Really AEVWD: SI Edition 1.7

A modest approach to distant viewable objects, aka VWD. Lord Sheogorath will be pleased. Or throw pie at you. Depends on his mood.

This package performs a similar service for the Shivering Isles as the regular RAEVWD. The main difference is that all of the VWD objects are additions to the process. SI only included a very limited number of distant objects. The city walls around Bliss, Crucible and The Fringe, and the New Sheoth palace. Anyone who has played through SI knows though that there are a lot of large ruins, settlements, and mushroom trees all over the landscape. Not one of these has a distant object provided by Bethesda. So you run into a great deal of "pop-in" as the closeup versions load. So with that in mind I spent a few days generating low-poly meshes out of the missing pieces.

All of the meshes have been hand 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 an VWD object.
  
• Animation controllers removed. It is impossible to animate an 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. And the only one covering Shivering Isles at all.