REALLY Almost Everything Visible When Distant Mod

Requirements

TES4LODGen - needed to generate the distant view information.

Installation

The archive is provided as a BAIN package, which makes for relatively easy installation without the hassles associated with supporting OMODs.

Manual installation should be fairly straightforward as each folder is named according to what it contains, but read on for the details anyway, ok? :)

00 Core - This folder contains meshes that the game normally ships with but have been optimized. The Imperial City and castle walls surrounding other cities. It also contains additional meshes for Cloud Ruler Temple, Frostcrag Spire, Battlehorn Castle, and IC sewer exit tunnels. Also included in this folder are all of the reduced size vanilla textures, which are shared among the other categories and are thus required. If only the core files are used, VWD performance should improve slightly over vanilla.

01 City Plugins - The ESPs used to provide VWD for buildings in the Imperial City and the outlying cities. Both of these are entirely optional.

02 City Architecture - Just what it sounds like. The buildings used primarily within the cities.

These are also used in the wilderness by village and town mods, but in vanilla this doesn't happen much.

This folder can impose a significant frame rate hit, so if you're on a lower end PC, you may wish to leave these out.

03 Imperial City Architecture - Additional meshes for the Imperial City. Most of this material is not used outside of the IC.

The contents of this folder can impose a stiff performance penalty when looking toward the IC.

04 Wilderness Architecture - Contains buildings normally found outside the major cities.

Farmhouses, the lower class buildings, priories, docks, and wayshrines.

Lower class buildings are also used in Chorrol, but for the most part only show up out in the countryside and on the IC Waterfront.

05 Ayleid Ruins - Contains just what it says, the meshes used for Ayleid ruins.

06 Imperial Forts - Contains just what it says, meshes used for ruins of Imperial forts.

07 Large Rocks - Contains meshes used for the 2080 sized rocks, and all of the large rocks on the Gold Coast around Anvil.

08 Ships - Contains meshes used for ships as well as shipwrecks.

09 Statues - Contains meshes used for various statues of the Nine Divines and Daedric deities.

10 Higher Detail Castles - Meshes for city walls and castle keeps which have higher poly counts than the default Bethesda models.

These are visually more accurate and fit the pieces they're meant to support, rather than just being overly generic ultra-low poly blobs.

This will have a slight impact on overall performance due to more polygons and more textures being loaded, but they are visually superior.

11 Higher Detail IC Bridges - Meshes for the Imperial City bridges that are seen around the Imperial island.

These have a higher polygon count than the models Bethesda used but are visually more accurate.

This will have a very slight additional impact on performance but is well worth it for the visual improvement.

If you want it all, just enable all of the package options and you're off and running.

No DistandLOD folder is provided. In order to actually see the results of what you just did, you need to download TES4LODGen and run it. It's a wicked simple utility that processes VWD information based on _far.nif files provided and will tailor itself to whatever mods you have installed.

If you're still using OBMM for whatever reason, TheNiceOne has created an OMOD installer script for RAEVWD.

Uninstallation

Manually remove the files you installed, or uninstall it through BAIN.

Options

The 2 ESPs included with the package provide additional placement of VWD information. Each one is entirely optional and can be left out to help improve performance.

RAEVWD Cities.esp covers all cities except Kvatch and the Imperial City. It places buildings and trees in their proper locations behind the city walls. This ESP is 100% module compatible with Open Cities (Classic or Reborn). It should not be used in combination with Better Cities (which now includes Open Better Cities) or you will end up with VWD duplication which will severely harm game performance when viewing a city from the distance.

RAEVWD Imperial City.esp places buildings and trees behind the walls of the Imperial City. It is fully compatible with Open Cities (Classic or Reborn). It is not compatible with Better Cities. Using it with Better Cities installed will result in a severe drop in game performance when the IC is in view.

Cathedrals have not been placed where missing since the Unofficial Oblivion Patch and some other mods address this. If you're not using the UOP, uh.... why not?

The cloister in Anvil as well as Benirus Manor have also been left out since the UOP deals with these as well. The UOP places the full detail mesh, so don't worry :)