Has there been any progress on the issues with pre-vis and pre-combined meshes?

[MPankey]

Early on in FO4's modding history the community cam upon a large road block for modding. Editing an exterior cell could cause serious issues. Changes to exterior cells could/(would?) cause pre-vis data to not load or load incorrectly, and block pre-combined meshes from rendering, among other issues. I haven't seen any news about a fix for thus. The cell-reset bug seems to have been stealth fixed by Bethesda in an update, but i haven't seen any thing similar--stealth or not-- about a fix for this major issue.

[VIitS]

That is intentional on Bethesda's part, otherwise you would have to rebuild the entire precombined mesh and previs data for each mod any time you edited something that had been part of a precombined mesh. You can rebuild the previs and precombined mesh data in the CK (although it seems to be iffy on whether or not it will work for any given mod user), but it makes mod compatibility a huge pain (and drastically bloats your mod size).

 

If a mod doesn't touch a reference that is part of a precombined mesh, previs and precombined meshes won't be disabled.

[Trosski]

There were some tutorials on how to fix this issue. I wrote a couple of them on Beth.net, but since they are doing a beta of an even worse version of their crappy forum... good luck finding them.

 

The problem in the beginning stemmed from the fact that the CK cleared the timestamp data on precombined meshes, and previs data upon exiting the CK. So you could create new precombine, and previs data, but your plugin would reference the Vanilla timestaps when looking for said data. They have since fixed the issue, and it was put out as part of a patch a few months ago. As VIitS explained this has created the need to make compatibility patches. It's not a big deal for PC users, but can make consolers think twice about downloading mods as it can make a 25MB mod balloon to around 700MB depending on the extent of the changes made.

 

Creating compatibility is pretty simple, but if there are a number of mods that need compatibility created, then you either have to assume the users have all of the mods you are making patches for, or make a compatibility patch for every combination. This is the main problem with the whole system. For a game that bases it's longevity on the ability to mod it... They sure didn't put much thought into this system where mods were concerned.

 

Fortunately this system did not make it into the special edition of Skyrim.