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Discussion Scrapping Mods/Performance Issues

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That's kool! At least console users have a little something to clean up with. :)

Yeah, further testing reveals that Scrap that Commonwealth completely breaks downtown Boston, especially around Goodneighbor. There are clear indications of broken precombines, and if that's not the problem, then something else is seriously broken.

This makes it all the more surprising that my experiment with the "triangle of death" was successful. I was already pushing the limits of the Xbox One X without STC, so I was sure that, if it broke all the precombines, I would at least notice some kind of performance hit with STC installed, but performance seemed about the same before and after, and that's rather confusing now.

This, of course, raises the probability that STS is actually just breaking all the precombines in settlements, but the impact to performance is not all that huge so I simply haven't been able to detect it so far.
 
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This, of course, raises the probability that STS is actually just breaking all the precombines in settlements, but the impact to performance is not all that huge so I simply haven't been able to detect it so far.
And there's your sign! LOL!
Like I said before, settlements are not that big of a performance hit. IF <<<Big IF, you restrict the broken precombines to the build area.
On PC you can toggle the usage via the console. But.. if I remember right it, has to be toggled before the cell is loaded. (might be wrong.. so don't quote me on that!)
And not being a code monkey.. I don't understand how you could select an item to scrap that is part of a precombine without it being broken first.
 
I don't understand how you could select an item to scrap that is part of a precombine without it being broken first.
Well, the mod authors are definitely trying to do something different. Whether they're succeeding or not is another question.

The best guess is that when you scrap an object that is part of a precombined mesh, they delete the precombined mesh entirely, but then respawn every object in the mesh individually. Since the game pauses the frame while executing the scrap command, you wouldn't see anything different. If you could see it happen, a whole building might disappear because you scrapped one pile of trash attached to it, and then the whole building and everything attached in the precombine would respawn individually except for the one part that you scrapped. That way, you could effectively disable each precombine only when the player actually scraps something from it.

This would require a whole bunch of detailed work setting up each command for each scrap item to remove and respawn the correct replacements for its precombined mesh. It just so happens that one of the few things the mod authors have shared about making the mod is that setting the whole thing up is extremely tedious work and that they developed some tool to help speed up the process.

I don't know if this is possible, but it's my best theory of what they're trying to do.
 
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If you look at Scrap Everything, yeah it would be tedious as all get out setting up all the forum lists & recipes and ..stuff without a little xEdit automation! hehe
But as you've already discovered.. STC breaks precombines right off the bat. And I'm guessing STS does exactly the same thing.
One way to check is to get a settlement expansion mod that expands a settlement well beyond the current cells. If STS is breaking precombines right off just in the original settlement cells, it will stop working outside those original cells.
 
But as you've already discovered.. STC breaks precombines right off the bat. And I'm guessing STS does exactly the same thing.

Well, my first attempt to test STC suggested that it was actually working as advertised. I had the "triangle of death" all upgraded to level 3, and the Xbox One X was already buckling under the load. It wasn't unplayable, but it was clearly struggling. I was sure that if STC really did just disable precombines, it should destroy performance in the triangle of death, and likely crash the game. But when I tried, there was no noticeable impact to performance, and everything worked just as it did before, except everything was now scrappable.

I suppose it's possible that STC is working in some parts of the map and not in others, and that the problems in downtown Boston could be rectified, though I'm not holding out so much hope.

One way to check is to get a settlement expansion mod that expands a settlement well beyond the current cells. If STS is breaking precombines right off just in the original settlement cells, it will stop working outside those original cells.

If the speculation about how STS is supposed to work is accurate, then STS probably can't scrap any object that it wasn't specifically set-up to scrap, because it's actually scrapping whole precombines and then respawning some of the pieces individually. Since it wouldn't have been set up to scrap precombines outside the settlement borders, discovering that it can't wouldn't tell us anything that we wouldn't expect.

There is one possible test, but I'm not sure how to do it yet. If I'm not mistaken, then precombined objects share the same loading pop-in, i.e. the whole precombine should appear at the same time. When precombines are disabled, then each constituent object gets loaded in separately and so their pop-in isn't synchronised. If so, then it seems like it might be possible to visually test for disabled precombines by contriving a way to get ahead of the loading, perhaps by installing a mod that increases player speed way beyond what the engine can reasonably handle. Then you could watch objects pop-in and see what happens.
 
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If you run Spring Cleaning Compatibility Patch (nothing to do with SC) it stops SE from breaking precombines outside of settlements.
hm, but why does SE break precombines outside of settlements in the first place? it doesn't actually edit all those cells, does it?

i read somewhere that if a scrap recipe exists for an object, it will never be included into a precomb. does that also automatically break all precombs where this object is included?
 
i read somewhere that if a scrap recipe exists for an object, it will never be included into a precomb
I wrote it here Custom Precombines and Sim Settlements, and here Precombine/Previs regeneration question for settlement mods.

An object with an existing scrap recipe will never be included in the NEW precomb for settlement cells. I haven't checked it for non settlement cells.

But if the object is already included in the precomb, it will not scraped, even if there is a scrap recipe.
Need to break precomb or regenerate a new precomb.

I did it here: Mirelurk Pond Settlement or here: Test recalculated Precombines/Previs data in Triangle of Death with Scrap mod
 
hm, but why does SE break precombines outside of settlements in the first place? it doesn't actually edit all those cells, does it?
No it doesn't.. and I was incorrect in that statement. Please forgive my dumbassery!
The SCCP actually covers the same settlement cells that SE does plus a few that SE misses. Like SanctuaryExt09 for example.

i read somewhere that if a scrap recipe exists for an object, it will never be included into a precomb. does that also automatically break all precombs where this object is included?
If that was the case then you wouldn't need bUseCombinedObjects=0 to scrap across the entire world.
Or even need to remove the pre vis reference of a cell.
Say you have a door mesh that is part of a precombined in downtown town Boston, but that same door mesh is also used in Sanctuary and is laying on the ground just waiting to be scrapped.
 
weird. i noticed that SE breaks precombs in mod-added settlements and assumed SE just breaks them in general.
 
weird. i noticed that SE breaks precombs in mod-added settlements and assumed SE just breaks them in general.
Unless the MO rebuilt them.. the CK will break them just adding a workbench.
 
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Maybe this would help in detecting what STS is doing? (Whoops, can't create links. Bethesda forum post titled simple yet subtle ways to detect broken pre-combined without the creation kit).

Anyway, after a long break and a crashed hard drive, I'm reinstalling Fallout.

I know that Clean and Simple breaks precombines and doesn't rebuild them.

I believe that it's still quite a bit better than scrapping mods in terms of stability and performance because it removes huge amounts of stuff with the CK rather than by disabling. I also believe that you can install Scrap Everything and still get the benefits of using C&S, plus the ability to clean up any settlements that C&S doesn't change.

Can anyone confirm that?

If so, I think I'm going to use C&S in the resource intense areas (triangle, Hangman's), and use RotC and SE to handle the boonies.
 
I know I promised to come back and answer questions/update the thread in Educational Vault, life has been in my way lately! But I haven't forgotten. :)
 
“Cluttered Mind” - truth in advertising :)
 
Truth be known.. she's still hung over. ;)
LMAO I only wish! Sadly it's been pretty dry in my house lately. This upcoming weekend however will be interesting and next week I'll be hungover for days most likely. :evil:
 
I tried Sanctuary Lite and I consistently ran into a CTD issue it. I had like three or four of them before I started looking into it. Simply because if ya get a stray CTD (which happens even with vanilla) you dont worry about it until you get consistency.

The consistency of the CTD was every time I got near the location first house bloatflies and your home. I could restart the game run to the same area and within a minute or two it would crash. I could do it in workshop mode and out of workshop mode.

So I disabled the mod (which brought everything back on top of my settlement) and the CTDs stopped. It made a real mess and was kinda funny.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd....187/DC8C6ABE5A22BFB5C32C1D2F8B475DF773D1D029/

Now that was WAY more budget with everything brought back for a normal Sanctuary. So it may not have been a budget issue, maybe. It is hard to tell because the modder pushed the settlement borders to cover the entire island and so the entire island terrain and stuff was included in the budget.

Another issue I noticed with Sanctuary Lite was I kept getting flashes of the long distance graphics while inside the cells. Those also went away when the mod did.

I should have known better when I hit the build limit really quickly at the start after barely building anything. Then I should have immediately ditched it once Sim Settlements had a conflict of not being able to increase the budget because the planning desk didn't recognize being in the settlement.
 
From the Boston FPS Fix mod:
- I would also like to make clear that using the console command to disable objects will have better results in many cases; BUT this too WILL break precombines and cause VIS issues; Do not let anyone try to tell you otherwise.
Thoughts?
 
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