Fight with 15 radroaches slows game to halt.

[EPDGaffney]

I made a custom enemy that is a tiny version of the radroach and very aggressive, with the speed multiplier very high. I dropped 50 of them into the room and the game was unplayable. I reduced it all the way down to 15, put the speed back to normal, turned off their audio, and gave them a script to use all four functions mentioned here:

https://geckwiki.com/index.php/SetAllReachable

and the results are barely any better.

 

The cell is a duplicate of the bottlecap counterfeiter cellar, but with most of the clutter and all the lights removed. I'm not positive that the script is working correctly but it's a GameMode script attached to them so it should update every frame as the wiki suggests. Their audio sounds as if it's occurring less often but I still hear it and I'm not sure why. My guess would be it's built into the animations but I've never worked with that in this engine so I don't know. Where I disabled it was the Sounds tab of the Creature form.

 

I've had fights with upwards of 50 enemies in mods before (not my own mods) and maybe 20 actors in the vanilla game, so I'm not sure what I'm missing.

[kingbeast88]

Is their speed multiplier higher than a Young Cazador 300 and 90 turning?

[ZeroAndOne]

>.>

Edited February 5, 2018 by ZeroAndOne

[EPDGaffney]

@Kingbeast88

Both values are currently set at 100, and the vanilla radroach's turn speed is at 200 which is now twice as high as my custom one's turn speed.

 

@ZeroAndOne

'FNV never did well with more than 20 when it launched & they patched it. You could make it do more, but it required heavy optimization of everything.'

First, yes, more than 20 actors are present in a few instances in this game. I don't know how they optimised it but even so, a lot of mods go for massive brawls as climax events and I've counted over 60 bodies after a few of them.

 

'Do you have a proof of concept with the vanilla assets for the vanilla radroaches?'

These are vanilla radroaches with higher aggression and lower size. If someone knows that one of these settings happens to be one of this engine's very rare bugs that it doesn't experience every time it tries to attempt to hope it could think of a dream about processing data, I would be interested.

 

'Why a gamemode script? Do you just not understand the math behind a run in every frame of the game? It's a lot.'

If you read the wiki, the optimising functions I'm using get turned off every frame, so they need to be turned back on every frame, which is exactly what's advised in their wiki entries. Also, there are currently just 15 enemies in this cell, not 50. This script should have no impact, and I can confirm no difference in results after testing running the script both not at-all as well as making a custom clutter item with the script on it and removing it from my roach enemy, which ran the script on one object instead of 15. I don't think you realise how many scripts this game is running constantly, moreover scripts that reduce performance whereas my script is purely to increase performance.

 

'Why didn't you just make VFX for it? If it's over 20, I think maybe it would be better built as some kind of VFX of infestation.'

I turned off the audio entirely and it didn't turn off. Did you not catch that? I'm still making my mod...that's why I didn't 'just make VFX for it' yet.

 

'What about like, a tactical challenge instead of "The War Of The Roaches" Different Radroaches with different Ai that is hard to predict & various types that throw the player a curve ball, different speeds or attacks. Seems more fun than just a straight up numbers game.'

I had the most sarcastic thing written here but I've erased it. Basically, you have literally no idea what is in my mod. You have no idea why I want to do this. It is not a roach mod or something...

 

It sounds a little silly, all I'm saying.

That's what I thought about your font choice but I wasn't going to say anything.

 

 

And conclusion: It was the scale adjustment. Not a problem, really, as I was going to make a custom model for these anyway. But yes a problem because why is this engine so stupid?

Edited February 2, 2018 by EPDGaffney

[Mktavish]

 

I've had fights with upwards of 50 enemies in mods before (not my own mods) and maybe 20 actors in the vanilla game, so I'm not sure what I'm missing.

 

I've often puzzled over this function "SetSceneIsComplex" http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php?title=SetSceneIsComplex

 

Maybe that one is what you need , or multiple of the 4 mentioned in "SetAllReachable"

Meaning ... use them together ?

 

But yes ... I imagine scaling the roaches to mini versions may be adding some issues.

 

And I guess you could call the engine stupid in this context ... but it is more like they didn't incorporate the scaling feature to include all of the elements with an object. So when you scale something ... other elements of it do not scale with it.

 

Like for example ... I know this is of a different vein. But I made a script to move water up/down. By just adjusting the Z position of the water surface. And with placeable water besides the visual surface element. There is also the element where you swim on the surface and start holding your breath beneath it. But those elements do not move with the visual surface. Also I was not able to disable the placeable water I had just moved ... without returning it to its original position. Otherwise it would crash the game.

Edited February 3, 2018 by Mktavish

[EPDGaffney]

I've worked with several engines in the past and anything that facilitated scaling did so far more easily than this. In fairness, yes, the engine should get credit for several things that it does well, and all things considered there is a lot of data it's handling at once, but still, I know this will work perfectly when I make a smaller model myself and import it, which means their scaling code is deeply flawed if it causes this kind of performance hit with more than what appears to be about five scaled actors. And you're right, it doesn't scale everything, because when they get turned to ashes, the ash pile is about 500 times the size of the body, and if you kill them in any other way, they turn into giant dust-storm-like things that move round the room at lightning speed. They missed something when they put this feature in the engine for sure.

Edited February 3, 2018 by EPDGaffney

[Mktavish]

Well in my experience of scaling objects , which has mostly been statics , it works just fine.

Although it is limited to 10.0 on the larger and .01 on the smaller. Which does still exhibit what I would call stresses from the stretching / shrinking. Like to make placeable water larger ... it starts to have problems with displaying the reflecting and refracting properties. And I imagine making it smaller would have it's share of problems.

But dynamic objects with animations like actors ... It would seem following logic , that they would be the worse case scenario's to suffer from scaling. And I wouldn't say they missed something with the engine that does give so many possibilities to get things done. Just that they didn't warrant that extra work worth the effort on the off chance that someone would want to make a bunch of mini actors for a fight scene. Especially when like you said ... you can simply scale the model outside of the engine to fix that issue.

Edited February 3, 2018 by Mktavish

[EPDGaffney]

If you're happy with it, great, but this is easily the buggiest engine I've worked with. It makes sense that something that's barely had work done on it since 1996 would have trouble with the expectations of 2010.

[Mktavish]

If you're happy with it, great, but this is easily the buggiest engine I've worked with. It makes sense that something that's barely had work done on it since 1996 would have trouble with the expectations of 2010.

 

But the point of the Geck forums is not how to make the Geck better ... But the reality of how to use the tools given. Even though yes ... we have people making addons to make it better. But still ... they are working with what is given ... and seeing what is possible.

 

That is why I like the Geck ... compared to the few other engines and editors I have worked with.

This one lets your imagination work for you vs boxing it in.

 

As a grey scale mention of comparability anyways :geek:

[EPDGaffney]

I'd hope most editors are at least trying to do that. I like that Bethesda tried as well, but it's obvious that the engine and its editor should have been improved more between each game, and I think Zenimax/Publisher-Bethesda just didn't want to fund that or didn't want to give them enough time to do it. The spellchecker uses Win95 as an example word. That's kind of scary.