At some point tonight, I hope to play FO4 again lol. The last time I wanted to play it, I borked my mod setup playing with full foliage overhauls... screwed the LODs up completely. I see the leaves on trees only until I begin to get close, when the bulk of the leaves disappear. This was a bit before I broke my hand... just didn't have a ton of motivation to tinker with anything.
It's a compound issue... I have problems generating new LODs. I'm running an older version of the game because I don't really want/need to update the mods that will need to update along with the new script engine memory addresses. Lets get another thing straight... the game runs on my C drive... my system nvme, because it is one of the few games that can really benefit from it. Loading times off of an nvme are significantly faster with uncapped frame rates. I had an additional install for mod testing purposes, as well. On my sata SSD is a clean, Steam-managed install. There are better ways to manage it all. I'm considering jumping to MO2. I need to settle in on my base texture pack. I have like, a full gross of dozens of texture mods, all unpacked from their compressed files so I can mix and match, have individual textures overwrite. The idea is that when I have a sufficient base locked in, I can pack all of that into a mega kit... pack it into BA2s resembling the original game ones, with one archive for each DLC and such. Just keep that to simplify other aspects of modding, and preserve it across installs. That's the biggest bitch of modding games extensively. Long-term file management. Even with the tools available, it's a stressful administrative nightmare to change/move certain parts.
Anyway, problem I'm having is, the LOD generating software only deals with that Steam game folder that holds my blnk dummy install. So it won't build LODs off of the meshes, materials, and textures from my foliage, landscape, and building mods. I'm kinda stuck... no tree mods work right. I'm missing a major component of the look and it is jarring how there are backdrops totally vieled in forests and then as you get close, rows forest pop into tall twigs with tiny handfuls of sparse leafy branches. I wanna run all of the fancy stuff with atmospheric weather, full ENB/ReShade with fake-RT in the form of rough path-traced global illumination. It was running killer with a 3060ti to carry it. Post-processing is one place where GPU grunt still matters, outside of maybe having the memory for hi-res textures. The new lighting stuff you can inject into the raster pipeline is sick, but GPU-heavy. A modern GPU has a much easier time. I can still get ~80FPS with brute-forced global illumination. Probably much better if my textures were properly sized and compressed in archives.
What I am doing right now, is copying a copy of my actual modded game folder back to the C drive. To convince Steam to manage that folder, I had to delete my install from it. Steam then installed the latest version onto the C drive. So now, I am waiting for the old game folder with the old version that's compatible with my mods, as well as my injection based mods/shaders and some other random stuff, to overwrite the new install. Steam has been told not to update unless I launch the game from steam or the game launcher. I'll be using F4SE's launcher. Once that's done, I'll re-deploy the 400+ mods I have set up into that shadow-swapped C drive install and finally generate my LODs using the correct source assets.
Everything about this stuff is so clunky, I swear. I'm using xLODGen, which like xEdit (script data table editor,) deals with many different Bethesda games. The way you choose the game is to actually include the right prefix in the filename. So to do FO4, you literally change "xLODGenx64.exe" to "FO4LODGen.exe" and then it will auto-scan for the Fallout 4 game folder, compile all of the relevant ini files and everything. There are actual command prefixes you can start it with to change where it dumps the generated files and such, but I can't figure out if there's a command to force a different game directory. Hence the ghetto teeter-totter move. At least I don't have to use the CK... the clunk really only begins with the fact that it momentarily locks up between doing almost anything and doing almost everything.
EDIT: And with lots of back and forth messing with different setting in the LODGen, gutting archives, messing with plugins... it is finally TIME for PINE.
A strange fog seems to have suddenly rolled in...
