SCOLs assembled from vanilla/PBP components?

[VersusXV]

I think I could manage without it but using Static Collections via the CK by creating a SCOL experiments plugin(Which only uses vanilla & Project Blueprint stuff, that way the only chance of missing objects should be if they don't have sim settlements installed) then later merging into my City Plan's plugin may allow me to do more & with better performance both through SCOL being more efficient vs individual objects and being able to use 1 way textured pieces in the CK rather than the typical 6 sided 3D like are normally in workshop build mode. 6 sided objects in reality renders extra faces that the player can't typically see which will add to the burden in terms of generating light effects & casting additional shadows, furthermore these shadows may end up being cast in ways that don't actually make sense from an immersion standpoint.

I assume these are intended to be used on the Xbox One(Including the original X1) via the City Plan Mega Pack? I think the performance benefit would be significant for Xbox players, and if it works great on there then it's pretty much 99% that it's gonna work great on any PC that runs Fallout 4. I obsess about optimization things like this since the more we can reduce performance burden the more headroom the game will have to build a Sim Settlement & incorporate more plots with a larger population.

To clarify, this is to use the SCOL itself in the city plan. Not a generated combined Nif as that would require packing in a separate file which wouldn't be within the rules(Or are we allowed to pack in nifs we made ourselves using vanilla/PBP only? Testing on my own custom settlement suggests to me to expect about 10mb file size before BA2 compression, if I created combined nifs for the basic structure/foundation level. For my own custom place I'm expecting it may be about 30mb uncompressed in included Nifs but my custom settlement is very large at 6 cells in size). Combined Nif seems to be the most beneficial to performance but I observed that even just spawning the SCOL's static collection record still offers benefits vs individual objects while not require any separate assets. By merging it into my CP plugin, it simply references the vanilla objects + position/scale/rotation without the use of any additional nif files.

This is certainly an interesting challenge that gets us to think about how to leverage the game systems as much as possible, in order for it to work on the Xbox.

 

[kinggath]

We'll likely allow that in a future round. We're actually experimenting now with involving the Creation Kit in builds. It has a lot of unanticipated issues.

Once we have those kinks worked out, I'll put out tutorials for people who want to build City Plans in the Creation Kit.

 

[VersusXV]

We'll likely allow that in a future round. We're actually experimenting now with involving the Creation Kit in builds. It has a lot of unanticipated issues.

Once we have those kinks worked out, I'll put out tutorials for people who want to build City Plans in the Creation Kit.

That's pretty cool! But I guess for this one, it isn't allowed even if essentially a seamless inclusion? My thoughts were to use a repository plugin with SCOLs(Which I already have going, for my NW custom settlement mod's gradual WIP city plan), when working in settlement I would use PlaceAtMe then later on when done I would use xEdit to copy over the static collection record onto my city plan's plugin.

Although there is the chance that Project Blueprint may have what I need, although about that, if there are particular items I would like for it: Can we request things for PBP? Like if I'm making a structure & wanted 1 way texture pieces to cut down on unnecessary shadows/rendered faces?

In future round might Nifs generated from a SCOL (like we do for SS plots) be allowed so long as no other mods/dlc are required? Just a {City Plan Name} - Main.BA2 containing the Nif(s) being included. In my NW settlement I turned a laggy build into 60 fps by remaking parts of what I did into big combined statics where the handmade settlement had 3000-5000 objects.

 

[kinggath]

Possibly, since the ultimate goal is to start producing some city plan packs and share these out with a ton of people, we would need to find a workflow that made it easy to get all of these things merged into a single plugin.

 

[VersusXV]

I think I may be able to do it in a pretty seamless way, even with the generated nif route. I just tried packing my NW settlement's level 0 platform start Nif and it went from 6.83mb down to 1.38mb.
For reference here is an image of it ingame. (I used only vanilla HIT set pieces)

It's 6 cells in size, 11k-12k units in width by a about 7.5k units in length and about 1800 units tall.(in the image it went up to 1332 Z pos, but I bumped it up 500 units to avoid the tree clipping so as to avoid breaking precombineds by deleting anything)