SMB92

This is the Unique Landscape mod I was thinking to use, but seems it has a lot of it's own assets, I thought it would just edit the landscapes. If the vanilla game has too much assets, then not to worry about that mod. It's been so long I can't recall what assets could be removed/replaced easily from vanilla. Have to do some running around. There is this grass mod too, but sounds like you already have something better planned out.

I think Greek might have assumed he didn't need my esp, and included the just the assets in the mod. I was meaning to ask him about this.

Oh you think Steam is bad. Do you own an Xbox One? I bought one about 3 months ago, Gears of War edition 2TB One S. Mate said it was an awesome game and awesome system. Steam is a Saint in view of that piece of garbage. I was getting angry just playing NRL football on my PS4 and updates, but Xbox takes the cake ,worst system I have ever used. Supposed to be Windows? I hope Windows never looks like that crap. Take your time. It's Friday night and the ADSL internet is slow for me, max 10Mb/s sec.

I'll grab that save game now. I forgot to install the Shivering isles and Knightsd discs, I'll do that now too. I was unaware of problems with the speedtree in this game, it was never a topic I saw in memory ( it';s been 4 years, but I modded this game so much). What do you mean trees are moving? They follow you? Random Generation? I do remember some LOD issue where sometimes trees stay as LOD or do not disappear when "disabled" or "deleted" (either) and LOD "phantom" trees would track with the player. I never recalled how to fix them, but I'll leave that with you if you can :)

I completely with you, If I was making my own mod I would definitely be doing it this. But what I'm saying is I've gone ahead and generated meshes in the laoded area anyway, and checked the data over and over, and it's only recombined those cells which anything actually changed in anyway, so effectively generating the meshes in the area makes no difference - except that it picked up the Drumlin diner outside of those 25 grids and generated the 5 cells affected all by itself - a major convenience for me. This says that the system in CK is working better than expected which is hard to take in really given thus far dramas. But this is consistent. The caveat to this is, when I generate with new assets present, such as the Summer Overhaul mod's assets installed, then yes all the cells XCRI lists get rearranged because it actually bakes in the new trees - and by that I mean I can fully remove the Summer Overhaul mod and the new trees are still perfectly present in the game (well perfectly no - they revert to vanilla material and texture). This is problem regarding stealing assets if you think about it that way. And also unintended assets. But listen to this - a SMIM type mod is possible because in that case, we don't ever have to generate Vis again which is the sketchy part - we have the option to generate just the meshes alone for the world, which is all we need in that case. And anyone saying consoles wouldn;t be able to get it - well it would be out of there league anyway lol. If I had the assets from such a mod (SMIM) I would gladly run the generation myself. I know it will work. A SMIM type mod won't need Vis because you won't throw out the occlusion with such "small" changes so to speak, as opposed to replacing a dead tree with a massively branched model (which do cause occ. bugs due to horrendoulsy sized fake square branches being used as "occlusion planes" effectively, again, so to speak) Precombining visibility thereafter only ever seems to deal in the occlusion of these new precombined objects Regarding performance this makes sense from my tests because I only ever see the boost when around large groups of objects. This gets the system working as intended but let's say for example we went and added recipes to everything, how much extra performance would this system bring? So either way on that note, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't, that's my thinking if you want to go the way of being able to scrap the world and having this system running perfectly in tact. In that case, they might as well not bothered with such a system to begin with. They've balanced the build objects with the plain static objects. So I fear, the majority of the popular vote of users will be to make everything scrappable, over having this system working anyway. Just walking through the commonwealth I've seen how fast a precombined collection loads over individual objects, it is quicker by far. hard to explain that one, you have to look at it yourself really. So you see, like all Bethesda's engines, a deal with the devil must be made somewhere, multiple times at that.

Beautiful, sounds great. So the only real mods Im looking at is the Better Cities mod that expands the towns and the Unique landscapes collection, although from memory I only used 4 or 5 parts if it and again from memory they dont include assets of there own, only rearrange/rebuild landscapes (hey you can do that in this game, no lazy precull systems yay!). So if placement is an issue I will lock down those selections first and provide links. I am considering some better textures for my 980ti will handle them, but if that is not compatible with your system then I won't get them. Also if it matters I will use Darn UI. I will get the links soon from the PC.

Cool, i'll get on to it shortly, just got home

I haven't touched any interiors, I am aware it doesn't work. Only exteriors. If I refer to the inside of the Starlight diner, that is part of the exterior cell. I am generating for the 25 cells, however it picks up seemingly important nearby "named" cells and does them too if they have been changed - best example is Starlight mod because even though Drumlin and Bedford were outside the 25 cell block, it picked them up and changed them accordingly - properly at that. I checked this by running only the precombined meshes (no Vis) and saw that it does this everytime. I checked this theory on whether or not generating the combined meshes for an area would produce and different results than doing them individually, edited cells only. The data in xEdit looks exactly the same either way - but like I say it wouldn't surprise me if it occasionally picked up erroneous data, but from these mods I have worked on I have only consistently seen that one bug. Now the other thing being, generating just the meshes does indeed update the timestamp on the XCRI record, but everytime I have checked it has only generated new data for the edited cells. It will change an item in a cell if a new NIF file exists outside of Fallout's BA2's and rewrite/reorder the list though, while that appears to be a bug of reordering the list for no reason it actually indicates a change. That is why precombining the meshes is absolutely required from what I can see, because if a mesh is changed or replaced, especially resized, you will get occlusion bugs because the vanilla precom meshes expect the vanilla model - the game doesn't actually disable precom for a new model - which again is what Beth refers to in their wiki. Also there is a error message in CK occasionally when reloading a plugin, tellling you that it has reverted data to ESMs, I've seen this referred to as "corruption"by some modders, specifically in relation to Beantown Interiors. I followed this bug, it actually never changes any data even when CK tells you it does, period. I'm not trying to say anyone is wrong, but I've spent weeks testing this now, and this is what I see.

Cool, I'm a bit flatout until Saturday myself. Link to OB Reloaded. Pretty nifty little mod. I'd like to make it fluffy with flora as I can, it just makes sense in this game.

I think you're right Purr, it would make perfect sense for such a buggy system (and I'm referring to the game and CK collectively) to occasionally pickup erroneous data like this. And that sincerely turns me off working on downtown areas. BTW did you ever happen to make anything for Oblivion flora wise? I'd like to see your work on that :) Oblivion Reloaded is pretty cool, full model first person cam and everything.

BTW I'll have everyone know, I'm so headfudged by this whole thing I just reinstalled Oblivion on my system and gonna start playing that again between working on this and waiting for SKSE64. This is truly a dark age for me. I hope this Oblivion Reloaded mod is as good as they say it is, it's been 4 years since I stepped foot in Cyrodiil.

Thanks very much for all that info, appreciate your time. I have a couple things I want to add based on my findings and experiments. 1 is that when I am working on a mod, I always have my new precull data go to a new esp too. However my CK won't add the mod as a master if I dont flag it temporarily as an ESM, and that causes problems for me with particular mods - which leads me to the second thing - I found that having a mods included new meshes is the only way to get a mod done properly because precombining will bake them in - this was mist notable for the mod Sanctuary Restored Revised. I would have occlusion bugs everywhere without baking the newly fixed meshes. This also applies to flora, if you precombine an area with Summer Overhaul active (just meshes) it will swap the trees for the real models in that file - which are huge. I relate this to the Bethesdas wiki where they mention about swapping an NIF as the game won't actually read it. The other thing being, I also documented the problem with precombining visibility, precombining meshes takes 10 seconds for the area but then the visibility ages (and theres no option for world) Anyway the CK appeared to be locking up on me too, but after a while I started to examine this. What I found was I was running out of memory even with 6gb of RAM spare because it actually prefers the page file for some reason. I setup a 32GB page file on a rarely used SSD, and I ran 4 different precombined visibility generations in one session, for the mods I mentioned (I did meshes for each area first of course, but not RRR or Drumlin because after examing xedit, the generation was catching them anyway, even though in the case of Drumlin it is outside the 25 grids that are loaded when doing StarlightExt). Each time I went surfing the net and come back, it would freeze initially and return me to the cell view. I checked in xEdit and ran the file in game, and it works great, except that one occlusion bug by that window in Starlight. I tested on both a new and 600 hour save. This is just what I've found. I am going to fix the navmesh in Vault 1080 and run that in as well on the weekend, but the Starlight one is puzzling. Edit - just some clarifications, I get that one bug in Starlight even when I do the mod by itself, with no custom assets whatsoever (even his own BA2), and I always run precombine meshes, then precombined visibilty - I found that the regular visibility option doesn't give me the whole story, maybe it flags items as dynamic or something, and from all I've done I'm certain the generate precomined visibility option deals only in precombined meshes - which I'd highly prefer it just do those.

Damn that must be worth a fortune?

Wow and this is all done with speedtree? I guess it would be harder for fallout 4 seems thats gone now...

I appreciate your time, glad you responded :). I don't think I'll continue the downtown cleanup mod, compatibility would require a whole team of people. I don't want to have to ask a whole bunch of people for help. I think I will just keep helping some authors who need that data at best (if they have clean mods of course!). I'm not sure about this new texture pack. I'm finding Vivid Fallkut and sone other custom textures work really well... And yeah my F4 SSD is full XD. That sounds pretty cool that floral mod, I own F3 on Steam but I haven't got it installed atm. Floral system in this game is a janky clippy mess. I do have New Vegas unstalled though, if you play that too

Yeah lot of good info there. I have successfully generated this mods precull data, with Eli's Red Recket included. Now that I recall it, Quince done what you sugeested with this mod and moved everything underground.

I figured out how to turn the wasteland into a jungle too, using Summer Overhaul 3. I noticed Bethesda mentions in their wiki about new models and "Clear affected cells for data" to get it going, but thats a useless option anyway. If you have the custom meshes installed, generating the geometries bakes the new trees in. Of course then you have to do it for the worldspace, big problem lol. But sadly, previs can never work with those tree models in particular, the giant fake branches trigger precull to often. It'd need to have proper branches, and that'd break performance anyway. I really feel like I'm walking on a tight rope in this game. Skyrim can at least be cured with super fast CPUs in the future (20 years from now that is), to some degree.

Wow thats alot of info, thanks a bunch. I've been studying a bunch of posts from countless forums but this right here is golden. I have one question left though, if I was only flagging the main mod file just for the CK session to do my generating, and flagged it back at the end, should that be okay? I haven't seen any evidence yet per say, but like you said earlier it could haunt me later on? The idea isnt to permanently make the mods esms, only fir the purpose of working with the patch, everything changed back later.

That's bad ! That changes so much you would not understand. Really? I thought it was a good thing to flag them as ESMs, because CK won't "change them" and my patches get the right masters added to them - it won't seem to add the mod files as masters to my patch if I don't? Or would you say it's better to create a blank plugin in sEdit, add the master to it manually in the header and then work on it? If what your saying is true and even objects that are "initially disabled" have to be included in the precombined meshes or preVis UVDs, making them force rendered if we have this system on, then the system is completely broken. Maybe I'm not understanding something here, but that makes me think It can't be used for anything apart from vanilla! And in that case how come I have it working on mods like Sanctuary Restored, where he completely changed the area? The only way I could think of making anything really work is if you never disabled it, and just dragged any items you want removed from a cell 20 thousand leagues under the cell, and put a big occlusion box on them all. But how impractical would that be? Sorry for ranting, but this is a truly terrible revelation. I might as well give up now. I started working on a cleanup mod for the Commonwealth, I spent an hour cleaning up Trinity plaza of excessive assets. What's the point if it can never be compatible with anything! Again thanks for all this info, it's hard sometimes to make sense out of it all by oneself and thy experiments :D

Sorry just to make it clear, I'm not working on all 5 of those mods together for the purpose of this post, I get those problems with those mods alone. I was just saying what I my goal was. And best to add this now, when I've been making these precull patches I have been flagging all the mods involved as ESMs. Otherwise my ESP won't have any masters and be full of orphans.

Suppose I didn't check if he had undeleted records in there, I assumed he followed standard protocol. This teaches me to check anyway before I run my generations. Getting ahead of myself with my own systems, haven't worried about theirs....  What I'm trying to do is build a single master patch that contains all the precalc data for a bunch of mods. Something everyone seems to be afraid to try. I have Sanctuary Restored, Eli's Red Rocket, Immersive Drumlin Diner and Starlight all working together in a single file that was made together, apart from that one bug which is present even with that mod alone.. I basically want to conquer this system in it's entirety, cleanup downtown Boston, and publish an article on this preculling system and how to work it properly :) It seems I've neglected to check the authors work first, getting a bit a head of myself. While I thank you for reminding me to my homework, in the case of these mods it is absolute necessary to load them together. So far with the methodology I've worked out, everything's been fine, data looks good in xEdit, runs great in game.... Then I ran into these 2 little bugs....  But now I am curious, if the newly generated Vis file called for an item that is deleted, why did it try to add it in when I ran a new generation? I know it's bad practice anyway, but does this mean it will also incorporate "initially disabled" records, requiring them to be on scene? That would be a tremendous bug in Beth's system. That'd make it impossible. Now in the case of Vault 1080, did you try to precombine the meshes with the assets installed? (not vis - that comes after - just the meshes first). Because I can generate the precombined meshes fine until I add in those custom assets, so I am having doubts the missing Navmesh data is actually having any affect on this particular system... Although it's all to obvious that xEdit reported them... So Generating Vis includes Navmesh.. I dunno what to think.  I'll have to run some tests on that, thank you again for pointing these things out to me.Â

I am interested in cleaning up the Commonwealth downtown a bit, I've already started disabling what I find to be useless, excessive objects downtown, but not to the point where the streets are clean. It's a bloody big effort though. Suppose if I keep working on it bit by bit each day, it'll grow to be pretty big. I'm kinda doing it in relation to another project I've been heavily into lately but anyway. If I ever go anywhere with it, I'll make a post.

Cool. Are you seeing the occlusion bugs with my precull patches in game?

Yes, I was working on these 2 mods separately sorry. Lot of things in my mind right now, been in CK all day

If there are deleted ref's, that'd be on greekrages part concerning the Starlight mod. I only ran the precombination and previs correctly and tested it in game. I'll have a look at the log for that again. Regarding vault 1080, I've confirmed it's got something to do with the included meshes for that mod. here is a link to that mod if you didn't already have it. See, for proper generation we need the mod assets loaded into CK, or the custom models won't show up and/or precombination will get disabled. Precombining bakes them in. But this mods files are not working for it. When I read what you said about not having any other mod assets loading, I thought you considered that, so sorry my miscommunication. CK doesn't crash when generating without the assets, of course, but no point to generate because it will be broken without them..... First mod I've seen so far with this issue, I'd really like to find out what's wrong with the offending mesh, but I'm no modeler.