[dev] Distant LOD

All of this that follows is specific to Oblivion!

About DistantLOD: AFAIK, all those files are re-generated by TES4LODGEN... I fact, part of the process is to eliminate them before generating them again (TES4LODGEN does that automatically.) And you can even delete the DistantLOD folder and let it be regenerated.

If ignoring by extension works better with the way the code is organized, I don't think there should be a problem with adding *.LOD and *.CMP to the exclusion list.

As for what those CMP files do specifically, I don't really know...

I know that .LOD files are what defines which far mesh (*_far.nif) is placed in the world. They're basically big tables containing objects (FORMIDs, which in turn points to a _far.nif through the corresponding record in the mod in which they are defined) and their position and rotation. There are many LOD files for each worldspace: one file per cell.

They're load order dependant, as the FORMID inside them is an absolute FORM (includes the Mod Index from the actual load order.) I have no idea what the *.CMP files do or what they are... they are obviously related to the worldspace as there is one per worldspace.

About LOD Meshes: Those are simply *.NIF files that hold the model of a QUAD/Block of distant terrain. They're located at 'meshes\landscape\lod', and have names composed by the worldspace formid (in decimal) and the coordinate of their block, plus a decimal number at the end, which seems to be always 32 (maybe the size of the block? IDK)

LOD Meshes and Normals are normal DDS texture files that follow the same nomenclature of the NIFs above. The only difference is that the normals have appended '_fn.dds' to their name. They are located in folder 'textures\landscapelod\generated'.

This is the normal way the game handles its distant LOD... but Ethatron did something different with OBGE3 and OSCAPE, and that means, there could be possibly more type of files around when someone is using those. I never used it, so I don't really know how it works or how it differs from the standard LOD mechanism.

((AFAICT, the new OblivionReloaded still supports OSCAPE generated Far Terrain))

[Originally by @leandor in https://github.com/wrye-bash/wrye-bash/issues/219#issuecomment-168550383]