LE Portals, room boxes & optimizing a world space

[TurelimVampire]

Hey so I'm making an external world space in the CK & I have a village by the coast built of these makeshift, wooden shacks which use quite a lot of meshes & the frame rates I'm getting there are terrible. I'm wondering how to optimize it. I've checked out Dawnstar since it's a similar idea & there are boxes all over the place, covering everything.

All I know about optimization is what I've seen in the Bethesda tutorials where they show you how to add room boxes & portals to an interior space so I don't know what to do in regards to an external space. I can't find any tutorials via googling.

Does anyone have any idea what to do?

Thanks

[Di0nysys]

You can use occlusion planes in external cells. Put them inside buildings, land and mountains and anything behind them doesn't render. Always make sure your object count isn't too high, you'll notice CPU bottlenecks when that happens.

[TurelimVampire]

Do they work like portals & room bounds where they only render what's behind them when you are looking at it?

Do you have any idea what these boxes are, btw?

 

http://i.imgur.com/J8tr4D6.jpg

[Aragorn58]

 

Do they work like portals & room bounds where they only render what's behind them when you are looking at it?

Do you have any idea what these boxes are, btw?

 

http://i.imgur.com/J8tr4D6.jpg

 

 

If you click on them it will tell you. Most of them are trigger boxes for The CW Quest Phases. The tall thin ones are clouds.

[AnuH1]

I am confused. What is the difference between Roombounds and Plane/Occlusion markers? Why can't you use roombounds outside?

 

If I had a large Island, at I was at one end and at the other end was a forest, how do I stop the other end from loading while I am at one end. In the Main Cities like Whiterun, Dawnstar etc, there are Occlusion planes but they're not there for that reason. Do Worldspaces optimise themselves? Surely, a worldspace such as Tamriel could not have Planes for every single cell?

[soupdragon1234]

Planes are just that, flat two dimensional objects that block anything behind it rendering. Boxes cover entire areas. Functionally they're very similar except boxes allow portals that are effectively a window that lets you see into the contents of the box at that point.

 

Surely, a worldspace such as Tamriel could not have Planes for every single cell?

 

They don't, they're simply optimized by keeping the polygon count to a minimum. If you visit some of the larger single celled houses in Windhelm for example they're very sparsely populated almost empty, thats deliberate. Bethesda must have spent a lot of time optimizing or had a specialist team overseeing the worldspace designers with a view to never letting the polygon count get too high. Either that or their version of the CK has something that tells them when there are too many objects in the field of view. Modders just have to get by on trial and error, mostly.

 

 

 

So does that mean you could put a box over a house then make a portal for each of the 5 sides & it would only render when you were looking at it?

 

Only one or two portals are allowed per box, I believe, theres a page about portals and roombounds on the CK wiki that'll give the details.

Edited July 27, 2016 by soupdragon1234

[TurelimVampire]

Boxes cover entire areas. Functionally they're very similar except boxes allow portals that are effectively a window that lets you see into the contents of the box at that point.

 

So does that mean you could put a box over a house then make a portal for each of the 5 sides & it would only render when you were looking at it?

[Aragorn58]

 

Boxes cover entire areas. Functionally they're very similar except boxes allow portals that are effectively a window that lets you see into the contents of the box at that point.

 

So does that mean you could put a box over a house then make a portal for each of the 5 sides & it would only render when you were looking at it?

 

How large is your village and have you generated LOD yet? The LOD meshes and textures are quite a bit smaller than the meshes when you are close. Some of those small shack pieces if I recall don't have LODs. So if you have marked them all as never fades that could be your issue.

 

Also I just attempted to put a room bound in an exterior worldspace that I use for testing, and it will not work properly. And placing an occlusion cube over an entire building does not seem to work also, nor can portals be added to occlusion boxes or planes.

[Di0nysys]

You can't use portals in worldspaces. The way the game is optimized is it draws a bunch of cells around the player in full detail (ugridstoload), and the rest is replaced by low quality LODs. Occlusion planes can help, but don't rely on them too much for optimization. Always put them inside of big statics (buildings, mountains, high terrain, etc).

Real world game performance matters a lot. Keep an eye out on object count and monitor ur in game framerate and frametimes (when frametimes start to get higher than 20ms consistently, then the engine is struggling to load certain objects and u need to DELETE stuff). If the CPU is working hard but the GPU isn't, then you're hitting a bottleneck and again the engine is struggling with poly/object count. Trim it down and realy on less more bulky objects to clutter the place vs many small objects.

[NexBeth]

The render window shows how much resources you have used up in your cell (ext. and int.) compared to the limit. It's shown in the top border where the cell name is displayed. Saying that, many mods will exceed those cell limits without problems. I believe the limits were based on the capacity of 2011 pc limitations on the game, and limits imposed by developing the game for console users. PC resources, in most cases, are now much higher than when the game was originally developed. Much is dependent on the capacity of each gamer's pc. If you know your mod is loaded up with stuff and you want to keep it that way, then a warning on your page that your mod likely is not going to do well on an lower spec machine would be nice. If your mod is struggling even on your own machine, then you have a problem.