Helios One, z-fighting door and slow LOD change

[machuidel]

Hello everyone,

 

I decided to give Fallout: New Vegas another try again.

 

When standing almost in front of Helios One (see attached screenshot) the LOD is not changing to its full model. It is only loading the full model when I am right in front of it when it is already too late.

The screenshot is from a clean install, clean save (just walked straight from Goodspring to Helios One) and no mods installed. Also note how the door is z-fighting with the building model.

I also installed the latest drivers for my videocard and even tried the onboard GPU. I am using the "Ultra" profile and tried different settings in my INI files as well. All without success.

 

This is not the only model that is having this issue but decided to use Helios One as an example. I know about the z-fighting issues that exists on far away mountains which I accepted as not being fixable.

Do you have this issue at Helios One as well? Hope someone knows how to fix this and to get to load the full model sooner (without increasing the grid size)?

 

Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Videocard: ATI Radeon 6950 2GB

Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T

 

Edit: Another person having the same problem as me: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-1581798.html

 

Thanks

[JimboUK]

My game does that at Helios One, I'm not sure if there is much you can do, the door itself is rendered horribly late. It might be worth looking in the GECK to see if it's set right, it should be visible from a distance, maybe it's not.

[SMB92]

Wow I have never had this problem and I just did the HELIOS quest in my current playthrough. Gonna try replicate it, i'll post a screenie of what it looks like for me now.

[machuidel]

Wow I have never had this problem and I just did the HELIOS quest in my current playthrough. Gonna try replicate it, i'll post a screenie of what it looks like for me now.

 

Would be nice if you could do that for me. But do you see this problem if you run the game without mods?

 

I also tried MMUE hoping that would fix it, but without success.

[SMB92]

Lucky for you I have a vanilla install on another HDD, for testing purposes. I will look into that as well, thanks for mentioning it, good idea. Mind you I don't have anything altering the HELIOS building in my modded playthrough, with the exception of NMCs textures.

 

Was busy yesterday, will get into this morning.

[machuidel]

Lucky for you I have a vanilla install on another HDD, for testing purposes. I will look into that as well, thanks for mentioning it, good idea. Mind you I don't have anything altering the HELIOS building in my modded playthrough, with the exception of NMCs textures.

 

Was busy yesterday, will get into this morning.

 

Thanks. Let me know if you had time to look into it.

 

In your recommended mod overview you say that you are using the HD Distant LOD meshes to fix the distant z-fighting issues. I tried that mod as well but I still see the flickering mountains.

I suspect this issue is caused by conflicting wasteland terrain textures as I installed Poco Bueno over the NMC textures. Also Vurt's Flora Overhaul is caused a lot of LOD issues which I fixed by putting its .esp at the beginning of the load order. Happy to see someone recovered the Monster Mod.

 

My game does that at Helios One, I'm not sure if there is much you can do, the door itself is rendered horribly late. It might be worth looking in the GECK to see if it's set right, it should be visible from a distance, maybe it's not.

I was thinking about doing that as well. Thanks for the suggestion.

[TheMothMan]

The issue is with uGridToLoad (fallout.ini).

If it's below 6, the Helios One exterior and door wont load properly in my game.

 

It should be set to uneven values however, so raising it to 7 will most likely fix this.

 

A few things to note however;
It will impact performance.

You might want to raise uExterior Cell Buffer (fallout.ini) to compensate and in turn raise iPreloadSizeLimit (fallout.ini) to compensate for that.

Futhermore, once you raise uGridToLoad, you cannot load to a save that was saved with a LOWER uGridToLoad value - meaning all your progress made AFTER raising the uGridToLoad value will be effectivly lost IF you have problems with the new uGridToLoad value and is forced to lower it down the line.

 

TL;DR: Set uGridToLoad=7 in Fallout.ini will fix this.

-TheMothMan