Ok. Thanks!

Yes, definitely from RAEVWD. There isn't another source for architecture _far.nif files.

And you have no idea how much of a pain Skingrad was to reduce.

Just want to understand a little bit more:-)

Ok, so Skingrad castle is using meshes for which there are no _far.nif Files available (without RAEVWD)

But the other castles use standard Vanilla meshes so they are visible when distant.




Another problem:

After installing RAEVWD 1.7 and running TES4Lodgen my Skingrad castle looks like this:

http://www.imagebanana.com/view/3kbsjebo/SkingradCastle2.jpg

with little black ears:-)

Well I can't tell from that pic what kind of towers those are because it's not part of the vanilla Skingrad castle.

BC Skingrad Castle is using vanilla meshes for which there are NO _far meshes provided by Bethesda.

Those black "ears" are probably caused by _far tower meshes being longer than the close-up versions. They are vanilla Skingrad wall tower meshes.

Actually vanilla does supply them:

meshes\architecture\skingrad\skingradcastletower02_far.nif
meshes\architecture\castle\skingrad\skingradcastletower02_far.nif

RAEVWD provides optimized corrections of the ones in meshes\architecture\skingrad\ but not the other because in the other there is ordinarily no full sized mesh.

Also, yes, the LOD mesh is longer than the real one.

Thank you very much, wrinklyninja. I can turn on all the mods without crash on exit anymore. Sorry for this late reply but I have problem with my ISP about the bill of last month after luna new year ^_^ .

Those are just the towers (hence the appearance of the towers but not the rest of the castle in master176281's first screenshot of the castle from afar). There are no _far meshes provided for the rest of the castle - at least not in my game. At least, to be specific, no walls appear when using vanilla meshes, Oblivion.esm only, and the vanilla DistantLOD Tamriel files. Can't be more specific and look in the BSA right now while at work

Seems I have a skingrad LOD error.
http://img716.imageshack.us/i/screenshot58u.jpg/
http://img36.imageshack.us/i/screenshot59fy.jpg/

I did run TES4LODGen twice, havent Raevwd or other LOD changing mods installed.
Is this a well known glitch?

@Marshmallow and others with missing _far.nif files

Well, I know it's probably not recommended to run ImpeREAL Empire Unique Castles along side Better Cities, but you might be able to generate the _far.nif files from it and then remove the .esp of ImpeREAL Castles after having created the _far.nif files with TES4LOD. I think I will try that if I have the same issues when I test tonight.

I haven't really looked into/used milkshape 3d much, but that is interesting how much working around you do just to reduce the quality through that process.
And from you're explanation of how you did it, I see nothing wrong with the way you do it. It's just another way to do the meshes.

The same thing can be done in blender as far as degrading a mesh, it just requires knowledge of how to use the modifiers to accomplish this feat.

As far as my "BYFFI" process it involves a bit of thinking on the actual modeling side of the equation. Let me give you an example with one of your meshes.
Ummm. RAEVWD icelvenblock02house03_far.nif 163 kb
Import the mesh (nif) into blender. Open the mesh objects up and delete the duplicate and/or unused vertices. Export (nif). Open in nifskope & delete the NiBinaryExtraData. The simplest way. Mesh will now be about 122 kb. Right click optimize on the mesh itself PYFFI again 128 kb.

EDIT: Another RAEVWD example just by simply deleting unused/duplicate verts: icexteriorwall01_far.nif 298 kb down to 141 kb. Yes, more than 50% easily. 142 kb PYFFI. Time took: 1-2 min lazily.

If you want to take the optimizations to the max, you will have to at least learn the basics of modeling with the program(blender being what I use). This may involve UVmapping also depending on how much more optimized you may want a mesh to be.
If you think about the model(s) logically, one will come to the conclusion that about half of the dome roof object in the mesh is not needed, because it will never be seen or touched or walked upon, because there is no collision. Why? Because it is under the main roof which shows on top of most of the dome portion. Some of the verts/faces underneath can be safely deleted.

Anyhow, the thinking of what to change can go various different ways and is at the discretion of the modeler.
Questionable changes would be dependent on the texture and if you want to make more textures or a specialized texture. Think. Could all the windows on each side of the building be 1 face? instead of 3,4 or 6 or whatever. Does the gutters or roof rafters have to have that many verts or faces? Definitely not. But would require a bit of work to remodel and UV map them, see?... A new reworked texture may/may not be needed to accomplish some of these things.
How many objects can be merged? Do they use the same textures/materials?

Another thing to consider is whether the faces are quads, tris, or a combo of both. This will determine the total # of faces. Simply changing the whole actual model to all quads will a lot of times wreak the UV mapping on certain portions. This is where the modeler will need to know by test what verts to not include.


(Reg model example) On a lot of the models that have stairs leading to a doorway, just look underneath the stairs. How much of that is not needed. Especially in the collision model also. If you understand the lines not to cross within the models, you will quickly understand and add up collectively how much unneeded data/faces/verts there are in the models.
Is it possible to make two collision faces one face? How about six or twelve faces into one? Depending on how many times that particular model is used in an area will effect the benchmark. Why should one have all the extra if it will never be seen, used, touched, or walked upon etc.

In doing so to models this will result in one or both of these: a optimized model and/or extra specific models.

And make sure in this whole process that the normals stay faced correctly. Regular models and collision models.

Some models will be used more than once and in various positions. Will deleting certain portions of a mesh affect the model overall In-game wise?

Above all this whole process is basically thought out as to what is/isn't needed for each particular model.


Yes, most of the UV problems may not really matter much, but if you can't see it, then why should it be there?
Learning to UV map is the best way to create new looking models from existing meshes quickly and (sometimes) easily.
Also in correcting UV mapping on existing models.

*End modeling blurb*

Hope this sheds a little light on the whole optimizing processes. Many different paths and choices to make.
Choose wisely. Save a copy of the original in case a portion may need to be added back in at a latter date for one reason or another.

Metallicow

Read the ten posts immediately before yours, perhaps?



BAD idea! BC already contains the entirety of ImpeREAL Empire Unique Castles. So anything relating to the castles which doesn't work with BC, won't work with IEUC either. Plus you can't generate _far.nif files from an ESP. You get them from the original non-_far.nifs which are in the vanilla Meshes BSA. TES4LODGen does NOT magically create _far nif files; what it does is detect all _far nif files in your Meshes folder, and instruct the game to make every use of the corresponding high quality version of that _far show the _far version from afar. So you have to have the _far nifs before running TES4LODGen. Install RAEVWD, then run TES4LODGen, this should make the castles appear VWD.

@ Metallicow: I don't have time to read your post, it is now exactly 8.30am and I have to stop doing non-work things while in the office now I'l read it during my lunch hour.
EDIT Read it now, I reckon I won't comment on any of it though, it's clearly for Arthmoor to understand

It looks like more work than it is really. I've gotten good enough at spotting when degradation starts that I can churn out a complete reduction in less than 5 minutes, including reapplying all the textures in Nifskope.



Sorry, most of that was Greek. I don't get along with Blender's archaic 1990's interfacee. I wouldn't have the first clue what to do to know what's unused or a duplicate by using that program. PyFFI already handles that during optimization anyway and I don't have to know anything about the mesh. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're doing, the triangle reduction I do in Milkshape 3D is vastly superior to simply knocking of some duplicate verts. It literally takes the mesh and merges triangles to reduce the over all polygon count of the entire mesh.

The import/export process also strips off everything that needs to be stripped off to produce a valid _far.nif. You get back literaly a texture block, a nistrips block, and a material property block per node, nothing else. That's why the only thing I have to do before exporting from nifskope is chop off the collision. Milkshape doesn't know the difference between that and the real mesh.

True, I don't know the program well enough at all to start manually removing bits that can't be seen, so when it reduces stuff, it's reducing whatever the original size mesh has in it.

Doubly sorry, but the rest of your post went clear over my head. I have no idea what you were really describing. As far as more aggressive optimizations, the only meshes that need it are the city architecture pieces.

hello

Sage's Skyrim Armory (SSA) patch for buma? the shop is overlapping with the castle walls

here is link to mod http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View...ail&id=4112

thank you for all your hard work team BC! Game is way better thanks to you

That's already been requested once.

Thanks for clearing that up. I just figured you could generate from a .esp file since every time I used ImpeREAL Unique Castles I saw the distant LOD after running TES4LOD. But, I must of had RAEVWD installed along with it each time. My bad...

It would be more suitable for there to be an alternate version of Sage's Skyrim Armory relocating the shop a small distance (such as the other side of the road) for use with Better Cities. Have you asked the mod author to consider releasing a BC-compatible version? A patch seems a little over the top since this shop is the only edit made to the Tamriel worldspace by SSA.

Yeah it works great - got this mod running perfectly now, thanks for your help.

Incredible mod.

Cheers

When using the moDem's City Life - BP Compat.esp patch that is included in BC which version of City Life is this pertaining to?

Can the newest v22 be used here: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=11278

I always had issues in previous installs after installing City Life in combination with BC (or sorry, it may just be City Life v21 which was rather buggy) with CTD's, usually in the Waterfront area.

I am hesitant to install City Life again on this install, although I love the mod and I think it breathes a whole lot more life into the cities in combination with BC is quite spectacular.

So if I may, which version of City Life is the patch in Better Cities (now 4-5-0) pertaining to? Will the v22 or v21 BP compatible City Life versions work best?

Thank you, great, great mod here and thank you for making it I would never play the game without it again.

-J

The patch is for the "Beautiful People" version of City Life only. It should not be used if you are not using the "Beautiful People" variant of City Life.

moDem's City Life has long been known to cause CTDs around the Waterfront area. This may have been resolved in more recent releases, I don't know.

I would just like to post a friendly reminder of permissions with regards Better Cities. From the readme and Nexus Description page:


Now, after acknowledging that "legally" this is overridden by Bethesda's own EULA stating that it's all theirs, not ours...
This means that we don't allow others to take any files found in the BC archives and reupload them elsewhere. We also don't allow others to edit any files found in the BC archives and reupload them elsewhere. Obviously some of the BSAs contain resources made by others - these resources are as free for reuse/editing/sharing as the original resource-creator allows, but the BSAs themselves are not.

What we DO allow is others creating mods dependent on any files found in the BC archives and sharing those with others. So if someone wants to create a mod using our ESM they can do so, BUT they must not include our ESM with their mod, they must require that BC be downloaded from us. If someone wants to create a mod editing one of the BC cities or IC Districts, they can do so, BUT they must use ESP mastering rather than directly edit our ESPs, and then they must require that BC be downloaded from us.

Ultimately, don't upset us, and we won't upset you.




One day, we'll (possibly) decide that we're finished with Better Cities. When that happens, these restrictions might well change.

Right, thanks. So I take it the newest "Beautiful People" compatible version should be used then? (v22)

If you are using the Beautiful People version of City Life, you should use the patch. If you are not, don't use the patch.

In our next release (whenever that will be) the cost and travel times for travelling between the cities by ship will be reduced quite drastically. Now that Onra has provided heightmaps for Valenwood/Elsweyr (plus Summurset and Blackwood, but that's not relevant to what I'm saying right now), I've taken the ship available in BC for purchase in Anvil Bay and sailed the coast myself (using vanilla timescale). I've discovered that those who suggested the distance was really quite short in TES4 were absolutely right, so now instead of taking five days to sail from Anvil to Leyawiin, it will take half a day. All other sailing trip times have been reduced to match this, and costs have been reduced accordingly.

I'm installing it now but I can't find the "better cities - complementary.bsa" or the resource update needed to get it. could someone help