GUIDE Fear and Loathing in New Vegas - Feedback

[oqhansoloqo]

Kelmych - Oh, so you have been reducing exterior normal map textures to 1K even with a 4GB card (for Skyrim)?  That's good to know, because that's what I have also.  :)

 

Then I guess I'll end up doing the DDSOpt thing for FNV as well [as done with Skyrim].

[EssArrBee]

Kelmych - Oh, so you have been reducing exterior normal map textures to 1K even with a 4GB card (for Skyrim)?  That's good to know, because that's what I have also.  :)

 

Then I guess I'll end up doing the DDSOpt thing for FNV as well [as done with Skyrim].

The standard is usually to use uncompressed or lossless compressed normals at half the size of the color maps because DXT compression really sucks. The half size uncompressed actually higher fidelity in most occurrences. The 1k normals use a different options on the restraints tab in DDSOpt, so just pay attention to that. It's in the guide with pictures.

 

I have a mid range 2Gb card in my laptop and get 45-50 FPS with 1k Exteriors for everything in Freesdie, which is pretty good for something I bought for under $600. >2Gb should probably go with Kelmych's recommendation unless it's one of the low end cards with lots of VRAM, like a card directed at the HTPC crowd that doesn't need a ton of power for coder/decoder of Bluray, but needs lots of VRAM for those huge file sizes. I haven't run into anyone like that except myself though, so if there are any HTPC nuts trying to game on their TV let me know.

 

I might even go lower on the normal maps myself to try and get the last two sections of the strip to work a bit better. I guess it's just a mess unless you participate in the 'time honored tradition of throwing more hardware at a software problem'.

[Crimson13]

Does anyone else get bad lag? I figured New Vegas Stutter Remover would remove or just help it (And I followed the .ini directions it had.) but typically when I go outside my FPS drops and goes choppy. I thought that textures might be the case so I unchecked Poco Bueno but it didn't change a things. I also get really strong slowdowns and lag when opening inventories.

[EssArrBee]

Lag no, I don't get that, but I do get some FPS drops in certain areas like the strip. Sometimes I get inventory lag when I have to many items and to many quests running at the time. I noticed that knocking out a few quests from the list will help with that. Also get a house and drop off you loot.

[Crimson13]

Hmm, odd. It seems to be just outside for me, indoors is alright. I used FRAPS to check the FPS and it's weird to see that I get better FPS from Skyrim with alot more graphic mods and the others than I do from F:NV. I'll even get a couple seconds of the game not responding just bringing up the pause menu and the console commands sometimes. Is around 30 FPS normal for F:NV?

[EssArrBee]

Gamebryo just isn't a stable engine. Creation even for all the terrible PS3 crap they had to add is better. Just count your lucky stars that all the platforms are now x86-64 architecture so future games will be better.

[oqhansoloqo]

Exactly what I get.  Yes, when I open a container and close it, the game lags a lot for maybe 10 secs (maybe?) before going back to normal.  I don't know why it does that and I haven't figured out how to fix that.  I'm talking a brand new game too, before having much in my inventory or a lot of items scattered around the game world.  I also had horrendous stutter when I tried running ENB for the memory tweaks, alongside with FNV4GB.  Of course, with all the mods installed, FNV4GB is required... ENB memory tweaks are not, so that is what I dropped - ENB tweaks.  After disabling the memory tweaks in ENB (what is mean is having either "ExpandSystemMemoryX64" or "ReduceSystemMemoryUsage" as "true" in enblocal.ini - I think...) the horrible stuttering I was getting just looking around in-game was gone.  I still have the other lag/FPS drop issue after looking in containers though...  It also seems as though the average FPS just drops, in general, after a few minutes of playing.  I don't know if it's because of rising graphics card temperature, or because of some kind of memory caching issue... but it seems to happen to me.  Sometimes I would just decide to save and quit the game, and then start it up again and load my game, just to refresh things (FPS/memory/whatever...).  I also did not notice much of an improvement from downgrading texture resolutions either (for example, using Poco Bueno versus Ojo Bueno), but I did notice some.

 

I also agree with you about getting better FPS in Skyrim with more intensive graphics/etc.  I think it's because in Skyrim the ENBoost memory stuff works properly, whereas it doesn't in FNV.  I think if FNV4GB and ENBoost memory stuff worked properly together, then we would see much better results than we are seeing.  I'm wondering if ENBoost even really works for FNV.  The current version of ENBseries for FNV is older than the current version for Skyrim.  Maybe that Boris guy needs to be pestered for an update for ENB for FNV that improves upon the ENBoost functionality.  :)

[oqhansoloqo]

Maybe it would help if someone created an Occlusion Culling mod for FNV, like "Skyrim Project Optimization".

[Nozzer66]

Just for your interest EssArrBee, Have tried Redesigned 3. Makes Doc Mitchell actually look like an OLD man, with wrinkles, which is the first good thing I've noticed.

 

Aside from that, and using the Dimonized Type 3 female body, have followed the guide to a T, and noticed when I started up a new play through last night that there was some sort of issue with the alternate start.

 

The first thing I noticed was that as soon as you got off the bed in the alternative shack, the game asked for your name and sent you to the design screen, rather than waiting for you to use the Vigor tester and then the terminal. You then followed the usual procedure of vigor tester and the terminal. I then chose to start at Goodsprings. All good there, you're placed outside Doc Mitchells, as usual. However you have no Pip Boy, nor any of the other items Doc gives you.

 

I thought, that's strange, so went back inside, and the Doc is still standing by the Vigor tester. Interacting with him just gives the "We can talk later' response. The vigor tester cant be interacted with.

 

Possibly just a complete co-incidence, and I didn't have much time to break out FNV Edit and investigate further, but thought I'd mention it. Removing the Alternate Start and remaking your char via the Vanilla method worked fine, though. There's something, somewhere messing with the very first quest, it seems... 

[EssArrBee]

Any additional mods? I haven't had a problem with Alternative Start once yet. It is hard to troubleshoot that mod when I can't get it to break.  :confused:

 

I actually decided to take a little break after STEP 2.2.9 launched, even though I said I'd return to F&L afterwards. I'll probably get back to testing everything again soon, but it really takes a lot out of you when all you do is test, troubleshoot, and write instead of play. NV Redesigned 3 looks pretty good, so I'll definitely test it out when I start doing that again. Maybe sometime this weekend when I finally finish writing the DDSopt instructions. 

[oqhansoloqo]

Nozzer66 - maybe it has something to do with "Tutorial Killer" mod.  Try re-installing that one.  I say this because it is a mod that has a patch in its FOMOD specifically for Alternate Start.  Maybe you didn't select that option and that's what is causing the issue you are having.  Personally, Alternate Start is the only mod in the guide that I don't use.  Because I don't use it, I also did not select the patch option for it in the Tutorial Killer FOMOD, but I know it's there.

 

EssArrBee - no worries.  Although I am eager to see some of these extra mods get incorporated into the guide, I also see how much work you put into the whole thing and think you should get a break from it for a little bit.  It's summertime after all.  :)

[Nozzer66]

Actually, you could be right, oqhansoloqo (How do you pronounce that, BTW?) cause I seem to recall in that Tutorial Killer FOMOD install that the option to select Alternative Start was grayed out. Will have a play.

 

Either way it's no huge issue cause I only ever used Alternate Start to pick the machanic background and get Jury Rig early, cause it's so damn useful. And always started at Goodsprings.

 

And EssArrBee, take your time mate. You've been working like hell. Get out there and smell the roses. :)

[Kelmych]

The standard is usually to use uncompressed or lossless compressed normals at half the size of the color maps because DXT compression really sucks. The half size uncompressed actually higher fidelity in most occurrences. The 1k normals use a different options on the restraints tab in DDSOpt, so just pay attention to that. It's in the guide with pictures.

 

I have a mid range 2Gb card in my laptop and get 45-50 FPS with 1k Exteriors for everything in Freesdie, which is pretty good for something I bought for under $600. >2Gb should probably go with Kelmych's recommendation unless it's one of the low end cards with lots of VRAM, like a card directed at the HTPC crowd that doesn't need a ton of power for coder/decoder of Bluray, but needs lots of VRAM for those huge file sizes. I haven't run into anyone like that except myself though, so if there are any HTPC nuts trying to game on their TV let me know.

 

I might even go lower on the normal maps myself to try and get the last two sections of the strip to work a bit better. I guess it's just a mess unless you participate in the 'time honored tradition of throwing more hardware at a software problem'.

Until recently I had a 2GB graphics card and I was using 1Kx1K for all exterior texures in Skyrim. I used lower resolution versions of mods (initially done manually) for the exerior textures and DDSopt when necessary to reduce texture size. That's why I added the ability to the batch files to take exterior textures from a lower resolution version of a mod, while retaining the higher resolution textures for dungeons and interiors where I was seeing much lower VRAM usage.

 

Most of the fairly large uncompressed textures are in body textures, mainly in head and body color maps and in model space normal maps. For those, as SRB mentions, I reduced sizes if needed but kept any uncompressed textures as reduced size uncompressed. In Fallout New Vegas I was able to use some 2Kx2K exterior textures, but I needed to be careful.

[MadOak]

For all of you experiencing lag when accessing containers and gradual lag/lower FPS while playing, perhaps you should try purging your cell buffer. There are a handful of mods to do so, but you can also open the console and type "pcb" (do I have to say it's without the quotation marks?). It usually work pretty well for me.

[Crimson13]

For all of you experiencing lag when accessing containers and gradual lag/lower FPS while playing, perhaps you should try purging your cell buffer. There are a handful of mods to do so, but you can also open the console and type "pcb" (do I have to say it's without the quotation marks?). It usually work pretty well for me.

It does work, but when it takes around 10 seconds for the game to register the console key (Tilde, I think? It's a weird name.) and the game gets to the point where you have to use pcb frequently in the span of 15 minutes it get irritating very fast. If you could post the mods you mentioned I'd be quite grateful.