Dyndolod and it's my own fault?

[Yinkle]

I have this recurring theme where I think, "OK this time I'll install Dyndolod, and it should work" but every time I do this, regardless of what setting I use (normally low), it causes my fps to tank and the game to CTD randomly. Bear in mind that I check my LO meticulously and take note of everything in the Dyndolod log.

 

My current save is with a lv43 character and was CTD randomly far too frequently, so I removed Dyndolod and cleaned it from my save. Now I have no CTD and way better fps in external cells. Is it just me, or are other folk sick of this "it's your own fault that Dyndolod doesn't work" thing?

[traison]

Personally using 2.95 on 1.5.97 and occasionally rebuilding it as mods come and go. Never had it cause fps drops or ctd issues.

 

Some things that come to mind:

1. You may have a mod that causes issues when lods are built using it. If you're using MO2, create a new profile with no mods and build lods from that just to test. That would rule out dyndolod itself as being the issue, pretty much leaving mod combinations as the only reason.
2. There is an issue where people would experience massive fps drops whenever an SL animation starts because Skyrim keeps removing and re-adding all grass several times; or at least this is one of the symptoms of whatever is actually going on. This may have been related to dyndolod, not sure if I'm remembering that correctly.
3. Have you increased the ini value for how many cells get loaded around the player? I would reset those to defaults when using dyndolod, they're not needed anyways and cause their own issues just by themselves.

[Yinkle]

14 hours ago, traison said:

You may have a mod that causes issues when lods are built using it. If you're using MO2, create a new profile with no mods and build lods from that just to test. That would rule out dyndolod itself as being the issue, pretty much leaving mod combinations as the only reason

Yup, but I'd rather lose dyndolod! I realise that the issue is most likely not dyndolod itself, but how it works in my setup.

 

14 hours ago, traison said:

There is an issue where people would experience massive fps drops whenever an SL animation starts because Skyrim keeps removing and re-adding all grass several times; or at least this is one of the symptoms of whatever is actually going on. This may have been related to dyndolod, not sure if I'm remembering that correctly.

I've not seen this issue, my problem is normally when moving between external cells or fast travelling.

 

14 hours ago, traison said:

Have you increased the ini value for how many cells get loaded around the player? I would reset those to defaults when using dyndolod, they're not needed anyways and cause their own issues just by themselves.

uGridsToLoad=5

 

It really is an odd issue as sometimes I could play for over an hour with no ctd and other times it happens within a couple mins of starting a session. It's very random, normally when I crash if I try to replicate it, it doesn't happen again. While it looks nice, I really can't be bothered with all the hassle and time getting dyndolod to work with my load order!

 

Edit: here's the last crashlog from before I removed dyndolod

crash-2024-02-13-06-18-58.log

Edited February 14, 2024 by Yinkle

[traison]

The value in RAX is... unexpected. BSScript::ZeroFunctionArguments looks interesting, does Google have anything to say about this?

 

I would disable the mod that provides Occlusion.esp.

[Yinkle]

28 minutes ago, traison said:

I would disable the mod that provides Occlusion.esp.

Yup that's Dyndolod 3

[Yinkle]

31 minutes ago, traison said:

BSScript::ZeroFunctionArguments looks interesting, does Google have anything to say about this?

I wonder if it might be the Dyndolod dll causing a conflict with papyrusutil? I read somewhere on the dyndolod forum that it should be fine to run them together, but maybe that's not the case?

[traison]

9 minutes ago, Yinkle said:

Yup that's Dyndolod 3

 

Worth considering going back to Dyndolod 2 then; or how about disabling occlusion.esp only?

 

5 minutes ago, Yinkle said:

I wonder if it might be the Dyndolod dll causing a conflict with papyrusutil?

 

Dyndolod does use PapyrusUtil, at least version 2.95 does, so it is possible your issues stem from papyrusutil.dll. The values in the R12 and R15 registers could be indicators of this. You could play around with the version numbers on both of these.

 

The version check seems to be in SHESON_DynDOLOD_MCM.psc:

Event OnPageReset(String Page)
	if SKSE.GetScriptVersionRelease() >= 53
		if PapyrusUtil.GetVersion() >= 33

 

The current version is hidden in PapyrusUtil.dll, but the logic seems to be to return the major and minor version with no dot, i.e. 3.6 returns 36.

[Yinkle]

5 minutes ago, traison said:

Dyndolod does use PapyrusUtil, at least version 2.95 does, so it is possible your issues stem from papyrusutil.dll.

For dyndolod 3 there's an optional dll plugin which is a workaround for the large reference bug. This might have been the culprit.

[libertyordeath]

While traison is following the possibility of one thing being the culprit, i would first consider if the OP does perhaps not understand what DYNDOLOD does in general, and therefore does not use the right combination of settings.

 

Here's how things work: There's so called "levels of detail" (LOD), which make the game render things in less detail the further away they are. Now what the OP may not understand is, there's two totally different categories of LOD: Levels 0-1 (i believe?) in are faily close in vanilla SSE - up to maybe 100 meters away. Why so close? Because those are rendered at fairly high detail, so to save performance vanilla keeps the distances for level 0-1 short. You might call it "near LOD" for this reason. Everything further away is rendered via so called "distant LOD" at very low detail. And not just that, for many objects vanilla SSE doesn't even have distant LOD, so once they pass the threshold those objects just disappear (or pop in, if you walk towards them).

 

You follow so far? Okay, now DynDOLOD only deals with the distant LOD part! And what it does is, to add a whole bunch of objects to it that normally just disappear. As you can guess, this reduces FPS, but not too much if you're using "low" settings. So this on its own is almost certainly is not your problem.

 

Instead the problem likely is: I just lied. Remember i said DynDOLOD does not affect "near LOD"? Except it does! Big time! Not by generating new things, but by vastly increasing the distances for near LOD! So the "detailed and performance hungry" objects that vanilla skyrim only renders near, are now being rendered up to medium distances. And guess what? This includes 3D trees! The bane of skyrim performance is now rendered up to medium distances.

 

Why does it do that? Target audience! 90% of people who install DynDOLOD want better graphics, not better performance. Yes, it does that even if you set "low" preset when generating stuff, because you see: All the work on generating stuff, that's all just about distant LOD. Raising the distances of "near LOD" is instead done by the plugin. It's those big numbers in the MCM menu that are doing it.

 

So how do you setup DynDOLOD for performance and viewing distance, rather than detail?

 

1. Keep using the "low" preset for generating distant LOD. You already did that right. But additionally download tree billboards and make sure they're used when generating. What are tree billboards? Literarily just 128x128 pixel sprites. Ultra cheap and performance friendly. Why are the billboards importan? Keep reading.

 

2. In your skyrim.ini, completely disable skinned trees. Yes, that's a bummer, but the benefits totally worth it. What benefits? Keep reading. Yes i'm a fucking tease.

 

3. In the DynDOLOD MCM menu reduce the level 0-1 LOD distances, so they're just a bit higher than vanilla. AND THEN RAISE THE TREE DISTANCE ALL THE WAY UP TO THE HORIZON! Endless forests for free! Zero performance impact! Zero pop-in too, thanks to lack of skinned trees. In fact the lack of skinned trees will make up for performance lost by rendering more objects in distant LOD. So the sum total is almost zero FPS lost compared to vanilla skyrim. But now you get trees and stuff up to the horizon. Add cathedral landscape and grass, and you can have tundra up to the horizon too! For free!

 

Yes, it's a PITA to set up. Yes it won't look as detailed and screen-archery as the stuff other people have. But it will look far better and immersive than vanilla at near-zero performance cost. I'm running this setup together with a performance-friendly ENB at 80 FPS on a lowly GF 1660 Super. 

 

Oh right, here's my MCM settings:

 

 

Edited February 14, 2024 by libertyordeath