Diamond City glitches...

[yzerman19]

Okay...I haven't played FO4 in about 4 months...and am now getting back at it. I am using Diamond City Expansion by Statsmakten. But when I entered the city, parts of it are flickering and disappear until I get near them. Anybody know the problem? Which mod would interfere with it? I am only using a total of 97 mods...

 

[MissingMeshTV]

First, without posting your load order all anyone can do it guess at which 96 mods you’re using other than the one you mention. In future, if you post your load order (in spoiler tags please) you’d be giving people more info to try and help you with.

 

Someone else recently posted about a similar issue while using the same mod. I took a quick look at the mod and it seems to properly regenerate the precombined/previs data for the changes it makes. Good on the author for that!

 

The mod author recommends you put the mod as low as possible in your load order. Have you done that? Have you read FAQ on the mod page? It directly addresses the issue you are having. You might want to start there with your troubleshooting.

 

But..while the FAQ recommends reinstalling the mod, I would suggest that you do that manually. NMM has gotten very unreliable as of late. If that's what you're using, it's possible it hasn't properly installed the BA2 archive that contains the previs data. It's certainly worth a shot.

 

Best wild-ass-guess without any additional info (and if a manual reinstall doesn't help) is that you have a conflict with another mod that makes changes (intended or otherwise) to the cell(s) you’re having problems with. Thanks to the awful optimization system this game uses, any mods that make changes to the same cell will conflict if one (or both) of them regenerate the optimization data that gets disabled from making said changes. When I say “awful” I mean it’s awful for a game that allows users to make changes to the world with modding. I’m sure it works perfectly fine in games where modding isn’t a thing.

 

It would also be beneficial for your own education to check your loaded mods in FO4Edit for conflicts in the Diamond City worldspace cells. That would help you figure out if one (or more) is conflicting with the Diamond City mod. If it should happen to be a precombines/previs conflict at least you will know which mods are causing the problem and you can try adjusting them in your load order. Don't totally rely on LOOT as many people seem to recommend. It's not a magic bullet for load order management and is not without problems. Human intervention is almost always still required when using it. Worst case is you may have to investigate getting/making a precombined compatibility patch for any conflicting mods.

 

Whatever you do DO NOT make any .ini edits that disable precombined meshes or use other mods that attempt to remove the sort of flickering you’re seeing. Doing that will likely cause more many problems in the rest of your game than you are trying to solve here. Those are just shortcuts and workarounds, not actual solutions to the underlying problem.

 

EDIT for clarification: the reason that DC Expansion is recommended to be at the bottom of your load order is because of the precombined meshes/previs data of the optimization system I mentioned. If you put another mod that modifies the same space above it in your load order it will attempt to overwrite the changes made by DC Expansion. The game reads conflicting data and doesn't know what it should be rendering hence the flickering. If multiple mods regenerate optimization data for the same cell the only real solution is to create a previs patch for the mods involved. Thanks, Bethesda!

[Transient3292]

Putting it last in my load order solved the same issue on my end.

[yzerman19]

I figured It out yesterday. Can't remember what I removed to fix it, but the way I do it, is to remove half my mods, test. Then if I still have the problem, remove half my mods, test. If I don't have the problem after removing half, then I add a quarter on....etc...etc...etc.