Hello. I just thought I'd share a few thoughts on the current, (Beta opt-in), state of Fallout 4 since I've been playing with FO4 for awhile now, and spent some time looking at the Beta, and a few other things.

1. Modless - There are some things in Fallout 4 for which people have developed mods, but which should not need mods developed for. Some of these mods may seriously deprecate performance due to the add-on nature of them; mostly due to BSA2 texture handling, additional handling, etc..

Foremost of these for me, are things like water reflections/Fake reflections. I have recently made the swap to a much more realistic solution, and yet, I feel I really shouldn't have to. When I approach a Fake reflection in game from a puddle or something, I see a glare-rich, icy surface from all glancing angles. Usually with Blue sky and clouds reflecting in it from directly overhead if I am standing on it. Even underground. There are actually 2 mods which combined fix this.

Cubemaps. I dropped a bunch of these files into a backup folder and found fixing the glare issue boiled down to just a few cubemaps. You don't even need the additional work-arounds, which I also dispensed with; though it doesn't produce quite as nice of reflections without. The replacement maps aren't even big. Unfortunately it has other issues which produce some odd visual effects like Grey Mr. Handy. I'm sure that could be dealt with, but regardless, have to wonder why this isn't just patched.

I'm not sure why the Sky reflects in underground puddles, aside from that it is reflecting worldspace in the engine, and possibly someone forgot to block it. I assume the mod which fixes this flags the puddles to prevent this, or something. I haven't delved into the why or how really; just made observations on the result. I use Post Processing too, which can make the effect better or worse depending on the settings.

Next, I think I'd have to look at simplified Post Processing used to improve the visual quality/fidelity of the game without adding any extra features or effects. I use Post Processing just to improve the base quality, over Ultra settings, with all the various effects enabled. Without it, I have a washed out, blurry/undefined view; where with it, I can see what I'm looking at. I think it's great that the game has a visual style; I just find it hard to appreciate when that style suddenly makes it impossible to identify what I am looking at, and requires me to add post processing to make it easier to identify.

By doing this I am actually decreasing performance. Recently, with the new Beta, it seems performance is seriously deprecated as a result. I'm getting 16 ms frame renders without, and 33 ms frame renders with, when the post processing effects-together-take less than 1 ms. This tells me the frames are rendering twice. Once for the base game render, and again for the post processing. At least, I assume. I've never looked at it until I saw the FPS drop after the Beta opt-in. Over 10 FPS, and sometime 25 FPs drop.

By comparison, before the Beta Opt-in, I was getting an average of 57 FPS with the post processing enabled in all areas I checked. I have add-on textures, so this could be increasing each frame render time to such an extent that the combined render time causes a significant difference. I'm not sure, but I have seen my FPS drop to as low as 14 today, in a fog, and this is consistent in the vault, which I think still uses all Vanilla textures. I actually took a guess when I checked the files and assumed maybe it was the Cuda driver I had never seen before, but I haven't thoroughly tested, (i.e: not yet opted out to do a performance check). Quite possibly this means the post processing drivers will need an update.

Regardless, unless you want something 'special', this shouldn't be needed.

Aside from that, there are some special cases:

- Power Armor HUD colors: The Pip Boy and base HUD/Interface both have the option to color shift; why was this not included? It is orange-yellow, and in my opinion absolutely horrid to have in your face while in PA. I actually spend much less time in PA because of it, and recently downloaded a replacement. I've not even looked at it yet, but assume it will be an improvement. I see no need to change the actual dash, which is btw influenced by opacity shifts iirc.

- Options: NVFlex I enabled this today just to check it out. It works, and it has next to no performance loss on my system. It's actually kind of cool, even if it's a bit odd that a cooler which drops paint/enamel pieces, or a bottle which drops shattered glass doesn't have damage after/during. You can see the radius on water as you move away from the location of disturbance. Not as a loss of particle effects, but as a blue ring which follows you around.

Why can't I enable it in options? I have to edit a file to use it, when I am aware that file will likely be written over at some point. Same with particles max. I have added these to Custom, but not tested to see if it works there. I know some things don't, and generally assume these won't.

Other options. I just think the list should be longer, and Custom should be used more/where the changes are written to and pulled from. It would make sense. I don't use the 3rd party solution. Among these, I think should be disabling Bloom, enabling HDR, and disabling DoF entirely. Just to be friendly to those who like to use post processing, because-lets be honest-they conflict.

- HBAO/SSAO: Currently these need to be tweaked in the files to make more effective. I'm not sure this results in more realistic effects. What I have noticed is that I can barely tell when either is in use. They are extremely limited in actual effect from what I have observed turning them on and off and switching between them, and I am not a fan of excessive use of various effects, including these. Still, they are an improvement, if only barely noticeable. My experience suggests they need tuning to make them more realistic, and obvious, but it may also stem from another problem.

- Tuning performance. Something odd I noticed about FO 4 is that moving between performance settings makes next to no difference, even when you are suffering performance issues. I've noticed it with other games too. Maybe it's just my system, but I can move between the highest performance options with no change in frame rate quite often, or at most 1 FPS difference.

More specifically, and aside from such observances, wouldn't it be nice if tuning performance actually increased the output of various effects? I think so. For example, does it take more or less performance to render 5000 particles, or 500 particles? More generally, (although NVFlex doesn't seem to care at that particular number). These aren't tuned by moving through the base quality settings from what I've observed, and yet I think they probably should be. Save people messing with all those numbers in files they shouldn't even need to access 90% of the time.

I actually seemed to have gained 2-3 FPS just by dropping particles from 750 to 500. Makes no difference without Post Processing, (59-60), but with the current issues it takes it from 24-33 to 29-37 with that and some other things, even with NVFlex enabled.

2. The Game:

- Minutemen side quests and radiant quests. I can literally pass Preston 5 times in 2 minutes and get 3 quests from him. This is not quite infuriating. Just dropping this to 1-at-a-time would be amazing. And that includes when there is a main quest active, such as Tenpines, because it is basically the same thing. I don't need to have to deal with 3 radiant quests, Tenpines, and Olivia Station all at the same time. I don't think anyone does. It actually gives me a false sense of urgency for all of them, when it should be some sense of prioritization. Impending doom of multiple settlers, with immediacy, in 5 different locations in opposite directions kind of messes with that however.

- LOD popping. I experienced this so little I thought it was someone elses problem when I discovered it. Turns out if you stand on the pointy rock, or to the East of it, on or above the platform at the top of the stairs, above the Quarry pit, the trailer yard and mire just become a square of water LOD, and everything else vanishes. This is a bug obviously. It is not present from any other location I am aware of.

- Movement in Scope. Okay, I understand this, but it's an issue. Create a deadzone for this please, because when you hold down L3 on the Gamepad, you walk off cliffs, building, etc.. without even knowing it, while shooting hundreds of rounds at things like Death Claws. Seriously, that thing is insanely tough on Normal, and it runs away unless you are on the ground. I spend an average of 1 hour killing it in Concord, because getting on the Ground with it always results in death if you are in the open. It just rips the PA to shreds and you with it. Kind of tedious.

I should only move when I've pushed the L3 down and rocked it more than 50% from center. If L3 isn't down, it should be normal. This can be a little erratic at times too, but that's I assume the scripts in the background, current load on the CPU.

- Detection and Following. Sure, NPCs getting after you and then becoming distracted makes it really easy to just knock them all down with a bit of planning and almost no risk... They actually take a shot from a 308, wander around for a ~20 seconds looking for the attacker, then go back to strolling amiably. This is not normal behavior. Even if they can't find me they should go to cover, and so should anyone else in their vicinity that has been alerted. At the very least.

On the other hand, I've had NPCs chase me quite a distance when I've been spotted. Leaving all help and support behind even. This is basically fine except, lets face it, running off cliffs, ledges, buildings, church steeples and the like, and falling to their death is a bit excessive. They will jump off the Corvega plant just to get a shot at you if they don't have the angle on it. Maybe not a great idea. It was amusing dodging the falling Raiders and watching them go splat though.

The AI is kind of dumb, in a nutshell. The only mod I've found that tries to deal with this also ends up causing convo's to be broken because of increased detection distance, and I assume also results in near enemies hostile to each other killing one another long before you even know they're there. Maybe that should happen anyway, or would normally, but it's not really intended.

3. Other:

The textures. I'm not sure if this was rush-rush, or what, but I've noticed some things.

- The UV Maps are being tricked in in some cases. This basically means the textures for those UVs have been over-sprayed to account for them not being quite on with the UV stitching on the mesh. Not sure why, but I recall that weird bar-spectrum texture on edges of a number of textures.

Does this also mean the Normals are out? I'm sure it's not every case, but there is another problem with this: Texture replacement and Texture load/optimization. If I were to create a new texture from existing, I would literally need to grab a normal, black out between the normal to create a mask, move that to the diff, and then see what I had to work with. Great, but now I also have to consider black areas being on the model because the UV Map is off. I may be wrong but the supposedly untouched, up-res'd textures I've seen were almost solid. That is, they were sprayed from one side to the other with brushed on scratches, colors, etc..

Very artistic I guess, but think of the unused detail going into the texture files. How much wasted space when it could just be black? The Chinese Sword is a great example. One in which I can't even identify where the UV Unwrap begins and ends, or even what it is actually supposed to be. I have no idea, and I at that point understood suddenly why so many people have just made matte black textures for things. Everything. Looks awful btw.

Anyway, just some thoughts, critique, etc.. I'll add more if I think of it.

So, I tested opting out of Beta, and Custom settings for NVFlex. Opting out didn't change the frame rate issue. I'll have to look at that a little more. Generally assuming post processing renders twice normally, and what has happened is the individual frame render time has increased from a lower value, though I'm not sure why yet. It may be the Normal maps in the loose files, or something else. I have made the observation that it is less obvious in places like the vault, and other interior cells. Maybe LOD files.

NVFlex: Appears not to work from Custom. I did notice the Blue ring is still on the water. Maybe that was new after the Reflection changes with the new cube maps. Added issue, or perhaps some other setting I tweaked. Probably it will be dealt with sometime later if it has anything to do with that.

Aside: I gather that the Devs look at mods and take ideas from them; if for no other reason than some mods, or a combination of mods which alter some similar thing all point to something people have a preference for. I think probably, this would be listed in the sensible changes section, because why not? Weird reflections, LOD issues, and a number of other things list pretty high among the visual defects in games. It'd be nice if they were just fixed. I have no issue with modding, but generally feel it should be more appropriately done for additions or changes, rather than simple fixes.

Something else: Weapon and armor additions, (and this is as much critique of the modding community as the GECK - Using Skyrim as an example), are quite often individual, each requiring unique packs, and this tends to make me wonder what sort of issues I might run into installing them. When I used them in Skyrim, I found a number of problems, with one mod overwriting something in another, or making unwanted changes. The more that is done with these, the more issues that can arise.I never liked that, and it has been made worse by so many not even working at all.

For the Community: Wouldn't it make sense to work together a little more? Combine mods and develop a list of similar style and technical approach items, then put them all in one? Develop an actual add-on mod with multiple unique items, encounters, etc.. in it. This applies not just to this, but to crafting as well. A standardization system. This for this, that for that. Cooperate to create some reasonable compatibility list. I've seen some indication that people do consider it and make a little effort towards it with FO 4. I never saw it at all with Skyrim. And worse, I quite often discovered that multiple resources from one modder each had their own unique mods, when it should be completely sensible to make it one.

This sort of applies to making multiple esps for one mod too. Why not just scale some esp packs to include an A, then add B, then add C, respectively, so options result not in 5-10 packs, but a limited pack, or a complete pack. Or something in the middle. Within reason anyway. It would be a pain to cover a number of options this way, meaning the options would then require a myriad of final pack options instead of just a few. In this case, I think it's perfectly reasonable; I'm just not convinced it is always reasonable.

Needless to say, a little initial cooperation might also mean less need for compatibility patches. Develop a list, assign a moderator/administrator or group of moderators, and form a larger group which agrees to follow those standards, and take available entries, then add the entries taken to the list. This way you have a resource modders can look at to determine which available IDs they can use. You could even create a few lists in different categories. Extreme, silly, unbalanced mods, and balanced mods for example. Mods which are lore-centric, and those which aren't.

The Devs:

Wouldn't it be nice if the tools to do that were already there. In the GECK I mean. Why needlessly create packs for hundreds of little things, if you can just create an edit file which the Geck can turn into a clean addition to a larger mod? Either something one modder could do, or a group of them could cooperate to do, or an end-user could use to create their own. Just a thought. In my experience, the Skyrim GECK was less than friendly in this respect, and that might have something to do with why and how so many mods were left unique when they could have been combined, and there was such a plethora of mods which had bad edits in them that caused issues elsewhere and unrelated.

Small addition of the ability to sub-mod so to speak. Detach the need for creating a esp and then editing to it while sifting through the game esm for things to edit as required, and instead move it to an external edit which can be easily kept clean and injected into an esp-final later. This would also greatly reduce the chance for data corruption from excessive memory usage, data scraping and editing, etc.. Something which as I recall was common with the GECK in Skyrim. Not that one couldn't use another 3rd party option to clean them to some degree after, but why should that be necessary?

Thanks,

Oh sure. You are using a controller on a PC and it's not acting well. Oh my. The initial Deathclaw is pretty easy, especially if you have played Fallout games before. Perhaps the controls might be as important as how it looks, I dunno.

Minimal tweaks to my 2560x1600 display and it looks very nice. I'm not sure why you are having problems, I'm not particularly fussy myself, so it might just be that.

I suppose you'd have to define easy. Sure, it's easy to shoot it a few hundred times from a high vantage, or stand in a building while it menaces you outside, then unload a 10mm into it because it lacks the intelligent AI to realize it can't reach you, or the ability to enter the building through the door even though it fits, but it still takes more or less time respectively. The issue isn't killing the Deathclaw, but the time it takes to do it reasonably effectively and believably. Drop down in power armor and have a go while you ping away at its defenses with a mini-gun, (pretty ineffective overall, even-or especially-in VATS), between getting slammed and mauled, and waiting for animations to play out, and it becomes a little harder. Impossibly hard because it only takes 2-3 attacks by it to tear off your PA and less than 1 to kill you.

That isn't the issue though. The issue is that even a little deviation from center while doing a thumb-press on the toggle causes movement, and that compounds over multiple shots. Mostly it is unnoticeable. It just needs a deadzone for L3 activation.

I'm sure plenty of people are happy with the way the game looks, and with a high res display, and a larger one, it may be easier to tell what you're looking at. Given your display size, I'd assume you also have a fairly powerful system to run it, and that means you likely get pretty decent frame rates too, and consistently. I've bought Fallout 4 on both Playstation and PC, so my initial experience was with PS. I actually rather expected it to be pretty decent, but at 20 FPS it was actually unpleasant. On PC however, I expect much better detail, and while it was an improvement, on a 1920x1080 display, at 60 FPS, it was decidedly lacking in my opinion.

Wandering around, one of the most obvious issues I found, was the sometimes inability to tell what I was looking at. Being a cautious person, and a permadeath-style player, being able to identify targets, details, etc.. and at a distance is important to me. Not finding any decent Post Prossessing presets which suited me, (basic color correction and enhancement mostly), I made my own. It was working quite well initially, and my FPS loss was next to nothing, but more recently it took a fairly significant hit. This prompted me to start trying to figure out why, and as yet, that is still a bit of a mystery. Turns out it wasn't the LODs either.

I've cut effects just to test it, and the result is always the same, which makes sense if you look at just the effects because they're very light, but not if you look at the FPS loss itself; something which isn't reported consistently by other users of post processing. In fact, it isn't reported at all, so I seem to have run into a somewhat unusual circumstance.

Regardless, the game with default rendering lacks any visual detail. Everything tends to blend together, and it's difficult to tell where one thing ends and another begins quite often, unless one of those objects happens to be more colorful and provides a tonal contrast. Most do not. Raiders, dogs, ground, bushes, trees, fog, etc.. all share the same basic color tones without any texture replacements. And those objects which have some color difference are generally faded and washed out, so as not to be all that noticeably different at a distance. Post processing can be used to correct that, and I did. Not with contrast adjustments, but with a little Tone-mapping and color correction, HDR, and a little added filmgrain for dithering and a little noise to keep things from being so apparently bland, as well as debanding to keep those effects from introducing artifacts.

Personally, I think the result looks fantastic. Unfortunately it can't be broken down without completely ruining it, but that doesn't really matter because the effects themselves have next to no cost. The cost is coming from applying them at all, and that's heavy. I've been considering another approach, but not yet done. Figured I'd see if I could identify the cause, but everything I look at seems to be a non-issue, even combined. Personally, I just think it would be a little more ideal if the game itself was rendering at a slightly higher bar of quality; especially given I know the actual cost to do so is very minimal, and having it on that end means it only needs render each frame once. That would mean I wouldn't likely have to consider it in the first place. It has been entertaining though.

Of course, I could always just upgrade to a much better GPU, but that shouldn't be necessary either. Mine can handle much higher fidelity games quite well.

I'm also a very visual person; especially after having worked through the basic gameplay and figured out how mechanics generally work. It's not just the inability to determine what I'm looking at consistently that bothers me, but the general blandness of the scene. Interior spaces do tend to be much better in that regard.

Aside however, there is something causing slowdowns too, and making inputs unresponsive. I generally think this may be scripts running in the background, and resource hogging of the CPU threads. Again, a better PC would improve this, but it isn't a console either, and the minimum specs are mostly well below what I have. Recommended too.

The high res screen allows me to run minimal AA for one thing. My Korean 30" 2560x1600 screen is among the best investments I have made. It does require a GTX 780 to push the pixels but it does look very nice.

Anyhoo, I've smoked the silly Deathclaw a few times now. He's not all that tough, really. As it says below I only play on Survival and never use VATS and I put him away pretty quick last time. Did not use the minigun much. My low level chars do not go toe to toe with Deathclaws, that comes later. I play with him till he quits moving.