Hiyas! I'm looking for some help on distant buildings.

I've been using RAEVWD for a long time, but I go from 45-70 fps (while running around outdoors in the mountains) to 8-16 fps (while standing still overlooking Cyrodiil from mountains, or when running around and the great valley view comes into peripheral vision). Without the mod, fps stays stable. I know it can't come without an fps cost, but I think other people probably don't get hit so hard, and I cannot account for why I am such a special snowflake. Mind you, this is with just the city architecture and cities plugins installed.

I generally play with moderate fog values and don't spent a lot of time looking at distant scenery, so my goal is just to have the buildings inside city walls (Imperial City, Chorrol, etc...) visible while distant, because their absence sticks out rather glaringly.

Do y'all know of any mods that can provide that, or have any other ideas that might help? Thanks in advance!

Remove _far meshes for objects that are not inside the cities (forts, ayleid ruins, etc.) and tun TES4LODGen.

"I know it can't come without an fps cost" this is not true by the way. FPS hit is caused by very, very badly made LOD meshes that are available right now. Noone bothered to model the proper ones (low poly, untiled textures) for Oblivion in 10 years which I find very weird. Mod makers created thousands of new weapons, clothes, house mods custom furnitures and the like, but not a single LOD mod apart from RAEVWD which used the automatic decimation of full meshes resulting in unoptimized FPS heavy hitting LODs.

Those were already the only ones I had installed.

Colorwheel & Evenstar had done some work on better optimized LOD meshes, and I had what they'd made overwriting the RAEWVD meshes for a while. Just removed them to see if they were a culprit of sorts, but FPS didn't improve.

I just... I mean, I can stand in the middle of Chorrol and not have my FPS die with all of those full-poly buildings, I just can't figure out why my FPS dies looking at low-poly Chorrol from far away?

When you stay in Chorrol it's LOD meshes are not loaded.

Last time I checked their meshes (Colorwheel & Evenstar) they were too decimated full ones, this only works fine for natural shapes like rocks. Architecture LOD models must be created manually like in Skyrim for optimal performance. The fun fact: when I initially added RAEVWD meshes into Skyrim for a test (in Skyblivion) the game refused to work and stuck in infinite loading screen. This shows how bad RAEVWD meshes are considering that newer optimized multithreaded engine couldn't handle them at all. It is a miracle that Oblivion even works with them.

(I just meant that the non-LOD meshes you see close-up seem to not eat FPS as badly as LOD meshes.)

Ouch. That really IS bad.

Do we have any bored modelers hanging about? Req: Optimized Distant Buildings MAX.

Just remaking LOD models for cathedral, famhouses and ships should help immensly, those are the biggest offenders.

Sort all _far meshes by size, anything that is >70kb is bad. Skyrim uses 50kb LOD models in average.

Colourwheel plagiarised the whole of Arthmoors work into her mod, without changing anything

I know because I was there when the first upload went up, the archive had the same CRC as Arthmoors, and further uploads to try and cover up that, erm, oversight, were just a case of repacking them in a way to get the CRC to change .. As for optimisations at a later date I checked out individual files in the zip, they were mostly all the same file size and modified date.

Maybe more work was done on them at a later date than that I dont know, but I also witnessed first hand the re-engineering of the ongoing conversation she had with Arthmoor in her own comments, she was very clever at editing her own posts ( which Arthmoor had already replied to ), chopping out some of his posts and leaving others in .. So that the whole conversation looked like Arthmoor was being the troll - I kept refreshing for a few hours and watched as it progressed, the comments became a complete fabrication from what it was originally

Never touched anything by Colourwheel since, and apparently this was not the first occasion, she has been known historically to plagiarise other peoples work and similarly engineer the conversation to her advantage in the publics eyes.

I normally try to avoid saying anything negative about anyone, but what I witnessed deserves warning everyone about, she is a complete charlatan.

From what I recall Arthmoor spent an awful lot of time producing / editing those files with something called Milkshape 3D, which was not the easiest thing to get to grips with.