AFK_Weye by Dwip has always been one of the staples of my modded Oblivion, as it's been for for many of us, judging from the number of downloads and endorsements. It offers not only a working, living town on the suburbs of IC, but also adds a number of exciting quests. It's also one of the best made mods around.

Almost perfect, it has one thing that's always bugged me. Whenever I approached Weye, I could see from afar the farmhouses, the stable, the inn, but the most prominent structure - the manor house - was sorely missing. It's never been generated by TES4LODGen because there's no _far.nif for it in the archive. So I created one, made a matching lowres texture, and now at last you can appreciate the complete Weye when you look at it from distance. You simply need to install this little mod and regenerate the VWD objects by running TES4LODGen.

The mod can be safely used alongside such popular mods adding distant view for objects and structures as Really AEVWD, Evenstars Colourwheel LOD Update, etc.

At this time lowres texture for the distant view manor is based on vanilla textures.
Please, if you want one that's compatible with your retexture, send me the following files from that set:
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICWindow01L.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICWallButtress01.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICWallButtress06.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICWindow01.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICRoof01.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICDoor04.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHWall01.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHWallTrim01.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHCol01.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHWallBottom01.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHWallStrip01.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHWallBottom02.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHWallBottom03.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHCol02.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHCol03.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHDomeWall01.dds
textures\architecture\imperialcity\ICHDomeStrip01.dds



Extra information for the interested
The VWD manor model is made from scratch within the original model's footprint. I didn't just reduce the original model, as has been customary so far. This model uses only basic shapes, and minimum number of vertices, but is not distorted in any way. While the regular manor consists of many objects, materials, and textures, I was able to recreate its bulk as just one object with one material and a single texture.

My approach was inspired by Simon Trümpler's books about rendering, and especially by his musings about draw calls. Incidentally, just yesterday CarlosS4444 sent me a link to an old discussion in which Pherim presents the same conclusions as for what's the bottleneck when it comes to rendering distant objects in Oblivion. It seems like I was simply reinventing the wheel, but didn't do so for nothing because looks like that other project has fizzled out.

One _far.nif may seem like nothing, I'm happy nonetheless because I tried for a long time to find the most economical (or rather stingy) solution with mediocre success rate, but this time it actually worked. It makes me think that with enough models like this the game might actually run considerably faster.

I'm not saying that I'm ready right now to create manually _far.nifs for all crucial models in game, but it's possible that I keep adding stuff every now and then, just like I do with my such other mods as Arboretum and Watch Your Step. It means one day we may have a less resource-hungry distant view.