I haven't done any modding in the last couple of months, but I have started poking away at my mod again and I thought I would ask for some advice about optimal reference counts in exterior cells as it relates to framerate.

The worldspace I am working on is very dense in terms of foliage, rocks, harvest plants, etc., and runs noticeably slowly on my PC. Now, I have an old PC (four or five years), and the framerates aren't all that different between my mod and vanilla exteriors (maybe 3-4 fps) but I was wondering whether or not I should be concerned about it. I have kind of been going on the assumption that newer computers would be able to handle the extra load without any difficulty, but I don't know if this assumption is warranted. I have thought about reducing the reference count, but I am very happy with the appearance of the worldspace as it is and I think that trimming it would be detrimental to the atmosphere of the mod.

Should I be concerned about placing too many objects in exterior worldspaces or will most people be able to handle the additional load? Is there an optimal reference count range that I should try to restrict myself to? What are your thoughts and suggestions.

TIA

If you can be bothered to download it Nehrim is a good reference. It looks really nice and has much more objects per cell than vanilla, but the framerate is pretty bad even on my relatively good computer (at least compared to a 2006 rig - e8400, ATI 4890 1GB, 4GB quality ram). It is playable, but compared to vanilla (where I rarely go below my cap of 60 frames per second) it is not a pleasant experience (regular exteriors are around 30-40 FPS, but often it drops down to less than 30 FPS, sometimes even as low as 15 FPS).

Did you add NPCs and LOD yet? That has a big impact on performance as well. If not and you're already getting a worse framerate than in vanilla you probably have too many objects.

But if you have NPCs and LOD and if your worldspace has a better framerate than Nehrim then I wouldn't worry.

Thanks for the reply.

The worldspace does have LOD and NPCs (though not many) as well as a fairly heavy script running in the background that I need to rework. In my worldspace I tend to bottom out at 10 fps in the most densely populated cells. That might seem pretty drastic, but I bottom out in vanilla at about 15 fps w/o mods. (Yeah, I have an old PC.) Is it safe to assume that that means I've lost a third of my framerate? In other words, if your norm for vanilla is around 60 fps, would you expect to average 40 fps using my mod? That seems about par with Nehrim.

I'm going to take a look at my script, too, and see if I can't optimize it a bit. I have a feeling that's counting for a couple fps as well.

/offtopic-ish The CS used to have a 'Memory Usage Calculator' tool, but for some reason Beth removed it :rolleyes:

So, will the unnamed be restoring it?

Can't, I'm afraid; the code's been scooped out completely.

That's too bad. Must not have worked it they stripped it out completely. It would be nice to have some idea of the performance as you're building, as TM was asking about...