Trees and rocks

[Qurion]

Good evening,

 

I have a small problem that I never looked into in what must be ten years of modding.

Also am not sure how to name this issue and therefore not entirely certain how I can pinpoint the issue for a google search. Yes I tried.

 

To keep it simple.

 

There is a modified area.

And there are trees and rocks that dont belong there.

Sometimes they show up, sometimes they do not.

 

Technically speaking, why does it happen and what ways are there to solve this?

[Fkemman11]

This is a very good question and I would also like to know. :nuke:

[Perraine]

It's known as 'Lod Flicker" and is caused by pre-culling of meshes, and by the pre-combined mesh system that Bugthesda implemented to try and optimize the game.

 

Basically if you have an area with a House, a car, a tree and a rock, and to avoid having to load 4 different meshes Bugthesda created a "pre-combined" mesh of all those items together which is usually a much smaller file size, and slightly improves performance..

 

Now if someone creates a mod that removes the tree the rock and the car, but they don't make a new pre-combined mesh, the the game will try and load the old pre-combined mesh that is no longer valid, and you get the flickering of the landscape and other objects.

 

You can use this mod to lessen the effect, but nothing will get rid of it completely, it's simply part of the game, and part of the price of using mods.

(make sure that the above mod is ALWAYS the last one loaded, if you use 'Loot' it might move it down the load list, so always manually set that mod as the very last one every time you use Loot or add another mod.)

[Fkemman11]

So, that's why my scrapped houses in Sanctuary keep coming back. Either the author didn't make a new pre-combined mesh or its a load order conflict. So its sorta a Yoda-ish " The fudge is all around us- the rock, the tree." kinda thing lol. I wonder how the scrapping system is done then. Like if every time you scrap an object the game has to use a new pre-combined mesh or something. That would seem incredibly counter productive. Must be handled a different way. :smile:

[Perraine]

So, that's why my scrapped houses in Sanctuary keep coming back. Either the author didn't make a new pre-combined mesh or its a load order conflict. So its sorta a Yoda-ish " The fudge is all around us- the rock, the tree." kinda thing lol. I wonder how the scrapping system is done then. Like if every time you scrap an object the game has to use a new pre-combined mesh or something. That would seem incredibly counter productive. Must be handled a different way. :smile:

It gets a bit complicated ... Basically it's usually a distance based system which determines the LOD (Level Of Detail) that you see - far away = low detail pre-combined mesh vs close enough to interact with = higher detail individual meshes for scrappable objects ... The problem arises from "scrap everything" mods because normally most items are NOT scrappable, so the game doesn't have to worry about swapping meshes, it just keeps using the pre-combined version.

 

Scrap mods work by setting the "scrappable" flag on those items, which confuses the engine.

 

It's also why most scrap mods require you to set bUsecombinedobjects = 0 in the games .ini file, so that everything is (nearly) always using individual meshes, this of course can have a big hit on game performance, particularly in very "intense" areas like downtown Boston.

 

However this setting only effects cells that have not been altered from vanilla in any way whatsoever the instant the game notices even a single pebble or bottlecap out of place, it will turn off all close up pre-combined meshes, but not usually the distant ones. That's also why there aren't a lot of mods that alter exterior spaces with lots of 'clutter" like the inner city, because the "LOD flicker" can be extreme.

[JimmyRJump]

There's also something called Ghosting -which are objects that have been scrapped turning-up for a few seconds while in WorkShop mode. Nothing can be done about it and it's not a major problem. Not to me, anyway.

 

Also be aware that the No More Disappearing Act mod only works on exterior cells and only for vanilla (altered or not) settlements plus a couple of settlements added through mods.

[damanding]

Scrap Everything doesn't require the ini edit in order to work, in fact they recommend you DON'T use it unless you use mods that let you build outside normal settlements.

 

 

To use this mod across the entire wasteland (with mods that let you build anywhere) change the following line in your fallout4.ini (under the heading [general] ): bUseCombinedObjects=1 to bUseCombinedObjects=0. Do not use the ini edits otherwise, they hurt more than they help.

 

This is one of the reasons why Scrap Everything is a superior alternative to other scrap mods. Scrap Everything disables the pre-combined meshes in vanilla settlements only by default instead of needing to do it throughout the whole game.

 

Most mod authors who edit world spaces intentionally do not re-build pre-combined meshes because doing so makes your mod conflict with any mod which also touches a fairly broad radius around the initial mod's changes. So if mod A adds a magazine to say Mystic Pines and mod B does a full overhaul of or settlement at Mystic Pines and both mods don't re-build pre-combined then they will play reasonably nicely together. But if mod B re-built the pre-combines, you can't use both mods together. There is the unfortunate side-effect that at least one, if not both mods may have broken the vanilla pre-combined meshes for that location which causes issues like that described above (especially if scrapping happened) and also reduces performance in that local area. However most mod-authors would prefer to have greater mod compatibility than the performance savings and lack of the harmless visual glitches.

[Fkemman11]

Wow! Those are great answers. Now I kinda understand why someone else that intended to "clean up" the entire game was having so much trouble. One thing that puzzles me is deleting objects. I have a mod that removes clutter throughout the game. Well actually two (which might be a bad idea with what has been said). One of them claims to delete unnecessary objects. Doesn't he mean he disabled it? Or do some mod authors delete objects for a reason? I have heard this is a bad idea. I mean if an object has a reference and it is deleted doesn't that cause many problems(CTDs come to mind)? And how does Beth seem to make so many of these avoidable errors? I mean cleaning the masters reveals at least 1k or more DRs. Not to mention ITMs. Are these dirty edits intentional sometimes? I have looked for answers and asked the X-edit team- but got only a partial answer. Sorry for all the questions. I'm just trying to figure out what's under the hood. :D

[damanding]

Sometimes people say delete when they mean disable. Other mod authors, especially if new, do actually delete objects. Deleting objects is not a good idea, they need to be disabled or yes they can cause crashes if another mod refers to them. As for Beth's masters...well, it's Beth.

 

As for mods that remove clutter, it depends on the method they used. If they went into the CK and deleted a bunch of stuff instead of disabling it, that's a bad idea. Others use tricks like modifying the clutter nifs directly to either shrink them or make them invisible. Those are perfectly safe approaches assuming the nifs are good (and if they aren't they usually don't make it through testing to publication).

[JimmyRJump]

Mods that alter/do away with objects in a game (like Insignificant Object Remover) do that through scripts. When loading the altered game, for the game engine there's nothing missing since the base script has the reference I.Ds barred from the original script.

 

In a nutshell (and a non-technical way) scrapping stuff in the game which normally wouldn't be scrappable (or deleting objects by using the markfordelete console commands) doesn't do away with the reference identifications and therefor the game keeps trying to render them. This is what causes the LOD flicker and in some cases makes the game crash, the latter especially when reloading a save in which you just deleted objects and performed the save while staying in the same cell in which you did the scrapping/deleting.

 

If and when you're using the markfordelete command, first make a "New" save, then delete what needs deleting, walk away a reasonable distance or fast-travel to another location, make a quick-save and then reload the quick-save and go back to where you made the changes.

 

As far as Bethesda goes and their ability to screw-up their own games, well, to me it all comes across as laziness and perhaps different teams doing different things to the same source material and not telling one another what they did...