Performance issues with horses

[rynak777]

I'm running oblivion and LAPF on a quite low-end machine, but by now managed to get a quite good framerate constantly, even when there are quite a lot of NPCs nearby. Even combat is now very playable.

 

There are however still two situations where framerate drops so bad that not even streamline visual adjustments can keep up with the stress.

 

- One is locations with a very high amount of clutter. That's understandable and to be expected.

 

- The other is horses. Heck, even just one of them seems to double the stress on my machine.

 

I'm using the vanilla meshes and textures, plus the replacements by fejeena. My bashed patch disables all foot sounds of creatures. I don't get those issues with any of the other creatures in the game - it's just horses. Does anyone have an idea what do to about this (besides buying a better machine) or what the bottleneck might be? (Texturesize, Polycount, Skeleton, Physics, AI)

 

I was unsure if i should post this in oblivion general, or LPK subforum, but since i'd like any possible "fix" to be compatible with creatures 2.0, i decided to post here.

[varenne]

I don't believe horse skeletons or meshes have been altered. So no clue why it would affect FPS so severely. I'd look at that plus any horse textures, meshes and animations you've installed.

 

Also, have you looked into PyFFied and those meshes that have already been run through it? It can definitely help improve FPS. I have not used or tested Streamline so no help there.

 

Last (for now) what is your max RAM and O/S on this low-end machine?

 

Very last, maybe even not yet: If you have at least 4GB try running the 4GB patch on Oblivion.exe.

[rynak777]

I don't believe horse skeletons or meshes have been altered.

 

 

 

So no clue why it would affect FPS so severely. I'd look at that plus any horse textures, meshes and animations you've installed.

 

Also, have you looked into PyFFied and those meshes that have already been run through it? It can definitely help improve FPS. I have not used or tested Streamline so no help there.

 

Last (for now) what is your max RAM and O/S on this low-end machine?

 

Very last, maybe even not yet: If you have at least 4GB try running the 4GB patch on Oblivion.exe.

 

Fejeena's pack does replace horse meshes and skeletons, but how much alteration has been done i do not know. By pure filesize, the replacement files aren't significantly larger than the originals. The textures in the pack are fairly low res (256kb) and only for dicks, with the exception of there being horse_grey.dds.

 

So, i doubt that it's the polycount of fejeena's pack. The skeletons just by filesize comparison also don't look worse than for "human" actors - actually less complex.

 

Just checked texturesizes of what i have installed (which should be vanilla, except of the stuff replaced by creatures20 and fejeena) - nothing that jumps out - comparable to everything else.

 

The animations (non-sex) are the vanilla ones.

 

About PyFFi..... a few months ago, i tried to get that to run for 5 hours and eventually gave up. Then i searched the web for existing packs (besides of the stuff already included in the unofficial oblivion patch)... it messed up a whole range of architectural meshes, so i had to restore from backups. For the bridge of IC, i sadly had no backup, so i now have invisible colliding boxes on it. Suffice to say, i'm not very motivated to try any random pyffied meshes from the web again.

 

RAM shouldn't be the issue, because when i run oblivion, my total memusage rarely goes above 1,8GB. System is XP with 4GB RAM (3,5GB recognized because of 0,5GB VRAM). The swapfile runs on an SSD.

 

I suspect my problem isn't one of sizes and quantities. What about physics - do horses perhaps run on a different physics algo than the other creatures? Or perhaps more complicated collision detection?

[fejeena]

The hore mesh with dick(391KB) is a little bit bigger than original (265KB) the Skeleton both 31KB (30,832 and 31,336)

Dick Textures 512x512 you can try with reduced textures (256x256)

horse.7z 256x256

in Folder textures\creatures\horse\

 

Edit: the horse_grey.dds is original Oblivion size.

 

Edit2:

reduced horse meshes, 373KB ( no Vertex Colors. I don't know how it looks in the game )

horse meshes.7z

[varenne]

Then I'd be looking for conflicts between MODs that include calls to horse meshes and skeletons. I had stability issues with fejeena's add-on for Bravil Underground, sorry fejeena. I like her meshes/textures, just not the resulting issues. It could also be an as yet unidentified issue between LAPF and these horse meshes/skeleton. As a test, go back to either the LAPF mesh/skel for horses or vanilla and see if FPS is impacted. I have many additional horses added to my game via Slof's add-ons, with no impacts to FPS.

 

Are you running/managing MODs via OBMM or WB?

 

I've been tracking down some similar issues with NPC meshes and skeletons in nif files and eliminating them as I find them by running the NifSkope Spells. A lot of work.

 

As far as PyFFIed, it must be targeted at specific meshes, not en mass applied. There are also specific restrictions, such as hair and helmets and also anything affected or acted on by Havok. I posted links a while back to some Oblivion PyFFIed meshes, which I've been using for about a year with no issues. Thye should still be around.

[fejeena]

I never used other horse Mods/meshes as Vanilla and my meshes with dicks. And I have no Problems with the dick meshes (FPS or CTD)

The dick Skeleton is Vanilla with added dick bones (like The LAPF Skeleton with penis bones) The Horse sex Animation don't need and use the dick bones.

The horse meshes are clean, no unused Bogus Notes or unnecessary Properties.

 

Edit: I use the dick mesh with female lowerbody as LAPF futa replacer (Player only. NPCs use the original LAPF lowerbody) No Problems.

 

 

[varenne]

@ fejeena - I suspect rynak777's "when near horses" FPS issues are something other than just horse meshes/skel/animations.

 

@ rynak777 - Let's back step a bit. What FPS are you aiming for and currently averaging? If you are trying to go past 50 FPS avg. you're exceeding Oblivion's capabilities, on ANY machine. I have thoroughly tested this on both an XP box with 4GB, and a newer one with 8GB on Win7-64 bit. Anything above 50FPS will become unstable, I don't freaking care what you do or try to optimize. That IS Oblvion's hard limit. Run OBGE and 4096 textures? Yes, absolutely achievable. I'm doing that now with my new machine, without Streamline.

 

What is your VidCard and VRAM? Have you created an optimized profile via the VidCard software yet?

 

There is definitely a correlation between FPS, meshes+skeletons+animations. I recently learned this the hard way with mistakenly mixing body meshes (LAPF) and armor (pre-LAPF) with LAPF animations and skeleton. Not going to work for very long, but most especially in high volume areas.

[rynak777]

@Fejeena:

Thank you very much for the quick reply and conversions. The reduced dick textures don't seem to make a difference, but on the other hand, unless one zooms in close, they don't look much worse, and well - with just 512mb VRAM, such small differences might add up on more diverse scenes, so thanks.

 

The reduced meshes with my graphics settings don't look much different, but framerate improves a bit. It's now similiar to when i use the LAPF skel and meshes. Which means the remaining bottleneck now has to be elsewhere.

 

By the way - which tools do you use for such quick batch reductions? I know there's ordenador for batch resizing of selected textures, but i'm not aware of a tool to in a halfway smart way batch-reduce meshes without causing glitches?

 

@varenne:

Your suspicion was right. I disabled everything horse related including lovers creatures itself, and then any plugin i thought might possibly interface with horses/creatures often. Major FPS boost - horses now impact performance similiar to how other actors do. Will now try to narrow it down.

 

I'm using OBMM to quickly change loadorder and enable/disable plugins. Wrye Bash i only use to build the bashed patch. I don't really need a bashed patch to reduce plugincount, because the number of files in my data dir is at about 150 - thus way below 256. Only reason i use a bashed patch, is to merge leveled lists and races, and making tweaks like removing foot sounds.

 

Should perhaps finally search for some tutorials about nifscope - so far thought that it's only needed for mesh creators, but as you put it, it sounds as if it is like TES4Edit, just for meshes.

 

About optimized meshes - Do you perhaps have a link or keywords i use to search in google (not gonna bother with forum search - it won't find it anyways). Besides of minor FPS improvement without the issues i previously had, maybe by chance the IC bridge is included, so that my NPCs could cross it again.

 

[rynak777]

(Replying the post #7 by Varenne)

 

I wasn't aware of the 50fps cap, but also not really shooting for it. For halway crowded scenes, 30-40fps would be nice, and by now i'm getting it for such scenes, except of when horses are included (previously, for scenes with horses, i'd go to 20-25fps).

 

I did so via various means:

- Video driver settings

- Not running OBGE

- Not installing large texture packs or item-packs with very high polycount

- A handful of selected tweaks to oblivion.ini (most things i kept at the default, because there's a lot of ugly sideeffects on can create, by changing seemingly harmless settings)

- Replacing the heap in OCPS

- Tweaking streamline settings

- Editing plugin scripts that had an unneccessarily high call speed, and removing plugins which just generally seemed to bog oblivion down

 

By now, i think i've nearly depleted my options. Besides of hunting down that plugin causing the horse issue, i'm quite sure the only way i could gain another significant boost, would be a body and armor replacer that is very efficient with poly usage, but i'm not aware of such a thing (i'm currently running standard HGEC).

[rynak777]

Found it - it was a plugin that was supposed to just give horses more health. In CS, i see that it has a script that runs twenty times per second - what the hell? On the upside, replacing this is easy - can just edit horse stats myself, then merge changes into bashed patch.

[fejeena]

The reduced horse meshes are only NifSkope work = delete the Vertex Colors in NiTriStripsData.

 

IC Bridge: do you have a Mod that adds fire and statues ? Remove both especially the fire. All fire and flickering lights greatly reduce the frame rate.

[rynak777]

Thanks for the info about vertex colors. Coincidentally, i currently have nifscope open to do my first overly simple task: Rename filename of a texturename (Background is, with HGEC, the shrouded armor mesh does not properly fit - fingers will clip through the gloves. Someone else on nexus made a proper mesh, but the nif has wrong texture names, because the modeller thought it was a good idea to correct bethesda's spelling errors ("darkbrotherhooodf.dds")). The author allows redistribution, so if it works properly after testing, i'll probably upload it, since i couldn't find any other proper replacement for HGEC and that armor on the web.

 

About IC bridge - i'm sorry, i should explained that remark better. The issue isn't with FPS. A while ago, i used one of those pyffied packs from the web, but it contained a lot of errors, so i restored from my backups. I however had no backup of the IC-bridge, so those errors remained. Said error is, that the collision geometry is wrong - one can still pass it on the sidewalks, but there are invisible colliding boxes on the centre "road". Inconvenient for me - but NPCs because of their pathing just forever try to go through those "invisible walls" instead of trying the sidewalk.

 

Still, thanks for the info about light flicker. I don't have a plugin that adds fire, but i always wondered what all the talk about light flicker is about. Didn't know that it's this bad.

[fejeena]

The original Oblivion IC Bridge ? Have you changed the meshes in the BSA ? (repacked your BSA ? ) If the bsa is original you can delete the mesh in the Folder and the game use the bsa mesh.

If it is a Mod Bridge you can unpack the original Mod and replace the mesh.

 

If it is the original Oblivion mesh I can extract it from the bsa and send you the original mesh.

 

EDIT:

I'm going to bed, so I upload the original Oblivion Bridge meshes ( ? IC Bridge or the great Niben Bridge ? ) I upload both, checked and cleaned (Combine Properties) with NifSkope.

Bridges.7z in the right Folders.

 

 

[rynak777]

Great. I thought those architecture meshes weren't part of the BSA (which i'd never modify). Thank you again!

[fejeena]

Oh too late.

see Edit old post.

[rynak777]

No problem. Good night.

[varenne]

Search string:

site search http://www.loverslab.com PyFFIed

4GB Patch is here, first post, item 3f.

 

PYFFIed Mesh and High-rez oily texture for MBP+Xeo Title is misleading, it also includes Oblivion, SI and DLCs.

 

NifSkope and 'From the Wild Nifs'.

I've had a disturbing, sneaking suspicion that my inclusion of various MODs and nifs were contributing to my in-game issues, in a big way. And they were. Many body, armor and clothing replacers include various bones and bone setups, none of which is overly standardized. Some are much worse an have multiple Scene root nodes, which is very bad. But this can wait till you have other issues addressed. Same for effectively running PyFFIed. Not hard just have to get it set up right, and memorize a process for yourself.

 

 

[rynak777]

Thanks for the link and search term. I yesterday saw that title in google, but as you mentioned, skipped it because i thought it was for MBP+Xeo.

 

Will take a look at clothing/armor replacers at a later time, as you suggested.