Jump to content

DOWNLOAD MODS

Are you looking for something shiny for your load order? We have many exclusive mods and resources you won't find anywhere else. Start your search now...

LEARN MODDING

Ready to try your hand at making your own mod creations? Visit the Enclave, the original ES/FO modding school, and learn the tricks of the trade from veteran modders...

JOIN THE ALLIANCE

Membership is free and registering unlocks image galleries, project hosting, live chat, unlimited downloads, & more...

Road record, uGridDistantCount and Streamline


vometia
 Share

Recommended Posts

I guess the title makes it quite obvious this is a rather specific query!

I was curious why a particular combination of the above can cause really bad performance problems, and if anyone has any ideas. I've been faffing about with the road record in order to correctly add two new provinces to my game, Elsweyr Anequina and Valenwood Improved; prior to that, NPCs of a more wandery bent weren't able to travel, and now they are, so all is well there (for the record--which was an unintentional pun, honest!--I've started off with Arthmoor's excellent NRB road-generation grid and manually mapped the new provinces myself; which seems to have succeeded in spite of me forgetting how to delete the existing pathgrids en masse.)

All has been well, for the most part... unless I'm somewhere in the south, pretty much anywhere below Bravil but especially Leyawiin, or Haven in Valenwood, if I look towards Corinthe (near the south of Elsweyr) I get appalling framerate drops, typically under 10 fps with awful lag. Normally I'd expect at least 40 in outdoor areas, usually much higher.

(It's possible Corinthe itself could be the culprit since open cities aren't things Oblivion does well, but in this case it's so distant from the areas affected that it seems unlikely.)

The weird thing is, I only get it when I have Streamline active: it's fine otherwise, but no amount of faffing with its settings seemed to rectify the problem. Of course I don't want to disable Streamline as it's pretty much essential when using Better Cities unless I want my graphics permanently on minimum. Also for the record, I additionally have the Oblivion Stutter Remover installed, but I've told it not to monitor the min/max fps.

I have found a kind-of solution which is to reduce uGridDistantCount from its default of 25 to 15: this has little visual impact for me as I have the weather set up to always fog at a maximum of 40,000 units: that was influenced by Morrowind and intended to make the world look bigger (something I found wasn't the case in Morrowind if I used MGE and turned off fog!) Because of that, having 102,400 units worth of landscape being rendered is a bit of a waste as all I see are silhouettes of distant trees and objects: I don't want to nuke them all but it's rather inefficient as it is, so 15 seems like a good compromise. It has mostly done the trick, that <10 fps and lots of lag is now about 20 fps and some lag in the worst-affected areas, but I'm still curious as to exactly why it's happening: even with a solution, knowing the reason would still be nice!

The other benefit is that it's consuming less memory so I can now go for a startling 30 minutes or so between crashes, usually, whereas it was down to under 10 which was becoming almost unplayable. I guess I just have too much stuff loaded up, which isn't a good idea with Oblivion's extremely fragile memory management, but it'd be nice if this could also be mitigated somehow; sadly, Oblivion seems to be immune to the 4GB patch and won't use more than 2GB. But I guess this is getting off the point a bit...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

I'll be straight, I am new to the modding community however, I have created many successful modded operating systems that I will not comment on, so I am somewhat competent lols.  You might want to try to reverse engineer the issue.  There are different ways of doing this.  The most simple is to start with the unofficial patches and your mod only, and then slowly work your way up to your normal build trying to isolate the cause.   Both streamline and Oblivion Stutter Remover are Beta mods, and probably should not be used together.  I can assert there is little probability that OSR by itself is the culprit, but perhaps in combination with streamline or perhaps streamline alone.  I myself have not needed streamline, have a GTX 460 and G530 dual core cpu, with 8 GB of ram.  My suspicions are that streamline and your mod are competing with each unless you know precisely how the original cities were coded and are following the exact principles.  Makes sense?  In other words, your mod probably contains mistakes, and streamline probably still has some bugs. 

 

The first mod you want to install after unofficial and yours is Streamline.  If it fails then, you know streamline is the issue.

At that point, you want to open the steamline mod without the oblivion construction software, and try to walk the algorithm it uses through your mod, in essence do a pretend practice to see how the code will behave as it continues.  You should be able to isolate the issue, and patch it yourself :) 

 

I am currently working Oblivion Visual Overhaul 2013; a complete visual overhaul with 0 FPS  increase and tangible visuals.

My main issue which is slowing me down is identifying texture that I see in files, and matching them with their corresponding texture name....without having to go through all the textures.

Wish their was a console command.

Stuck right now on the the chapel steps in Bravil (everything else in Bravil is looking perfect).

Edited by ericore
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the suggestions!  I think the problem was caused by things pulling each other this way and that, and Streamline occasionally trying to be too clever (don't get me wrong, I love Streamline, but it sometimes gets a bit tangled up.)  The uGridDistantCount fix worked well enough to make me happy so I'm leaving that particular problem alone for now!  Now, if only I could find out why it's more unstable than I'd like... it's always hard to say if it's a bad mod (which is a little unfair in some cases, some things that can cause a CTD really shouldn't) or just Oblivion being Oblivion.

 

As for the chapel steps, can you click on them, get their reference ID, use it to look up the base ID, dig out the NIF and use that to find the texture path?  Or is it stuff like ground textures, which I really have no idea about trying to track down...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...

I am currently working Oblivion Visual Overhaul 2013; a complete visual overhaul with 0 FPS  increase and tangible visuals.

My main issue which is slowing me down is identifying texture that I see in files, and matching them with their corresponding texture name....without having to go through all the textures.

Wish their was a console command.

Stuck right now on the the chapel steps in Bravil (everything else in Bravil is looking perfect).

Have you tried using the Texture Replacer (tr) command to dump out the list of textures in the NIFs? That's a lot quicker than opening each one in NIFskope.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...