[RELz/WIPz] Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch [UFO4P]

[gazza1986]

Arthmoor, When do you think Bethesda will make the fixes you need for the CK?

[fireundubh]

Arthmoor, When do you think Bethesda will make the fixes you need for the CK?

 

The CK does need fixing, but the CK does not need to be fixed with respect to the UFO4P or my Unofficial Scrap Patch; we need the game itself to be fixed.

[Roy Batty]

The corpses disappear after time, robbing you from reclaiming the weapons if they do? That was the point of my statement.

 

I think this one falls under a preference call and not a bug. The behavior is not undesirable to me, and likely not to others.

[VaultDuke]

The corpses disappear after time, robbing you from reclaiming the weapons if they do? That was the point of my statement.

 

I think this one falls under a preference call and not a bug. The behavior is not undesirable to me, and likely not to others.

The unofficial patches have fixed this bug in exactly the same way in games before, too. This discussion has been held many times, too.

Sadly, it seems now with FO4 the setting that fixes this bloating issue comes with an additional bug.

Might the UFO4P team try to get the bloat issue fixed engine side, again, to get rid of the whole issue to begin with?

It's sad to see; especially after FO4 left an initial impression of being way less buggy at launch than Skyrim was; that many new additions to the game and its engine came with a selection of bugs for modders. Infuriating might be an appropriate word, seeing as how Bethesda seems to push modding even more, this time. Wish they would have added the same QA improvements to the modding push, that they did for the base game.

[Roy Batty]

I can understand it causing an issue with games which have 1000 hours on them, but most play throughs don't. As for the temporary reference limit, I don't think even in 10000 hours would it use up 16777215 references, although that would certainly explode a save game size, but most of those temp references are also purged.

 

If Bethesda would address the issues that would be for the best, but they haven't always been known to do so without a lot of noise, and even then never.

 

My main concern with Beth right now and engine bugs is things which were in F3/NV. If they started with that code base and updated it, then it's likely more crippling bugs like navmesh degradation are present again. Does anyone have a way to test for that reliably?

 

They still have not fixed "falling from the sky" either, I've seen it several times now. This might be the underlying reason why they chose to make everyone immortal.

[Arthmoor]

The corpses disappear after time, robbing you from reclaiming the weapons if they do? That was the point of my statement.

 

I think this one falls under a preference call and not a bug. The behavior is not undesirable to me, and likely not to others.

Put simply, we don't consider "save bloat" to be a preference feature. It's clearly a bug and one that needs to be fixed. Spamming the world with extra guns is not the only source for generated forms. This game appears to have multitudes of pathways to do that so it's not unreasonable to think this can cause serious problems when stacked together with all the other ways generated forms can come into existence.

 

Bethesda ultimately needs to fix this on their end in order for it to behave the way they want it to. For now, we have a huge number of people happy we've addressed this bug for the second time in as many games.

[Roy Batty]

Frankly, I consider it a subjective change.

 

Here's my test.

 

5000 of Deliverance dropped through the wasteland with placeatme resulted in 934 kilobytes rise in my save file size.

 

My play through has just under 200 hours (which I'll use as an average playthrough) , all quests completed that could be, Automatron completed. I'm an explorer so I actively searched for every single dungeon and location in the game and killed every single enemy I came across. I tallied up my kill count according to the stats in the pip-boy leaving no kill type out (includes creatures, robots etc) and that kill count tallied to 3833. Lets say that generously 50% of those kills dropped a weapon, that comes out to 1916 weapons. That is roughly 38% of the 5000 weapons I dropped, which would equate to 354kb if not a single one of those weapons was picked up.

 

Additionally if I kept them all they would remain in my save, be it in a chest or scrapped into components (even more references).

 

No, no I don't think it's a bug or even an issue.

[Arthmoor]

Your opinion has been noted and rejected as non-factual.

 

A bug is a bug. Save bloat and item duplication cannot possibly be considered intentional features of the game. You can claim all you like that this is subjective, but it's very clearly a fix for an issue that Bethesda needs to fix properly but currently has a useful workaround.

 

Unless "Word of God" decrees otherwise, no, we will not be removing this fix from the patch.

[Roy Batty]

I made a scientific test with results anyone can reproduce along with factual information about created refs that is well documented.

 

It is noted that you will reject factual information and declare them opinion without any factual information to back up your claims.

 

You professed to me and the public that you don't like "fixes" that are purely subjective, yet here you are defending one of them.

 

I guess I'll find another bug fix project to contribute to.

[JaxFirehart]

"Noted and rejected as non-factual" you're one of those people who insists the world is flat, aren't you?

 

He did actual tests, with actual numbers. If you want more proof I will write a quick mod that spawns random legendaries until it hits 10k, to prove it even more. Hell I can have it spawn literal random items and/or NPCs, if you need more proof.

[Arthmoor]

I already tested the issue plenty. My conclusions were irrefutable, but obviously both of you already rejected the factual analysis of the issue in favor of your own subjective interpretation of the data. So if you want to go down the road of calling people flat-earthers, look in the mirror.

 

Dropped weapons spawn duplicate refs. Those duplicated refs pile up and never get pulled from the game after cell resets, despite their parent corpses being properly culled.

 

There is no other data necessary. This can be factually proven to generate save bloat and is identical in result to someone running PlaceAtMe commands and never deleting the results when they're no longer needed.

 

You professed to me and the public that you don't like "fixes" that are purely subjective, yet here you are defending one of them.

No. I am defending a legitimate bug fix that cannot be disputed as anything other than a bug fix. Just like I was prepared to defend the audio splice fix that was a legitimate bug fix until developer level evidence was presented to the contrary.

 

What does that mean? It means if Bethesda literally comes out and says it's a deliberate feature that you are able to loot two guns from one source and that the associated bloat is an intended side effect of that, we will remove the fix.

 

What frustrates us more than you can know is that this very same fix was made for Skyrim and literally nobody argued against it because the consequences were crystal clear and easily replicated. You both have already 100% confirmed the issue exists, as have several other people. What more is there to discuss?

[TrickyVein]

Just reading the last few posts, the numbers don't lie. 

 

That *extreme* number of added references don't add to save bloat, clearly. 

 

Even if they did, or even significantly, I fail to see how this qualifies as a 'bug' that any player would actually notice, much less recognize as being 'fixed.'

[TrickyVein]

 

Dropped weapons spawn duplicate refs.

 

I have never seen a duplicate weapon available on any dead NPC where the weapon is also dropped and can be acquired. Picking up the dropped weapon removes said weapon from the dead NPCs inventory, and looting something from the NPC removes it from the world. I guess I'm a little confused about what this is referring to.

[Gribbleshnibit8]

I had to make an account just to comment on this.

 

You DO realize that this is a feature that has been around since at least Fallout 3, right? Like, enemies dropping weapons isn't a new thing even to this decade. 

 

 

Dropped weapons spawn duplicate refs. Those duplicated refs pile up and never get pulled from the game after cell resets, despite their parent corpses being properly culled.

What does this even mean? Do they? I've never gotten duplicate guns? Where is the duplicate ref? Is one in the inventory and one on the ground? I loot all the guns, parts yo, and I've never gotten doubled up ones. I feel cheated now, please fix this obvious game designer bug of me not getting duplicate guns.

 

I'm right there with the math, seems like 900kb of save data isn't that big a deal, what with settlements and all that. I haven't even bothered to check because I don't care about save bloat but I sure do bet settlements increase save size a lot faster than a few hundred dropped weapon refs. You gonna start deleting people's settlements too? "It's a bug that you can bypass the build limit, obviously that's bad so we're going to make your settlement fit inside build limit again." I mean, might as well, right?

[fireundubh]

I don't think the save bloat is all that serious, but it's still a bug. When a weapon drops to the ground, that's actually an entire second instance of that weapon. Normally, when you loot one instance, the game is supposed to disable the other instance either in the actor's inventory or on the ground, but if that link is broken (e.g., with RemoveAllItems), then you have two instances of the same weapon (i.e., duplicates.)

 

Also, I'm willing to bet that every time a weapon is dropped to the ground on an actor's death, that's two unique Form IDs generated for what appears to be a single weapon.

 

Roy's test was the wrong test. He was testing dropping weapons, but the issue isn't dropping weapons, it's weapons dropped on actor death, which is a separate and special thing.

[Arthmoor]

The numbers do point to a problem though, and accumulated sources of this can add up a lot faster than you might think. Several sources of this sort of thing existed in Skyrim and their cumulative effect over time led to save sizes growing many megabytes beyond what they should be. Even if you never run out of actual FF index forms, you will reach the point of instability this engine is famous for long before then once the saves are of sufficient size.

 

I have little doubt that as time goes by we'll discover more sources for this, and they'll need to be corrected for too.

 

The testing I was conducting was solely to confirm the bloat. It was only a side effect of that testing that led to proof that this also results in weapon duplication for those that are dropped.

 

And yes, maybe it wasn't entirely clear, but these are weapons dropped by dead actors you've killed.

 

Things the player dropped would not be considered in this as iDeathDropWeaponChance has no effect on that.

 

As for making straw man arguments about knocking down settlements, please, don't be childish. That said, it is one more factor to consider. If you unleash the limits and go crazy, then other unintended sources of generated forms will eventually limit how far you can go with that.

 

Also, just because it never got fixed in FO3 and NV does not mean it wasn't a bug. Should we lobby to get back the broken navmeshes then? Or just forget trying to get them to fix the bug with edited NPCs? Cause that's literally the logic you're employing here, which renders ANY bug fix project a moot point.

[Roy Batty]

Other peoples posts are not mine.

 

From my own tests duplicated references happen when the NPC's drops a weapon. When you either pickup that weapon from the ground or the NPC the duplication is removed. If the NPC despawns, the "disarmed" weapon remains. It is a game mechanic in the Fallout games to target and disarm opponents. NPC's also discard weapons with 0 health (broken) in the older games (which is not an issue here).

 

Irregardless of that the figures I gave are quite reproducible, and the effect on save game size is negligible. I'm not entirely sure what "save bloat" is in this regard other than some buzzword nonsense to explain something people don't have a concept of. How can less than a megabyte for an amount of references that would never occur in a normal game be construed as a bug. Seems like an edge case to me in that regard.

 

If such a "bug" has been reported to bethesda , and it's so simple and easy to fix, if it truly was a bug I think they would have addressed it by now as they did other legitimate bugs that you yourself have pointed out.

 

You also just defended your position with the exact same thing I just did to argue your position.

[TrickyVein]

 

As for making straw man arguments about knocking down settlements, please, don't be childish.

 

It's not childish at all. The point of the comparison was thus, if you failed to notice it:

 

These are things which nobody notices and which don't matter.

[fireundubh]

If the NPC despawns, the "disarmed" weapon remains. It is a game mechanic in the Fallout games to target and disarm opponents.

Disarming has nothing to do with the iDeathDropWeaponChance setting. I'm not sure why you brought that up.

 

If such a "bug" has been reported to bethesda , and it's so simple and easy to fix, if it truly was a bug I think they would have addressed it by now as they did other legitimate bugs that you yourself have pointed out.

 

News to me. Bethesda's approach to fixing bugs is simple: "Delete their mods and disable that INI setting. Fixed!"

 

These are things which nobody notices and which don't matter.

The duplication bug is quite obvious when you're using Auto Loot, which is why I now set iDeathDropWeaponChance to zero as well.

[Gribbleshnibit8]

 The numbers do point to a problem though, and accumulated sources of this can add up a lot faster than you might think. Several sources of this sort of thing existed in Skyrim and their cumulative effect over time led to save sizes growing many megabytes beyond what they should be. Even if you never run out of actual FF index forms, you will reach the point of instability this engine is famous for long before then once the saves are of sufficient size.

 

[...]

 

The testing I was conducting was solely to confirm the bloat. It was only a side effect of that testing that led to proof that this also results in weapon duplication for those that are dropped.

 

Post the numbers then. Make a video, show us this happening and we will not have a problem with it. If it's as big and frequent a problem as you claim, it should be easy to show us in a matter of a day or so.

 

 

Things the player dropped would not be considered in this as iDeathDropWeaponChance has no effect on that.

 

How... does the value of a game setting determine what is and isn't duplicated? That has zero bearing on the argument of "dead actor's refs are duplicated, player dropped ones are not", which is the much better argument you're trying to make. Bringing things like this up makes me question some things (not related to the argument at hand). Are you saying that items that are dropped because of that game setting are duplicated BECAUSE that game settings says they should be? I'm confused.

 

 

As for making straw man arguments about knocking down settlements, please, don't be childish. That said, it is one more factor to consider. If you unleash the limits and go crazy, then other unintended sources of generated forms will eventually limit how far you can go with that.

 

So, are you saying I'm being silly, you'd never do this. But you would consider it if it were a problem later?

[TrickyVein]

So what about for people who aren't using auto loot. I don't use auto loot, have never seen this issue. Maybe auto loot is bugged. That would be my first thought.

[Roy Batty]

In Fallout 3 and New Vegas the references are linked until the player either takes the weapon or the corpse despawns. In New Vegas if that weapon was disarmed or has 0 health it becomes an unlinked reference and remains.

 

On a side note, the worst save bloat comes from badly made mods that add creatures or increase spawns via placeatme and then have no script to clean up the corpses. There is even a mod for Fallout 4 right now that does that very thing, even though this has been known since Oblivion not to do. This is also why placeatme (falsely) has a bad reputation for being used, it's merely author incompetence.

 

The fact remains it doesn't contribute a significant amount to save size in normal play. Unless you are preemptively fixing bugs in badly made mods, in which case I think that is out of scope.

[fireundubh]

So what about for people who aren't using auto loot. I don't use auto loot, have never seen this issue. Maybe auto loot is bugged. That would be my first thought.

 

Calling RemoveAllItems() on a killed actor who has dropped its weapon to the ground will correctly remove the item from the actor to another container but leave a copy of that weapon on the ground, effectively duplicating the weapon.

 

You can test that yourself, and if you get the same result as me (you will), I'll be sure to suggest that your script is bugged, too. Fuck off.

[Gribbleshnibit8]

Calling RemoveAllItems() on a killed actor who has dropped its weapon to the ground will correctly remove the item from the actor to another container but leave a copy of that weapon on the ground, effectively duplicating the weapon.

 

You can test that yourself, and if you get the same result as me (you will), I'll be sure to suggest that your script is bugged, too. Fuck off.

That sounds like a bug with the function, not the game. Perhaps don't use bugged functions?

 

EDIT to add that we know of many known bugged functions in FNV. AddItem to an NPC breaks their AI, we have workarounds/fixes for that, up to and including someone writing a whole new function to do the same thing.

 

Additional Edit to add that I have written a mod that encountered my previously mentioned bug, and I had to work around it. It sure is stupid to have to add, remove, add, remove, and then force reset an actor's AI just to work around a game bug, but damn if I didn't do it to make my mod work. Perhaps instead of rewriting game functionality, you should look at rewriting mods to work with the game.

[fireundubh]

That sounds like a bug with the function, not the game. Perhaps don't use bugged functions?

It's not a bug with the function. I reported this to SmkViper, who created Papyrus, and he forwarded the issue to the inventory team.