World LOD

Overview

The World LOD dialog is used to generate LOD terrain and LOD building geometry for the world.

Data Fields and Buttons

• Worldspace list: List of all Worldspaces.
• Worldspace Stats: TBD
• Generate Terrain Meshes: Creates terrain meshes for the world from the local land geometry.
• Generate Terrain Textures: Builds texture and normal maps for the LOD terrain, also from the local land.
• Chop Terrain Texture: Allows you to instead build LOD terrain texture maps from a handpainted texture up to 8192x8192 in size. It does not build normal maps. (This might be changing - TBD)
• Generate Objects: Creates LOD geometry and texture maps for all refs in the world that are marked visible distant.

Notes

• Currently, all of the functionality that creates textures creates source TGA textures that need to go through our build process to actually be visible in the game. (This might be changing - TBD)
• The mesh generation process requires at least 1GB of memory and takes a rather long time, on the order of 6-8 hours.
• Source TGA textures for generate LOD-Objects dont extract automaticly out of your textures.bsa Archive. Open your textures.bsa archive and extract the required DDS textures for your LOD-Objects out of this Archive. Then convert those DDS textures into source TGA textures. Use a Programm like http://www.irfanview.de/ for it. Now copy those converted TGA textures into source\textures TGA\(now use Filestructure of textures.bsa Archive here). Source\textures TGA\ is located outside your Fallout3 Game Directory.
• For successful generate of LOD-Objects not only the required TGA textures are needed in the correct Path, but the required _lod.nifs too. Open your meshes.bsa archive and extract the required _lod.nifs out of your BSA-Archive into your Fallout 3 Data Directory.
• The capital wasteland worldspace is located at a coordinate of around 10500z. You should always create a new worldspace far above this z coordinate, what means at a minimum of 3000z above 10500z. In other case you will get floating trees in the sky or above the ground when you change worldspaces.
• Be aware when creating LOD for worldspaces with worldspace autowater that you will get in some cases big surface holes in the Water-LOD and it's not easy to fix them.