Fix for crappy lighting at Vault 88?

[_MaZ_TeR_]

Dunno if there's a mod that would fix it, but basically at Vault 88, lighting seems to peel through the seams from any Vault prefab rooms located under or on top of the prefab you're in.

And it's to be honest not just Vault 88, I noticed in Sanctuary, basically some floors in in houses separated by walls blocking that light are lit up, but those walls aren't. But this is most visible at Vault 88.

[Zekiran]

The walls in this game barely function, tbh.

Add to that some of the baked in lighting directions from lights available to build? yikes. They simply go *the wrong direction*.

I haven't checked out much more than the description on this page, and this mod hasn't been actively worked on for 4 years or so, but:

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/20003

?? Maybe? Read the bug reports / forum posts first.

[The Cure]

You could try this mod, I personally use it to light up the vault since it's hard to light up those large atrium areas. It might also fix the problem you're having.

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/51188

[_MaZ_TeR_]

Well, that's not really what I was looking for. The problem isn't the light, it's the fact that it peels through where the floor and walls connect and basically casts a light on only either one, leaving the other pitch black. Looks like it's an engine bug and no mod will fix it.

Though, the mod that The Cure linked looks nice even though it wasn't what I was looking for.

[Zekiran]

The shading and shadows are *absolute garbage* in the game, YES. :/

I made the error of putting in a bunch of hanging lanterns (far harbor styled) in one raft-based community I made but FORGOT that there are two versions of that lantern. One of them just basically sways and casts a steady light.

The other - which I made the dreadful error of installing over 30 of these things on walls all across the complicated raft settlement - CASTS SHADOWS.

My FPS tanked so hard and I got actually motion sick just entering the area. It took a hot minute to remember omg the shadows and went through and rapidly removed and replaced them. That was a visual nightmare on so many levels.

[Mathius]

It's not just this game. In the early days of 3d FPS, i.e. Doom and other Wolfenstein clones, you used to have to draw your level out as an actual map, generate sectors, set your ceiling and floor heights, etc.

Now every. single. thing. is just a 3d Object, static or non-static. This causes all kids of havok with navmeshing, lighting, and any kinda of sensory type things if the studio doesn't focus on it, particularly in these "building" type games where this stuff is generated on the fly.

I think Skyrim was the first Bethesda game where the studio actually put out their own Tutorial videos, and they basically showed if your meshes don't line up right, just shove a boulder in it.

That's why some older PC's see crazy slowdown in the downtown Boston area. There's tons of things being rendered because someone decided to shove a whole tree underground just to get the tips to show. This kind of stuff saves them time in the modeling process, but plays havok on optimization. They tried to fix it with preculling, but you see how well that worked and it just caused issues with scrapping mods.

Those trees you guys complain about at Coastal Cottage? Those aren't individual tree clumps. That's all rendered as one big object. That's why you can't scrap it because it'll leave a huge hole in the map. But it's probably better than generating 8 different trees. From purely a rendering standpoint, the number of triangles is the number of triangles, but from a processing standpoint, the game has to decide to load each of those objects, instead of loading 1.

See another thing about those early games? Memory was expensive back then. Until manufacturers starting seeing a market for it and everyone started producing it. So then when memory became cheap, optimization took a back seat.

It's also why rain and radstorms manage to permeate your buildings and your screen gets that glossy covering on everything and your settlers in vaults get stuck all over the place because the navmesh doesn't generate properly.

And it's not just Fallout, it's an industry issue. Ark's been out since late 2014 or 2015 and it still rains inside your base if the ceilings are high.

[Zekiran]

Originally posted by Mathius:

Those trees you guys complain about at Coastal Cottage? Those aren't individual tree clumps. That's all rendered as one big object. That's why you can't scrap it because it'll leave a huge hole in the map. But it's probably better than generating 8 different trees. From purely a rendering standpoint, the number of triangles is the number of triangles, but from a processing standpoint, the game has to decide to load each of those objects, instead of loading 1.

You'd think they would WANT to fix this.

AND YET

.... Every. Single. Piece. Of. "MACHINERY".

Is made of SCREWS and PANELS and VALVES and RINGS and GAUGES and... They didn't bake them all into one stupidly simple object. They KNEW this would be a problem, but still went right ahead and put 14 thousand more individual triangles in one factory floor.

[Mathius]

Originally posted by Zekiran:

You'd think they would WANT to fix this.

AND YET

.... Every. Single. Piece. Of. "MACHINERY".

Is made of SCREWS and PANELS and VALVES and RINGS and GAUGES and... They didn't bake them all into one stupidly simple object. They KNEW this would be a problem, but still went right ahead and put 14 thousand more individual triangles in one factory floor.

I would love to see an example of where you see this. I pulled two random consoles, one from Hallucigen Inc, and one from the FEV lab in the Institute, and both .nif files show the meshes having the gauges, etc. as part of the whole, not individual objects.

I'm somewhat surprised at the level of detail in the models, actually. In the past you would have just made a flat panel and made a normal map for the texture to simulate depth. I'm curious what the payoff is. I could see more detailed meshes being useful in animations and collisions, but for a background console it seems excessive. But then I don't do this for a living.

[Zekiran]

Originally posted by Mathius:

I would love to see an example of where you see this. I pulled two random consoles, one from Hallucigen Inc, and one from the FEV lab in the Institute, and both .nif files show the meshes having the gauges, etc. as part of the whole, not individual objects.

Try disassembling the Starlight Drivein projector. Any other piece of machinery sitting around in a settlement is just godawful. I run a lot of settlement mods allowing me to put roots down in places like the Natick Power Plant and good LORD there's so many pieces.

[Mathius]

Originally posted by Zekiran:

Try disassembling the Starlight Drivein projector. Any other piece of machinery sitting around in a settlement is just godawful. I run a lot of settlement mods allowing me to put roots down in places like the Natick Power Plant and good LORD there's so many pieces.

That's because there is no projector in Starlight Drivein. What you're seeing is something some clever level editor threw together using generic industrial parts. Judging by the layer title, it was someone named "John G". (possibly John Gravato, or based on his art?) There is no projector model.

For example, the "reel" is actually a valve handle, and the projector part as well as the bell on the side of it are both some type of tanks, presumably air tanks or something.

They used a material swap to make it appear dull instead of the yellowish/orangish color that's used on so much machinery in the game.

Little things like this are what allow you to come up with some clever level designs.

But, and again, I'm no expert.... I don't see anything indicating the parts are linked together, which I assume they would be if they were precombined. One of the supposed new features of the upgraded Creation Kit for Fallout 4, was supposed to allow them to be loaded as one object, thus making them optimized.

[Zekiran]

Yeah I know there's no single unit of "projector", that's my point. We got ridiculously small settlement size budgets because of that garbage taking up so much of it.

[Mathius]

Originally posted by Zekiran:

Yeah I know there's no single unit of "projector", that's my point. We got ridiculously small settlement size budgets because of that garbage taking up so much of it.

I just want to make sure you understood what I said. It's not that there isn't a "single unit" of a projector.

There literally is no projector model. It was created by a hodge podge of other industrial part meshes.

I'm not going to get into the settlement budget. I find them to basically be a waste of time and if you're running mods and worrying about scrapping screws, then you obviously have the ability to increase your settlement budget, so I don't see the issue. I wouldn't bother deleting it.

[Zekiran]

I delete it because it's in the way. Because for some gawdawful stupid reason, you can, with one click, remove the big screen, AND the diner/wings, but the rest of it *remains hanging in the air*. And if I need to actually get all of it removed - I have to get up in the air and delete

every

damnable

part

individually.

[Mathius]

Originally posted by Zekiran:

I delete it because it's in the way. Because for some gawdawful stupid reason, you can, with one click, remove the big screen, AND the diner/wings, but the rest of it *remains hanging in the air*. And if I need to actually get all of it removed - I have to get up in the air and delete

every

damnable

part

individually.

Then why don't you just make a blank settlement if you're going to delete everything anyways.

I don't understand people who complain about problems they themselves create. The whole point of every settlement being different is so you have to make choices.

If you don't want to make choices then clear the slate. Go into the Ck and make a mod. It's not that hard. Or download one of those mods that lets you blueprint your settlements and then you can load it up on every new save.

There are solutions.

If you were playing the stock game you wouldn't be able to delete those things in the first place to complain about them.

[Iron Knights]

So Vault Prefabs vs. vault custom ? You know you can put wall "connectors" on with custom pieces, like the quarter pillar that is rounded on one side.

[Zekiran]

Originally posted by Mathius:

Then why don't you just make a blank settlement if you're going to delete everything anyways.

I don't understand people who complain about problems they themselves create. The whole point of every settlement being different is so you have to make choices.

If you don't want to make choices then clear the slate. Go into the Ck and make a mod. It's not that hard. Or download one of those mods that lets you blueprint your settlements and then you can load it up on every new save.

There are solutions.

If you were playing the stock game you wouldn't be able to delete those things in the first place to complain about them.

I think you're SUPER missing my point.

The game's developers could just as easily have made "machine one" "machine six" or whatever, with all those individual pieces baked together as one solid, possibly scrappable model.

Not sure why you think I want "a blank settlement" dude I want to actually build settlements. Both vanilla locations AND new ones. I don't want to just create GM_FLATGRASS all over again. Go look at how many hours I have in this game, go look through my screenshots, and tell me what I know or don't know about what I personally "want" out of settlement building.

I like the challenge of having a new settlement, but I think that the developers were incredibly short-sighted in terms of code load on the user's computer, which could have reduced a LOT of strain, if they'd bothered to "not" use a billion different parts to make heavily repeated devices. The same devices are found across the *entire game*. All of them, made out of individual models with textures, normals, etc - all of which create a ridiculous amount of math needed.

I didn't "create" this problem for myself, the developers put in stupid amounts of things which any sane development team or art department would have said "yo, let's REDUCE the amount of individual parts on this thing" rather than having to spawn all of those things.

Also it's not just settlements, this is literally *the entire game*. The WHOLE map, interiors and exterior, is filled with a volume of junk that could very, very easily have been baked into portions of the maps or as one large item.