Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Really Almost Everything Viewable When Distant

This post may come as somewhat of a surprise for some, since I've been spending the majority of my free time on the official forums discussing my research regarding adding to the cities of Cyrodiil. However, my attempts at tweaking a mod that I was considering were getting too tedious, so I figured I would move on for now to something a bit simpler for myself.

Distant land has always been a troubling issue when it comes to Cyrodiil's atmosphere. Although the land occasionally is pleasant on the eyes from a distance, further exploration allows the player to discover that several structures and rocks that should be visible from afar seem to disappear after a certain distance. This results in forts, ruins, towns, and rather large rocks to instantly pop into view when approaching them and erasing themselves from existence when walking away. In order to give the appearance of a more consistent world, Really Almost Everything Viewable When Distant (RAEVWD) was created. When watching the video, be sure to note the ruins and forts that are visible when the mod is activated.


The models that are used to represent objects in Oblivion have two different forms, the structures you see when close to them and the images that you see of the objects from a distance. In the original game, distant models could have been generated for all the existing models of Oblivion, but only certain objects were classified as visible when distant. The reasoning behind this was probably due to the desire to produce a game that would be easier to run on the computers of the time. RAEVWD adds to the distant land a variety of structures that should always be easily seen from a distance, such as settlements, ruins, and larger rock formations. Since computers are much more capable of higher processing levels today, there is only a small decrease in game performance. If you have a more recent computer and like the idea of adding more to Cyrodiil's distant landscapes, you can find RAEVWD right here. Be sure to keep in mind that you won't see any changes without using TES4LODGen, which updates the game to recognize all new distant objects added into the directory. Also note that installation of the mod is much easier when using the Oblivion Mod Manager. If you'd like to use this method of installation rather than attempt doing it manually, you can also find the script and instructions for installing RAEVWD this way on TESNexus.

So that's that. Hopefully I'll be able to talk about adding life to cities in my next post, but I won't stop myself from posting if I can't. Just know that I'll definitely be discussing that sometime in the near future. Until next time, goodbye for now.

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