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It may be time to give Fallout 4 the 2023 AE treatment

gregaaz

Entry posted by gregaaz in Miscellaneous

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I love my janky, crazy-quilt Fallout 4 built that I made for Charley's story. It contains tons of custom assets, lots of playthrough-specific details and tweaks, and it was a solid learning experience that directly informed the development of my highly stable 2023 AE build for Skyrim. And, no small detail, it gave me the platform for a 94-chapter fanfic that dwarfs any of the other stories I've written for this blog. 

 

Unfortunately, it's also become super unstable. I booted it back up this weekend to try and write some more for Charley's story, and I was shocked by how badly it was performing. Not only were the load times prohibitive and the actual game performance kind of weak, but I was encountering serious problems like infinite loading screen from the main menu or signs that the game was getting close to overflowing its memory constraints almost as soon as I loaded in (even though I was nowhere near my full memory capacity). Of course, FO4 has always been a little janky when it comes to memory handling.

 

With a real sense of regret and disappointment, I think it may be time to pull the plug on Charley's story and build a new world to play with. Of course, this won't be an overnight process. I have no intention of deleting all the custom assets and other work I did for Charley's world, so I'll need to take some time to carefully go through all of that material and sort it out, and ideally peel apart my big patch plugin at the same time so I won't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of the database. 

 

And I can already tell some changes I'll want to make in the new world. First and foremost, we won't be starting up the game with a million settlement add-ons active. I learned very pointedly in Charley's adventure that not only was there no reason to start the game with those loaded, but that at times it was actively counterproductive to do so. Case in point, Salem and its whole loyalty cascade problem with the gun turrets. There's also a lot of bloaty mods that, while they were superficially good ideas, I've learned my lesson about and won't be including again. One example is Boston Natural Surroundings, which adds tons of trees that cause all kinds of geometry conflicts and also add to the draw call load. Another example is High Poly Faces (and indeed, 8K skin textures in general), which are surely "part of the problem" for memory-related breakdowns in the facegen system.

 

Of course we'll want to get Sim Settlements 3 installed and running, and we'll want to lean on it more for our settlement building, with far fewer manual-placement type mods installed. There'll be a few certainly for the NSFW stuff or for narrative purposes, but settlement add-ons are definitely "part of the problem" when it comes to bloat in this current build, something that shows with occasional resource related script lag weirdness. Most that add random new weapons will also be on the chopping block; I keep trying these out and they never live up to expectations. On the other hand, clothing mods like VTAW's and TheKite's stuff will definitely be staying, since making fun custom outfits was a very satisfying part of Charley's playthrough.

 

The process of building the next world will probably take a while, in no small part because many mods have been updated or developed alternatives, and everything is going to need to be scrutinized carefully for what it adds. Still, that should be a fun process in its own right, and I'll look forward to sharing my progress with you all as that starts to take shape.

 

Finally, in wrapping up Charley's story, I'll share with you my notes for what would have happened next. I had kind of roughly outlined where the story would go through Book 8, and while the technical limits of the engine mean that story won't be written in full, I'd like to share at least a glimpse into what I was planning on writing. So stay tuned, Charley's story isn't quite done yet.

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qalavix

qalavix

Posted

I cringed when I saw the headline, because what I think of when someone mentions "the AE treatment" is all the mods that will never be updated and will never work again 😭 ... all of RedRocketTV's stuff, Knockout Framework, Wasteland Dairy, and CWSS (the bathroom & plumbing mod) to name a few suspects.

 

I mean, yeah, I get it -- my current (not well done) FO4 load order runs for maybe an hour at a time, and I absolutely need to save before trying any loading-screen door, and most of these crashes don't even generate a Buffout4 log 😖 -- but, still.

 

 

I am, however, all in favor of seeing you develop one of your impeccably documented load orders for Fallout4. 😃

Have you ever considered making a Wabbajack list?

 

And, a question: when you said

Quote

we won't be starting up the game with a million settlement add-ons active

did you mean the SimSettlement2 'add-ons' like Ruined Homes & Gardens, or did you mean buildable-things-for-individual-placement mods like Settlement Objects Extended or CREAtive Clutter?

gregaaz

gregaaz

Posted

10 hours ago, qalavix said:

I cringed when I saw the headline, because what I think of when someone mentions "the AE treatment" is all the mods that will never be updated and will never work again 😭 ... all of RedRocketTV's stuff, Knockout Framework, Wasteland Dairy, and CWSS (the bathroom & plumbing mod) to name a few suspects.

 

I have to admit, I'm a little worried about this "next gen update" they're developing for just that reason. There's way too much closed source development in the community and way too many people who aren't active anymore or who ragequit the Nexus and are now lurking on obscure discords.

 

But when I say AE here I'm just referring to my 2023 AE build that focused on stability and quality of gameplay. 

 

10 hours ago, qalavix said:

 

I mean, yeah, I get it -- my current (not well done) FO4 load order runs for maybe an hour at a time, and I absolutely need to save before trying any loading-screen door, and most of these crashes don't even generate a Buffout4 log 😖 -- but, still.

 

Yeah, it's so frustrating. I wish the community had the depth of talent that SSE has because I think of SSE had the memory handling problems FO4 does they would have been fixed or at least well documented and understood. The spontaneous blackface bug's documentation basically boils down to "either you're running low on VRAM or the game is handling assets wrong because it's over optimized towards BA2 files. :: shrug:: figure it out yourself" which makes it a little challenging to come up with a risk control plan for that issue. 

 

10 hours ago, qalavix said:

 

I am, however, all in favor of seeing you develop one of your impeccably documented load orders for Fallout4. 😃

Have you ever considered making a Wabbajack list?

 

I always consider Wabbajack lists, but it depends a lot on mod permissions. That can get particularly tricky when it comes to custom assets because it's not feasible for me to track down a million authors to say pretty please... and that's not even getting into mods that were taken off the Nexus in the great temper tantrum. 

 

Its further complicated by some stuff like the custom magazine mod which includes a lot of work by non English language artists, some of which were banned in the big Pixiv purge so there isn't even a good way to find their contact information.

 

 But we'll see - if I can "keep it legal" I'd love to share the list. 

 

10 hours ago, qalavix said:

 

And, a question: when you said

did you mean the SimSettlement2 'add-ons' like Ruined Homes & Gardens, or did you mean buildable-things-for-individual-placement mods like Settlement Objects Extended or CREAtive Clutter?

 

The latter. Those manual placement mods put a lot of strain on the Workshop because they expand it so much, to say nothing of adding *so many* assets to load. I want to lean more on Sim Settlements and mostly limit hand placement to vanilla stuff plus maybe some expansion of the vault parts since for Vault 88 you still need to build the structure of the facility before you plug in the SS plots.

 

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