I found this while looking through some scripts:

Doesn't surprise me, it was pretty obvious from the GECK that it was all one mini-world. Split up for performance reasons because the game engine lacks the ability to put more then 10 NPCs on the same screen at the same time without slideshow-city occurring. (Depending on your CPU and video card, on the GTX 460, I can manage 15-20 NPCs before my frame rate drops below 30.)

It's a weakness of the game engine - there doesn't seem to be a way to tune the thing to support more then a handful of NPCs being visible to the player's camera at the same time and keep performance up. In EQ2, they used to have a slider where only the "N" closest NPCs would be fully animated/textured, everyone else would get toned down with lower-res textures and animations. AoC had a setting where actors would become less detailed at a certain distance away (along with less detailed animations). But Fallout New Vegas pretty much only has "Actor Fade" which controls the distance at which actors show up and it's all-or-nothing.

Gets really obvious when you install something like "http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35369". Even with a GTX 460 card, I had to stick with the "light" version.

the strip is the one area i have problem with.

the Vegas "strip" is massive. much much much bigger than the 3 sections they devoted to the new strip.

basically obsidian took Las Vegas and divided its size by 50 and said lol New Vegas.

Bad Obsidian :facepalm:

They do have a sort of work-around- take a look at the BigBattle (or something like that) armour files in the bsas- low poly copies of all the clothing used by factions in the Hoover Dam battle. There's no low-poly casual clothes for use in Vegas, though.

There are more optimizations then just Fade -> there is the Bone LOD system for animations and the Texture MipMaps and multiple gamesettings for Active AI also there are functions that will cull processing load on actors when the scene in complex -> the only thing the game engine does not have is Mesh LODs which depending on implementation would most likely be worse performance as it would require mutiple meshes to be present in the nifs increasing memory load.

Maybe you should read up on the game engine before commenting about it.

I don't get it, is there a point to this thread? So the strip was all one zone in the beginning... what does that change? I'm sure it was also intended to be part of the main worldspace too, until someone said "Hey you know, we need to make the strip a separate worldspace" either during planning or testing. I mean... what, are we supposed to feel like we got ripped off because of a performance decision or something?


No one said the restored part of the strip is the entirety of the original. House stopped Vegas from getting directly nuked, but then he took a 200-year nap, only bothering to create "New Vegas" out of the tribe-infested ruins ~7-8 years before the game. He has one young man working on signs, and there may or may not even be the market yet for that number of casinos yet.

Really, it always makes me :rolleyes: when people complain about the size or scope of things in games. "Oh, they're just LAZY. It's not like they have budgets, deadlines, gameplay concerns or a rapidly aging engine that only looks worse to people the later they release. It's a crime they didn't make a 4.2 mile run of casinos stretching from one end of the map to the other and the content to fill them."

Seriously, if they'd made the strip "realistically sized" (nothing else in the game is either, but lets just say you did) then you'd have to walk the distance from Goodsprings to Primm between mildly interactive bits of it. If that sounds fun to you... should be a good mod project then?

even if you include the "surrounding area" you are still missing alot of vegas

its not lazy, its just the result of not enough development time.

i have no complaints about the size of the game, just that of the strip. Vegas has a grandiose feel to it, New vegas feels lacking, and uninteresting.

I noticed this in the files, too.

I'll figure that the area ended up just not working right for something, and, the only fix was to break it up into smaller pieces.

[censored] happens I guess. Although, this does tell us how they really wanted the area to look and feel. Maybe someone should put it all back as one area and see what breaks

And where are these documented?

A few of those are just 'common knowledge'. Like if you have more than oh so many actors it does cull the active AI and make some of the NPCs not work properly since it simply does not run things on them like pathfinding and combat simulations. Also, you must generate Mipmaps (the same image but of smaller and smaller quality each time like 8 times) when you make a dds texture file for a mod. This way it can load in the crappier and crappier quality images as you get further away from objects to improve performance. I cannot name an exact place these are explained, but I can tell you in my 12+ months of modding that they all exist and are used excessivly to improve game performance.

I seem to recall from one of the early previews in which they showed the strip with all 4 casino's and Vault 21 in a single scene with NCR drunks walking around already... In fact I know I did, you could see from the steps of one casino and they panned across the entire strip - Vault 21 down to the Gammorah. Clearly they added the walls in the end for performance reasons, though I was surprised at how small the sections ended-up being.

Not that we will ever know, but I'm curious as to what caused them to split it up, as there are not that many items in the strip cells. In fact, they are tiny in terms of placed references when compared to many other cells. Makes me wonder if the complexity of the models with all the lights is part of it?

Probably down to most of the large areas using a smaller range of models (NCR tent/Legion tent/whatever) whilst The Strip used a lot of different large models all of which would have to be loaded. Plus, there's not much optimisation possible. You can drop room bounds (or whatever the exterior version is) all over Camp McCarren, but The Strip would be one big area with everything rendering at once.

For those of us who don't mind a slideshow now and then, maybe a mod which undoes it is actually a positive thing.

Thanks Talkie. I assumed that as well, and the strip is largely devoid of clutter items too.



You know I bet the performance for us on high-end PCs would be just fine with an open-strip. Merging two exterior world spaces back into one however - that we don't yet know how to do. If we did, I and several others here would have reason to be Very happy. I have not found a way in FNVEdit yet to do this, though I have tried a number of methods. I can get a Partial movement of placed references, but its never whole.

That said, if someone makes a mod of the full strip, they will likely have to re-build the stuff in two of the 3 cells unless there is a way to port exterior cell content from world-space to worldspace... Timeslip had a tool that moves the Landscape, but not placed references and it core-dumps on FNV.

What is needed is a function in one of the tools that can "Migrate" exterior cell content from X, Y in world-space #1 to A, B in world-space #2, and there are only a few folks versed in the code well-enough to do it.

I was running around in the Ultra Luxe the other night and there seemed to be quite a few NPCs in the various rooms. I almost thought I had loaded a mod that I forgot about (I had not). However there were at least 30 NPCs in each room, maybe more. In fact, there were so many NPCs that it was almost difficult to run through the place. Now, these NPCs were not doing much, mostly just walking around so the scripting was not cumbersome and the load on the CPU would be less than other more active NPCs.

I think an open Strip would be quite doable for those folks who have a better than average PC. As the NPCs that are on the strip now do not do very much.

I agree. It goes without say that dividing the strip into three sections was necessary. I just wish it was easier to remake it into one section. Scripted doors, and npc spawns are mainly what's preventing such a mod from being created. Additionally, if someone were to make this mod, they would need to redo the LOD. The NV LOD Essential Pack could be used for this. And luckily the Strip is its own worldspace. With this being said, I'm sure it is doable(<-- Wow that's actually a word) just tedious.

No need for any of this. The Strip is already one single world-space.

Langy is correct. Just turn on TCL and walk right through those walls, you'll see.

I could make this mod in like 10 minutes I think .... yeah hm brb.

I think they added the tiny walls to justify occlusion planes so it only really renders the tall buildings at all times. Everything else is culled out when your in one part of the town.

Well if you want to get an idea of what it's like in-game, here.

http://www.finhosting.fi/~fallout/downloads/NVOpenStrip.esp

Screenshot: http://www.finhosting.fi/~fallout/screenshots/StripOpen.jpg

Not intended to be tidy and I think I even forgot to get rid of one object (its floating above the street) but anyway.

I loaded my game and my display pretty much went to its knees.... struggled for a bit.

There's no question the game couldn't ship with the strip wide open, at least not with the colors and flashies and whatever stuff is in there now.

Edit: Yeah. Once my machine seems to load all the textures or ... something , I don't know ... I like it. Someone should finish this little project up (preferably someone who understands exactly what should and should not be done to an esm-located, pre-existing navmesh).

Yeah... not as easy as you think. Sure you can just go in and start deleting stuff. However there are more obvious things that need to be done, i.e. navmesh along with more difficult and complicated things to do such as npc spawns, npc movement scripts (attached to the doors you deleted), and LOD that needs to be redone. All of this combined will take much longer than 10 minutes.

Sorry to rain on your parade :sadvaultboy:.

Um, no, what I'm saying is, it IS that easy.

I can be the one to do it since I do understand the navmesh issues, but my thought was, if someone else had the burning desire to do it, I didnt' want to go and just make the mod and deny them the fun of making it.

I've seen nothing wrong with the NPCs nor the LOD - - - it all looks fine. That's what I'm saying.

The NPCs having a limited wander range is fine as well.

Also I didn't delete anything - - that would have been bad form - - I just sunk it all underground.

Maybe I should make a sorta clean version of this, and if someone wants to touch it up in some way, they can.

Owned, yet again, by Gamebryo.

Sorry. I guess I just misunderstood what you were saying.

With the NPCs and robots it is true that all the NPC moves you're seeing in the door scripts would, out of necessity, need to be replaced with actual NPCs for each activity. Its not hard, I'll mess with it when I'm done filling in the navmesh holes.

As for the game performance after actually DOING that um, I guess it would first be done, and then, see what has to be decreased, if anything. We're already deep into the realm of slideshow upon first entering the area.

I've seen what a room with like 100 NPCs in it is like. its in general not usable. This won't approach 100 buuuut its interesting to think about.