Hangman's Alley

[JuJooGuppy]

So, out of curiosity, does Hangman's Alley hit everyones PC's pretty hard once you get NPC's / decorate it? I recently reformated my PC, and was happy to find my game runs like it shouldve given my specs.. that is, I run everything maxed out and hold 60 fps overall, dropping to 45-60 range in the heavier city areas, with the worst being 30 fps (BUt again, this is all max settings, max draw distance etc, so that doesnt surprise me). Hangman's though, takes a beating on me.. it can drop to the 25-30 range :/. I havent even finished decorating the entire place yet, so kinda worries me.. it says 17 pop, though I think its closer to 12 actual. I tried markfordelete'ing a bunch of the NPC's just to see the effect, and I noticed no real difference. Starting picking stuff up and it still wasn't changing much. So I am curious if it's just a really bogged down / laggy area in general, given its heavy action area (The supermutants and DC guards are always fighting, meaning my PC has to run all that, too...)


On that note, its really annoying to have my entire town try to run out to go help the DC guards w/ super mutants that arent even close by lol. ALl that AI script prolly really hampers the CPU?

Its sadly both one of my favorite and least favorite places to build...

[tedman84]

What are your PC specs?

Have you turned down Shadow Distance? Setting it to Medium makes a huge difference to performance in the city.

[robhartman9]

I dont like Hangmans alley but not for performance reasons. Its very small and its hard to build up due to many overhead obstacles. I downloaded a mod that lets you build planter boxes conserving a lot of space. I also have a mod for scrapping extra stuff but i still cant get rid of overhead wires. Anyone have a way of ridding those peskey wires? I scrapped a light post that was not removeable without the mod only to have the wire still hanging there in mid air

[Moraelin]

Not sure if it affects performance, but Hangman's Alley has a broken navmesh, which makes it annoying enough anyway. Might also be a reason for performance loss, EVERY NPC constantly fails calculating a path, if they're trying to go between the two parts of it.

 

Personally, I just gave up on building there any more.

[JuJooGuppy]

My specs are..

i7 4770k

R9 290x

12gb ram (forget the rating off hand.)

running 2 SSD's + a regular drive, a 120 SSD for windows + steam, a 240 SSD for Fallout 4 (and a few other games, not installed currently) and a 2tb backup drive for non-important apps speed wise.
And a MSI Z87 MPOWER mb

 

 

Spec wise my PC should destroy this game, but this game doesnt like Radeon cards much sadly. But, like I say, most places in town w/ max shadows and everything I can maintain 45-60 fps, and outsie of concentrated areas I run a steady 60. Its just Hangman's that really really eats my PC up.

I realize I can turn settings down to run it smoother, I wasn't looking for fixes, more curious if anyone else has the same kind of issue with it. Good to know the navmesh is FUBAR too, I noticed I have a hell of a time getting them to function there, though I got them to somewhat function.

I think its more how this game engine works, loading stuff thats way out of sight (shadows in particular). Hangmans is a small, tight area that I have a decent amount of building done, "17" settlers that are all failing to move around properly, and on top of it, it ALWAYS loads the scripted fight between the DC guards and the super mutants that takes place on the other side of the big buildings hangman's is located behind. This causes my entire freakin settlement to pour out and run all the way around trying to fight this fight, plus my PC is running all those extra AI I cant even see, and extra shadows, effects, etc. So, I suppose it really shouldnt surprise me much lol.

[JuJooGuppy]

Well... I did some experimenting with this because it was bugging me that around hangman's was pretty brutal. Now granted my PC w/ all ultra runs into some areas of trouble, but normally the lowest is say 40/45 fps, not the 20-30 fps the hangmans area and areas right around it was causing. I tried dropping shadows to the lowest distance and quality, and while things improved some.. it stillw as hitting some hard FPS drops in hangmans area.

So, I decided to disable a mod that came to mind, and much to my sadness and happiness at the same time, it seems to be the primary issue, as now back at full ultra the FPS drop is more along the 45 range than 20-30.

 

The culprit for me was Spring Cleaning, unfortunately. I love this mod to death, and now im kinda put in a pickle lol. Not 100% sure why its causing such a hard hit. I know that it makes things not be combined referrences, but damn. I didn't think it'd cause such a huge hit.

On a 2nd note, beings this mod was the cause, and the graphics settings had minimal effect, I *THINK* personally that its the CPU side that I am getting hit on, but I could be completely wrong there.

Anyway, thought I would share, disabling the mod had a massive effect. This isnt to bad mouth the mod, either, its a fantastic mod and works great, but was hampering my PC for some reason. I was using the .esp variant not the .ini variant, maybe I will try the ini version and deal w/ the reset bug to see if it works better, idk.

[zanity]

There's a lesson to be learnt here. Don't bad mouth the performance of the game when using mods. Early mods are 'bad' hacks of a BAD PS3 class engine, which = disaster!

 

HA is a settlement in the WORST location (where the engine is over-loaded to breaking point by the geometry), and mods hacking the geometry will magnify the problem exponentially.

 

Current mod users should be grown-up enough to accept all the DOWNSIDES of hacking a BETA version of the game before the GECK is released. Only when FO4 has had a year+ of patching by Beth may it be in a half-decent state. And only when this PS3 based engine hits a final stable version can mods attempt to avoid performance issues.

[JuJooGuppy]

You know, if you actually read, I wasn't "bad mouthing" anything. I actually asked if this was a common issue, and began testing settings. I didn't once say "damn Bethesda is so stupid / lazy / etc". I DID say that area has a LOT going on, so I expected performance drop, just not to the degree I was getting it, and I was right. The only things I blamed on the game was the fact the game engine is poorly optimized, which is true regardless of mods... it loads a set area around you, regardless if its visible, which means it renders all the AI, shadows, lighting, etc. This is cripping in dense areas.

I am not someone that even remotely blames Bethesda for performance loss due to using mods in a very early state.

So please be patient enough to read my post before accusing me of not being grown-up, sir. I realize there are a lot of people that jump down the dev's throats over issues caused by their own hands, but I certainly didn't do any of that.