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Landscape LOD replacement textures for Oblivion
Version 1.0
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by shaja

History
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Version 1.0: April 1, 2006
- Initial Release

What does it do?
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Replaces the original 1024x1024 landscape LOD textures with improved 2048x2048 textures.

Makes the far-off terrain look much less blurry.

This version includes only the 12 textures for the 'inner Tamriel' - the part of Cyrodiil you can normally travel across.

Installation
===========
Unzip the .zip file to your "Oblivion\Data" directory, using folder names.

The following files should end up in your "Oblivion\Data\textures\landscapelod\generated" folder:
60.00.00.32.dds
60.00.32.32.dds
60.00.-32.32.dds
60.00.-64.32.dds
60.32.00.32.dds
60.32.32.32.dds
60.32.-32.32.dds
60.-32.00.32.dds
60.-32.32.32.dds
60.-32.-32.32.dds
60.-64.00.32.dds
60.-64.-32.32.dds

Uninstallation
=============
Delete the 12 dds files from your "Oblivion\Data\textures\landscapelod\generated" folder.

How it was done
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* Each original 1024x1024 texture was opened in Photoshop.
* The texture was resized to 2048x2048 using the Bicubic sharper filter.
* Film grain filter was applied, with Grain: 3, Highlight Area: 0, Intensity: 0.
* Brightness was reduced with the Brightness/Contrast tool by -8 to compensate for the brightness added by the film grain.
* Texture was saved using the Nvidia DDS plugin with DXT1 compression and no mipmaps.

Bugs & Limitations
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Lighting does not affect the normal high-detail close landscape and the LOD terrain in exactly the same way, so the dividing line between them can be very visible at certain times.
Initial game load times are slightly longer.
No detail was added by hand, so it is certainly possible for someone with actual artistic talent to improve the quality even further.
I've tested and found no framerate reduction using the high-res textures on my system, but it is possible that lower-spec systems might see a framerate impact.

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