Devious Devices - Integration 4.3a (2019-09-10)

[t.ara]

Why should skyrim have any type of animation-limit???

...-has there been a secret wish to let the next animator for an object drive into trouble,

because the overall animation pool´s limit is peaked?!

There´s far enough headroom available, concerning FNIS.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Nazzzgul666]

9 minutes ago, t.ara said:

Why should skyrim have any type of animation-limit???

...-has there been a secret wish to let the next animator for an object drive into trouble,

because the overall animation pool´s limit is peaked?!

There´s far enough headroom available, concerning FNIS.

 

 

Short answer: technical reasons, not considering mods would ever break that limit (vs "this has to work on PCs and consoles in 2011"). Which may sound dumb and unrealistic at first, but if you consider that there is a string count limit at 65k... THAT is a really dumb limit. For animations i can somehow understand it since Beth might not have thought about sex (or devious) animations or even if they did not expected about it as the big thing it is now. 

 

Longer answer: probably data types. If you define a variable, array, whatever, you have to set a data type and all of them have a limit. And in general it's good advice to use one that is big enough to take what should go in, but not more because that space will be reserved no matter if it's used. If you just say i want 99 trizillion possible entries for everything, we as users would need something like 99 Fantasticbyte RAM. It's possible to define your own data types and the limit they use, but it's work and well... i admit i can understand a limit for animations. There are only that much ways one can run through Skyrim, or how to kill dragons, nobody would need thousands installed in one game, right? Except of course somebody creates dozens of items that change the way you move and hundreds of sex animations.^^

I'm not that much the expert on this and there might be other reasons aside from data types, but in the end memory management is most likely the reason to all of them. Be it RAM, HDD space or CPU cache.

Considering that Skyrim was released in 2011 and people still manage to push current hardware towards it's limits... i'd say they made some bad decisions in parts but didn't fuck it up entirely.

[fore]

45 minutes ago, Nazzzgul666 said:

Short answer: technical reasons, not considering mods would ever break that limit (vs "this has to work on PCs and consoles in 2011"). Which may sound dumb and unrealistic at first, but if you consider that there is a string count limit at 65k... THAT is a really dumb limit. For animations i can somehow understand it since Beth might not have thought about sex (or devious) animations or even if they did not expected about it as the big thing it is now. 

 

Longer answer: probably data types. If you define a variable, array, whatever, you have to set a data type and all of them have a limit. And in general it's good advice to use one that is big enough to take what should go in, but not more because that space will be reserved no matter if it's used. If you just say i want 99 trizillion possible entries for everything, we as users would need something like 99 Fantasticbyte RAM. It's possible to define your own data types and the limit they use, but it's work and well... i admit i can understand a limit for animations. There are only that much ways one can run through Skyrim, or how to kill dragons, nobody would need thousands installed in one game, right? Except of course somebody creates dozens of items that change the way you move and hundreds of sex animations.^^

I'm not that much the expert on this and there might be other reasons aside from data types, but in the end memory management is most likely the reason to all of them. Be it RAM, HDD space or CPU cache.

Considering that Skyrim was released in 2011 and people still manage to push current hardware towards it's limits... i'd say they made some bad decisions in parts but didn't fuck it up entirely.

 

I totally agree with you. It has nothing to do with animation count, it's a general memory management issue. That's why I can load so many more animations than most of you (I hardly have anything else). THat's why sheson's fix has worked so well for at least the first few thousands of animations. Crash fixes, ENB boost.

 

Behavior files are XML. They have to be read somewhere. The 10,000s lines of data FNIS is adding to the animation(set)datasinglefile.txt as well. That all was simply not foreseen by the Bethesda designer, and notincluded into their tests.

[Piiska]

Memory management makes a lot of sense. Question is what in this 4.1 update is causing the need for most of us to drop so many animations until the game works again?

[galgat]

32 minutes ago, Piiska said:

Memory management makes a lot of sense. Question is what in this 4.1 update is causing the need for most of us to drop so many animations until the game works again?

   Yes there is something wrong, some where 217 animations added by 4.1, and I have to drop almost 1600 animations.

 

Something is not right. Right now what i am seeing the difference between 4.0 and 4.1  is I have 1600 less animations with 4.1, and I have 1600 more with 4.0.

 

  Now which would you want to run?

[Cirena]

I have a crash when I installed the new version of this mod. I linked it to the XXL version of FNIS as when I install over 9700 animations the game will crash upon loading. I use the Sexlab animation loader and mods that use that to add more animations. Is there a solution to this?

[galgat]

3 hours ago, Piiska said:

Nope, it's more or less the game's limit. The 20k limit on FNIS XXL just means that FNIS itself can load 20k animations. That doesn't mean that the game supports the same amount. People confuse these things and I believe that's why fore originally hesitated to increase the limits of FNIS.

 

Now, we don't know exactly how many animations the game can handle but we know that when it comes to FNIS, 12k there is some indicator of a limit that the game can handle. And even then FNIS may not count the animations correctly, at least there has been discussions about that as well. BUT in any case when you reach 12k character animations on FNIS, It seems to be Skyrim's limit. Might not be exactly 12k but around that point.

 

It is strange that while DDi 4.1 adds only 270? animations, it seems like it adds way more because now we have to drop from 12k animations to around 10400. It feels like these 270 animations are somehow being read as 1600+. Or maybe there is something else on top of the animations that cause CTD, given enough animations. I tried to uninstall FNIS Sexy Move when I was around 10400 but that didn't work either so it would seem to be about animations and not AA sets but again I don't know for sure and this needs a deeper look.

   on the FNIS DDI has a soft dependency the esp can be off ( not removed as MO will do, but just unchecked ). but the script's are needed or mostly I believe for compatibility.

[galgat]

17 minutes ago, Cirena said:

I have a crash when I installed the new version of this mod. I linked it to the XXL version of FNIS as when I install over 9700 animations the game will crash upon loading. I use the Sexlab animation loader and mods that use that to add more animations. Is there a solution to this?

   is the and instant crash, in your log file does it ever reach the line "VM is Thawing" Line?

 

If not then you may have to many animation's, and will have to reduce some.

 

  I had to reduce mine by around 1600 animations to get DDI4.1 playable.

 

but with DDI4.0 I can add the 1600 back.

[Nazzzgul666]

47 minutes ago, fore said:

 

I totally agree with you. It has nothing to do with animation count, it's a general memory management issue. That's why I can load so many more animations than most of you (I hardly have anything else). THat's why sheson's fix has worked so well for at least the first few thousands of animations. Crash fixes, ENB boost.

 

Behavior files are XML. They have to be read somewhere. The 10,000s lines of data FNIS is adding to the animation(set)datasinglefile.txt as well. That all was simply not foreseen by the Bethesda designer, and notincluded into their tests.

I'm honored that somebody who actually has some clue instead of just my mainly theoretical half knowlegde agrees with me.  Just out of interest, can you confirm or deny a hard limit on 12k animations for human actors/creatures each?

[t.ara]

1 hour ago, Nazzzgul666 said:

Short answer: technical reasons, not considering mods would ever break that limit (vs "this has to work on PCs and consoles in 2011"). Which may sound dumb and unrealistic at first, but if you consider that there is a string count limit at 65k... THAT is a really dumb limit. For animations i can somehow understand it since Beth might not have thought about sex (or devious) animations or even if they did not expected about it as the big thing it is now. 

 

Longer answer: probably data types. If you define a variable, array, whatever, you have to set a data type and all of them have a limit. And in general it's good advice to use one that is big enough to take what should go in, but not more because that space will be reserved no matter if it's used. If you just say i want 99 trizillion possible entries for everything, we as users would need something like 99 Fantasticbyte RAM. It's possible to define your own data types and the limit they use, but it's work and well... i admit i can understand a limit for animations. There are only that much ways one can run through Skyrim, or how to kill dragons, nobody would need thousands installed in one game, right? Except of course somebody creates dozens of items that change the way you move and hundreds of sex animations.^^

I'm not that much the expert on this and there might be other reasons aside from data types, but in the end memory management is most likely the reason to all of them. Be it RAM, HDD space or CPU cache.

Considering that Skyrim was released in 2011 and people still manage to push current hardware towards it's limits... i'd say they made some bad decisions in parts but didn't fuck it up entirely.

I meant it a little different way: IF skyrim would have it´s need of 100000 animations for the gameplay (in 2011), it would have got them. And that´s not the question of memory, instead only the question of technology.  But it has been not the focus of skyrim´s development to have such a huge pool of animations at least. 

The game has been kept light-weighted, - maybe they wanted this game to become also an online game-from beginning. 

Lot of games today add thousands of new animations by updates, every month.

 

[Nazzzgul666]

32 minutes ago, galgat said:

   Yes there is something wrong, some where 217 animations added by 4.1, and I have to drop almost 1600 animations.

 

Something is not right. Right now what i am seeing the difference between 4.0 and 4.1  is I have 1600 less animations with 4.1, and I have 1600 more with 4.0.

 

  Now which would you want to run?

You make an understandable, but not necessarily right assumption. Your conclusions are based on the assumption that it's only SLAL and DD that fights about resources, but i doubt that. Like fore mentionend, it's not even necessarily only animations that have that fight.

For actually proper tests, remove all mods except the requirements (which might still add to the fight, but no point in removing those). Then add once DD4.0 and see how many animations you can install, try again with DD4.1. Then you can try to add any other mods and see how far you get.

[galgat]

32 minutes ago, Nazzzgul666 said:

You make an understandable, but not necessarily right assumption. Your conclusions are based on the assumption that it's only SLAL and DD that fights about resources, but i doubt that. Like fore mentionend, it's not even necessarily only animations that have that fight.

For actually proper tests, remove all mods except the requirements (which might still add to the fight, but no point in removing those). Then add once DD4.0 and see how many animations you can install, try again with DD4.1. Then you can try to add any other mods and see how far you get.

DD and ZAP have the same "problem".
They reuse AA animations in combination with others to create new sets of animations, resulting in an invisible difference that's not shown in FNiS or by counting the amount of animation files.

 

it is screwed, and make management of our animations problematic.

 

 EDIT >>> which in reality show's that DDI4.1 adds over 2842 animations with this new release. Up from only 1025 in DDI 4.0

 

EDIT >>> next release they add maybe 2 more item's, do even more of that and maybe we lose 5000 or 6000 that we can not see.

[Nazzzgul666]

37 minutes ago, t.ara said:

I meant it a little different way: IF skyrim would have it´s need of 100000 animations for the gameplay (in 2011), it would have got them. And that´s not the question of memory, instead only the question of technology.  But it has been not the focus of skyrim´s development to have such a huge pool of animations at least. 

The game has been kept light-weighted, - maybe they wanted this game to become also an online game-from beginning. 

Lot of games today add thousands of new animations by updates, every month.

 

No, you missed a point i mentioned but probably didn't explain it well enough. Again - not sure about other memory issues that might work similar, but with data types as example i hopefully can explain it.

So, let's say you're the Beth dev, and you write the game engine. On such a level regardless of the programming language you use, all data types MUST have a limit. Imagine this as creating a box (a real one, not a virtual one) - you set the maximum volume of this box by how small or big you create the bottom and walls. And at the same time you define how much space this box will take - you have to consider that for a complete game you need a lot of those boxes and in the end they all need to fit into the house - which is the gaming device that your customers will have.

It doesn't matter if the box is full or half full or completly empty - it will always take that amount of space, and it will always only have a certain amount of space inside. It doesn't help anybody if you just take the volume of the entire house and make every box about this size. That would mean your customers would need something like a million houses to use your finished product. That might become better in future when they build bigger houses, but you don't want to sell your product in a million years. You have to build those boxes as small as possible and reasonable, and with modding and stuff you have to estimate how much "reasonable" is - right now, and in ten years. 

That's a very difficult task and when it comes to animations... imho their guess wasn't that bad.

 

And no, if Skyrim would have needed 10000 animations in 2011, it wouldn't have gotten them. They would have changed their needs, because it is rather pointless to a company to create a product that nobody on earth can use at the moment they finish it. That's a certain way to go bancrupt. Again, as fore mentioned it's not only the HDD space that those animations require to work. You somehow need to register them to the game. That needs a list (i.e another box) that has to be read and loaded into another box, and this process shouldn't require half a year to finish. Or the complete RAM of your PC. Or the entire CPU cache. There are ways to split that from RAM to cache, but those ways need... another couple of boxes. Which might not need much space, but you still have to build them.

 

Not sure what you mean it's a question of technology, ofc it partly is - but Beth isn't able to build and sell devices that everybody who wants to play their game can effort and uses technology 10 years ahead of Intel, AMD and whoever. And they haven't been in 2011 either. If your customers don't have the technology to play the game at release date, it is entirely pointless to create this game then. I'm ok with 2011 as a release date for Skyrim instead of 2021, if that is what you're refering to.

You are most likely right when you say it wasn't the main focus to add more animations when they created Skyrim. The focus was to create a game that is fun, and will be sold. Skyrim is not something like the Unreal engine where you're supposed to create your own game.

[Piiska]

1 hour ago, Nazzzgul666 said:

I'm honored that somebody who actually has some clue instead of just my mainly theoretical half knowlegde agrees with me.  Just out of interest, can you confirm or deny a hard limit on 12k animations for human actors/creatures each?

He said he can load more animations than most of us so it's not a hard limit but that seems to be the limit for most of us mod users. I don't know anyone here who can run over 12k character animations without getting CTD. The tools we have such as Crash Fixes probably raised the limit to 12k whereas before we might not have been able to run even that amount. Now that there has been no new "tools" coming to raise it further, most users have experienced the 12k as the "limit".

 

Now what's happening with DDi 4.1 proves that mods also affect on the amount we can run. Suddenly we cannot run as many animations as before. For a long time though, 12k was the amount people were able to run with a heavy mod setup. DDi 4.1 did something that forces us to lower it and no one knows what yet.

[Lastbdsm]

Guys, anyone have the old 4.0 DDi and DDx?
Mine just update, and now my save cant load, even new game got CTD.
I deleted the old version coz I think this will just run.

Using 4.0 Before runs fine and never crash/ctd

[t.ara]

51 minutes ago, galgat said:

DD and ZAP have the same "problem".
They reuse AA animations in combination with others to create new sets of animations, resulting in an invisible difference that's not shown in FNiS or by counting the amount of animation files.

 

it is screwed, and make management of our animations problematic.

 

 EDIT >>> which in reality show's that DDI4.1 adds over 2842 animations with this new release. Up from only 1025 in DDI 4.0

 

EDIT >>> next release they add maybe 2 more item's, do even more of that and maybe we lose 5000 or 6000 that we can not see.

...has zap really AA animations in the pack?...maybe I lost some month here all around, I´m really not up to date:-(....my version(s) have no AA animations. TUFP had them for Maria Eden in the past. ZEP has them also.

[galgat]

6 minutes ago, t.ara said:

...has zap really AA animations in the pack?...maybe I lost some month here all around, I´m really not up to date:-(....my version(s) have no AA animations. TUFP had them for Maria Eden in the past. ZEP has them also.

   It is not you, one of the reasons you never have to register zaz animation is the way zaz use's them ( in Game ), it was small fry in it's use, but DDI has taken it to a whole new level.

 

   In DDI 1242 animation, by scripting trickery is turned into over 2842 animations, that approximately 1600 of them will never read out in FNIS. so FNIS will show your limit at far less, but it is really close to the same as it always was, but you will not see them counted in the FNIS read out.

 

EDIT >> as they do more of this with each addition to DDI you will show less, and less animations that you can use. It will look in FNIS like your limit is reduced, but it actually is not, these animations will be hidden from the FNIS count.

[Piiska]

8 minutes ago, lw71 said:

Guys, anyone have the old 4.0 DDi and DDx?
Mine just update, and now my save cant load, even new game got CTD.
I deleted the old version coz I think this will just run.

Using 4.0 Before runs fine and never crash/ctd

This is exactly what we have been discussing. Right now with 4.1 your best bet is to uninstall animation packs until your game works again. No other workaround known at the moment. You probably have to uninstall a lot of them.

[Lastbdsm]

Just now, Piiska said:

This is exactly what we have been discussing. Right now your best bet is to uninstall animation packs until your game works again. No other workaround known at the moment.

I see so thats because the increasing number of animation.
ok, gonna do that. thx

[t.ara]

57 minutes ago, Nazzzgul666 said:

No, you missed a point i mentioned but probably didn't explain it well enough. Again - not sure about other memory issues that might work similar, but with data types as example i hopefully can explain it.

So, let's say you're the Beth dev, and you write the game engine. On such a level regardless of the programming language you use, all data types MUST have a limit. Imagine this as creating a box (a real one, not a virtual one) - you set the maximum volume of this box by how small or big you create the bottom and walls. And at the same time you define how much space this box will take - you have to consider that for a complete game you need a lot of those boxes and in the end they all need to fit into the house - which is the gaming device that your customers will have.

It doesn't matter if the box is full or half full or completly empty - it will always take that amount of space, and it will always only have a certain amount of space inside. It doesn't help anybody if you just take the volume of the entire house and make every box about this size. That would mean your customers would need something like a million houses to use your finished product. That might become better in future when they build bigger houses, but you don't want to sell your product in a million years. You have to build those boxes as small as possible and reasonable, and with modding and stuff you have to estimate how much "reasonable" is - right now, and in ten years. 

That's a very difficult task and when it comes to animations... imho their guess wasn't that bad.

 

And no, if Skyrim would have needed 10000 animations in 2011, it wouldn't have gotten them. They would have changed their needs, because it is rather pointless to a company to create a product that nobody on earth can use at the moment they finish it. That's a certain way to go bancrupt. Again, as fore mentioned it's not only the HDD space that those animations require to work. You somehow need to register them to the game. That needs a list (i.e another box) that has to be read and loaded into another box, and this process shouldn't require half a year to finish. Or the complete RAM of your PC. Or the entire CPU cache. There are ways to split that from RAM to cache, but those ways need... another couple of boxes. Which might not need much space, but you still have to build them.

 

Not sure what you mean it's a question of technology, ofc it partly is - but Beth isn't able to build and sell devices that everybody who wants to play their game can effort and uses technology 10 years ahead of Intel, AMD and whoever. And they haven't been in 2011 either. If your customers don't have the technology to play the game at release date, it is entirely pointless to create this game then. I'm ok with 2011 as a release date for Skyrim instead of 2021, if that is what you're refering to.

You are most likely right when you say it wasn't the main focus to add more animations when they created Skyrim. The focus was to create a game that is fun, and will be sold. Skyrim is not something like the Unreal engine where you're supposed to create your own game.

..and therefore one step ahead has been the Havok Animation Technology, it spends the possibility to merge existing animations with a sheer limitless overlays of suiting animations from the pool at all:

 

Skyrim got ONLY a few bunch, focussed on the humanoid characters....

 

There are  about 40 animation files (base pack), animation pool:

1 Lever

1 Pull-Chain

1 Projectile

10 WitchLight

20 Ice Wraith

22 Chicken

23 Storm Atronach

25 Frost Atronach

25 Slaughterfish

26 Mammoth

27 Dwarven Sphere Centurion

28 Hare

29 Mudcrab

30 Dwarven Spider

30 Flame Atronach

30 FrostBite Spider

31 Bear

32 Wisp

33 Chaurus

33 Hagraven

33 Skeever

35 Horker

35 Steam Centurion

36 Goat

36 Spriggan

39 Deer

39 Troll

39 Wolf

40 Dragon Priest

41 Cow

44 Dog

44 SabreCat

52 Werewolf

57 Falmer

62 Horse

116 Draugr

1013 Humanoid/Character

 

= 2218 TOTAL (maybe I haven´t all of them?!)

 

so this basical stuff, this is very, very light-weigthed, indeed:-)

 

[Supertin]

21 minutes ago, galgat said:

   It is not you, one of the reasons you never have to register zaz animation is the way zaz use's them ( in Game ), it was small fry in it's use, but DDI has taken it to a whole new level.

 

   In DDI 1242 animation, by scripting trickery is turned into over 2842 animations, that approximately 1600 of them will never read out in FNIS. so FNIS will show your limit at far less, but it is really close to the same as it always was, but you will not see them counted in the FNIS read out.

 

EDIT >> as they do more of this with each addition to DDI you will show less, and less animations that you can use. It will look in FNIS like your limit is reduced, but it actually is not, these animations will be hidden from the FNIS count.

 

Could you please stop spreading misinformation?

 

Thank you

[galgat]

 

7 minutes ago, Supertin said:

 

Could you please stop spreading misinformation?

 

Thank you

Oh! yeah you all don't do that..Right!

 

EDIT >>> You reuse AA animations in combination with others to create new sets of animations, resulting in an invisible difference that's not shown in FNiS or by counting the amount of animation files.

[Supertin]

2 minutes ago, galgat said:

 

Oh! yeah you all don't do that..Right!

 

EDIT >>> You reuse AA animations in combination with others to create new sets of animations, resulting in an invisible difference that's not shown in FNiS or by counting the amount of animation files.

Maybe there's a language barrier issue here? What you are saying is absolute nonsense. There is no "reusing AA animations in combination with others to create new sets of animations". I don't even know what this is supposed to mean.

There is also no invisible difference in animation count in FNIS. The FNIS output shows every single animation file it registers.

 

You are insinuating that the 217 added animations in 4.1 somehow account for a strain on your game equal to your arbitrary number of 2842 animations. Unless fore can confirms that something causes FNIS AA animations to have a much bigger impact than regular animations, this is also unfounded gibberish.

In fact, if I remember correctly fore said that the footprint for alternate animations is smaller than for regular animations (found the post of it).

 

[galgat]

Just now, Supertin said:

Maybe there's a language barrier issue here? What you are saying is absolute nonsense. There is no "reusing AA animations in combination with others to create new sets of animations". I don't even know what this is supposed to mean.

There is also no invisible difference in animation count in FNIS. The FNIS output shows every single animation file it registers.

 

You are insinuating that the 217 added animations in 4.1 somehow account for a strain on your game equal to your arbitrary number of 2842 animations. Unless fore can confirms that something causes FNIS AA animations to have a much bigger impact than regular animations, this is also unfounded gibberish.

In fact, if I remember correctly fore said that the footprint for alternate animations is smaller than for regular animations (found the post of it).

 

   You truly miss the point, 11803 animations playable with DDI4.0, 10400 animations playable with DDI4.1.

 

The FNIS count is off, so we can not manage our animations well, as the FNIS read out is not correctly counting them.

 

    I have not a problem with the addition of animation's.

 

      But i do have a problem with not being able to know where my limit is.  And the New DDI has very much changed that limit ( some how ).  So where will that limit be when you add your next update. will it drop to 9000, 7000, 6000. I need to have something to work with here, so I can try to adjust my load order to comply with what ever changes you all intend to make.

 

   I hope I can still run Sex lab when you are done it has 1203 animations in it.

[Nazzzgul666]

1 hour ago, t.ara said:

...has zap really AA animations in the pack?...maybe I lost some month here all around, I´m really not up to date:-(....my version(s) have no AA animations. TUFP had them for Maria Eden in the past. ZEP has them also.

Not sure about ZAP 8 +, but ZAP 8 doesn't have a single one according to FNIS. So... as far as i can say, galgat is just wrong, at least with his direction.

 

For animations, well, you probably know more about that than me but to me it seems you're forgetting some. There are all the furnitures like chair, working bench,... plus, "dragon" is not an animation. "Dragon flying" is one, "Dragon biting" is one, "Dragon getting killed" is... more than one since there are several.^^ At least that's how FNIS counts afaik.  My guess would be that the original game has something like 10k animations already, and if the 12k limit is right, they might have just doubled the number they had to make it avaivable for mods. Same for script counts - there is a limit of about 65k and Skyrim plus all DLCs use around 32k. 

And at first glance that doesn't sound totally insane or evil to me - considering the size of Skyrim, all the NPCs, items, locations, quests, dialogues,... i can understand the assumption that doubling that in size should be enough for a second playthrough. Don't forget that you can just uninstall all the mods and install some different, again doubling Skyrim in size and have a new experience.

Don't get me wrong, i'm not saying i'm totally fine with all the restrictions. What i'm saying is that i can understand it, and if i'd been the developer it might have happened the pretty much same way. 

My guess is that they never considered any big frameworks at all. I.e. mods that add a lot of stuff without doing anything on it's own, needing other mods. And that these frameworks might work nicely together. One or two of them (Sexlab + ZAP for example) - still works fine. Add DD, the amputation framework, PCEA and one or two fighting overhauls... well. Or rather not well anymore. But honestly without beeing a fanboy of Bethesda, it's really hard to blame them for that mistake imho, or even call them evil for not considering that, because at least i can't say for sure that i would have done it better.