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Tel Nalta - Optimizing Exterior, how to?


Deleted31005User

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So after several months of work on Tel Nalta I created an entire new interior, pretty much that Tel Uvirith tower you get in Morrowind and I managed to successfully add room bounds and portals to optimize that interior:

http://static-3.nexusmods.com/15/images/110/31005-1409310795.jpg

Without this optimization in the interior it was really laggy.

 

However the real issue I am having now is major lag in the exterior, to create this town+tower I had to use a lot of new objects and I also added a lot of plants in the area.

 

My question is this: How can I best optimize the exterior to avoid this lag?

I know removing objects and plants would help, but what exactly is causing the game to lag regarding objects, is it the textures, the actual mesh or the collision attached to it?

-Would it help to remove collision on some objects? (like the ones on the tower since the player will never be able to reach those anyway)

-Would it help to lower the UV scale on objects inside nifskope?

-Would it help to edit the objects inside MAX3DS to lower the amount of vertex points on the mesh itself?

 

I've also seen tutorials about occlusion planes but tbh I don't think these would be possible in my exterior since there are no strait walls to cover things behind.

 

So please help me out, any information about improving this lag is appreciated.

Edited by Guest
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Hey ac3s,

 

First I want to say I just read your mod page yesterday - looks more than great - good job :smile:

 

I am working on an external house and I had the same problem...

 

My solution was a "personalized" "LOD" system using trigger boxes to partition the external space with what the player sees... It saved my mod... for now... still work in progress... but I would be honored :smile: to help out... it would be the highlight of my modding career as of now :smile: ( am kind of a newbie)

 

I first did it with a "general" "LOD" system with markers for each area\room that takes ALL objects and switches them on or off... but after a few days I found it was more useful to designate the objects to different LOD markers - One for Stuff you see from the outside, a second one for shared objects (shared walls and architecture) and a third one for internal objects in the room... then a fourth one who is a parent to all for when I need absolutely all objects shown... Your house is an internal cell so you maybe won't need all that... but it could help with the outside - I know it helped my lag in my external cell...

 

I wish you much luck and fun with your mod - I wanted to download it but will maybe wait till I finish my own house... It is taking almost as long as building a real house :smile:

Edited by rockyourazz
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Not sure how helpful this might be, since yours isn't underground, but DavideMitra wrote a tutorial about this at one point and I cleaned it up and put it on my site:

 

Completely Exterior Dungeons

 

It goes over a lot of issues that can usually be found when making them. Including performance.

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It's unlikely that it's any one thing that is causing the lag but rather an accumulation of all the things you've mentioned combined. Unfortunately there aren't any really good diagnostic tools available for Skyrim (that I'm aware of) that profile exactly what's going on under the hood.

 

Options for optimising are somewhat limited for exterior cells compared to interior cells. I don't think that portals and room bounds are going to work in your situation. You can try to place occlusion planes at strategic locations around the exterior, but this might also be difficult to find the right locations given the shape of the tower etc.

 

I think you're just going to have to tweak/test/repeat.

 

Here's a couple of tricks I sometime use to diagnose performance:

 

1) Switch to wireframe mode in the console and look around the exterior of your house. This is a good way to visualise the density of vertices/edges/triangles in your scene. If there are area's of your cell which are almost solid with edged then those area's might be good candidates for mesh optimisation e.g. reducing the vertex count. Sometimes it's difficult to distinguish your meshes from background/distant meshes when in wireframe, in which case you can temporarily surround your cells entirely with occlusion planes so that you are "mostly" only viewing the meshes in your cells. Unfortunately the terrain will still be visible. Modern graphics cards can generally handle quite a large number of triangles though, so I would probably leave mesh optimisations as a last resort.

 

2) In-game find a view of your exterior cells which seems to have to most lag or the lowest FPS. Bring up the console, target an object and then disable it using the console command, check fps, repeat with the next object.

This is a bit tedious but it allows you to determine if there is any one object which might be causing the lag (though unlikely). Start with the largest objects (the towers etc) and work your way down to the smaller objects.

 

If the lag still occurs with collisions switched off then it's unlikely to be an issue with the collisions on meshes, though I don't actually know if disabling collision in the console stopped the engine from calculating collisions, but I assume it would.

 

From my experience, flora (plans/trees) can have a big impact on performance. I noticed that you have a lot of Ivy and moss around the place. You could try temporarily disabling all those and testing. This would probably be easier done in the CK than using the console in-game.

 

What about lights? It's difficult to tell in your video but do you have a tonne of lights around the exterior?

 

Finally, the UV scale of textures on meshes should have no impact on performance at all.

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