FAR – Faraway Area Reform (LOD)
Thank you for the support. There is not much more that can be done with this mod as it’s usually a one-time affair, so be safe in the notion you probably will have to download these quite large files once or twice maximum. Finally: Dear jim, it’s more than “pepper” FYI, so maybe you should try “Getting a Clue”?
Remember: If you just want the optimised textures with a slight clarity boost bullt-in, remove ‘noise.dds’ and ‘detailnormal.dds’ from the ‘Terrain’ folder of the main file. They do a lot of the work.
FAR – Faraway Area Reform < Yep that is the actual title to those asking. I do modding to share, it ain't no advertisement campaign. I could call it "buttocks" for all I care. Tags work, use 'em!
Description
This is a little texture mod I made for everyone, like my one for Skyrim (well kind of little, it has thousands of edited textures). What this does is adds a balanced amount of eye-tweaked noise to 3060 distant terrain files. This gives the appearance of making it look more detailed. You also get a new bump map with lots more variance, as well as a fixed noise texture. Why is it fixed? Well if you take a look, you can see Bethesda added a fake red glow to it for some reason. I refined the noise and eliminated that as there is nothing worse than fake lighting especially with lighting mods.
What else? Well those 3060 textures were saved at 341kb with a blank transparency. I removed that which seems to work fine, so this now makes them 171kb each. 341 x 3060 = 1,043460 and 171 x 3060 = 523,260 which is a huge saving, so It should actually improve performance. You can do that same sum again, but with 3060 bump maps, bringing the total to 6120 terrain textures, all saved properly, which doubles performance.
Please don’t expect the terrain to be as detailed as my Skyrim mod. You will still be getting more performance and detail, but because Bethesda made some questionable changes here with the noise, it won’t be as dramatic as Skyrim. What it aims to do is still make terrain look more detailed and in situ with the objects around it.
Versions
The main file contains 3060 colour textures with two newly designed noise textures. The optional file contains 3060 bump textures. Why is it optional? Well, due to people who may still have backward ISPs or slow internet pretty much. The main file will make more difference, but both files have optimisations for texture formats, so both are required if you want the most out of this mod.
Compatibility
As with any mod you will need to pick and choose which textures you prefer if you download another with the same files. Either overwrite the other mod with my files or the other way around depending on what you like. I can’t tell you what is which is better for you personally, people like different things.
Performance
You will suffer no performance loss and should see a small boost. Images in my gallery are taken with low settings to easily show you the differences.
Recommendations
I recommened Optimized Vanilla Textures alongside this.
Installation
Manual
Nexus Mod Manager