EVE Grenade Explosion Lag Fix

THE PROBLEM

I learned that even people with the latest GPU and CPU components have this particular bug, clearly indicating that the explosion effect was done in a way that's too taxing on the game's engine. The proposed solutions for this problem in the EVE's Optional Files section did not produce results in my game at all. Thus the dreaded 1-2 second delay on the first frag explosion after loading the game persisted. After that it doesn't happen anymore while playing the game, and it often works fine even after loading a quicksave. I'm not sure if it happens after entering buildings/locations with loading screen, BUT if you do it from the main menu, you'll definitely get the freeze. The frag explosion in question affects both dynamite sticks, frag grenades, frag mines, and the 40mm grenades - all very often used explosives.

THE SOLUTION

With permission from weijiesen and using knowledge from ydok4's detective work I came with up a (hopefully) once-and-for-all grenade lag fix:

The following steps were done to resolve this:

• []The rock debris inside the troublesome WJS_ExplosionGrenadeFragOD.nif mesh uses four different diffuse/normal map textures from the textures/landscape folder of the game; I tested and concluded that those diffuse textures create the freeze as soon as their resolution goes beyond 1024x1024, which means this becomes a problem for people who use high quality landscape retextures. So I created a separate textures/effects/grenadedebris folder in which I put the four (vanilla) rock diffuse textures and linked them to the explosion mesh. The vanilla textures the mesh now uses are all 512x512, so this bloody nuisance should now be taken care of for good.
  • []As an added bonus I removed all the normal maps from the six debris rocks of the mesh. This might not have been 100% necessary, but they're pointless to be on such small rock pieces that disappear after like three seconds in the game. And if they're above 1k in size, I can't guarantee they wouldn't continue to cause problems.

    Here's a before/after video demonstration

    : 

    Link

    INSTALLATION

    You have four options available: two with the standard sized debris rocks, and two with 50% smaller rocks (my personal preference). If you're fine with the default EVE explosion debris, you'll probably be fine with the standard version. Additionally, both versions have an option without the burning effect (you can see it at the end of the video). It doesn't affect performance in my game, but for me this particular fire simulation (a visible burning shrub) appea