Feels extra-good to be playing Fallout 4 again... a month after basically losing my whole mod setup and starting from scratch. I was lucky that I had a reference to go by. The backup was corrupted but the entire folder/file tree of my game folder was preserved, along with the appdata folder for Vortex, where the mods are staged and archived. So I could see what I had and somewhat how it was set up. I thought I could use it... that copy seemed to run okay, but as you go on, it becomes obvious that a lot of the files are corrupted. But it was at least good as a starting point. I was even able to pull some mods from it that are no longer on the nexus
It ended up being worth starting over. I sorted my texture packs better, so the highest-quality ones get priority, while the ones that are simple optimizations and/or up-scales are stacked underneath. First time around I didn't know which were which. Now I recognize the modder's style and techniques. I kinda know now which ones aren't as good by looking at a handful of their screenshots. Definitely looks better with them sorted proper!
While re-downloading everything I went back over the mods, skipping over ones that are now known to cause problems, as well as ones I wasn't appreciating or even using. I also found when reinstalling all of my mods that patches/fixes I needed to make last year are no longer necessary thanks to mod updates. It was mostly minor things with tags for lists that didn't jive right. Maybe 20 minutes of work to do that.
All in all, I rebuilt my whole modding setup of ~400 mods in an afternoon. Wasn't as bad as I thought. I remembered more than I expected. And it gave me really good opportunities to fix old problems I never touched because of how far back I'd have had to go. The worst part was going through the texture packs, which is a good 300 of those 400 mods. As you might imagine, most of those conflict on at least one texture. One of them is 7.1GB and conflicts with with close to 30 other packs. It's like... good luck making rules for that without them bumping into eachother! Setting all of the rules is probably a pretty good IQ test. Once you have like one that conflicts with 12 other packs, and then some of those packs conflict with eachother, you start inadvertently making them double into each other. The whole thing involves a level of logical thinking I just don't have anymore.
Vortex gives you a weird plot to try and solve it but I've never understood it. You get a bunch of dots spread around with intersecting lines that have arrows on them connecting them all. It looks like in the detective shows when the guy's got that corkboard with all of these maps, photos, and notes tied together with pushpins and string.
Like this...
Your chances of solving it are about as good as this guys chances of solving that 30-years-dry cold case...
It's definitely a way to show all of the info, but my god is it painful to try and make the connections you need to make while also going over the packs in your head and thinking of what has what in it.
I found a tedious workaround. You can override the rules you set for whole packs on a texture-by-texture basis... and it never cycles because those overrides go by the specific file. So if I had like 6 packs cycling into each other and I'm looking at a list of 20 or so conflicting packs that I'm trying to get in order, I would just set the rules to fix the cycle and then go in and override each individual texture so they all crisscross how I want them to. The downside is that you have to crawl through each and every pack, making a note of which ones should come from which pack. Quite time consuming. I don't know if I'm smart or stupid for that. I used to do the same with Skyrim SE in Mod Organizer... if I ran into an unsortable combo of texture packs, I would just overwrite or delete the textures I didn't want coming through.
I don't like doing it. It doesn't leave easily detectable traces. So if I ever have to reinstall a pack or something, I'd have nothing to help me recreate the order.
It was funny, too. When I finally got it all working, I wound-up with the EXACT problem I was trying to fix before Vortex crashed and destroyed everything. And I solved it in 30 minutes. For some reason a blood spatter overhaul causes loading crashes in 3 specific locations, that I personally know of. Best part is that none of those locations even have blood spatter that I can find. But it's a thing. I enable that mod and I get very predictable crashes. Why? Bethesda.
I don't know why I do it anymore. If you want my opinion on the game, it's a mediocre game and was when it came out. Yet I've still got over 1000 hours playing it. Nearly a month and a half of my life.
Upgrading from a 2600 to 3900x has made things interesting with Fallout 4. The performance is actually markedly better. There were always a few spots in the game with nasty FPS dips... and I mean always, even without mods. Those are mostly gone. What used to shoot me down to 30-40FPS now only takes me from 60 to... 57. It's crazy to me, to see such a difference. Shadows are DEFINITELY cpu bound in a big way. I used to have to minimize the shadow res and distance to get past shadow-related dips. Any increases would just decimate my FPS. Now, with my 3900x, I can run them at 'ultra' resolution and far enough back that I don't see them rendering (looks like a fog line, but with shadows.)
Probably point to the physics system for that one, which is widely known to be pretty crappy. I'm betting that's why it struggles with volumetric light, too. I can say the godrays no longer bring my machine to its knees, either.
Did AMD finally do it? They made the mythical CPU that can run Fallout 4 properly? Seems like Ryzen 4000 should run Crysis no problem...
Apparently, there's not nothing to it. GN looked into it once and the results are pretty unusual. I'm not sure what CPU it's actually optimized for, it's so bad on all of them. Really just a matter of insanely varied degrees.
https://www.gamersnexus.net/game-bench/2182-fallout-4-cpu-benchmark-huge-performance-difference
Sadly I'm not out of the woods yet. I decided to install the game on my 860 evo sata drive instead of the 970 nvme system drive. Just to see... and to make potential backup/restore ops later lower on variables. And man... what a difference! It's actually quite slow. That really surprised me... more than the differences the 3900x made. The texture pop-in and microstutter are pretty bad running off of the sata drive. Do people really play this game on spinners? My question for you would be HOW?! Even ignoring the stutter, the load times are tantalizingly long. Long enough to invoke past traumas of hanging loading screens. Usually I'd say you could skip the nvme for gaming... really I would. Unless the game in question is Fallout 4. Then, it seems like its almost mandatory.
