Optimization of rendering

[smuthny]

Hi guys.

 

I'm having some fun changing appearance of some femele NPCs. I've downloaded some outffits and hair packs. I've also changed most of NPS faces (geometry and textures) in GECK but there is a problem. When I'm looking on chenged NPC when game is running the fps noticeably going down to about 15-25 fps. Normally I have about 50-70 fps so apparently rendering this new-looking NPCs is a challange for my PC. Thats strange coz they shouldn't be more difficult to render than normal models of NPC. Is there any way to optimize this? And sorry if this question is lame-i've started using GECK 2 days ago... And some pictures of ladies :D

 

 

http://i27.tinypic.com/33nxmd5.jpg

 

 

http://i31.tinypic.com/2ups48x.jpg

 

http://i26.tinypic.com/28tjibo.jpg

 

http://i26.tinypic.com/28h24rd.jpg

 

http://i28.tinypic.com/2mdo4k1.jpg

 

http://i25.tinypic.com/2wf1c7o.jpg

 

http://i32.tinypic.com/2vaf5lx.jpg

 

http://i30.tinypic.com/2afa5c6.jpg

[mechine]

Yes an no...

 

 

I think it's called Poly count

 

 

A fancy way of rating textures, or somethin.

 

 

 

It's kind of like sounds. The vanilla sounds are encoded at like 28kHz, While the player created sounds

are like 48kHz, so it's 28,000 vs 48,000 cycles per second...

 

Which one do you think taxes the system more.

 

 

Hey, wow it's the one we like better.

 

 

But it's not a big deal, you can encode up to 98kHz or something.

 

 

 

 

Games use all kinds of tricks to yeild high res textures, there's texture layers Low an high

or even frame stacking low res then high really fast an we can't tell, and a bunch of other stuff

we'll never really take the time to understand...

 

 

 

One of the more obvious tricks bethesda played on us is the first person third person models.

 

Take the 10mm pistol for example.

 

 

It has a third person model which is just the model for it.

It's textures are in like 512x512 or something (totally low res)

 

 

Then GECK has slots for first person models

which are like 1024x1024

 

So really it's just a reskin with 1024x1024

so that in first person the close up of the 10mm pistol doesn't look all atari 64 low res or whatever

 

 

 

What Bethesda didn't really think about is that the players were just going to take those

high res 1024x1024 maps an make GECK use them for the third person model an then select none for

the first person model slot.

 

(you don't even have to use first person models, the third person is default)

 

 

So all you really have to do is find the first person model then rename it an drag an drop it over the

third person model, and bam you just got a high res 10mm pistol

idk probalby should set the first person to none though, you know make it a clean mod an all.

 

 

 

Anyhowz back to the issue.

 

 

 

It really depends on your system, and also your settings.

 

 

You can run totally low res textures all day long

so long as you have a killer grapics card with tons of AA an AF

Shoot sometimes turning off fallout 3's AA an AF

then making your grapics card force whatever AA an AF settings you want

will allow you to pick a even higher AA an AF setting than fallout's while not losing

any performance as far as FPS goes, and it might even combat stuttering.

 

On the flip side you may have problems running high res textures with AA an AF

Shoot just turn AA an AF off, an try it out. I've been dropping AA an AF when I'm underground

in the feral ghoul rampage, because I don't need it an it drags down the FPS from all the chaos.

Then when I get back outside I turn it back on.

 

 

So I guess a good place to start would be following the tweek guide.

 

Max settings, pfft, Max settings meets chaos-player meets lag 5000

 

 

I haven't really followed the whole tweek guide this last time

I set it on ultra, and then

I just set everything to about 3/4 with depth of feild off

medium reflections an shadows, maybe 3-4 shadows

 

 

I did however read the whole tweek guide, the last part is rather advanced

and is also the part that helpped the most.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Fallout3_1.html

 

 

 

After that I'd get into modding really heavy

 

You wana take your girls pretty much

 

and either look in GECK at the poly counts in order to tell which one is going to cause the most system drag

 

Or open up the parts like the textures an meshes

 

I'm guessing you'll find some G-string sized clothing that's textured on a 2048x2048 map

Which is totally hillarious...

 

 

I'm just guessing, but clothing that small should only fill about 512x512

depends on how well you want it to look, the original creator of the clothing

is by default going to want it to look perfect, more real than real itself

but the question is, does that work...

 

 

You know, it could be in the mesh, they could be set up to have texture maps, glow maps, enviroment maps, specular maps, and more...

Nifscope does some pretty cool tricks kind of like those though, so drop the extra maps an put a little shine or glow or tweek on them.

Even further you can draw glow or shine inside the main texture, heck some drawings look more like chrome than chrome does.

It won't react to the surroundings like reflect what's over there on the wall, but then it won't lag either.

 

Besides, things that look too real make a game world look dead.

We have our own little world here so we can make it look however we want.

 

 

It could be high res skin textures as well as the clothing, maybe the combination of the two

or even a completely seperate issue causing it.

 

 

Shoot defrag the hard drives, and try a bunch of crazy stuff you wouldn't think would help.

 

 

I can't think of anything else besides boobs/legs

boobs on legs, whos your daddy bish, that's right smack

FULLY, lolz, skin skin skin, gimi some....

[smuthny]

Thanks a lot for answer... For now i've just used "Export NCP face textures" option in GECK and it seems that game runs faster but I will try figure out this issue more deeply when I will have some time :) Thans once again for such valuable answer...