City LOD - Performance Edition WIP

City LOD - Performance Edition

After the overwhelming success of my high-performance LOD mod for the Imperial City, I've decided to do the same for other cities of Cyrodiil. No longer will you see overfortified villages in the distance – with this mod, cities will truly look like the sprawling, majestic hubs they're meant to be.

Designed with performance in mind, these LOD meshes have been meticulously optimized to maintain an imperceptible drawcall impact, ensuring smooth gameplay without sacrificing visual quality.

The project is in WIP state, and I will release new cities as soon as they are finished.

Released cities so far:

- Anvil (vanilla and BC)

- Chorrol (vanilla and BC)

Also check out Imperial City LOD

Requirements

slowLODGen or TES4LODGen is required. Run it after the mod installation.

As the mod touches only buildings inside the city walls, J3 Atlassed VWD 2 is highly recommended to cover the stuff outside the walls.

Compatibility

A Better Cities-compatible version is provided. I'd argue that this version is much better than the one for the base game, as it makes cities look 2x bigger. Not compatible with any Open Cities variants, including OCR and the open version of BC. Using tes4ll is highly recommended for the Better Cities version, as the vanilla LOD land mesh hides some of the buildings underground.

Performance impact

Should be negligible for any modern GPU. BC users might expect slight performance improvement, both generally in the Tamriel worldspace as there is less drawcalls to render the LOD and near the cities as all the high-poly buildings behind the walls have been replaced with a couple of lower-poly 1-shape meshes per city.

JESSETIN3 for the atlassing/baking script. Also some meshes form J3 Atlassed VWD have been used.

GBR who started the whole "merge LOD meshes" thing with his merged LOD for ruins

Tools used:

Python automation

CSE and xEdit