The State of TPF 4.5

Hey guys!

I made it. The exams are all done, the final day of school was survived, it's the holidays. The next two weeks I will have entirely to myself. In the second week, with some squeezing of the ol' wallet, I will finally upgrade my PC - new motherboard, CPU, AIO cooler, and case to complement my 3080. Before that, however, I am hoping to complete TPF 4.5 which I have been working on for a few weeks by now.

DynDOLOD 3.0

Let's start with the big one: With 4.5, TPF will switch to the new (alpha) 3.0 versions of DynDOLOD. This includes a number of neat new features, including billboard generation and grass LOD. The latter has been giving me a massive headache for two weeks straight at this point - I must have rerun TexGen and DynDOLOD more than a dozen times at this point (on the upside, I finished a very good book sitting on the couch while Dyn was generating in the background).

The main problem at the moment is matching grass LOD to actually rendered grass. Especially because of how ENB affects rendered grass, this is proving to be extremely bothersome and I am beginning to think it may not be worth the effort. Currently the game genuinely looks better (=less awful) without grass LOD - but I will continue tweaking and trying things out.

Cathedral Landscape

In 4.5 I also finally removed Cathedral Landscapes. The idea of the mod and many of its implementations were rather revolutionary at the time but it never received the support and updates it so desperately needed, and I can no longer justify its presence in TPF. Grass is now handled by Veydosebrom Regions and Cathedral 3D Pine Grass while landscape textures are a hand-picked mix of various packs.

Because of that I re-added terrain LOD generation instructions to the guide. Previously we did not need to regenerate terrain LOD because it was packaged with Cathedral Landscapes.

Rudy ENB

There is an estimated 85% likelyhood that TPF 4.5 will switch from Serio's to Rudy ENB. I am tired of people complaining about Serio's, and Rudy's has an impressive range of features. Interiors are especially stunning. 

Performance

Rudy ENB, grass LOD and Vey instead of Cathedral grass will probably increase TPF's performance impact. I can't actually tell on my 3080 while my FPS are capped but once I have figured out the correct TexGen+DynDOLOD settings, I may uncap it for some testing to see just how bad it is. Vey is already comparatively light as far as grass mods go and between people complaining about ugly grass and bad performance I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.

For what it's worth, I am planning to do a performance tweaks page in the near future so there is proper support for turning down the visuals.

High Poly Heads

I've rather liked High Poly Heads for some time and decided to bring the mod to TPF. There are some implementation tweaks I made and the process of rebuilding facegen will be different. A patcher for Synthesis to replace our current zEdit script is in the works.

Other changes

• I removed JK's Cities Lite. There are some rather glaring bugs that I can no longer ignore. I did not add JK's Skyrim or any other city overhaul - I tried most and while especially JK's Skyrim has some impressive changes, I didn't feel like they fit TPF.
• I removed Arthmoor's awkwardly squeezed-in village additions. Wanted to do this for a long time. We can now all go back to absolutely never noticing that some NPCs don't actually have homes rather than getting irritated over badly placed extra buildings.
• Removed a bunch of other mods that were a thorn in my side for a while now.
• Added Aspens Ablaze, Iconic Shrines, DAR+JBO, and more.

Conclusion

So far the majority of the work is done. I won't be able to work on the facegen section until the Synthesis patcher is ready but then it should be rather quick to write up. The only road block at the moment is grass LOD which is pushing me dangerously close to getting burnt out. I don't deal very well with frustration. Here's to hoping I'll get it figured out over the weekend - otherwise I'll simply drop it for the time being.

ETA on 4.5: If I figure out grass LOD over the weekend, have an okay time next week, maybe even a good day or two, TPF 4.5 should be done before Easter. If not, hopefully the week after.

Oh yeah, I also decided to push TPF-X (that addon I'm working on) to its own update. Gotta do one thing at a time. I'll pick that back up after 4.5 is out.

 Hope that answers everything. Have a nice day o/

Phoenix