Limit on objects in cell?

[Anubis Zombie]

Hello all thank for reading. I'm building a giant lego fort out of concrete road barriers and sandbags in cell 16,-20 (the parkinglot south of rivet city). Like Lord of the Rings, Bavarian fairytail as tall as the carrier in some places castle that takes up all of 16,-20 and bleeds over into all surrounding cells and is eventually going too spire up the side of the carrier. with real rooms full of objects and what not.

 

What's going too be the end effect of having hundreds, if not thousands, of sandbags and barriers in a nine cell square? Plus all the tables and gun racks and ammo boxes and gates and doors and lights. Am I gonna havta make peices like the cubes in the interiors or is it ok to build it out of the smaller peices?

[TheChan]

I don't think there is a limit but that's going to kill your framerate.

[Anubis Zombie]

YEAH PROBably gonna haveta make the interiors cells

[pkleiss]

If you look at the top of the render window, you'll see something like this:

M# XX.xx% (YYY.YYMB/177.00MB)

 

The XX.xx% refers to how much content this cell has based on the designated max of 177MB. Once you reach 75% the border of the render window will turn yellow. Once you hit 90% (I think its 90%) the border will turn red. This is not a hard limit as a cell can go over this limit and many Bethesda cells do, in fact. But the higher the M# is, the more likely you will get a drop in FPS. The drop can get to be so bad as the make the game unplayable, especially for those on low-end machines.

 

There is a solution, however. SCOL - Static Collection (see this link)

SCOL allows you to group several objects that use the same textures together as one object. If you put many of your sandbags into a single SCOL, the game treats all of those sandbags as one object. This can really help. Lets say you have 1000 sanbags and you put 10 sandbags into a SCOL and use that SCOL 100 times. Now instead of having 1000 sandbag objects loaded, you have only 100 SCOLs loaded. Yuo have reduced the number of objects the game has to laod by a factor of 10. That is huge! You have basically reduced the number of objects by 90%. One thing to note, you must include the SCOL with any release of your mod.