How to make floors "solid"?

[DieFeM]

I do know to differentiate what is terrain and what is an object. I would not get this issue placing objects inside of the castle if the ground were terrain.

 

I can place objects everywhere in vanilla Vault 88, I don't know what you're talking about tbh.

 

Thicket Excavation is not vanilla settlement location, therefore the cells were edited to convert it in to a settlement, which probably breaks precombines, an therefore it reinforces my theory.

Edited July 18, 2021 by DieFeM

[niston]

 

you can't copy anything (rooms & corridors and stuff) from other cells, as you need to replace all floors and walls.

 

Ctrl-F is your friend.

But you're right, it *is* a lot of work. Like most anything in this game.

 

@DieFem: Which castle mod are you referring to specifically? The one by Hozsa? And by "ground" you mean the terrain in the courtyard?

[DieFeM]

 

 

 

 

@DieFem: Which castle mod are you referring to specifically? The one by Hozsa? And by "ground" you mean the terrain in the courtyard?

 

 

I don't recall, this was time ago, but it is just an example, anyway that doesn't have any relevance, what matters is that breaking or disabling precombines makes a lot of settlement ground objects to not act as ground. If I recall correctly place everywhere has the same effect, because it disables precombines, the "remove anything" mode (INS key) might need to be enabled to disable precombines though.

[aurreth]

Precombines have nothing to do with what is ground or isn't. Precombines/previsibility are graphics optimizations, to make things load faster. When you break them you get graphics glitches, things flashing in an out of existence depending on your distance to them and viewing angle, and seeing the glaring white void. This has nothing to do with whether the object is considered a valid place to set things down on. That's what the WorkshopStackableItem actor value controls. It literally means "can I stack something else on top of this or not". Now, editing the floor pieces in the CK can screw up the vanilla precom/previs, but not the other way around.

 

You may not have any issues, but there are places in the Vault 88 gear room that I could not place things on without using Place Everywhere, until I went in and added the appropriate actor value to 3 or 4 different floor base items. It's possible that one of my mods messed up the vanilla values, or it's possible that you never tried to put things on those particular floor pieces.

 

Changing Thicket to a settlement does not affect the precombine at all. To make a settlement you add a workshop workbench, some bounding boxes (not visibile) and some markers (also not visible), and a quest to register it. What people are not doing is adding the stackable actor value to some very obvious things that people might want to set things on, which is why there are complaints. This happens because you can find dozens of "how to make a settlement" videos on YouTube, but following those does not teach you the underlying mechanics on how to do it right.

 

Which is why I asked this question in the first place. "What makes a floor a floor?" "The WorkshopStackableItem Actor Value."

[aurreth]

 

Which castle mod are you referring to specifically? The one by Hozsa? And by "ground" you mean the terrain in the courtyard?

 

Jenncave Clean and Simple, which uses the Hozsa castle. This is actually being discussed in another thread of mine regarding visible/invisible navmesh fixer pieces. I used placeatme to put the castle on Spectacle Island and it exhibits all the problems that DieFem talks about. The castle isn't "floor", and it's not navmeshed, which means that NPCs just see it as a huge impassible block. I may eventually fix it and make it a constructible object. Have to finish Vault 95 first, where the elevator to my replacement cell does strange things.

[DieFeM]

Precombines have nothing to do with what is ground or isn't.

 

I know what precombines are. Make some test before making assertions like this one. Then we can talk.

 

It's possible that one of my mods messed up the vanilla values

 

Surely.

 

Changing Thicket to a settlement does not affect the precombine at all.

 

 

No but given that it is a location that is meant to change after certain event, most of the objects in this location are not part of the precombined objects, which makes the objects not suitable to act as ground in a workshop, therefore you have to use AV to force the object to be ground.

 

Which is why I asked this question in the first place. "What makes a floor a floor?" "The WorkshopStackableItem Actor Value."

 

 

Well, believe it or not, disabling precombines affects to it.

Edited July 18, 2021 by DieFeM

[niston]

@DieFem: From what I can tell, Place Everywhere does not break precombines. In fact, if they are not disabled by ini setting or otherwise, Place Everywhere can not be used on some objects to scrap them (because they're part of precombines). There are some scrap mods which disable precombines, you might be thinking of them perhaps?

 

Apart from that, what does Precombine mean?

It means that the development tool (CK) lumps a bunch of spatially related, separate meshes into a new, *combined* mesh, which then saves on draw calls and perhaps other system resources at runtime.

 

Now, what actor values does a combined mesh object receive? Does it inherit all the values from all the individual objects it is made up of?

Are precombined meshes perhaps treated specially by the game engine in this regard?

How does the game know that a precombine is part of the ground? And what happens if you break up this precombine?

[South8028]

@DieFem: From what I can tell, Place Everywhere does not break precombines. In fact, if they are not disabled by ini setting or otherwise, Place Everywhere can not be used on some objects to scrap them (because they're part of precombines). There are some scrap mods which disable precombines, you might be thinking of them perhaps?

Â

Apart from that, what does Precombine mean?

It means that the development tool (CK) lumps a bunch of spatially related, separate meshes into a new, *combined* mesh, which then saves on draw calls and perhaps other system resources at runtime.

Â

Now, what actor values does a combined mesh object receive? Does it inherit all the values from all the individual objects it is made up of?

Are precombined meshes perhaps treated specially by the game engine in this regard?

How does the game know that a precombine is part of the ground? And what happens if you break up this precombine?

I faced such a phenomenon. When switching between precombinations, the actor falls off the flying mesh. For a second, the mesh disappears, the actor falls, and the mesh reappears, continuing to fly without a player. It is interesting that there is no such phenomenon in the created worlds. You can fly endlessly. On fo4 maps only up to the borders of the loaded area. How to deal with this? Disable precombinations?

[DieFeM]

Now, what actor values does a combined mesh object receive? Does it inherit all the values from all the individual objects it is made up of?

None that we can tell, because a precombined mesh is not an object reference, nor any object type we can access directly, maybe a F4SE plugin could do that, but that's out of the scope of this conversation.

 

Are precombined meshes perhaps treated specially by the game engine in this regard?

Sure.

 

How does the game know that a precombine is part of the ground? And what happens if you break up this precombine?

All precombined objects are treated as ground in workshop mode I guess.

If you break precombined meshes they become its original base object references and, if the cell contains previs data, it creates visual glitches, and additionally, if you use it for a settlement, you get those objects treated as any other object, unless they have the appropriate AV.

 

Where do you want to get with all those questions, Niston? Because I don't think I'm telling you anything you didn't already knew, except maybe that the precombined meshes are treated as ground when it comes to placing down objects in workshop mode, something you could easily check by disabling and enabling precombined meshes from the ini and trying to place down an object on a ground object which its base object doesn't have the AV.

[niston]

Oh, just trying the Socratic method to get readers to understand that Precombines are indeed special with regards to being treated as ground and also why that is the case.

Thanks for playing along :)