Giggilyomeromicon

Looks like they're there in the mesh. http://i.imgur.com/rMWtrCK.jpg It's the area between Faneuil Hall and the airport. e: Okay, after substantially more messing around I've figured out that it's the water material and settings being used by the mod Natural Atmospheric Commonwealth version 9b. Running the game without that mod still results in some FPS loss, but it's an 8k draw call improvement.

Alright, I've been trying to figure out what the hell is going on with one specific area not culling correctly. It seemed like just one cell is causing problems, but after looking some more I'm getting more confused. There might be something really bizarre going on with the terrain LOD. http://i.imgur.com/vvM2sLh.jpg http://i.imgur.com/fWtFwCy.jpg For some reason while standing in certain positions on the map the game starts absolutely flooding draw calls and I really have no idea why. There's nothing visible in either of these pictures besides the LOD and low detail terrain. When I move to the same places above ground there are actually much fewer draw calls. http://i.imgur.com/PLIowMl.jpg There are also these seams underground that, for whatever reason, have shadows being drawn on them. Here's a video of the lighting on these bugging out: I am very, very confused. However, the above ground FPS problems seem to happen near and while looking in the direction of these cell boundary seams. If I stand in the right spots and look at the ground I can wrack up 10,000 draw calls, and if I look up they drop to just a few thousand.

There are a number of textures which don't tile, especially those used in exterior architecture. However, you're right, material swaps pose a pretty big problem, there's no way to easily atlas many of the textures which I'm looking at without having to create a new .nif for every material type. This would probably add hundreds of MB in .nifs, and would be a massive pain in the ass to place all of the new meshes in the world. For what it's worth, though, it should be doable to combine textures that rely on single gradiants, but the performance gain caused by that seems pretty negligible.

Has anyone here thought about giving texture atlases a shot? The main bottleneck in FO4 seems to be the amount of draw calls that the engine can handle, not necessarily the hardware. My CPU and GPU are rarely taxed at over 50-60%, even when scenes are hitting around 17-20k calls. My thought is that one of the best ways to combat this would be to start designing texture atlases for the game's regular textures, not just LODs. There are a number of textures and materials which are pretty often found in groups, especially on buildings buildings, and my guess is that a large number of these could be combined. For example, every different color of wall in the hightech model set is its own set of textures, but they're almost always used in groups alongside one another. Batching as many of these together as possible would likely be a huge help. The big downside that I'm imagining is more VRAM space being used up by loading large amounts of unneeded texture space. However, even in the worst case scenario of 20,000 draw calls my VRAM never tops 6k with the entire HD architecture pack running, and ENBoost would allow players to jump over their VRAM limits. It'd cause stuttering, but higher overall FPS. I'm also aware that mipmap bleeding may be an issue, but after looking at the vanilla LOD texture atlas it looks like F4 doesn't have that problem. There's no spacing whatsoever between the mips, so if worst comes to worst I could just hand make the maps.

It's a debug thing for NAC, which I assume has to do with what type of audio effects play where.

Here's a quick WIP video of performance around downtown Boston. The area around Goodneighbor is still a massive pain.

Does anyone know how much a texture impacts performance versus a triangle on a mesh? I've edited about 60 LODs and the performance gain seems really good, around 10 FPS in certain areas. The only problem is that Bethesda designed their LOD meshes so that their UVs are optimized for the LOD texture atlas. Since the Atlas is a fixed size I would only have a limited amount of space with which to add new textures for the lower poly LODs. On the other hand, from what I understand the lod generation script for xEdit can create LODs with their own textures, outside of the Atlas. This would potentially allow me to simplify even more meshes. What I'd like to know is when it would be better to create new texture files, or just stick with the higher poly models. In certain cases there are LOD meshes with thousands or hundreds of tris, which I'd be able to drastically cut down on, as well as buildings with only 10 or 20 tris, but which can repeat dozens of times. I'm not sure what a good balance to strike may be.

There aren't any Red Rockets around the spots that I'm editing, but I may take you up on that later. I'm also having pretty good success with the mesh edits that I'm making. Only gaining around 5-10 in some of the major problem areas at the moment, but that's the difference between 20 and 30 FPS for me. Once I'm done just doing .nif replacements I'm planning on replacing more 3D models with 2D alternatives in the CK where applicable. Also, the CK transitions between cells in downtown Boston so, so much faster now it's insane. Like, there's zero stutter now, where before it would take a couple of seconds. E: Okay, I have the majority of the Financial district running at 30 or above FPS. There are still some problem areas, and I'm again beginning to realize that it's an issue with Bethesda's modeling. LOD objects do not cull very well at all, I think everyone knows that by now. The problem is that many, many LOD buildings and parts have needlessly complex surfaces, the same way that a large number of high tech building panels are. Lots of instances of multiple triangles being used for flat surfaces. The big issue here is that there are single groups of buildings that can produce around 8-9000 draw calls from just their LOD alone. http://i.imgur.com/1LSKT9E.png On the bright side, an entire regenerated world LOD is under 200 MB, and the architecture folders are under 20mb, so while it will be annoying to fix all of this stuff, it shouldn't be a huge file footprint, and will hopefully save some FPS around Boston.

That's certainly a downside, yeah, but from my experience these meshes are only posing a serious problem in a few cells. Since the occlusion culling only works properly when fairly close to an object you wind up with scenes in downtown Boston with hundreds of these needlessly complex meshes being used. I'm hoping that just using them in a few cells will be all that's necessary.

So, I've made an interesting discovery in regards to some of the .nifs which are used frequently downtown. Check this out and be amazed: http://i.imgur.com/XixJI7m.png http://i.imgur.com/bRtTHdk.png lol

I'd like to add that I'm a few weeks into this downtown optimization project. In this time I've probably placed around 100 occlusion planes and made many more cell edits. I am still encountering no bugs with Previs or Precombined mesh generation. I have no idea why things are working now, but it may do with the ugridstoload setting in the CK. I have mine set to 3, where I had previously encountered problems at 1 or 5. Not sure if that's just corelation or causation, however. In terms of performance gains, some spots have improved anywhere from 10 to 30+ FPS. Some big improvements have been made by creating occlusion boxes which stick further into the ground. For whatever reason these contribute a great deal to the game correctly culling distant objects, like LODs. I've also had very good results from nuking unnecessary architectural complexity. Buildings with open interiors not hooked up to anything, properly nav meshed, or event visible without disabling collision, are surprisingly common. Filling in these gaps and replacing the 3D walls with planes has massively improved performance in certain places, as the amount of objects drawing and their ability to cull objects greatly improves. I'm pretty hopeful that these changes will be able to greatly improve performance for a lot of people, and that the end result won't have too large of a file size. Right now I have about 768 megs in precombined meshes, but I haven't cut out those without edits.

Well, I think that that's happening to me right now. For some reason collision isn't working with a number of objects in the cell, mostly stairs, and there are a couple of pieces of furniture still showing up at the COC marker. I'm assuming that they must be falling through the floor somewhere.

Thanks, that was exactly the problem. It turned out that some rogue statics had stayed at the origin point of the cell after I moved things. Everything is working correctly now.

I'm currently in the process of converting 35 Court's rooftop area to its own interior worldspace. Things were working fine up until I moved all of the objects in the cell from the 0,0,0 coordinates to the 35 Court location in the interior LOD. Now when I load in every static object not part of the precombined mesh spawns on top of the COC marker. I am very confused.

I'd like to convert the roof of 35 court to an interior worldspace. Unfortunately, it's a pretty serious performance sink in an already overloaded area. I haven't been able to get the area to cull, especially not from range, so I don't see a way to fix the performance impact besides just removing it from the world. What steps would I need to follow in order to make a conversion, or is there a tutorial for how to do this (or something similar) available?