/workarounds to share, post them here and I'll attempt to incorporate as much useful, concise information into this top post as possible.

Basically my own questions are basic ones

Is there a good, simple way to get object LOD working without issues? If so, how?

How does the region generation work? Specifically with regards to generating landscape objects like forests, rocks, plants etc? I know some people had success but there were also comments that it was a steep learning curve; I'd like to know if there's any techniques people have developed and would like to share.

And finally are there any major bugs *sigh* HOW MANY major bugs have we found with this and what are they?

NOTES SO FAR -

Basic Object LOD

This appears to be functioning fine in the Creation Kit, however there are some preparations to be made. Firstly this is assuming you only want distant object LOD have already generated landscape/water LOD meshes using either Oscape or the CK, and generated LOD landscape textures using Oscape (the CK is hopelessly bugged) You will need a .BSA unpacker, such as http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=247, and need to extract the following -

• From Textures.bsa - you need to extract the .dds textures from Textures.bsa/lod (including all subdirectories) and place them in common/Source/TGAtextures/LOD (is outside of Skyrim directory, one level up from it, yes Bethesda did it to confuse you).
  
• Also from Textures.bsa - you need to extract the folder /landscape/mountains/ and place the contents in skyrim/data/textures/mountains/.
  
• you then need to get a copy of http://www.xnview.com/en/nconvert.html, then create a text document with the command line -

nconvert -out tga *.dds

• Rename this to a .bat extension, place in the common/source/tgatextures/LOD directory you placed all the extracted .dds textures in, and run the .bat file. This should create a bunch of .TGA textures in there, and you can delete the .dds ones if you want.
  
• From Meshes.bsa - you need to extract the .nif meshes from Meshes.bsa/LOD (including all subdirectories) and place them in skyrim/data/meshes/LOD in the same file structure you found them in. After all the above processes you should have all the files required to generate standard object LOD for your worldspace.
  
• In the Creation Kit; go to your worldspace in the world>worldspaces menu, a dialogue should pop up with settings for it. At the bottom are two settings - "HD LOD Diffuse" and "HD LOD Normal" - you need to point these at data/textures/landscape/mountains/mountainslab02.dds and data/textures/landscape/mountains/mountainslab02_n.dds respectively - this should fix any objects turning up purple at a distance.
  
• Place a few objects in your worldspace! Remember - not all of them have LOD enabled so best to pick some large, mountainous objects or huge buildings to try it out. You can see if an object has LOD enabled by opening it up in the Object Window view and seeing if it has "Has Distant LOD" and occasionally "Uses high-Detail LOD textures" enabled. Double check it has meshes assigned if you want by clicking the "Specify distant LOD meshes" - it will normally have several levels of LOD assigned - you can read more about that http://www.creationkit.com/Distant_LOD_Meshes_Dialog
  
• Now is a good time to save! I didn't have any issues but some people reported landscape problems when saving after LOD generation so I just save beforehand just in case - someone may confirm otherwise in which case I will update this
  
• To generate your object LOD, go to World>World LOD.. and tick the "static objects" box - you only need this box if you want to just generate object LOD so de-tick the textures boxes (as CK generates crappy LOD landscape textures anyway) and the terrain/trees stuff if you don't need terrain/water/trees generating.
  
• Click OK, and you should get a report pop up while it does it. With only a few LOD objects it should only take a few seconds to generate on a fast PC. Now is a good time to check it for errors - it will tell you if it can't find any of the meshes or textures it needs, and will say where it was looking - if there's no errors in the report, you should be ok. NOTE - it may give issues with vertex count at the end, this doesn't seem to be a major issue and is just a warning if something is a little too detailed at long distance.
  
• The LOD objects will generate fine in the relevant meshes folder, but the object textures will be generated in Source/DDStextures/Terrain/Yourworldspace/Objects - you need to move them into Data/Textures/Terrain/Yourworldspace/Objects for them to work in-game. If you forget this, also remember not to post on the forums in a panic thinking you've discovered a massive bug..
  
• Load up your mod in Skyrim, and see if it's working!

Object LOD is simple and can be done in the geck. You simply extract all the lod textures and make them TGA's, then put them in Source/TGATextures, within their respective folders. For example, TGATextures/Lod/Farm/Farmhouse.tga is where you would put one texture if that's wher eit was in the BSA, not just 'TGATextures/Famehouse.tga'. Then you generate with the CK. If your mountains are purple, set the HD LOD Diffuse and HD LOD Normal map (In the Worldspace settings near the bottom) to '\Textures\Landscape\Mountains\MountainSlab02.dds'. This fixes mountains and some rocks. That's all for object LOD.

For regions, its really just messing with it. I spent 2 weeks figuring it out and I can finally make fairly good looking stuff. I could maybe explain with examples in a video, but even then it's mostly you feeling it out for yourself until you understand it. :/

It's a VERY steep learning curve. I may just have to record a video on it.

Object LOD is fine as long as you move the TGA files to the right folder, tree LOD is bugged. Trees are restricted to a relatively small area, any tree outside that will be moved to the border of that restricted area, causing a huge wall of trees and nothing beyond that. Looks like a run-time issue, since changing the coordinates of files doesn't move the wall deeper into the outer zones.

The only workaround I have so far is replacing Tree forms with equivalent Static forms so trees get included in the Object LOD. It's a ton of work and most people won't be able to do that (you need to temporarily delete the Tree forms from Skyrim.esm with third party tools like tesvsnip).

I'm able to get the tree and object lod's to work but when you get up close like the lod doesn't go away. I know some others have posted about the trees doing that but with me also the buildings are doing that. They look fine from a distance but when you get up close and they should go to their closup look the lod is still there also. I don't know if anyone else is having the building issue or not. I'm hoping someone will have some ideas about that, I've been experimenting with things but have had no luck with a resolution.

Yeah I was including trees when I said objects - Having a look about the editor now and realised that Trees are in fact very different to statics, due to the animation options available. No workarounds for that then?

I do notice, however, that there's a lot of objects with 'distant LOD' and several meshes, whereas others, like some buildings, have several versions within the editor.. does this mean I have to place the item twice? Once for a 'normal' version then another LOD one? Just seems odd they'd do it in two different ways.

Also objects keep dissapearing in the editor.. even when I go back to the cell they're supposedly in they're invisible.. any way other than generating LOD every single time you put a large object into the game? Also any way to say find a particular reference of an object? Like I've put a building into my map and I'm buggered if I can find it again! It says there's 2 counts of this building but I can't seem to find a way to list these counts (one I know is from Skyrim) and simply go to/delete/edit them. Is this possible?

Sorry about all the questions but personally I like to understand something implicitly before diving into it - it saves a lot of time and headaches.

Oh dear.. I appear to have spotted a massive bug..

IGNORE THIS, FOR I AM A COMPLETE IDIOT.

Now I'm gonna confirm or deny this for sure in about an hour or two when the CK finishes messing about, but for now maybe someone can theorise about this -

When I just generated my LOD objects without textures selected I got the dreaded purple texture issue. Just in case I checked a few things, like placing new objects AFTER saving normal/diffuse LOD file locations etc etc, still no matter what - purple objects in the distance.

So it turns out - If you only generate your Static objects meshes without diffuse and normal textures ticked, you get purpleism on all your LOD objects at long distance... OK, fair enough you say - so just generate your object lod textures then!

Unfortunately doing this when you've already made your landscape LOD textures in Oscape creates a problem - firstly the CK will attempt to create ALL the textures - landscape included - which not only takes FOR EVER and has a tendency to crash several times during the process.. it also overwrites your nice correct Oscape landscape textures with Bethesda's crappy patches-of-black-everywhere ones! Here's the kicker too - it generates the object textures LAST. So it's not like you can just let it do the objects then tell it to 'eff-off and bring back your nice oscape ones.

Thankfully I suspected this was going to happen and backed up my worldspace's textures folder. I would suggest everyone does the same, or generate landscape LOD after doing their object LOD.

I think it's obvious though that what we really need is some way to generate just object LOD textures the CK's been at it with mine for like 15 minutes and only got 10% in (!!) - so there's another 3rd party program we're gonna have to pray someone's got the smarts to program.. argh..see I KNEW it wouldn't be that simple haha..

What? Isn't Object LOD and Object Texture LOD done at the same time, by the one single 'Object LOD' checkbox?

nope, well it wasn't generating any textures in my textures/lod/objects folder (and I tried it several times) with just that box ticked. And yes I already had LOD objects in my worldspace. Feel free to confirm it - I'd much prefer it if I was just going mental haha.

Actually wait I just discovered a workaround! - take Tamriel.objects.dds and Tamriel.objects_n.dds, from the data/textures/terrain/tamriel folder, rename them to your worldspace's name and voila! Instant working textures!

My only concern looking at the contents of the .dds file here is whether Tamriel contains every single texture that skyrim uses. If not, and any of you guys can recreate this apparent bug when using oscape-generated landscape textures, then it might be worth me creating a small worldspace with every single LOD object in skyrim inside and generating that for people to use instead. Obviously I'm guessing custom ones would have to be generated from scratch.

Object LOD generation works fine for me as long as I have the correct meshes in skyrim\data\meshes\LOD and TGA textures in source\TGATextures. No purples at all, and all you have to do is just tick generate objects. Did you copy and paste the generated textures from the source folder to the skyrim folder after generation?

As for the regions, I really don't think the learning curve is that steep. Some really good basic hints:
For things like trees and larger rocks, keep the radius somewhere near 100 and the density between 1-10
For child objects, like mushrooms or ferns, keep the density around 2-5
Place textures as child objects to get variation - though honestly I think most texturing should probably be done by hand
Think about the order of objects in your region. For example, in my rocky plains region, it would make sense for smaller rocks to be scattered somewhere close to the large rocks, and for plants to 'crop up' around grassy textures

Oh bugger, you're right on the money there. I forgot it gets generated in the /source folder and you have to move it manually...

[img]http://actuallyitisrocketscience.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/nuc-u-fffuuu2.jpg[/img]

I am in fact an actual muppet. Can I blame Bethesda for putting the stupid hidey-away folder outside the skyrim direc.. no? OK.. *shuffles off*

AAAnnyhow.. thanks also for the info on regions, I shall try some of that stuff out when I get some spare time and once I get some nice results if you don't mind I'll add it to a brief tutorial at the top of the thread. I shall also amend the current object LOD guide up there to compensate for my abject failure and weshallforgetthiseverhappenedyeah?

I've been experiencing this issue as well. From what I can see it is because of the BTO files, if I compare mine with the Tamriel BTO files there is a significant difference. My worldspace's files always have one BSMultBoundNode, while Tamriel's seem to have two BSMultiBoundNodes. The extra one has a BSSegmentedTriShape node called "ObjHD" (the first one has one called "Obj"). It wouldn't surprise me at all if the lack of the ObjHD node is the cause of this bug.

I've seen some people report that it doesn't happen to them, but remember that you need to "manually" travel to trees for this to take effect. The bug doesn't occur when you teleport with COW or use fast travel, or when you load the game in that area.

Is there a definitive work through for producing the LOD now for oscape, including all the steps before and after to get it working in game without the purple issues, sea level problems and so forth?

Yes there is. Ethatron's released a new beta of Oscape (pretty sure it's the latest beta one on nexus right now) which has fixed the water LOD. It also installs fine when generating/installing .dds files now too so no need for nconvert.

only issue is for some people it generates brown LOD landscape. There's a couple of fixes for this in the last couple of pages of the latest worldspace thread. Mine's fairly well outlined step-by-step in there and after that it works perfectly.
my o
nly issue is things seem to "pop in" and do so at a very short range.. I can't help but feel the LOD distances should be twice what they are in my mod. dunno if anyone else experienced this issue or not yet, or if anyone's got a simple fix.

I had ONE instance where the game didn't seem to load any more non-LOD for a while. I spawned in with 'Cow' and ran about 100 feet. I was standing ON the low quality LOD ground with LOD tree's all around, then suddenly it caught up and everything popped in in high quality. From then on it loaded just fine no matter where I ran or how fast. Maybe you're experiencing this but slightly different?

Yeah it's a bit like this, but even moving slowly towards something massive like the cliffs or the LOD winterhold spire-with-blue-palace-on-top I made to test distant LOD, it seems to be able to get very close, well so it's entirely noticeable you're looking at a crappy texture. Then I go a few steps forward and BAM - LOD kicks in instantly and suddeny it goes all hi-res. I need to have a look at my skyrim game at some point and try to gauge if there's a big difference - certainly feels like it though. How many cells distance roughly do you guys get before LOD kicks in/higher res textures fade in? It doesn't have something to do with those Oscape figures, does it? You know the 'target of max resolution'... I never was entirely sure what that does (other than crash oscape a lot).. I'm guessing higher values = higher detail mesh, no idea how it affects textures but maybe a low-quality mesh popping in would enhance the effect?

Hey everyone:
I've created a wiki page for this whole process! Please take a look at it and edit it as you see fit!
Since everything except for the object LOD (which I think is an engine issue, not a CK issue) is working, I went ahead and made a rough guide in the wiki:
http://www.creationkit.com/Creating_a_Custom_Worldspace_with_LOD

I think everything in there is correct, but it'd be nice if some people could confirm it.

Hm, what IS the object LOD issue then? I seem to have it working fine now, although it could do with a bit more testing i guess. My only issue is the range at which it changes and the fact only the very closest LOD fades in instead of 'popping' in instantly.

That's precisely what I was referring to. I definitely should have made that more clear though

Is anyone not having issues with the tree LOD? I haven't even tried on mine yet.

I think this thread needs an update, so has anyone figured out something to solve this specific annoyance discribed by Maegfaer in comment number 3:

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/757/screenshot7bd.jpg

These tree lods should be at least one km further north, where the mountains are, of which the lod works quite well so far as you can see. Has anyone solved this?

I haven't solved it, but I worked around it by changing the formID's of all trees and replacing them with Static equivalents, that way they became part of the Object LOD. It's very time consuming and requires some plugin technical management skill to pull off, and what I made was specifically made for MERP, which uses a stripped Skyrim.esm of 6 MB. Not useful to anyone else.

Hmm, that looks incredibly similar to a similar issue I had with landscape LOD.. where all my generated landscape appeared in the wrong area. I think it had something to do with one of my maps being set to -64 -64 coordinates in TESannwyn, then another one being set to -32 -32, the problem appeared to be persistent despite regenerating the meshes. Odd, and probably a file-based oversight on my part, but does bear a resemblance to the issue with the trees. If they were at the correct coordinates, would those trees be at the right height still? If so I'd look into the possiblity of the XY coordinate of your first cell being off. Can't guarantee anything but it's food for thought.

Nope, behold Lord Bethesdarion's illusion mastery at coord 1,1...

http://img862.imageshack.us/img862/4674/screenshot9j.jpg

...and where do the bleeding snowy textures come from? Unbelievable...

Weird, yet some people are apparently not having problems. Oh well, I had a play with some object LOD and that's going well. Bit of a pain with giant stuff and I encountered an issue where the LOD window just wouldn't bloody close (and mod refused to save until I closed it.. vicious circle, I'll have to go back later), but here's a bit of a mess about with the basis for Umbriel -

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/805/screenshot24m.jpg/

Just playing about making the base for it, and I have NO idea how I could fit a mod for it into Skyrim without breaking the almighty Lore, but I just borrowed the two books about it from my girlfriend's brother, so we'll see. I suppose with mods you can break canon a good bit anyway, so long as you make the story believable and engaging.

I finally got the tree lod to work properly. What I did was convert my .esp to an .esm via tesvsnip. I then loaded the .esm in the creation kit opened an actor and then just closed it without making any changes and then saved the .esm via the creation kit. I then generated the tree lod. I loaded up the .esm as my plugin and did cow myworldspace 7,0 which is where my trees started and finally there was no lod inside the trees. I moved out so the lod would show and then came back and the lod disappeared like it should. I think the way Bethesda created their tree lod's was only as an .esm file, it must be. Please someone else try this method and let me know if it works for you.

That's interesting, could you clarify the process a bit though? How did you save an ESM in the CK, I thought you couldn't save ESM files? Also theoretically if your method works then you could just convert to .esm, generate trees then load a .esp and have it work since they'll still be the same worldspace and therefore the same LOD content.