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Scrap Crash and City Plans - Is our workflow making things worse?

Tharatan

Active Member
City Planner (S3)
Banned
Messages
176
I've been wrestling with some issues on a Far Harbor settlement in my current play through, and in the course of trying to fix things have come across information that suggests the top-down workflow of City Plan makers might be exacerbating issues.

In particular, I was looking at R2K's Power Tools (https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/17777) and reading the linked post by @kinggath (https://www.simsettlements.com/site...sh-reason-fix-and-preventative-measures.7696/) when this part jumped out at me:

1. I'm going to make a major change to Sim Settlements and Workshop Framework code so that any time those mods scrap things involved with power, they leave them hidden, rather than destroying them. This will ensure your power grids don't become corrupt from those mods.

The prevention method will be included in patch 3.4.6 of Sim Settlements, and in patch 1.0.6 of Workshop Framework, both will be released by this weekend.

If this is still the case - items being scrapped are hidden instead of destroyed - then the common workflow of city plan creators to build the full L3 plan and then devolve it seems like it could be creating many hidden items and carrying them down all the way to L0. This means more records and complexity to handle at each stage, and inevitably, more chances for things to go wrong. To illustrate, lets assume our settlement adds 25 power nodes per level, and look at the implications of both workflows:

Starting from L0:
L0: 25 nodes active (25 total)
L1: 50 nodes active (50 total)
L2: 75 nodes active (75 total)
L3: 100 nodes active (100 total)

So far, so good. Now lets look at working from L3 down, both from creation and gameplay usage perspectives:
Creating L3: 100 nodes active (100 total)
Creating L2: 75 nodes active (+25 hidden = 100 total)
Creating L1: 50 nodes active (+50 hidden = 100 total)
Creating L0: 25 nodes active (+75 hidden = 100 total)

But what happens when you then use the plan in the game? Are the hidden nodes actually being un-hidden and used on level-up, or are they remaining there, dormant, cluttering up the records? Worse, are new hidden-node entries being generated on level-up since they were included in the plan level (and the old nodes never got destroyed, only hidden), creating this scenario?

Gameplay L0: 25 nodes active (+75 hidden = 100 total)
Gameplay L1: 50 nodes active (+75 L0 hidden + 50 L1 hidden = 175 total)
Gameplay L2: 75 nodes active (+75 L0 hidden + 50 L1 hidden + 25 L2 hidden = 225 total)
Gameplay L3: 100 nodes active (+75 L0 hidden + 50 L1 hidden + 25 L2 hidden = 250 total)

I don't know for sure if this hiding-instead-of-deleting behavior is still the case, but from a barely-above-user level the idea of creating extra bloat in settlements simply because of the way we put things together (rather than for any performance or aesthetic reason) is concerning.

Are we creating extra load or other gameplay effects by creating settlements top-down from the L3 level and devolving, compared to working bottom-up from L0?
 
(Did you post this twice or did I forget to hit submit when I went to answer this?... could've sworn I responded to this already)

Items that are disabled like that are ignored by Workshop Framework's export. This is one of the big benefits to getting away from Transfer Settlements, I have control over the export code now and can ensure it plays well with all the weird stuff we do in SS2.
 
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