This mod completely bricked my game, I'm aware that it might be conflict on my end as I'm using Oblivion Reloaded which also adds shaders. But the game CTD before main menu even after deactivating the omod in Mod Manager. Luckily I Zip my entire Oblivion folder just in case for situations like these, beware and take precautions.
I know it's like a year later, but for future reference, if anyone wants to try something like this in other games I'm happy to explain how it's done. It's ultimately fairly simple, but you'd just need to know how to mod the shaders, and then put in some work on the textures themselves.
Granted this is a conversation spanning literally years at this point, but I figure I'll share for posterity and future reference. :)
Under the hood the mod is extremely simple: it just changes the way the blending value for each layer of the landscape is calculated to factor in extra information stored in the alpha channel of the textures.
This is similar to the way that modern games use displacement data to blend textures with stuff like stones sticking up through dirt, but uses a more deliberately authored mask so that the edge you get between material layers has a medium-scale pattern as well as a detailed one.
About 95% of the labor involved in creating it was painting sensible alpha masks for every landscape texture in the game. The magic though is in the other 5%, the shader changes, which replace using the straight blending weight from the layer with a bit of simple math:
BlendAmount = 2 * BlendWeight + TextureAlpha - 1 This basically makes it so that if BlendWeight is 0.0 the layer is fully transparent, if it's 1.0 the layer is fully opaque, and if it's 0.5 the alpha from the texture is fully respected, blending between those three points. More details on that here.
Sadly I don't know a thing about moding those other games - I don't actually know how to do it for Oblivion technically, since Zeroed was the one who knew how to package up the shader changes - so I can't help with the basics, but if you know how to mod their shaders and want to put in the time creating the blending masks, it should be trivial to implement a similar scheme in just about any game.
Having trouble making this mod work... Any easy way to convert its format into 7zip so it can download properly and show up in mod manager. MO2 doesnt change it from its outdated format for me *EDIT: nvrm think i found it further down in the comments https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/46744?tab=files
Have a look at Imperial Roads, which contains a repackaged version of this, for easier installation or for installation with mod managers like MO2 or Wrye Bash.
Just use something like OBMM to extract it to a folder, I use MO2 to mod Oblivion and have done that will all the omods I have. You simply click on the mod, right click and scroll down to extract to folder.
Hi , fantastic mod. i have tested DT Beta II as well as DT SI, both of these worked.
However, i could not seem to get DT - Unique Landscapes to work.
I tested at the area around Cloud Top, Colovian Highlands. My Before & After screenshots showed no visible change. I am using OBMM. After activating this mod, i was not prompted to overwrite anything. I archive invalidated, and have tested launching from both OBMM and OBSE. Please advise, thanks.
EDIT
Oh, i see now, that Unique Landscapes are player-introduced areas. Sorry, i misread the desc.
Don’t get me wrong but what is the advantage of this mod when you could simple turn on anisotropic filtering in the control panel of your graphics card?
The advantage would be that this mod isn't providing anisotropic filtering. I haven't tried it yet, but even by reading the description, it states that it merges terrain shaders without blurring them over top of each other. That is not anisotropic filtering.
This mod broke my Oblivion install and broke OBMM due to the "null error can't create" issue installing the OMOD. Thanks for forcing me to do a total reinstall.
same. verifying local files in steam > reinstalling texture mods that replace everything under Oblivion\Data\Textures\Landscape saved my complete installation. *memo for people that might have these issues in the future*
176 comments
Under the hood the mod is extremely simple: it just changes the way the blending value for each layer of the landscape is calculated to factor in extra information stored in the alpha channel of the textures.
This is similar to the way that modern games use displacement data to blend textures with stuff like stones sticking up through dirt, but uses a more deliberately authored mask so that the edge you get between material layers has a medium-scale pattern as well as a detailed one.
About 95% of the labor involved in creating it was painting sensible alpha masks for every landscape texture in the game. The magic though is in the other 5%, the shader changes, which replace using the straight blending weight from the layer with a bit of simple math:
BlendAmount = 2 * BlendWeight + TextureAlpha - 1This basically makes it so that if BlendWeight is 0.0 the layer is fully transparent, if it's 1.0 the layer is fully opaque, and if it's 0.5 the alpha from the texture is fully respected, blending between those three points. More details on that here.
Sadly I don't know a thing about moding those other games - I don't actually know how to do it for Oblivion technically, since Zeroed was the one who knew how to package up the shader changes - so I can't help with the basics, but if you know how to mod their shaders and want to put in the time creating the blending masks, it should be trivial to implement a similar scheme in just about any game.
However, i could not seem to get DT - Unique Landscapes to work.
I tested at the area around Cloud Top, Colovian Highlands. My Before & After screenshots showed no visible change. I am using OBMM. After activating this mod, i was not prompted to overwrite anything. I archive invalidated, and have tested launching from both OBMM and OBSE. Please advise, thanks.
EDIT
Oh, i see now, that Unique Landscapes are player-introduced areas. Sorry, i misread the desc.