I'm telling you FO4 never ceases to amaze... I thought I had seen all of the crazy bugs this game had but I guess not. When it rains, I have no textures on anything. No interaction with light. No alphas. Just polygons. Without any AO, you can't see anything but a silhouette and a horizon. Also not sure what that trailing is about. Motion blur is definitely off. I'd know if it had been on because it physically hurts me.
Behold as a I mash record and frantically try to understand what is happening in my life. And yes... I play FO4 with a controller even though I know it cripples muh action-packed gaemplae experience what with all of the intense, top-tier shooting action!
FO4 is one of those games that's meant for when you want to sit like you have no skeleton and just stare into a big bright light for awhile. You run around, you grab stuff, you kill a lot of people, you talk to people (before you kill them, to get all of the stuff/go to all the places,) and sometimes you even look at things that are kinda neat in a quaint sort of way. Oh... and you read things that mostly don't mean anything and have no impact. Which is nice... nothing takes me out of a game like having to parse new information to continue. You don't even have to shoot the victims yourself. It has a button that tells the game to do it for you, if you just don't feel like aiming. Just follow the bright green boxy things and use your matrix powers on every moving thing you see. It's basically designed to make you dumb and lazy. A lot of times, I think, "That's not so bad." I mean, look at me! I'm mostly okay and if this game was a minimum-wage job, I'd be roughly $10000 richer. But I digress...
I like how it almost looks like it was meant to look that way with ENB+ReShade. It's like magic! From basically not a game to almost a game and all I have to do is sacrifice a paltry 80ish FPS. I wish I was joking. Fortunately unrestrained the game will run fast enough that I still hit 60, which is as fast as it goes, consistently stable anyway.
Something with the rain occlusion, 'wetness' shader and AO just shits on its own face for no discernible reason. I thought it was my mods, but no,
it goes back to 2015, with vanilla games. So at this point it's a classic. One of the great prototypical bugs of the mythical creation engine in its twilight form.
Maybe the mods are agitating it, but usually when that happens, it's in a new place and/or new mods. Not this time. Far from the first time it's rained in this location in this playthrough, but still the first I've even heard of the bug. I was sure it was mods and I was in for a nightmare round of "What fell off of my game files." Say you have this machine that's needed a certain part to run. It's a complex machine with 1000's of parts that you can swap or even remove. But it just can't without that one part. But somehow you've ran it for 10 years flawlessly. Now, it never runs, because it needed that part... meaning you have to figure out where that part was supposed to go, what it did, and where it is. You don't have the box and the manufacturer has gone out of business.
Somehow, you find the part and get it working, but it never runs quite as good as it did without it. The part basically does nothing for you but lower efficiency and... be needed. Simple and logical, right?
That's what I think of randomly needing to turn on the game's AO for it to work right, when I never needed it before, for no direct visual benefit other than being able to see anything at all and a slight performance downgrade. I'm telling you... I can't see the difference with the AO, but I guess it's doing whatever job it does because everything is rendering with textures again. It's like... of COURSE I couldn't see the textures! Everyone knows AO is what makes the textures... exist. I definitely remember everyone ever saying that, now. Weird how I forgot something so basic. I remember when SSAO didn't exist yet and all games were just white polygons.
Normally I'd say something had to have changed... but given this game's otherworldly temperament I'm willing to believe that it just decided it needed something new to continue working on its own. It's like being 10 years into a marriage for me at this point. And I'm over there like "The gameplay is still spicy at times, even if none of it is new or exciting. I still care about you. I just wish you looked better and you wouldn't spontaneously be so difficult with me for no reason."
I'll never get why the fix is to turn them all on or turn wetness off... so SSAO (super-shitty ambient occlusion for the GFXXX noobs,) wetness, and precipitation occlusion (isn't that impressive for this game? Rain doesn't fall through ceilings or trees!
) I could just turn the wetness off, I suppose... but for my entire adult life, everything I've done has been to turn the wetness on... I want to keep it GOING, not turn it OFF! If it was moisture then yeah, keep that away from me. I don't like things to be moist much at all, not in my games... or anywhere else for that matter. I don't like for things to be moist.
I'm sorry for this post. I'm very tired. I wish I could say I was dehydrated but I don't drink. I was born this way. Honestly this game is killing me slowly and I needed a distraction before I could go back
Weird thing is... I've never run the game with built-in AO, though I always use the other two and I have never seen this bug. Now, any time it rains, it snows.
1000+ hours modding this game to pieces and never had anything remotely like this. Then randomly, wayyyy into a playthrough (level 43 now,) it hits every time. Again, no changes to anything. Been running the same mods the whole time. I guess my job is finally done. I didn't need to break it with mods! The game does it for me, and apparently always has for a few others. See, that's what I like to see. A dev who knows their players
Move on with 2/3 of your team and no problems. Or solo. Its pretty flexible like that. But yeah. Those names.. XXROXORZOMG etc ... I suppose it will never die 
