Alright, boys and girls, it is finally here - the Skyrim Road Reconstruction Project, or SRRP (because abbreviations are cool and make things seem complex). The SRRP is an ongoing, long-term project of mine to manually, painstakingly, reposition Skyrim's road meshes... one... by... one. I don't like releasing premature mods, but this one will take forever and has to be an ongoing project. Please see the attached map to keep up with the progress. As is customary with my mods, SRRP has been designed with maximum compatibility in mind.





Features

• Better blending of roads with landscape (see Technical Stuff for details)
• Less awkward 'road bumps' with protruding landscape parts, less ambient occlusion issues
• Should be mandatory in every load order except for complete road overhauls (Northern Roads / Real Dirt Roads)
• ESL-flagged
• Maximizes compatibility and avoid the need for patches (No landscape edits and no added or dramatically changed road meshes)
• Work in progress, but fully functional as far as its done (see Progress)
  

Installation & Load Order

• Load SRRP as early as possible in your load order
• Blended Roads or any other 3d road meshes is a soft requirement (really blended, unblended etc)
  

• Load after vanilla masters and USSEP (if using)
• Load before everything else including SLaWF + LFFGM.
  

Compatibility

• SRRP should be compatible with everything if loaded at the top of your load order.
• Road Chunk Remover - Redundant on roads I have covered but can be used together. RCR takes a simpler approach by simply removing all smaller road meshes, SRRP manually reimplements them so that they blend in and RCR isn't needed.  
• Northern Roads & Real Dirt Roads - these overhaul and remove/change all road meshes, so SRRP is redundant with these.
  

Progress
See the map in images for details

• Roads connecting Winterhold to Windhelm
• Roads connecting Falkreath, Helgen, Riverwood and Whiterun 
• Roads connecting Whiterun to Windhelm
  

Technical stuff
The issue:
The origin of the problem is that Bethesda used road meshes with some landscape baked into them. This was largely fine a decade ago for three reasons: 1. we had lower standards, 2. we had no ENB-injected ambient occlusion, so it was less obvious, and 3. before 3D road meshes like Blended Roads, the cobblestones were literally a flat texture and couldn't protrude from the landscape anyway. With 3D cobblestones, there is technically no need for landscape baked into the meshes, but it is unfortunately still necessary due to how Bethesda implemented their roads, often covering indentations in the landscape. So, we still need the awkward landscape mound in the road meshes for now, but what we can do is reposition (primarily lower) the meshes into the ground far enough that (mostly) the cobblestones stick out through the ground. This massively improves blending and minimizes AO issues.

The approach:
I follow a handful of design principles in this project, in order of priority:

• No landscape edits
• Ideally just lowering meshes into the ground (Z axis)
• Avoid clipping when possible
• Minor X/Y axis repositioning and/or rotation changes when necessary
  

This approach does not fix everything, in some situations you'd have to edit the landscape to get things flat, but it's generally a big improvement.

The future:
Beyond me manually going through every single road mesh in the game (getting there), there are two ways we could make all these issues go away entirely:

• Someone as ambitious and talented as JPSteel2 making a complete road overhaul with flat landscapes and 3D road meshes without the landscape baked into them. These could be more reasonable and less silly-looking roads than the spread-out big boulders of vanilla roads.
• A combination of SRRP and landscape edits, which could fix all these issues entirely while maintaining close-to-vanilla meshes and landscape. This would, of course, be better for compatibility, but not perfect. I might give this a try in a future version.
  

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[/size]Check out some of my other pet peeve fixes:[/b]

• Skyrim Road Reconstruction Project
• Actually flat flat snow drifts
• No Berries on Wigfrid09's Reach trees
• Dead Fishes Don't Glow
• Whiterun Wall Rubble Fixed
• Blended Bridge Dirt
• Less glowy spider drool
• Less glowy trap dust trails