Old Post Performance impact with prebuilt cities

This is more of a general question, so I think general section is the proper place for this thread.

I recently finished a playthrough with RotC 3-in-1, where I had most of the settlements evolve to lvl 3, with a few special locations (Sanctuary, Castle, and a few other) that I developed manually. While I never had any major issues (I was using maxed out performance options and complex city plans) on my system, I did have recurring minor issues such as occasional CTDs when travelling to/from settlements, cities not upgrading or not increasing built limits until I manually fix it, and so on. By the end of the game those issues started to be slightly more frequent, as I had every single settlement in the game being closed to maxed out.

For my next playthrough I would like to do a settlement-free run, with neither minutemen nor raider quests. However, I would like to see most settlements as fully built lvl 3 cities, as it makes for a much more immersive experience, with traders and other options available for travelling mercenaries like the one I intend to play.

Therefore, my question is as follows: if I wait for all cities to be fully upgraded to lvl 3 in the start up sequence, but then ignore/kill both Preston and Jammer, how much of script workload will there be for all lvl 3 cities? I assume that because they will be fully upgraded and I will not be capturing them, scripts that calculate needs, happines, production, attack/defense scores, etc. will not be running? So there should be less of an impact on my game performance compared to my last run where all settlements were captured, connected and slowly upgraded from lvl 0 to lvl3?

 

The biggest performance hit will be all the extra npcs that will be active when those settlements are loaded into memory. Depending on the plans chosen, that may be quite a lot of active npcs. I don't believe that the settlement management scripts will be active until you take control of the settlement.

 

@Yagisan By "extra npcs" do you mean guests, artisans and the such, or actually all extra settlers?

 

Settlers and guests.

 

I play survival - Horizon - etc. so fast travel is not an issue for me, though I do realize it takes time to load a cell with ROTC/Conqueror - even with my new computer, I have pretty much the same (but less) - similar - lag. With the survival and no fast travel, and sometimes taking my time walking towards a settlement - I have no CTD's. If I do play a non-survival game, with fast travel, I never fast travel to an ROTC city, but find a location that is close, but perhaps 1 cell inbetween (so 2 cells away) ... So, if I want to go to the worst lagging ROTC for me (Starlight), I will fast travel to Bedford or Thicket, mystic pines, etc... and walk towards Starlight (level 3 complex plans ultra - puts me about 35fps 1080TI) ... no CTD. Yes, extra walking.

BTW - there is a mod that lets you have more locations and discover... I haven't used it for awhile because I am trying to minimize my load order... but will probably use it again.

John

 

@MrCJohn
CTDs that I experienced were rare and not a recurring issue (i.e. a CTD will only happen once, after loading the game back it won't happen again), it is more so that I'd like to know if there's any benefit to having all settlements being prebuilt at start to minimize script load for the rest of the playthrough.

 

Old forum... saw activity... forgot about it.

For the Scavenger Horizon type player, I have been playing Atomic World - love it btw.
For the more game play kill a lot - and a lot of scavenging - Fallout Reloaded - love it too. (more lag so a good system definitely needed)

My experience is having the fully loaded pre-built is better for the lag during game play (things going on in the background while you are off killing … and as long as you stay out of a cell with big cities, not bad at all.

If you are doing pre-builts, I have found having Outpost Zimonja and Ten Pines at the same time.. is problematic... same cell, relatively close to each other... and have had CTD's in this area.

Lately, almost all of my CTD's are related to the UI system, VIS-G, and scaleform data dumps that overwhelm the UI - example is when overloaded, hitting "T" for perk tree - CTD.

And many mods just dump stuff but don't clear it out. This especially happens I find is when there are a lot of NPC's in an area, lots of character animations, etc...

This is just my opinion... I still think most big mods need to dump data etc to an external file... to have an internal system for shutting down scripts when not relevant (compartmentalize better?) …

In the end it is still a shitty Beth engine... for the love of G-d, would I pay for a better engine... something that goes beyond 128, 256... make Fallout 4 the monster it could be...

My penny for the day. Wooden. Better than a nickel.
John