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Really AEVWD 1.9.3


10 Screenshots

About This File

A modest approach to distant viewable objects, aka VWD.

You're all familiar with the various VWD packages, right? Some provide more than others. Some are geared specifically toward super-high end machines. One isn't even designed to be played and will cripple anything currently on the market today. For the rest of us, myself included, we'd just like to enhance the visual experience without crippling the game. None of the available packages has been fully optimized, usually with large amounts of unnecessary data still attached.

In order to address these issues, I've decided to compile into one source as many useful VWD objects as can be reasonably applied to the game from the following sources:

AEVWD Large: Enhanced lowres textures.

UOMP: Battlehorn Castle (requires the official DLC to be activated).

Oblivion: City wall meshes only.

Brumbek: VWD illuminated windows, optimized lowres texture pack, optional QTP3 lowres texture pack, as well as several mesh and texture fixes.

Me: Machine regenerated all architecture, Ayleid ruin, and Imperial fort meshes for better quality and lower polygon counts. UOP corrected versions were used for the reductions wherever possible.

The overall goal is to provide enhanced VWD visuals while also trying to preserve performance as much as possible. This all stems from my realization that even with a high end graphics card, full detail VWD meshes and textures are simply out of the question. The VRAM usage is causing large amounts of stuttering when trying to swap out the memory and not even Streamline 3.1 can keep up. This package has brought the VRAM usage under control and has had a huge impact on overall lag and stuttering.

All of the meshes have been checked and had the following done:

  • Collision data removed. If actual collision grids were still present, the branches have been deleted entirely. It's impossible to collide with a VWD object.
  • Animation controllers removed. It is impossible to animate a VWD object, so this data is bloat.
  • Geometry morphers removed. If a mesh had these, they've been removed, as they are only useful in animation.
  • All NiStringsExtraData blocks removed. These are nearly always associated with collision.
  • All BSX Flags removed. These are nearly always used for collision and animation.
  • All NiSpecularProperty blocks removed. Leaving these in place causes visual anomalies, most notably the "every VWD turned yellow" issue.
  • All NiBinaryExtraData blocks (tangent/normal spaces) removed. This data is not required for VWD meshes and helps tremendously in reducing memory usage.
  • All parallax flags turned off. The distances involved make this useless anyway.
  • All meshes have been assigned lowres textures instead of hires ones.
  • Nearly all NiAlphaProperty blocks removed. If the mesh required it for transparency, it was kept. If this is left on a mesh that does not require it, visual anomalies can result.
  • All NiVertexColorProperty blocks removed. These lead to some cases of black VWD objects.
  • Optimization using PyFFI after the above has been done.

In addition to mesh work, all VWD normal maps have had their alpha channels removed since it serves no purpose. This will help some with VRAM, and eliminate issues with sparkly objects.

The typical VWD mesh comes out the other end of this process losing up to 75% of the data it was carrying with no loss of function. A fully optimized and functional VWD mesh will have only the NiMaterialProperty, NiTexturingProperty, and NiTriShapeData/NiTriStripsData branches left in its NiTriShape/NiTriStrips branches, and will have only NiTriStrips or NiTriShape branches attached to the scene root.

Compared with all of the other VWD options available, this is the most optimized, game friendly set of VWD objects there is.


What's New in Version 1.9.3

Released

Corrected Imperial City plugin. The streets were extending outside the main gate when they should not have been.


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