A couple of basic questions

[vometia]

Hi all,

I've a couple of questions which may come across as being rather basic, but they're things I've never really found a satisfactory solution to. Of course I could look them up, but I'm afraid I may find many conflicting opinions and since I trust you lot, I figured I'd ask here!

First is internal lighting. For reasons that have become historic enough for me to have largely forgotten, I've assumed that the bulk of lighting in interior cells must come from light-sources rather than the cell's own lighting which seems to have become relegated to minor ambience only. I suspect I'm making a rod for my own back here because I've found it's often next to impossible to light an internal cell using light-sources only, certainly when stopping them from overlapping for performance reasons. As such, I've started bumping up the ambient light from under 10% to around 20% or so; is there any reason I shouldn't do this? The only thing I've found is that it's too easy to make the cell too bright (in which case, turn it down a bit!) and it's too easy to overdo it with directional light. But it's nice actually being able to find my way around; and more atmospheric to save the really dark bits for caves and dungeons instead of having the whole place a gloom-fest.

Another thing I was wondering is how much time to spend on performance optimisation: one of the things that really gave me modding fatigue is that I was spending twice as long trying to keep the performance at an acceptable level for what I'd consider was an adequate PC not running odds and ends like Streamline. Thing is, my idea of "acceptable" tends to be at least 40 fps, preferably 60+, whereas it seems that most people are happy with half that, and as an average. Better Cities doesn't worry overly about flat-out performance, for example, and it doesn't seem to harm its popularity too much. Obviously it's worth expending some effort to avert terrible performance (a formerly huge interior area of mine got broken down into half a dozen smaller bits, for example) but, again, I suspect I'm making a rod for my own back by being overly perfectionist about it.

NPC schedules I think I already know the answer to: I've spent a long time making these as complicated as possible, but a piece of advice I read a while back pointed out that nobody follows a particular NPC around all day, so forget it. Although I still like the idea of them popping up here and there at random, I guess I could do with expending less effort on that; one worry is the menace of "AI overload": has anyone experienced this syndrome for real? I think I've seen it once or twice (i.e. the thing where NPCs in general just "stop" and take a while to resume their business) but I've no idea if my mod is responsible, even a bit.

Finally, OBSE: I guess at this stage it's fair to assume that any serious mod users are using it. Especially given my history of not releasing my mods, should I really worry about making a contingency for its absence?

Sorry that this is a bit long, but some of these things contributed to my modder fatigue in a big way, so I figured it was time I asked for some opinions!

[HeyYou]

I would love to get a minimum 40 FPS everywhere.... especially IC Waterfront.... but, unless you have a pretty beefy machine, or, don't run many mods AT ALL, that is an unrealistic expectation. I run a rather extensive mod list, along with texture packs, and RAEVWD..... so, in the aforementioned waterfront, I dip to about 20 FPS or so. And that is perfectly playable. Oblivion isn't a first person shooter, where you need 200 FPS to be competitive.... anything over 20 or so, and you can't really tell the difference anyway.

Now, my point being here, tweaking your mod, and compromising features you would like, so someone with a machine that barely meets minimum requirements can still run it, is a useless exercise as far as I am concerned. Look at the overall impact of your mod, if it drops FPS by 50%, then you have an issue, but, if it's just a few percentage points, I really wouldn't struggle with that much. If it turns out that your mod is rather 'heavy' on the performance hit, but, you LIKE the way things are, just note that in the readme...... let folks decide for themselves if it is an unacceptable hit or not.

[vometia]

As far as I can tell, it has only a negligible effect on the rest of the game (and I suspect I'm probably giving myself too much credit for script overloading!); my concern is really just with my own areas. I suppose I am a bit of a "speed freak" when it comes to performance, but I get migraines easily; then again, Streamline fixes most of that stuff for me and the performance is fine compared to lots of mods where I think "yeah, whatever, it goes with the territory and I'd rather have the mod"!

Anyway, the point is, thanks, that opinion is worth knowing! Maybe I can actually start enjoying modding again instead of thinking of it as a chore!

And I think for those numerous houses I seem to have inadvertently added to it, I'll just leave their doors locked lest I get clutter fatigue again. I seem to recall that Onra's suggestion that got my started with my mod was "a few extra NPCs in the castles", not effectively creating new cities... yes, I am familiar with the concept of mission-creep.

Edit: probably not migraines, or not necessarily, lest I sound like one of those people who likes to elevate mere headaches to something exotic! Though I do get migraines now and then, motion sickness is my major bugbear with video games...

Edited September 30, 2011 by vometia

[Khettienna]

I am in complete agreement with HeyYou about this:

If it turns out that your mod is rather 'heavy' on the performance hit, but, you LIKE the way things are, just note that in the readme...... let folks decide for themselves if it is an unacceptable hit or not.

But there are things you can do to get back some FPS with taking away too much quality:

• Make new light objects that don't flicker or have sound attached (this is also a good anti-headache effort, I'm with you there). Let the fireplace alone be enough sound and flicker for a whole cell.
  
• Like you mentioned, use enough ambient light so you don't have uncomfortably dark corners, and so not every bit of the cell needs a light source
  
• Having your light sources be a slightly different color than your ambient light will be a little more interesting without requiring so many lights
  
• Use statics of combined objects instead of havoked misc. clutter for decorative items the player doesn't need to interact with (static booksets/filled bookshelves, static dishes, etc...)
  
• Items with transparency or reflections are more work to render, consider replacing with opaque/matte objects
  
• Simplify your path grids as much as possible without pathing becoming unnatural
  
• Avoid "game mode" scripts on objects; for times that can't be avoided, order your conditions so that as little will be processed as possible until needed
  
• If your NPCs have a lot of packages, try to adjust them so they don't overlap and give them simple but concise conditions

As for OBSE, I think at this point you can safely assume most people who are really interested in mods have it, or would be able and willing to get it. Mods like All Natural and Animated Window Lighting System require it, and those have hundreds of thousands of downloads, thus OBSE is quite widespread. I'm a fan of not introducing dependencies you don't really need - but if you really need this one, don't be shy about it.

You can probably ask for a volunteer or two to help you with those last interiors. Or you can cheat a little and copy/paste-in-place a vanilla NPC interior that uses the same structure, and just switch around a few bits, and probably nobody will mind since players won't really be hanging out there. You can always go back and spruce it up later if you really want.

[Arthmoor]

I generally find ambient lighting between 15 and 25 for each setting to be sufficient. This does two things: Takes the edge off the fade radius, and gets rid of the too-dark corner problem. For dungeons, I will often go down to 10 in each setting since it's supposed to be very dark down there.

As I tend to keep All Natural in mind, I usually err on the side of keeping things well lit but not overly bright. Enough to realistically see by at night but not enough to magnify the effects of being part of the interior weather daylight system. It's a delicate balance that's not always easy to get right.

Either way, definitely avoid bulking up on too many actual light sources. Doesn't matter if they're the fake bulbs or actual emitters. Even non-flickering light in large amounts can drag down performance. This amplifies itself the larger the cell is, so if you're going to get beyond about 3,000 units it might be helpful to make use of cell fog because that will limit what's on screen to be rendered.

Scripting is generally not an issue with Oblivion unless you manage to create something that accesses too much of a particular thing, like accidentally making a shader effect toggle on and off repeatedly. In general, even very large scripts will have no noticeable impact.

With NPCs, I will try and limit them to no more than 4 packages. A sleep package, one meal package in public, a task package and a default wander pack to fall back on. NPCs with more to do will get more as needed. If you have packages that only execute under specific quest conditions, consider adding them to the NPC on an as-needed basis using the AddScriptPackage script command. AI is one of the areas this game has serious problems with.

[vometia]

Thanks for the tips! The "ready made clutter" is something I really need to look into; I was kindly provided with a couple of links a while back but lost them, but I just noticed the modders' resources thread which seems like a good place to look. Copying existing interiors isn't something I'd thought of and part of me is protesting that it's "cheating", but I guess it doesn't pay to be perfectionist about it since perfectionism is what's put my mod on ice for over two years (I hasten to add that perfectionism and it actually being at all perfect are two entirely different things!)

The thing about transparency and reflection hadn't occurred to me for some reason; fortunately I haven't over-indulged there but now I understand why goblets and glasses are typically of a rather matt appearance in Oblivion.

Some of my internal areas are huge, even after being broken up, so lighting them is a bit of a headache. I think I'm going to have to go up to 40ish on average in some of those areas, but I guess some experimental screenshots for the sake of comparison will guide me to the best overall balance. I have used some cell-fogging already which I rather like because I think it adds to the atmosphere of a castle with a likely plethora or roaring fires! Oh, and the different coloured ambience compared to lights is a great idea, hadn't thought of that.

I think the hardest one for me is going to be to make my NPCs' packages simpler: I kind of like giving them lots of personality, though even without performance considerations it can also add to modders' fatigue if I overdo it. Perhaps a quest script to manage a bunch of NPCs using AddScriptPackage might be a good balance.

I also wonder if I might've overdone the pathgrids too, by the sound of things: at typically 16 nodes for every 512x512 cell (assuming no obstacles are present) perhaps they could be thinned out, or at least future grids made a bit more sparse.

Reassuring to know about both the scripting performance and not being too fastidious about avoiding OBSE-isms though! But it's still anyone's guess if it'll ever see the light of day...

[vometia]

Just played around a bit with the lighting; the top screenshot is the old one with low ambient lighting, the lower one has increased ambient lighting (otherwise everything is much the same). My feeling is that the ideal amount is somewhere in between... and probably without the slightly greenish tint that seems to have crept in somehow!

[_echo]

The first one looks good. Though I am bias to dark places with heavy contrast. However, the light radius is far too defined.

The second one, the light radius is much better, but IMO the ambient light is ttaking away from the depth of the room.

Remember that the more ambient light you use the more normal map textures are rendered useless. Normal maps att the more rough details to objects so they don't look flat and lifeless.

And just because Im a nitpicker

@Khett: AWLS only has 62,107 unique downloads. Not hundreds of thousands. And only 13,616 have the latest version. The download count isnt very accurate as it tallys up the total downloads for all files and unique downloads for all files, and the unique download count as a result, includes people who redoanloaded each new version. So while the mod is widely popular, its not nearly popular as the download counts lead one to believe.

[Khettienna]

And just because I'm a nitpicker: AWLS has ~205k total downloads, while AN has ~152k total downloads, for a combined total of ~357k, which is indeed a sum of multiple thousands of downloads, and that is what I meant when I said "hundreds of thousands of downloads". Either way, my obvious point was that lots of people use them, therefore lots of people have OBSE. Now if we're done playing semantic checkers, I do agree that the first one looks better, and it wouldn't be awful to have the "somewhere in-between" lean closer to the first one. I really like your work, Vometia, and I hope you'll Relz one day.

[vometia]

Thanks again for the comments!

Didn't realise that the ambient light compromised normalmaps, which I guess contributes to my perception of lower contrast. More experimentation is required, I think... One thing I discovered was that the rule about not letting light spheres overlap for performance reasons isn't necessarily true... or at least not in an absolutist sense. I spent a long time when originally lighting the place up ensuring that my lights might just about touch but not intrude into each other's spheres, which I think has actually given the lighting a rather piecemeal effect which is partly what I'm trying to cure. Perhaps excessive overlapping causes problems (I'm not sure either way) but it would appear that a modest amount seems to make no real difference to performance.

I really need to read up on light falloff and stuff, too.

Oh, and on an unrelated matter, using a text editor to make mass changes to a plugin is potentially hazardous as I've just discovered! I'm not being quite as reckless as may seem to be the case, using a binary-safe editor (though it still needs a script to check for the editor sneakily putting a newline on the end of the file and removing it if it finds one) but what I hadn't considered was that short enough strings may just appear at random in the binary portions of the file. Oopsie. Thankfully, backups were at hand... (Obviously this technique won't work at all if the plugin has compressed records or if the thing being replaced is a different length, since the overall length is often specified in a binary value nearby... and even when it does work, it's probably inadvisable!)

Edit: I should really release some stuff. I've actually created dozens of mods for Oblivion and FO3/NV, but I've released a grand total of one. And that was just adding some wrists to gloves that were missing them...

Edited October 1, 2011 by vometia

[vometia]

Oh. Unfortunately I didn't have a full backup of my Oblivion installation... unfortunate because for reasons best known to itself, OBMM has just deleted half of it.

It took me two months to install.

[vometia]

I'm trying to pull myself together here. It seems unlikely that OBMM would simply delete a whole bunch of files without warning, so I figure it must've moved them somewhere; only I can't work out where. Anybody got any ideas where to look...?

[Arthmoor]

I lean toward favoring the first picture. I like the darker, more moody lighting that gives.

Overlapping of light sources in and of itself isn't usually bad. The problem is that it usually means the person is adding a bunch more light sources to continue overlapping until the cell is covered. The cumulative addition of so many extra light sources is the real problem.

Have you tried doing a drive search for the files you've had go missing? As much as I despise OBMM, arbitrarily deleting things isn't one of its behaviors. Perhaps the files have "vanished" into the Virtual Store (assuming you're on Vista/7).

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore

[Khettienna]

Nope, OBMM will actually delete files without being told. Here is what happens:

1) You install an omod via OBMM.

2) You launch OBMM at a later time, and OBMM can't find the omod, either because you moved/removed it or you changed a file path somewhere.

3) OBMM then very kindly removes all the files that belong to the omod for you, since you clearly don't want them. How nice.

If you have a lot of omods, that can whittle down your install pretty quickly. If you're using omods to the exclusion of other install methods... *BOOM*.

I hear OBMM Extended prevents this from occurring, however. I've not tried it, but it's on the list.

[Arthmoor]

Wow, that's a pretty vicious bug then and I'm glad I don't use OBMM for anything more than BSA management.

[vometia]

I'm using OBMM extended: it deleted about 80% of my installation, sadly. Even though I documented it, it's still rather tricky trying to put it back together.

Fortunately I had the presence of mind to back up my WiP again before using OBMM to try to restore the stuff it had just deleted; just as well, because when I told it to import the list I'd saved (only about a third of it worked anyway) it tried to silently overwrite it.

I'm not really sure what its authors are thinking, allowing it to do such utterly destructive and ill-advised things; I'm torn about continuing to use it because it can be an easy way to upgrade packages, but as I've just discovered, it can also be an easy way to completely destroy your installation. Fortunately it doesn't seem like any of my WiP stuff has been annihilated, but there was certainly an element of luck involved.

I thought reinstalling all that stuff might at least fix the regular CTD I get between Bravil Barrowfields and Elsweyr Anequina, but it doesn't. <_< Absolutely no idea what's causing that, and it's as likely as not nothing to do with the two mods in question. But that's another matter!

I've made more progress than I expected restoring my Oblivion installation, so it'll be back to playing around with lights before I know it! Though I've got a nagging feeling that I'm going to struggle to be happy with whatever I end up doing.

[Arthmoor]

As bad as the situation is, it sounds like the perfect opportunity to get acquainted with BAIN rather than play more Russian Roulette with OBMM.

[vometia]

I'm inclined to agree, but I felt utterly lost last time I looked at it, and was equally perplexed by the documentation. Do you know of a handy "idiots' guide"?

[darkstone]

I would recommend The Wrye Bash Pictorial Guide , well written and easy to understand.

[Khettienna]

I also agree that it's a good time to switch to BAIN. I still use omods for my straight-up replacers, but that's only because I dread the days-long project of unpacking and repacking them all as BAINs. If I really had to start over, I wouldn't bat at eye at switching. For modding and playtesting, I have a separate install for each, just to be safe - and you can use M.O.M. (IS's Multiple Oblivion Manager) to set that up rather easily as well.

[vometia]

Pictorial guides are always welcome - I'll check it out!

Thanks for the reminder about the multiple Oblivion thing: I tried to set up something like that a couple of years ago but made it hideously complicated, so not unexpectedly it didn't work; that someone else has gone to the effort of doing the tricky stuff makes it a much more attractive proposition.

[vometia]

This now seems to be turning into more of a case of "argh, my intestines!", or rather "my installation is broken!" I'm strongly suspecting the reason is excessive memory use; I think maybe it's time to ditch QTP3, which looks too sandpapery for my liking anyway.

Sigh, I should've known the moment I started work on my mod again that I'd get side-tracked. Okay, so it isn't entirely my fault this time, but it's not like I need much encouragement. I'm now reminded of why it took so long to install: a couple of days to do the installation, another couple to tweak various settings to my liking, and about 350 years to muck about with everything. There's no hope for me.

Oh, and it's looking like the Bravil Barrowfields crash is probably also down to not enough memory. Dunno of the 3GB hack works with OBSE, but it makes me feel better.

[Arthmoor]

Which 3GB hack are you referring to?

[vometia]

Which 3GB hack are you referring to?

Turning on the ">2GB address space" flag with CFF Explorer. Which in Oblivion's case may or may not do anything useful.

Still can't get BAIN to work; tried following the instructions, but same as last time where no packages are displayed. Oh well.

[vometia]

Finally! Got BAIN to do something; typically, there was something random and obscure about my installation, a stray file with an odd character in its name that BAIN was objecting to. I removed it and now it's doing... stuff. I just need to work out how to cajole the stuff in question to do things.

In other news, my alternative version of the ChorrolHouseMiddle07Interior without the annoying central pillar is much less... annoying. Except that I forgot to delete the nails near the top, but my disinclination to go back and edit buildings in Blender outweighs any perfectionism I might otherwise be inclined to employ, and they're hard to see anyway...