How does Fallout 4 engine work?

[zorak912]

I am experimenting with the ck for the first time and there are things I do not understand.

My idea is to make my own flora mod, nothing fancy and only for testing, just some vines around the trees.

Doing it manually for each tree in the game would take me years and I would go crazy, that's why I thought of using another mod that adds trees on top of the vanilla trees, Misty Pines and replacing the pine models with a mesh made of vines that fits in the trees.

Simply doing that when loading the game everything seemed to be going well and the trees now had vines in them but as I was walking the trees stopped having vines. I realized that only the trees that load at the beginning of the game save have vines if I advance to another cell they no longer have them unless I save and load.

my question is, why exactly does this happen and is there any way to remedy it.

I also hope you understood what I meant, I am not good with English or programming.

Edited May 25, 2021 by zorak912

[DocClox]

Rather than adding stuff where there are existing trees, why not find the model files for the trees and edit them?

 

Edit one tree model and you change every instance of that tree in the game.

[South8028]

there is one nuance that, in my opinion, no one paid attention to. When you conduct huge construction sites with 50-100k building elements, at some point textures begin to "creep". The textures seem to be superimposed on each other, not having time to process the resolution. This does not happen if the textures are without mip maps. For some reason, CE cannot correctly process a large number of objects, or very complex objects with mip maps. I stopped using mip maps in fo4 altogether. Trees, by the way, I don't know why, but they significantly load the renderer.

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

When you conduct huge construction sites with 50-100k building elements, at some point textures begin to "creep". The textures seem to be superimposed on each other

I had that "problem" before in an interior cell. (A huge 8 level high building, more then a few thousand objects).

 

 

To answer the question asked in the title "How does Fallout 4 engine work?": Nobody really knows ...

[niston]

Yes. The texture smear or "object fade" bug, as I call it.

I think it happens when the engine is overloaded with draw calls and shits itself. The more objects there are, the worse it gets and in places like Downtown next to Mass Fusion building, it becomes so bad that entire textures start flashing in and out of existence. It may be corrected to some degree by adjusting the "Object Fade" Display Setting towards zero, but in the case of Downtown, not even that will help.

 

For interior cells, there are two options to make it go away:

 

- Use Roombounds and Portals

- Apply Precombines/Previs

 

For exterior cells, only the latter option is available.

 

Interesting to hear that not having Mip-Maps fixes it as well. Even though I wouldn't really recommend not using Mip-Maps, as they are an optimization mechanism as well. If you don't have MipMaps, the engine will always render the full size texture, even if the object is very distant (which might also be why South8028 sees high render load on trees...). But perhaps it will be useful info for FudgyDuff to fix this nasty problem for good, with Buffout 4. I amended my bug report there with this info.

[South8028]

I had no problem drawing on a regular map. The game flies and everything is rendered perfectly. I had problems with the construction site, because I liked to build giant structures, forgetting that fo4 is not minecraft.) Yes. By the way, I've never just plotted on a map. I have led construction projects exclusively in my own worlds or in empty interiors created for construction. This did not solve the problem of blurry textures in any way. The problems were solved only by the lack of mip cards. Problems with textures without mip maps have never been noticed either. On the contrary, without mip-maps, the engine renders textures better in most cases. This is subjective, natural. But the clarity seems to be higher. The exception is textures with a fine relief of the normals, or a fine mesh of the alpha channel, or the same fine relief of the mesh. My guess is that the engine is not able to handle textures that do not have a uniform resolution standard.It's just that no one at bethesda cared about the guys with weak iron and the guys going crazy at the construction site.They decided that the game would sell well as it is. )I can also add that when I got to 3d max, I didn't worry about optimization at all. My construction sites were overflowing with objects of 50-100k polygons. I noticed that this hit a lot more on performance than textures. I usually have a lot of panels with dds animation (they are all 8k), a lot of animated objects. So, high-poly models loaded the iron ten times more than if I just made all the textures in 8k. I can also add that nothing kills performance like objects with physics and complex collisions. A ball with a collision of 10k polygons, rolling, will simply blow up your iron. ) Edited June 3, 2021 by South8028

[niston]

It doesn't happen on vanilla map unless you disable precombines, as many settlement mods do (very much intentionally). Exterior areas affected then are Lexington, Bunker Hill and most anything Downtown. Vault 75 is an interior where it happens without precombines.

 

For interiors, it's easily fixable by properly setting up Roombounds and Portals (which Beth did not do in most cases). But for exteriors, that fix is unavailable.

 

But maybe it can be fixed in the engine now, with your info re MipMaps. My money is on some internal Mip-Map Lookup Table using 16bit addressing that rolls over when a large enough number of objects is in the scene graph, causing the Engine to mess up texture drawing. And Beth doesn't give a flying f*** about it, because they slap Precombs/Previs on everything and that postpones the problem by reducing the number of objects/draw calls. They'll eventually hit it again even with Precombs/Previs, when the scenery they create in some upcoming Creation Engine game becomes complex enough.

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

And Beth doesn't give a flying f*** about it, because they slap Precombs/Previs on everything and that postpones the problem by reducing the number of objects/draw calls. They'll eventually hit it again even with Precombs/Previs, when the scenery they create in some upcoming Creation Engine game becomes complex enough

 

Ah, this reminds me of work.

Lots of "workarounds" instead of fixing the actual problem ...

 

"Somebody" should remake the engine so that it uses 64 bit for everything, including the "Object Reference" thing (the XXyyyyyy number of objects where XX is the load order slot of the mod, you know).

But only "remake" the "backend" of it so that people can use it in the same way and nothing changes in terms of UI or the "workflow" of the CK.

[DocClox]

Ah, this reminds me of work.

Lots of "workarounds" instead of fixing the actual problem ...

 

Same as any software project ever. Everyone would love to take the time to overhaul the system and Do It Properly, but doing that takes time away from working on the game and deadlines take priority. So they work around problems and until such time as they get an opportunity to upgrade something.

 

It's frustrating as hell for us modders, mainly because we can't lean back in our chairs, tap the guy responsible on the shoulder and say "how the hell do I do this?" But, that's the hobby. What can you do?

Edited June 4, 2021 by DocClox

[SKKmods]

Cooking with the ingredients you have and making do is part of the fun (I trust) for time, budget or funcions.

 

Just looking up something the other day, I found where a creative commissioned the payrus function AttachModToInventoryItem in Fallout4 development which clearly costs money to develop, test and deliver. That function is only used once in the game and that is in a test fragment. The original concept was probably replaced with "EquipHelmet" animation for better UX.

 

Anyhoo, I imagined being able to commission base game (no not F4SE, please) papyrus functions that would unlock some of my XBOX visions. Actually plays out as "less fun" in my mind. But hey, thats just me.