Snowy's Water of Cyrodiil - Distant LOD (VWD)

You ever wanted to get past Oblivion's water LOD engine limitations of sea level height? Water of Cyrodiil fills in holes and instead, adds pools of water throughout the game to be seen from a distance! This sounds simple, but this mod enables this capability by tricking the game's engine into switching the _far.nif in for the editor object. The editor object and _far.nif both are from the same object source.

A VWD _far.nif file does not have to have the same attributes and contents as its close-up counterpart. slowLODGen does not care and will utilize the _far.nif's conditions.

This mod was created using a utility created by Arthmoor. According to the resource creator:

"In game performance impact from this should be negligible. The _far.nif is two triangles, so it's as low as the poly count can possibly get. There is no need to optimize it."

"I have not noticed any visual anomalies due to leaving the alpha channel in place on the VWD nif. I am fairly certain that is required or the water will not be transparent."

- I recommend to turn object, actor, misc, and maybe even tree reflections off regardless of this mod or not. Be aware that any reflections toggled on will still be present on the new water locations from a distance - test yourself.

Water type and coloring will be dependent on whatever water mods the user has installed and what type of water is present in the cell. So it should adapt itself to your mod conditions!

14 locations in Cyrodiil have been added into the WaterLOD - 53 water statics have been placed throughout the region with many exceptions or holes, as they were physically unable to be viewed unless via air.

6 locations in the Shivering Isles have been added into the WaterLOD - 33 water statics

Check out Snowy's Graphics Overhaul - Guide - Presets - Ini's, as I made this for the graphical overhaul and showcase!

Installation

- Download the version of choice (or both) - Snowy's Water LOD - Cyrodiil | Snowy's Water LOD - Shivering Isles

- Install via your choice of mod manager or (Wrye Bash preferably) or manually unpacking the zip folders into your Oblivion-->Data directory

- You can override the meshes from Cyrodiil if you are also installing the Shivering Isles

- Ideally, run a landscape LOD prior to generating the water LOD through the next step. My landscape generator of choice is Landscape LOD generator tes4ll-v5. Water placement was designed around generating landscape through this mod in its default settings. (I like using rocky filter 0. 9-0. 8 base, if its too dark, go with 0. 5-0. 4)

Click "Show" for Landscape LOD guide if you need - if you know how or already generated, skip