Occlusion Planes/Volumes - Where Are They At?

[GamingVirtue]

Specifically, I've been looking around at Sanctuary and some other locations like Covenant, and I can't find any occlusion volumes or planes listed in the cell, nor is there anything hiding under the meshes when I've moved them. I'm starting to wonder if, since the base editor has a "non-occluding" or similar checkbox, could the engine be creating occlusion planes and volumes dynamically based on the meshes present?

 

Then again, I might have the CK misconfigured and am being dumb, but I was wanting to make a plugin to complement Spring Cleaning so I could finally be rid of that damnable flickering when walking behind what used to be buildings and hedges.

 

Anyone have anything to add, confirm, or deny here? I'd really like to figure out what's going on so that I can try and implement everything I'm wanting, but I can't figure out what's going on with the method for culling here.

[rdunlap]

in each cells Edit page there is a check box "No Pre Vis" this turns off Precalculated visibility for that cell. The precalculated visibility is stored in a file *(cant remember the details off the top of my head" and the checkbox tells the engine not to use these values for that cell. Use this sparingly since it can have an impact on framerates. The precalculated visibility allows the engine to take shortcuts in drawing calls and this game is a HEAVY load on an average systems video card/memory.

 

Personally I would ONLY use this on known problem cells and not just go generic and do them all. A LOT of people would have big issues trying to run that.

 

Robert

[GamingVirtue]

in each cells Edit page there is a check box "No Pre Vis" this turns off Precalculated visibility for that cell. The precalculated visibility is stored in a file *(cant remember the details off the top of my head" and the checkbox tells the engine not to use these values for that cell. Use this sparingly since it can have an impact on framerates.

 

I didn't plan on using it in too many places, so that's fine. I'm also going to try to find a way to properly nest new occlusion planes underneath the meshes so that, if they're still present, they'll still occlude, but make them children of the mesh itself so they'll be removed with the mesh if someone uses Spring Cleaning to remove things like the Covenant wall or the houses in Sanctuary.

 

At the same time, this at least confirms that they're capable of being recalculated, which is awesome news since I'm also trying to find a way to possibly build occlusion planes directly into some of the workshop construction pieces.

Edited May 19, 2016 by IcefoxAxel

[rdunlap]

There is a workflow built into the CK that will allow you to totally recalculate visibility but I have no experience using it. It feels like a mistake to try to recalculate something so obstructive since the calculation would of necessity be based on whatever mods and such are active on the machine doing the calculations. It may be needed for us to get a tool to allow users to build this file set themselves when they change something that is affected *(like was needed in skyrim for LOD's).

 

Here is a question to ponder. Why is occlusions not simply HANDLED by the nif since the nif when textured by its nature occludes sight lines and when removed would need no further work. Is the game so overdone that it needs this HUGE extra helping hand to run on modern hardware? I am going to date myself here i guess but i remember all the hype when full sized video games started hitting the market *(the kind you put quarters in) and they could not foresee EVER needing more than 640k *(yes kilobytes) of total available memory to load and run a video game. Now i have a 6 gig nvidia card on my windows 10 box that has 32 gigs of ram and almost 2 TB of storage. the first program i wrote ran in 10k of memory.

 

Robert

[GamingVirtue]

Well, remember that Fallout 4 is using Umbra, so it's already not using an engine-native occlusion method. However, since it's using Umbra, I decided to look into it and, from what I've found, it seems that it apparently can work with dynamic occlusion planes kinda like what you're talking about. In that case, I can set the buildings not to occlude in the base editor, rebuild static visibility, and then drop the occlusion planes in under the models and the game should pick up on their presence dynamically instead of needing them to be baked in as well.

 

If I HAVE to bake them in, that's gonna suck, but I might end up living with a few frames less per second in some areas if it means no flickering when I trash the objects in the way.

 

EDIT: Well, I may not be able to. Unfortunately, it seems the edit window for cells is too tall to fit on my monitor. I'm stupid, I can just click outside the checkbox and hit enter to save the edit...

 

DOUBLE EDIT: Well, turns out that disabling precomputed visibility in Sanctuary's cells doesn't affect the game in any meaningful way, performance-wise. And my computer's on the low end of the requirements. We're talking, lag and stuttering throughout Boston on the lowest settings. I'll test this out with a couple other places like Covenant, but I know Bunker Hill, which could benefit from it, would lag unbelievably with this set up, so I might have to finagle that one a bit.

 

TRIPLE EDIT: As commenters on my mod have pointed out, there was already a mod that did this, so I wasted my time. Either way, this at least taught me what I need to do to accomplish this, so I should be able to implement this into my next mods...

Edited May 19, 2016 by IcefoxAxel