Looking for Adhesives to Repair a Broken Mask

[yakalrad]

I have been playing this game since release, vanilla for the first 10 months on PS4, in which I put in over 2500 hours, then switched to Xbox and started modding my game the very weekend in September 2016 when they first announced that PS4 mods were canceled. I may be a relative newcomer to Nexus but I have been around the Commonwealth block a few times and am definitely not new to the game. I am also not new to Bethesda games nor the Fallout series as I have extensively played both FO3 and NV. Nevertheless, I am strictly a console gamer, have never played on PC.

 

I have been so captivated by this game and excited about the future of console mods, that soon after release, I started reading everything I could about them on places like Nexus and AFKMods. Because of my love for FO4, I joined the Bethesda forums in April of 2016 with a desire to learn about the game and what happens behind the scenes, and to be able to discuss all aspects of it with like minded individuals. However, as of late, I have noticed several debates and statements in the Bethesda forums about certain game mechanics that just dont jive with my understanding of how these things work, which leads me here. I am hoping that you good and knowledgeable people of the Nexus, who have been using and creating mods for Bethesda games forever, would be able to help clarify some points of contention, in laymans terms if possible, and be willing to answer a couple of questions for me?

 

1. There is a lot of discussion about pre-combined meshes over in the Bethesda forums. Broken pre-combined meshes are a huge deal on console because they can severely impact the games performance on the Xbox and PS4. When I first started modding my Xbox game in September of 2016, I noticed that certain houses in a few settlements were now red instead of their usual gray color in vanilla. Also, I had noticed that other houses throughout the CW, outside of settlements, had changed color. This really perplexed me, and at the time, I asked around the Bethesda forums about why this was the case, but no one could give me a concise answer. Fast forward to the present and I finally have an answer, it is a visual effect of broken pre-combined meshes. I was using a scrapping mod back then that was much later determined to break the pre-combined meshes across the whole map, hence the texture changes. My question is, as has been claimed on Bethesda.net, are there any other kinds of edits that DONT break the pre-combined meshes that can also reproduce these same unintentional texture changes?

 

2. It has been claimed that broken pre-combined meshes are baked into your save and that mid-game removal of a mod that has broken them will cause irreparable harm to your save over time. While it might not be a good idea to remove a mod mid-game for other reasons, it is my understanding that pre-combined meshes are not persistent references and that once you remove the offending mod, in this case say the scrapping mod I was using in the beginning, that the pre-combined meshes are restored. Can you shed any light on this claim that unless you roll back to a save from before it was installed, mid-game removal of a mod that breaks the global pre-combined meshes permanently damages your save?

 

I appreciate you all taking the time to read my post and for any insight you may contribute to this discussion. I may be a console gamer, but my fascination with the intricacies of this game make me want to learn as much as I can about it. Since these days I feel as if facts are subjective in the Bethesda forums, the Synthetic Truth if you will, I have come here in the hope of finding some real answers. Thanks again!

Edited January 25, 2018 by yakalrad

[VIitS]

1) The reason for the visual change is because the material saved in the precombined mesh is not the same one set in Fallout4.esm (or whatever DLC plugin it's happening with). There are two ways it can happen without breaking precombineds: a) Replacing the textures the material (in the precombined nif) uses, or b) remaking the precombineds/manually editing the precombined nif to point it at a different material. If a mod has no loose files or .ba2, and is just a esp/esm, the only way it can cause that change is by breaking precombineds. In-game, you cannot affect a precombined mesh at all. You can't scrap it, you can't select it and disable it (using the console, something Console versions of the game can't access), you can't have a script do anything to it.

 

2) LODs are baked into your saves, precombineds aren't. The main save I use for testing (I rarely actually play anymore) has over 300 hours of playtime. I have disabled and re-enabled (or left disabled) so many mods (including ones that disable precombineds), so many times, that I am actually surprised that it is stable. I have never noticed any instability not caused by a bad plugin. I have even made new precombineds for cells I had already visited (so if precombineds were baked into the save, they would be here), and not had any issues.

 

What is baked into a save is what you have and have not scrapped. So if you scrap something with the referenced scrap mod, disable the mod (allowing the precombineds to show back up), and then re-enable it later on (or use a different mod that disables precombineds), the stuff you had scrapped will disappear again. But it won't hurt your save.

 

The only mods I know of that will break saves are ones with actively running scripts, and those will immediately break the save (trying to load it without the mod results in an immediate crash).

 

If you want to know way, way more about precombineds, the most comprehensive collection of knowledge on the subject is this thread

[chucksteel]

Thank you for the confirmation! I've been singing this song so long on Beth.net and it must be like a "Backstreet Boys" song because no one want's to hear it! :wallbash:

[yakalrad]

@VlitS I would like to thank you for taking the time to respond. You confirmed a few things I had already suspected were the case. For the past few months, I have been following the thread you linked. Admittedly, it is quite lengthy, technical, and I have had to re-read some of the posts in there several times over as some of it is above my pay grade, but it is very interesting to me nonetheless.

 

I have known Chucksteel for a while now and have been using his mods in my Xbox game since I started modding it back in Sept/Oct of 2016. I am well aware of all the work he has done with precombineds, both with breaking them in Beantown and regenerating them in his Optimization Patch. He is a clever and passionate mod author with a keen sense of humor who I respect tremendously as he is an all around decent person that goes out of his way to help both the PC and console modding communities. I totally trust his knowledge on the subject of precombineds. It is so nice that you can corroborate everything that he has been saying, which unfortunately, has fallen on a lot of deaf ears.

 

Since as a console gamer, I am unable to investigate exactly what a mod does behind the scenes, Chucksteels very informative post on Beth a couple of months ago about how console players can use the visible texture changes that happen on some SCOLs and with the alpha channels on paintings in order to determine when precombineds are broken vs. intact, was a Eureka! moment for me. It gave me the answer to the texture swap mystery I had long pondered and made me feel worthy of that Faded Trench Coat and Worn Fedora that Nick bestowed upon me. I have a couple of additional questions if you dont mind.

 

A. In your answer to the first question in my OP, you said this about the texture swaps:

There are two ways it can happen without breaking precombineds: a) Replacing the textures the material (in the precombined nif) uses, or b) remaking the precombineds/manually editing the precombined nif to point it at a different material.

I am assuming, that since the use of external assets is prohibited on PS4, that neither of these methods are allowed on that system. Is this a correct assumption? If so, this would mean, and please correct me if I am wrong, that there is no possible way any mod made with PS4 in mind can produce these texture swaps on purpose, nor with any other type of edit, intentional or not, that does NOT break precombineds. Sorry if I am repeating myself here, I just think this is important to reiterate, but seeing how these texture swaps can only occur on PS4 by breaking the precombineds, and by no other type of edit whatsoever, if one notices these texture changes in their game after installing any particular mod, can they safely assume that said mods breaks their precombineds?

 

B. Some FPS mods meant to improve game performance, Insignificant Object Remover in particular, are getting a bad rap on the Beth forums because it is claimed they break the global precombineds. It is my understanding that IOR, and other mods like it, just make adjustments to objects that are dynamically rendered as you travel around the game world, such as grass and some small twigs, rocks and debris, none of which are included in the precombineds. I know that some so-called performance mods can break precombineds, but I have tested IOR extensively in my day one, level 242, overbuilt, never modded, completely vanilla PS4 game and have not found the slightest bit of evidence that it does so. Not one single texture change in any of the spots I know where to check, and there are a LOT of locations I know where to look. Is it at all possible for a mod that only changes the values of the dynamically rendered landscape items to break the precombineds without causing the texture swaps?

 

Again, I deeply appreciate your participation here and I apologize if some of my questions seem redundant. I have more questions but will save them for later as this comment has already gotten quite long. See, this is why I cannot do Twitter! ;P

Edited January 25, 2018 by yakalrad

[VIitS]

A) Correct, the only way to cause that to happen for that to happen is to break precombineds, unless the object in question was never part of a precombined mesh (in which case a simple material swap can change it). 99.9% of buildings outside the settlements (and indeed, almost everything that isn't movable/interactable) are part of precombined meshes. If you're unsure (and have access to the main .esm files on a PC), FO4Edit indicates what is part of a precombined mesh by listing it as [Placed Object], and if it isn't part of a precombined it's just listed as Placed Object.

 

B) Just took a look at Insignificant Object Remover: as it doesn't touch any cell records (and doesn't include any ini edits), it is incapable of breaking precombineds. It just changes some "Grass" records, so if those records did get included in precombineds they wouldn't visibly change in the game. Can't say anything to other similar mods, but IOR definitely doesn't touch precombineds. If you change a base record (Grass, Static, Static Collection, Armor, etc...) but don't touch any Cell records (CELL) or Placed References (REFR), the changes will only apply to non-precombined versions of that base record.

 

 

It's why a mod like the Skyrim Mesh Improvement Mod are all but impossible for FO4. You'd either have to globally break precombineds, or rebuild precombineds for every instance of every object you want to change. Thanks to zilav (one of the makers of xEdit) it is possible to trim the unchanged precombineds, and thanks jonwd7 (maker of nifskope), it is possible to manually edit precombineds, so rather than 10+ GB of precombineds you might be able to get it down to 3-4, or maybe even 1 GB if you don't change as much as SMIM has, but you'd still have some big problems:

-That's still a huge download, especially for XBOX

-You'd have to regenerate precombineds every time you add a new object to the mod, so SMIM's method of adding things and updating the mod as they went would add insane amounts of work (a few hours of fixing up some meshes -> a few days of redoing precombineds)

-It's incredibly tedious, mind-numbing work that would likely make anyone just give up and only release a "breaks all the precombineds" version

-If you regenerate precombineds for every cell, it makes it incompatible with basically every mod that changes a cell (unless that mod breaks precombineds for the cell it is editing)

[yakalrad]

@VlitS Thanks again for your continued patience in answering my questions. Being unfamiliar with FO4Edit, and to touch on something you mentioned in answer A above, I was wondering if you could elaborate on its usage in determining whether precombineds are broken or not.

 

For instance, when he posted his tutorial on Beth, Chucksteel uploaded a small tester mod that broke the precombineds in a few cells where some of the texture changes happen so that any console mod user could install it and see these changes in-game for themselves. He accomplished this by introducing simple cell edits, ones that someone might do unintentionally and accidentally, which therefore broke the precombineds, which in turn caused the texture changes.

 

He also uploaded his broken precombined tester mod for PC so that anyone on PC could take a look at it in FO4Edit. However, when his tester is looked at in FO4Edit, it has been said that the precombineds appear to be intact. Again, not having a PC and being unfamiliar with FO4Edit, can you explain how after checking in FO4Edit, one might think that precombineds are intact when in fact they are not?

Edited January 26, 2018 by yakalrad

[VIitS]

Bethesda implemented a system that automatically disables precombineds and previs if you have a mod that touches a precombined reference and didn't generate new precombineds. It knows if you generated new precombineds by the timestamps (PCMB and VISI for Precombineds and Previs, respectively). So, since Chusksteel's tester plugin touches precombined references without any change to the PCMB field, it disables them. This isn't reflected in the Cell record, as it is a dynamic system that applies at launch.

Also, to clarify on how to tell when a mod touches a precombined reference:

As shown here, the ones with the brackets around placed object

[Placed Object]

are part of a precombined mesh, and if they show up in in your mod FO4Edit your mod will break precombineds (unless you make new ones) for that cell. And the ones that without brackets

Placed Object

are not part of a precombined mesh, and can be edited without worry.

[yakalrad]

I am assuming, and please correct me if my assumption is wrong, that Bethesdas dynamic system of automatically disabling precombineds and previs when a mod touches a precombined reference, is a hard coded engine level system? If this is the case, I would also assume there is no possible way whatsoever any mod that touches precombined references can avoid it? And just to make sure I am understanding this correctly, the reason someone may not realize that precombineds are in fact broken when looking at a mod in FO4Edit is because this is not displayed in the cell record and that the only way to see your edits is to regenerate precombineds, something that is impossible for PS4? Does this system work on strictly a cell by cell basis or does editing a precombined reference in one cell also disable the precombined in every other cell where this particular reference occurs? Edited January 27, 2018 by yakalrad

[VIitS]

It is indeed hard-coded, and can't be disabled. So yes, in the case of PS4 (which can't have new precombineds), you'd not be able to make new precombineds to prevent the system from triggering.

 

You might be able to trick it into thinking you did, by generating new precombineds, saving things so the timestamp matches the date modified for your plugin, then just uploading it without the precombineds. Not sure if the system needs to see an associated .ba2, as I have had it seem to work with loose files as well as packed. Though again, it might have seen the data modified on those loose files (or the fact that they were there at all stopped the system from triggering), I haven't looked much into that sort of thing. So it might be possible to have a PS4 mod "touch" a precombined reference without breaking precombineds. Of course, you couldn't edit precombineds, and even though you could remove a precombined from the lists (allowing you to scrap/move/delete it without issue) it wouldn't do anything about the collision info, as (almost all of) the collision data for meshes included in precombineds is stored in a single CELLID_Physics.nif file, the collision would stay even once the visible mesh was gone/moved. So even if you could trick the system into letting your mod "touch" those references without disabling precombineds, you wouldn't be able to make any actual changes to them, so you might as well just remove the references from your mod. And unless you edited the XCRI record to remove the precombined file (the relevant .nif) from the list, any visual change you made (including meshes changes or moving the position of it) won't be reflected in-game, since the position and shape of the precombined mesh is stored in the .nif, and it ignores anything in the placed reference record. And that's not even getting into previs, which would still think all the objects are there, so if you edit the XCRI record to let you visually remove something (and for whatever reason don't care that the collision will still be there), the things said object blocked from view (if it was of sufficient size to do so) will flicker in and out as you move around near where the thing used to be.

 

So basically, even if (and that's a big if) you can trick the game into thinking you made new precombineds, it won't be functionally different from not having touched the precombined reference in the first place, and it would just be a silly waste of time.

 

 

On the last question, it is done on a cell-by-cell basis. The auto-disable system was put in to allow mods to edit the worldspace more easily (as long as you don't care about the potential performance drop). As far as the game is concerned, a placed reference is completely distinct from the base record, or any other instance of it placed in the world, and since the system is triggered by a Placed Reference (an REFR record in FO4Edit), it will only affect precombineds for the cell that placed reference is in, disabling both precombineds and previs (the culling system that reduces performance needs by not rendering things that would be blocked from view by something, like a building). On an interesting note, using one of the ini edits to disable one of the two optimization systems (bUseCombinedObjects=0 and bUsePreCulledObject=0), it will disable the auto-disable system, meaning the other optimization system turns back on. That's the main reason why you sometimes see people complaining about the ini version of Spring Cleaning resulting in distant object flickering when you scrap buildings/tall hedges, since much less was known when Nverjos last updated his mod (Bethesda hadn't even fixed the Cell Reset bug :D).

 

Hell, trying to fix some issues with Spring Cleaning (namely updates to the base game somehow selectively disabling the auto-disable system, even for people with no mods except Spring Cleaning*) is what led to me knowing so much about precombineds. And based on what I have read, both here and on beth.net, I think it is safe to say I know more about breaking them than just about anyone :D **.

 

*I still don't have a clue what's going on there, beyond Bethesda being Bethesda

 

**Though I have spent a decent amount of time on regenerating them, there are definitely some people who know more about the creation side of them.

[yakalrad]

I’ve been hesitant to post further in this thread because I cannot see a way to ask my next question without directly quoting something I have read on Beth. I am only quoting it now because I truly want to know if this is even possible. The following has been said about certain scrapping mods that are only available on console:

“... gives users the ability to scrap objects part of pre-combined groups, without disabling the feature from the get-go, but rather letting the user selectively do so. In other words, interaction with objects part of pre-combines from within workshop mode is made available, but the optimization of pre-combine stands until the user decides to scrap/move/store an object part of it. Since it's one pre-combine at a time, the performance loss is minor; and if all objects are scrapped performance is increased.”

All of my tests with these particular scrapping mods installed on my pure vanilla PS4 game, with no other mods installed, and before scrapping a single item, have yielded nothing but the exact same texture changing results I see when first installing other mods that admittedly break pre-combineds. This begs the question, why are there texture changes if my pre-combineds aren’t broken from “the get-go”? Theoretically, if that explanation is valid, I shouldn’t see the texture changes at all, until I, as the user, breaks them. I have yet to read a valid reason for this occurrence on PS4, other than broken pre-combined meshes. And just to address the point in the above quote, yeah, if I wanted to scrap everything in every cell, performance might increase, but then it wouldn’t be Fallout.