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uGrids & LOD to normal transition


IsharaMeradin

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I understand that uGrids controls how many cells are loaded surrounding the player.  The more cells loaded, the more actors trying to run which means AI packages, scenes quests, etc all vying for the game's processing time.  Not to mention the added terrain, trees, objects, etc all needing to load in. So it understandably makes for a performance hit.

 

The positives that I've seen are that the NPCs are already going about life when you finally reach them.  You don't see them pop in out of strange places and start fighting each other or what not.  It makes for a more "realistic" appearance.  Also, the terrain doesn't pop from LOD to normal right in front of your face.  It is done much further out and unless you are in a wide open area with few trees it is hard to even notice.

 

Under all these conditions, I find walking to be much more effective than running.  Running will cause cells to pass through quicker and can lead to scripts not fully executing or stacking up waiting their turn to process.  But this can be true of the default uGrids settings.

 

Given what I've seen in my own game, I wonder how many un-resolvable bug reports are from running at a higher than default uGrids setting.

 

Example:

I was going to report that Ellenwen's horse wasn't being cleared from Helgen when using Live Another Life with Helgen Reborn.  But I first decided to test on a separate profile (Mod Organizer) with just the mods in question along with the USKP patches.  Guess what?  The horse wasn't there.  Added the uGrids adjustments done in the other profile and of all things the horse was again left in Helgen.

 

My main purpose for using uGrids = 7 is the LOD to normal transition.  It hurts my eyes seeing it pop in like that all the time at the default values.

 

Is there a better way to achieve what I want without the other negatives of uGrids?  I can deal with the random stray horse, but you never know what might not have done what it should have and hold up a quest as a result.

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Well yes, you found the risk of running grids > 5, and it's not worth taking. There is only the option to improve the look of the LOD terrain, and add more stuff to the lod by mods such as enhanced distant detail or DynDoLOD.

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I've been using Detailed Terrain and Tree LOD with Skyfalls & Skymills and recently (since starting this thread) started to give High Quality LODs a try..  Helps it to look better but doesn't resolve the pop in as you walk about.

 

Would it be OK to play the game at default ugrids, but bump it up to 7 when specifically wanting to take screenshots or video?  Just so long as I don't save....

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Yes, that would be ok. For screenshots you could even try going higher. As long as you do not save, anything that does not crash your game is viable

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I've been running SMAA + uGrids 7 for like 8 months and couldn't be happier. Didn't notice those nasty things so far while the graphics is better.  However, I'm not using many mods and none are overhauls, it's mostly vanilla Skyrim.

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Oh, I dunno, some of the odd things you've reported that we couldn't reproduce could well be because of messing with that setting. It's strongly recommended against for a very good reason.

 

Personally I'd be pretty happy if there was an option that would give only the graphics part of it, but there's not. It's an all or nothing deal I'm afraid. To get the better visuals, you have to risk breaking a lot of other stuff along with it.

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Maybe it's true, but for example, 'Halldir's invisible ghosts' I reported at times I was using default uGrids.
I still have loads of old savefiles and could test some of them on the default ugrid setting, just to make sure if some weird bugs I got are true.

But honestly, I try to report every bug or glitch I encounter. And that isn't that often considering how enormous this game is. Majority of time the game is running flawlessly.

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I'm curious about one thing - I'm able to set uGrids in-game via console, edit the skyrim.ini manually to match the set values, type "refini" in the console and save the game. That way the game won't CTD next time I load a save with new uGrid settings.

But is this the reliable way of decreasing uGrids for files that were saved with higher uGrids? In terms of added junk, stability, etc.?

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