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Question about lage and small scale


Honeybiscuit

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I have a question for the experienced. I am working on an inside building and was needing a question answered. The walls within this building are a lot. If I increase the scale of the walls it will reduce the number of walls that are required (in short less objects to process, I hope). Will it make a difference in processing speed if I increased the scale of the walls as oppossed to using many walls?
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Honeybiscuit - Hello!

 

That's an interesting question, I can't definitively answer it, though I've wondered about cell size & performance myself.

 

Some thoughts though...

 

Kit pieces (the building parts included in default Fallout) tend to be very economical memory wise.

 

It tends to be large quantities of havoked or large (hi-res) textured items that start to eat at resources.

 

As to scale the advantages to large wall segments would be less pieces for the game to process.

 

The downside though would be that large pieces would not be culled as readily as small pieces. The game culls chunks when not in view so small bite size pieces are more likely to get cut whereas large bits won't go out of view so easily & won't get cut.

 

Probably the reason why the vanilla game does not make big corridor or room size chunks but rather leaves them in single kit piece segments.

 

Breaking large levels into sections connected by load doors is a good way to prevent bloated cells.

 

Depending on your cells needs you can also use Room Markers & Portals to enhance performance:

 

http://geck.bethsoft.com/index.php/Bethsoft_Tutorial_Optimization#Room_Marker

 

Places like the Dunwich building have pretty big cells but break them up with Room Markers.

 

Though it's worth noting Room Markers have side effects on havoked items that could possibly move from one Room Marker to another (they turn invisible), so I use them sparingly & not where important havoked items are likely to cross over.

 

A little while ago while making a large cell I discovered a feature that does not seem to be documented in GECK, the "Memory usage frame".

 

It seems that when cells reach a critical size the GECK first displays a thin green frame around the Render window. If the cell grows that turns to a Red frame which I'm guessing is very bad. I've seen odd things in cells afflicted with the Red frame warning.

 

So it's a good idea to look out for those warning frames on cells that you think may be too big, I'd take them as a warningto break up the cell.

 

I posted a larger article about the Memory usage frame in the Fallout Mod Authors section but it seems no one knows about this feature as I've had no replies:

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/878363-show-memory-usage-frame/

 

Hope this helps!

 

Prensa

Edited by prensa
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