SKYRIMLE Real Roads for Skyrim

[Nearox]

I've been looking for a proper road alternative to SRO. Never found a good looking road on nexus but this one seems worth checking out!

[Livnthedream]

Lots of people like InsanitySarrows texture pack for roads. He links to it in the description. I found out about it using SMC. I would love to see comparisons for the various road textures+this.

[DoYouEvenModBro]

I would love to see that as well.

[Livnthedream]

Here is the Hodilton vid. I don't remember which road textures get pulled out for TPC but these looks pretty good, and not like the SRO ones posted earlier:

[DoubleYou]

Pretty sure SMC uses AMB Landscape for the roads.

[redirishlord]

Great video comparison, thanks for posting it. The cobblestones look very detailed, I imagine that would really pop with enb & parallax. I'm excited to check this out in game.

 

* after reading the mods forum & description sounds like Parallax is incompatible (because the mod ignores it in favor of its own meshes) and so is Tamriel Reloaded Roads (texture variety will require editing 90+ CK entries, I'm paraphrasing the author's post). So basic Tamriel Reloaded okay, just not the roads optionals, and the mod is an upgrade to parallax for roads (parallax meshes are ignored).

Edited July 3, 2014 by redirishlord

[DoYouEvenModBro]

SRO->SRO+Real Roads

 

Bah, the forum messed up the BB code again. I give up.

Ok. Finally saw these. yea, makes the road look really weird with SRO.

I'd like to see SRO vs Vanilla + Real Roads.

[Guest]

Aiyen what happened to more detailed exterior models are bad and will make my game explode? He he. 

 

Can anyone check the triangle count for a mesh under NiTriShape, I think near the bottom of said thang?  Not on PC at the moment, but a compare on that would be cool. The video makes it look less of a deal than the images. Maybe needs more protrusion.

 

-Livnthedream

 

I was wrong from the looks of it, but I was thinking of staff like who usually question these things. They always question my work performance-wise, but not this? I'm being trolled or something.  I know all about these crazy detailed mods alright. Uncompressed 4k is beyond silly.

Edited July 3, 2014 by Guest

[Aiyen]

No no Sparrow it will make your computer explode.. not your game! Only mages make your game explode! :P 

 

Joke aside then it is ofc. true that in general I am not a huge advocate of more detailed meshes since they are such a subtle performance hog. Most people are just not aware of the fact that they even affect performance. 

 

Just look at how many people still think that using higher resolution textures will affect FPS!

 

Another issue is the LOD generation.. which in some locations will just cripple even the best of systems due to some high detail model being loaded outside of sight... quality = 0, performance drop = 100%. Adding more detailed meshes is only going to increase this. If we had an LOD generation where we could be sure that all stuff out of sight would not be rendered at high poly levels then I would be the first in line to get all the high detail meshes I could! :) 

 

 

 

 

[Octopuss]

Are you saying that adding bunch of 4k textures won't affect FPS? Come on, you don't believe that, do you? :P

Meshes probably affect performance, but with default ugrids, the radius within which everything is being rendered isn't that big...

 

Can you elaborate on the LODs? I'm not sure I understand what are you saying here.

[Aiyen]

Textures themselves once loaded do not affect rendering any further. The reason you see an impact is that your reaching your memory limits.. which cause bottlenecks... but once the textures are loaded then your FPS will return to its base level again. 

 

A higher poly count will affect rendering at all times, hence you will get an overall drop in performance. Even more so if the mesh also have shadow cast and receive enabled. Since higher detail meshes means a more complex shadow calculation. (The issue with SMIMS chandeliers is an example of this)

 

Too see the LOD thing all you have to do is toggle free camera in the console and go up... eventually you will see just how much stuff behind mountains etc. that is still rendered, hence cost performance. In some locations this become more noticeable then in others. If you are using any mods that also force "high" detail models to be used instead of the LOD versions, then performance drop due to this will only get worse. 

 

Overall this is also why for games, if you can do something with a texture (Using normal maps, parallax or tessellation etc) then that is preferred since it is less costly. 

Hope that clears up what I mean! :) 

[Octopuss]

But what LOD generation are you talking about? I thought LODs are always vanilla, unless someone bothers with creating new ones (hardly anyone does that). Maybe I don't understand, but I don't think anything is being generated anywhere.

I'm not sure how LODs negatively affect performance, when in fact the purpose is to render simplified models at distance?

[Aiyen]

You can override the vanilla LOD generator with full detail models if you so wish using the CK. Some mods do this to avoid the pop in issues when you transition from LOD to detail model. 

 

So LOD´s do not negatively affect performance, unless you override it. If do that AND use models with increased poly counts, then you will ofc. experience even more of a slowdown in areas where the LOD generation is not... optimal. 

If you wanted to see what I mean with the LOD generation not being optimal means, then free camera your way up and see how much stuff is actually loaded even though it is not required at all since you would never be able to see said model anyways.. even if you transition to a different grid. 

 

Just to make it perfectly clear, for all who read this. I am not saying that this mod will plummet your FPS! :P 

I am saying that you need to make a mental note, or an actual one, that this mod increase poly count, which will contribute to overall less FPS. 

[Octopuss]

Hmm, looks like that project Sheson is working on really needs to see the light of a day, because if I understood it correctly, it would let people generate all the LODs manually for their specific game.

[DanielCoffey]

I have had a look at the .nif for some of the longer road sections and they add a LOT of polys. There are some seams in them that are just crawling with redundant vertices.

 

Example : roadcurve01.nif (picking a worse-case example)

 

There are two NiTriShapes in this - one which is the hump of the road bed itself and this is a good low poly model with about 650 vertices. The second is the cobbles and this one goes mad at nearly 30,000 vertices, a lot of which are redundant. It seems to be made up of several sections and they have joins that are more or less straight and are riddled with spare vertices. I would suggest the mesh could be reduced in complexity by a good 50% and still look very good.

 

Here are the seams I spotted (and highlighted in PS) and they run across the middle of the stone tops so could be optimised heavily...

 

 

Edited July 3, 2014 by DanielCoffey