If anyone can answer an Dyndolod question, I'd appreciate it

[Jotasran]

I ran Dyndolod and looked for the answer, but cannot seem to find one.  I can produce the texgen file and everything seems fine except the Moon and Star village which doesn't seem to have LOD because it just pops in when I get into range like it did without dyndolod.  In the gamerpoets video it was talking about mods having special files, but I can't see anything like that in the dyndolold that's out now.  It may be that I have other buildings that aren't added, but just haven't noticed yet.  Am I missing something obvious?

[travelmedic]

I'm guessing that what GamerPoets meant was that each mod would have special LOD files, not that DYNDOLOD would have special files for each mod.  In this case, the Moon and Star author may not have generated any in the Creation Kit.

 

You could always open Moon and Star in Creation Kit and make them but maybe more trouble than it's worth.  I kind of want to say that Wrye Bash can also create LODs, but I'm probably totally wrong about that.

[Jotasran]

It's my understanding the DYNDOLOD looks at my LO during and generates models as part of the TexGen creation procedure.  Is that not true.  Do I need to generate LOD files independently of the TexGen?

[travelmedic]

I probably should bow out because I'm not any sort of DYNDOLOD expert, but I'll try.  

 

Yes, DYNDOLOD looks at your load order.

 

The part I'm unsure about is that I think mods will sometimes include LOD data for DYNDOLOD to process, and whether or not MAS has that.  Hopefully I'm not steering you wrong.

 

You might still get some pop in anyway, it's just a question of how much and how close you are to the village in the lake.

 

Better to ask in the DYNDOLOD support page I think.

[Jotasran]

OK.  Thanks for your help.  I'll check there.

[traison]

Pretty much the only thing I know about this is that if you slap down a prebuilt inn building in the middle of the Whiterun fields then rebuild LODs with DynDOLOD it will be visible from afar and behave properly. However, where it pulls these LOD meshes from I am not certain. Considering textures contain this data (mipmaps) I would assume the meshes should as well. I personally see downscaling textures being a whole lot easier than simplifying meshes from a technological point of view. If they didn't automate it with textures, they probably didn't automate meshes.

 

My point is, if the Moon and Star village uses custom meshes that's probably your issue right there - no LOD data available. But this would also mean that there has to be LOD data somewhere for all vanilla meshes and I really can't remember ever seeing any.

 

I'll go look around and see if I see something.

 

Edit: Or is that exactly what the entire LOD building process is all about, building "mipmaps" of meshes? In that case you shouldn't be having issues with any content - custom or not.

 

Edit again: Found it. Vanilla LOD meshes are in Skyrim - Meshes1.bsa\meshes\lod. My assuption then would be that the village you're having issues with is made up of custom meshes, lacking lod meshes. Thus dyndolod has nothing to build with.

Edited June 9, 2023 by traison

[Jotasran]

 

1 hour ago, traison said:

Found it. Vanilla LOD meshes are in Skyrim - Meshes1.bsa\meshes\lod. My assuption then would be that the village you're having issues with is made up of custom meshes, lacking lod meshes. Thus dyndolod has nothing to build with.

So, you having a pretty good idea of my competency level, how could I go about generating them to see the village from afar? 

[traison]

Only tool I've heard of that does this was the tool ID Software made for Doom 3 back in the day. John Carmack's Magic I think it was called. Quite sure they wouldn't release something like that. Then again, Blender confuses me so I'm not the right person to ask for that. Maybe blender can do it too? Anyhow, I would assume Blender would be the minimum requirement for a job like this. You're basically looking for the inverse of polygon subdivision. I also imagine it would require manual editing afterwards, as the algorithms probably can't work out what's important and what isn't.

 

The poor man's option would be to figure out where the reference to the lod mesh is (I would start from xEdit, since DynDOLOD is interested in plugin data as well). Once you know, or add the path, simply copy the existing mesh to the lod mesh path and run DynDOLOD. May look out of place to have a high-res house in the distance, but maybe it's better than no house?

 

Edit: A random example of what looks like a static with a LOD mesh reference:

[00] Skyrim.esm (7CAB85A9) \ Static \ 0003F96B <ImpExtBldgICorner01>

Edited June 9, 2023 by traison

[Jotasran]

Ok.  So way past my skill set by far.

[traison]

I assume Little Vivec is the issue here?

[Jotasran]

Yes.  I see the flags from far away, but not the buildings.

[traison]

 I didn't see any custom meshes or statics in this mod. As far as I know this is just like any other vanilla village. I feel like there's something else going on here. Did you go through the DynDOLOD log? I mean I realize it's like a million lines long but if there's a way to get it out into something like Notepad++ where you can easily search for the obvious: "error", "warning" and "MoonAndStar_MAS" that would be something I'd do at this point.

[Jotasran]

OK.  I'll check that out and see what I can see.  Probably won't be until tomorrow that I can.

[Jotasran]

I'm looking through both logs and don't see anything which leaps out to me as suspect, but I might just be not seeing something out of not knowing to what to look for.  No obvious errors/warnings for Moon and Star though.  I can post the two files, but they are 1 and 6 megs or so.   I'm going to run over to the village so I can get a better idea of how to describe the weird behavior.

 

Edit:  Nevermind.  Now the game is making a liar of me.  It seems to be working exactly as expect now.

Edited June 13, 2023 by Jotasran

[travelmedic]

11 hours ago, Jotasran said:

Edit:  Nevermind.  Now the game is making a liar of me.  It seems to be working exactly as expect now.

 

 

Good.  Whatever was going on, I'm glad it's working now.