Ugridstoload setting for generating Precombied meshes and visibility in CK.

[Dubbyk]

So I'm attempting to create Pre combined meshes and visibility patches for my merged locations mods, and the CK only seems to create them for "loaded cells" and not for entire .esps. So do I have to keep the CK's Ugrids to load the same as my game setting (5) or can I up it to like 11 and create larger swaths of combined data at once?

 

Concord for example, with Bean Town and Concord expanded I can not fit the whole edited town inside my normal 5 cell block, I am unsure what happens if I move over a few cells to generate for the missing parts but now my 5 cell block over laps a section I just did.

[SMB92]

Precombined meshes will generate for the ugrids currently loaded, yes. Vis on the other, at ugrids 5,will generate 81 cells (40 cells radius from the central cell that is a multiple of 3). This is because it works in 3x3 grids. It will look at the central cells for the surrounding cells in generate them.

 

As to what setting for precombineds, depends, how large an area does your mods touch? You'd ideally like to capture them all for precombineds. Vis will grow exponentially when you up ugrids obviously.

 

Best practice is to generate for only the cells that are actually edited if you can help it, but this is potentially painful.

[Dubbyk]

Problem is the mods I have merged cover just about every thing, I have BTI, Lexington Interiors, Stumble upon, Plenty O, Subway runner, all of the "Expanded" series, a bunch of GreekRage's settlements, Mod 1984's settlement collection and so on and so on and so on, over 100 ESP split between 3 merged files. I guess I can probably ignore wilderness cells as there isn't much of a FPS drop in these cells even if the meshes are broken, and settlements because scrap mods are going to break the meshes anyway.

 

So I guess it really leaves, concord, Lexington, and Boston as the real problem areas.

 

Side question, if I have an area where the Meshes are not broken but I am getting some preculling issues, do I need to redo the precombine meshes AND the visibility? I attempted to just do vis and the area, got.... strange, huge holes in the world and stuff clipping / overlapping like crazy.

[SMB92]

Correct order is precombined meshes, generate Vis, then generate precombined Vis, both for loaded area. With precombineds you can do the loaded area to speed things up, or cell by cell. Any Vis that needs generating in any 3x3 grid, will need all the 3x3 grids around regenerated. Best to center on the area need doing.

 

Regarding all those mods, real Pita coming your way. Hope your computer is very decent. It can consume a lot of ram. Setup a 32gb page file.

 

When I generated Cambridge, Cambridge crater and Bunker Hill, I did precombined centered over Kendal hospital, 11 ugrids. Did all 3 gens, exited and reopened at 7 ugrids. Centered over Cambridge crater (i think CambridgeCrater02) and generated. Next I lowered it to 5 ugrids and generated over Bunker Hill. In my later gens I also have Better Goodneighbour so I put it back at 7 ugrids and centered over a cell near Goodneighbour with the Bank and generated.

 

Big job. Took roughly 2 hours.

[Dubbyk]

I have 32 gigs of RAM and over a TB of SSD HD space on the drive the CK is on, when I attempted to do the "generate for world" option for the meshes it was done in less time then it took me to sleep, and it managed to pop out like 20 gigs of meshes but that ended up being a pointless process as there is no way I can cram so much into BA2 files, and I've never been able to get more then one BA2 file to load off a single plug in like the fallout4.esm does even though the BA2 tool will automatically name your files Textures01,02,03 ect for you, they just wont work.

 

Why did you reopen the CK with different Ugrids set and redo the process so many times? Was this just to make your mod compatible with different end user set ups? Or is their some other gain I am missing.

 

 

Oh and just a note on the merges, they actually all work just fine, after a TON of time fixing conflicts in Xedit, I just some FPS hickups in towns, like Concord will drop to like 40-50 FPS for a few seconds when I enter, will rise back to 60 after the cells fully load, down town Boston is like 30-40 ish FPS, I just wish FO4 used more of my computers power, I hate seeing FPS drops by CPU useage is like 20% and GPU is only like 50%, and I can fit almost the entire game inside my RAM, grrrr.

 

So this entire thing is just trying to tune up the performance a little.

Edited December 14, 2017 by Dubbyk

[SMB92]

I heard the texture ba2s were bugged like that, didn't know it was bugged for anything else.

 

Most of why F4 is getting those frame drops is because the render core is fully loaded, only one core is actually doing the hard rendering of polygons. I'm usually seeing 40 to 50% when that occurs. GPU will usually drop below 99% when this occurs. The API and engine obviously plays a big factor, but core IPC is what you need here.

 

I don't have to exit and enter, but I find that sometimes towards the end of 2nd or 3rd generation the Ck may become unstable. So I start it fresh each time. You don't have to, if you feel confident enough about it.

 

I've been down the same road you have, but I simply don't have the time to keep mucking with it. I just focus on smaller mods for now until better methods are discovered (I know some folks were looking into it). The new ck seems to have some hidden gremlins with generations now (well it did when I made some smaller generations for mods I use, not sure if it still does)

[Dubbyk]

"Why did you reopen the CK with different Ugrids set and redo the process so many times? Was this just to make your mod compatible with different end user set ups? Or is their some other gain I am missing."

 

Maybe I worded my question badly, I get why you maybe open and closed the program now, but why generate the data at 11, 7 then 5, all for the same area?

[Dubbyk]

Also do you know if it matters if you put the default compression on the - Main.ba2 that holds the precombined mesh and vis data?

[SMB92]

I have only used default compression on my "Main" (non texture) BA2s, so yeah.

 

Why I generated at different ugrids? So I only covered the areas (approx) I wanted to cover. There's no option to generate Vis for world, so there's no "easy way out" so to speak (even though that means gigs and gigs of new and mostly pointless data). I drew of map of how my patch covered it, but don't have it anymore. Basically 11 grids gets the whole of Cambridge (centered on Kendall), then going over to Crater and gening 7 grids gets the missed part between Cambridge and bunker hill, then doing BH at 5 grids gets the cells miseed on the outside of there, and then doing Downtown (because I have Better Goodneighbour) at 7 grids got all that area and joined to the south of Bunker Hill. Worked out real well, I think it was about 3-4 GB all up. I had Beantown, PoE and Stumble Upon.