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Yet another question about precombines

C B Wright

Active Member
Messages
246
I'm posting this here, instead of in "Questions," because this is where the last bundle of discussion about precombines and their effect on SS took place, and this is relevant to that, and to building, since I'm now poking around the Builder's Kit and trying to see what I can do with Sanctuary.

So after reading through the last few threads about precombines and... uh... previs? I think that's the term, and the effects of breaking them in settlements, I was convinced--very reluctantly--that I had to do without my beloved Scrap Everything. I simply like to build too large to add more stress than I absolutely have to. So it's gone.

So I've been trying to make do with Place Everywhere's "delete extra objects" function combined with disable and markfordelete. But...

...for some reason I am now able to delete some bushes and many leaf and trash piles in Sanctuary, using either the delete extra objects OR the disable/markfordelete functions. I didn't used to be able to do this.

Default behavior should be that I can't do that, right? The junk garnish on top of Sanctuary should be baked in as part of the precombined... mesh, or structure, or whatever you call it? If I can get to it, that means another mod I have has broken it in some way.

Is that a fair guess, or is that stuff actually legitimately accessible without breaking precombines? It's my understanding that that's not the case, but my understanding is, erm, markedly incomplete.
 
My knowledge is as rudimentary on previs. But it's my understanding that the extra selection in PE might brake the previs. I say might, because stuff added by mods like RotC isn't part of the previs. Yet some of it can't be selected/deleted without enabling that mode in PE. At the same time, the extra selection mode enables you to delete stuff in the vanilla game that shouldn't be deletable. Same with the mark for delete console command. Thus in the latter two cases, deleting stuff that shouldn't be deletable logically would risk breaking the previs. I guess it all comes down to if the object is part of a previs or not. And I have no idea of how to tell.

Maybe @damanding could shed some light on this?
 
I stopped using Scrap Everything a while back but only uninstalled it very recently and my game acts very oddly now. Sometimes it lets me scrap stuff using delete extra objects or the console but later that stuff reappears and isn't selectable. I've also checked my ini files and don't have any lines relating to combined objects.
 
Honestly, this is why I like Clean and Simple Settlement Startup. She completely revamped a few of the settlements but the installer allows you to choose either all of the settlements or pick and choose the ones that you want cleaned up.

I've just started looking into the new City Builder toolkit but I think my first project is going to be a version of Sanctuary that uses Clean & Simple as the base. I know there are a ton of people on these forums that love it for regular SS building so I figure there will be those that won't have a problem with the requirement.
 
I'll be honest, I've never used Place Everywhere and I've never researched whether its delete extra objects feature breaks precombines or not. I'll ask around.
 
So I chatted with VIitS and he told me the following:

"If it can be moved or is designed to move (animated meshes), it can't be part of a precombined mesh. And you cannot select it using the console, so you would be unable to disable/markfordelete. Trying to select a precombined object will give you a "Picked Non Ref AV Object" message, and trying to use the pick reference id (prid) command will result in a "Picked Ref (xxxxxxxx) is a combined object under key (yyyyyyyy)" message telling you what precombined nif it is a part of, and still not actually let you do anything to it.

And Place Everywhere doesn't touch precombineds, and can't let you do anything to them. That's why it has to be paired with a mod that does so (like a scrap mod) if you want to use it to scrap a location bare."

So tl;dr if you can disable/markfordelete in console or using Place Everywhere's delete extra objects to get rid of the item it is safe and will NOT break precombines!

edited to tag @tankthing since he and I discussed console disabling previously
 
That helps. But what I'm wondering is this:

If another mod broke precombines, then wouldn't Place Everywhere just see those things as regular standalone objects? I wasn't accusing PE of breaking them, I was worried that because I could select something I didn't think I should be able to using the PE extra object selector, that something else had broken them.

At the very least I know that I can start a new game with only PE enabled and run around sanctuary with the extra objects enabled thing on to get a baseline.
 
An update to this, for those of you who are curious: one of the things that can apparently break precombines are texture changes. I had, um, rather a lot of those. I unloaded all of them and suddenly the leaves aren't scrappable again. So... something in there was the culprit.
 
I unloaded all of them and suddenly the leaves aren't scrappable again

Oh, those leaves are so annoying! Look what I built ma! it's a robot factory, now if only I could invent some sort of leaf cleaning device, sadly no-one knows how the ancients made those broom things work:(
 
They are annoying, but they're also visual proof that the thing I'm trying not to break in my game is, indeed, not broken in my game. :)
 
An update to this, for those of you who are curious: one of the things that can apparently break precombines are texture changes. I had, um, rather a lot of those. I unloaded all of them and suddenly the leaves aren't scrappable again. So... something in there was the culprit.
I had no idea of this. Thanks for sharing.
 
Apparently texture mods that use "material swaps" will do it. I honestly have no idea whether any of the mods I disabled used those, but I do know after disabling them the leaves were immortal again.

I'm now going through turning them on one by one to try to identify the culprit.
 
Any of the mods that add additional trees/bushes/etc to the wasteland are probably breaking precombines if they are using material swaps...or adding more meshes or worse yet, altering lod. I'd assume the leaves are a part of one of them. You could start there. I've even seen some of those mods cause ctds when scrapping. Hence giving up and moving on to a low impact floral mod, true grass (https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/23469). The trees can stay stupid. Not worth the problems they were causing me.

Which makes me wonder how many people aren't using scrap everything, thinking it's the boogeyman that will destroy their Sim Settlements mods, while still using other mods that break things anyway. Might as well just have scrap everything and enjoy the benefits of it if using any of those other mods. Scrap everything has less of an overall performance impact than half of those floral/tree mods anyway.
 
Honestly, this is why I like Clean and Simple Settlement Startup. She completely revamped a few of the settlements but the installer allows you to choose either all of the settlements or pick and choose the ones that you want cleaned up.

I've just started looking into the new City Builder toolkit but I think my first project is going to be a version of Sanctuary that uses Clean & Simple as the base. I know there are a ton of people on these forums that love it for regular SS building so I figure there will be those that won't have a problem with the requirement.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! I also love clean and simple but stopped using it in the settlements that I wanted to try RotC builds on because of them relying on the original settlement items to be there. I always thought it would be cool for the building plans to "switch" to the clean and simple version when they began the build ("tear it all down") the foundation .

Please keep us updated on your progress as I would love to switch all the settlements back to the clean and simple versions and have the option to use the RotC version as I choose instead of having to plan it out from the start.
 
Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of texture replacers (not build-able in workshop) and scrap mods require bUseCombinedObjects=0
in order to work.
Setting it to bUseCombinedObjects=1 will disable scrap and texture mods as the SCOL is no longer broken.
I made a post on here somewhere showing the dramatic difference changing that setting has.

For a layman's layman explanation of precombines or SCOL's...
Think of them like this.
Your house takes thousands of individual parts and "nails" them together to make a "solid" structure or a "precombine".
ie: bUseCombinedObjects=1

Now, if you pull all the "nails" you end up with thousands of "loose" parts again.
ie:bUseCombinedObjects=0

In terms of video rendering.. a precombine is 1 image. Easy peasy to render.
Breaking it into it's individual parts goes from 1 image to 10 (for example). Not a big deal.. yet!
But when you break up a thousand SCOLs you end up with 10 thousand images... Now it's getting rough.
Downtown Boston anyone? hehehe

@damanding This..
Trying to select a precombined object will give you a "Picked Non Ref AV Object" message, and trying to use the pick reference id (prid) command will result in a "Picked Ref (xxxxxxxx) is a combined object under key (yyyyyyyy)" message telling you what precombined nif it is a part of, and still not actually let you do anything to it.

is correct.
But you can still disable/markfordelete the precombined nif.
The mirelurk nests at The Castle is a very good (and safe) example of this. If you type in prid 12a244 (which is the precombine (yyyyyyyy)) you can disable all of the nests and eggs. Unless... you have a scrap mod, then it only disables the the nests and leaves the eggs because the SCOL is broken.
The crashed Prydwen is another, stuff blocking load doors... (both very bad to disable btw) LOL

Nuff rambling! hehehe
 
The problem is that not all scrap mods use bUseCombinedObjects=0 globally. When I was running Scrap Everything (which I think is still a viable thing to use if you have a very high end machine that can handle the graphics load, but I don't) I looked through all my ini files and I didn't find it. The setting is probably stored locally and used to overwrite default default settings when active? That's all I can think. But that means there may be something doing it and you don't know because it's not showing up in your local files.

I never used the environmental mods that made the wasteland greener, but I did use some texture optimization mods. During the Great Texture Purge, I disabled those too, and when everything returned to normal I assumed one of those were the culprit. But I've since re-enabled them and found that precombines are still... you know... precombined. So I have no idea what it is, yet. On the one hand I want to find the culprit, but on the other hand I want to play the game, so... :)
 
The problem is that not all scrap mods use bUseCombinedObjects=0 globally. When I was running Scrap Everything (which I think is still a viable thing to use if you have a very high end machine that can handle the graphics load, but I don't) I looked through all my ini files and I didn't find it. The setting is probably stored locally and used to overwrite default default settings when active? That's all I can think. But that means there may be something doing it and you don't know because it's not showing up in your local files.

I never used the environmental mods that made the wasteland greener, but I did use some texture optimization mods. During the Great Texture Purge, I disabled those too, and when everything returned to normal I assumed one of those were the culprit. But I've since re-enabled them and found that precombines are still... you know... precombined. So I have no idea what it is, yet. On the one hand I want to find the culprit, but on the other hand I want to play the game, so... :)

Chalk it up to one of those random bethesda modding mysteries.
 
SE doesn't require =0 he even says
Do not use the ini edits otherwise, they hurt more than they help.
So you prolly never made the edits.
 
As I understand it he has manually broken the indivudual precombines, but only in the settlement areas, so you don't need to use the ini settings. I confess, I'd like a 'Scrap Not quite Everything' that left 'The big Stuff' like foundations, solid buildings, streets et al, but let me clear leaves, trash, dead lights, dead wires on poles, and so on.
 
As I understand it he has manually broken the indivudual precombines, but only in the settlement areas, so you don't need to use the ini settings. I confess, I'd like a 'Scrap Not quite Everything' that left 'The big Stuff' like foundations, solid buildings, streets et al, but let me clear leaves, trash, dead lights, dead wires on poles, and so on.

You can remove the objects you don't want to be scrappable from Scrap Everything. There is an easy to follow tutorial in the articles section. I did so for all of the Sanctuary roads, sidewalks, and houses, for example, including various large objects in other settlements. Took about 10 minutes.
 
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