SMB92

Updated again, to version 0.07.01. https://github.com/SMB92/F4-SpawnEngine Lot of work done on initialisation procedures, weren't quite up to standard.

Minor update pushed this evening, now version 0.06.02. https://github.com/SMB92/F4-SpawnEngine You may also notice I have cleaned up the OP. I have removed all the redundant documentation pending a rewrite, for now all you have to go by is the comments I have left in the scripts. Please understand that I have very little time on my hands and I do what I can when I can. I am hoping to have a playable alpha soon (I already have the mod loaded in game, but it is not ready for any kind of public testing). Again, if you'd like to follow more closely consider joining our Discord.

Indeed it is optional, it's a bool flag :)

SpawnEngine has been updated to version 0.06.01.180504 on Github. https://github.com/SMB92/F4-SpawnEngine

Thanks Trosski, indeed I remember now.

Would serve well to have a comprehensive video for the masses. +1 from me. Has it been covered or mentioned, where scrappable objects clipping with static objects (that are otherwise unscrappable) are either ignored by precalc generation or causing any issues? I just noticed some trash piles etc getting scrapped along with the scrappable object they were clipped with. Can't recall if it was raised or not.

Thanks. There's a lot of intercommunication between scripts so the comments mostly serve sanity. Taking the mod open source now should ensure that it is not lost in the event something happens to me, there has been too much work involved to let it go to waste if something were to happen. It also gives others the opportunity to chime in with contributions and prepare for making add ons. If anybody is interested I am looking for help with a few things, I have posted job listings on my Discord server. I will be going away this weekend so no work will be done but I will be mostly available for contact and will be checking the server from time to time.

SOTC now has a Github and the current source code for SOTC is now available for viewing. https://github.com/SMB92/F4-SpawnEngine And that marks my 4000th post on Nexus :D

Not a bad idea Greslin, that area is highly unbelievable. I am however waiting on a certain someone's mod to drop that should solve that problem quite nicely. Such mod will also be supported by SOTC. MasterOfDragons, my mod doesn't really have any impact on the vanilla spawn times/respawn times etc, it is pretty much independent from this. As such you will have almost total control over it, including a forced reset, from the entirety of the mod to on a per Region basis.

I've learned in general that faction data is rather tricky to deal with, hence why you see so many oddities with certain actor types attacking others that should be neutral etc. I even wrote a script to make the Institute friendly or at least neutral with settlement factions (about 6 or 7 factions), and they continue to fight probably because some npc somewhere is in some faction that's enemies with the other, and therefore makes all his allies enemies regardless of their disposition. Its a royal Pita, and there is so many temporary/special factions used for just quests/AI etc, it's a full blown job in itself to sort all that out

Thanks for the kind words. Just to touch on story factions Spawns, these will not be included in the main random system. Too sensitive a subject to deal with, many people have different opinions on this. Best approach as you said is to leave them out, and revisit them in an add on at some point down the road.

From what I've been seeing, disabling precombined via that INI edit does not always result in Previs turning off properly. It's sending the whole game unstable. In fact just using TPC command at runtime sending the whole game unstable (even when not disabling precombineds), and I can also witness material changes when using the command - for example the glass on car windows - prior to using TPC this will show a milky white, then using TPC to disable previs, it becomes the opaque color I expect it should be. Why would this be the case, in my mind these 2 systems should be capable of running independently, particularly Previs should be able to be disabled alone while leaving precombineds in tact, but they seem to walk hand in hand more than the meets the eye. Perhaps this behaviour has to do more with the game currently having a UVD file loaded, disabling it on the fly causing this issue, but the similar way in which the game becomes unstable seems the same. Disabling static collections should be considered worse than disabling precombineds in my mind, especially for the sake of some cluster of trees. Furthermore, fluffy trees with the big "fake" leafy branches are terrible for Previs also (basically a square mesh with "veiny" texture for branches), particularly if they sway, previs will only calculate static position and then when they sway occlusion bugs will be prevalent. So even upon replacing all trees with big green variants properly, you are doomed with Previs unless somehow discluding trees from the whole process. Maybe this is viable, but I will not be losing sleep over replacing all trees, maybe someone will be dedicated to the task. It could also be considered to recombine meshes for the world, and disable Previs entirely for such mods at least allowing for some of the performance benefit, but then I refer back to the above RE instability in that regard. On another note, particularly since post 1.9.4, I've been seeing strange crashes with newly generated precalc as well, where it may work at first but subsequent attempts (EDIT - to enter the area with newly generated precalc, not regens) are causing the game to crash as soon as coming into the area of the new precalc. I haven't had time to investigate this, but rather just use the 1.9.4 CK seems to be fine. Possibly this has to do with the now convoluted process in making precalc patches RE having to rename extension to ESM etc instead of just flagging (although I am not seeing xEdit cause my files to orphan when redirecting to ESP). Wanted to mention this again in case somebody has info on this right now.

The more I think about that request, the more I don't really like it, even more so from the the actual engines perspective. I find it really unimmersive to see actors pop in from no where, I wouldn't want to see it in my mod if I could help it. And no it wouldn't make sense to spawn roaches out of Behemoth, and coding this to work without putting a script on the ActorBase themselves is something I don't think I want to do, well at least I don't think it's worth it. I really don't want to have to check the scale of an ambiguous enemy just to do this, and then see s#*! popping in from nowhere lol.

Ah kk, I'll have a look into that then. I was thinking I saw this somewhere lol.

That is a very interesting idea. I'm no animator so if I did something like that, it wouldn't look... Pretty. You'd have to live with actors just popping in to existence. I have the framework already to do this easily actually, but not so much for the rad roaches, I'd have to look at a way to detect their scale or something. Behemoths I can do easily enough, but still not sure how feasible it would be to have a nuchal of armed super mutants pop out of them. Feel free to post your thoughts on this.

There is a yucky way to get the pipboy actually, you can unequip and drop it (set a var in that process) and re equip it. SKK50 mentioned this so credit to him. Not recommended though, could lead to problems. Currently toying with a way to get a terminal ref in pipboy. I'll make a post if it works. But yes, apologies for derailing the thread.

Would be nice if Bethesda did/added a lot of things :) *Q: Hey Pipboy, can I have your ObjectReference* *Pipboy: kekekekekekekek* *Q: What about your terminal ref?* *Pipboy: wahahahahahaha* Just something that's been shitting me for a while lol.

Yeah that's in xEdit. In ck you can look at "Users" which is in a column next to the dot or in the object window.

Interesting regarding the persistent refs, I'll have to play with that next I muck around with precalc. Could of swore I have seen some situations where there end up being 2 objects. Just for trivia sake, was using a mod called Splinters, where doors could be destructible. Pity when the door is in the closed state, and destroyed, still occluded everything behind from the original previs. And the state of the doors gets saved. Can't recall if it was permanently or until cell reset, been a while. And RE how to detect precombineds on console, 2 sentences edition. Precombineds on: Mediocre frame rate. Precombineds off: bye bye frame rate. :)

You will have 3 different options regarding levelling, 1.Scale to player (default state, off) 2.Use built in Regional levelling system (2 modes, easy or hard depending on difficulty set) 3. Randomise level of all npcs via option 2. You may also disable combat boundaries to allow npcs to follow you indoors. You are able to disable or enable individual actor types, either entirely or on a per Region basis, in the advanced option for npcs. That is a particularly big menu though ;)

My apologies then yakalrad, I do not hang around Beth net garbage forums, so I do not know the context ;)

Now that is a good question. I want to be optimistic and say Beth would have saw that coming, and perhaps in order to keep precombineds intact, the object would load in along side the precombineds, which is definitely possible.

OK Reading the posts after chucks, I'm not sure if the latter is hostile to chuck or what but I sincerely hope not. No good becomes of that, only the open sharing of information can draw solid conclusions, not politics and derogatory. Anyway here is my simple conclusion, just to recap this thread. 1. We have the Umbra previs system. This works well for what it is. It apply occlusion planes (somewhat) dynamically to objects on scenes of certain types (namely static in this game). Due to performance concerns, they are applying this on a per cell basis via the uvd files, that will load with the cell and map the planes where needed. Fair enough. Witcher 3 uses the same system, which I've noticed they have cared less about the third person factor. 2. Bethesda has implemented their mutated static collections, the precombined meshes. Good in theory, in an unmoddable game. Oh wait this one's moddable. What a shame. The algorithm behind the generating of them in this system is causing us all sorts of headaches, thanks to over bloated generations reproducing files not needed. Or calculating inconsistently making its own mind up each time when their are some ambiguous groups of overlapping statics producing some different files. But overall, it decrease the draw call count, and contributes healthy performance statistics. Especially in combination with previs. Clearly the 2 previs options account for use of the precombineds or not. One options gens without, one options gens with. Logic would lead one to believe the previs with precombineds would be better as it would calculate a whole precombined mesh surface area to apply the planes. And that is proven in my testing on this also. Previs however is the thing that I see causing the instability, and it makes some sense, given the uvd files. There are already a lot of problems seen on cell load, such as the lod bug. It is a performance intensive operation and cell load stutter has been a chief complaint in many of the games by Bethesda. It only makes sense that throwing in the load of a uvd file and calculation, and then f*#@ing with that in anyway cause the game to have issues. What seems like a simple bool check, is not. I can turn a perfectly stable game completely to s#*! by typing tpc twice. This is clearly a factor beyond our control and down to the implementation of said system. There is one proper way to deal with it. Redo the precalc after modifications. Redo everything and a bit more. Massive mod download size you say? Sure. But you want to give up your sanity instead to get that lower? Your choice. Consoles you say? Take that one up with Bethesda and Sony even more so. Do away with precalc you say? Bethesda went too apeshit with trash and deco and nuked performance you say? Take that up with Bethesda too. What I know is it is what it is, and this is what you have to do now. Throw your sanity or your poop at each other, just think of the time you could of spent being more productive elsewhere. And then pray for multithreading renderer in future. And also better, less lazy Dev.

Chuck, you might be confusing the fact the cells don't actually reset until you get to them again. I haven't seen any evidence of precombined becoming persistent in any fashion, but in any case a cell is not fully reset in your save until you have visited it again. The game does not magically reset them behind the scenes, this would cause lag or potential performance issues. The only thing I could imagine is possibly the timestamp being saved. But otherwise save game would be massively bloated. RE the cell reset, this was recently confirmed to me by my friend Jostrus, aka BigandFlabby on these forums. A person who absolutely knows their s#*!.

All good mate