» Sat Feb 19, 2011 3:17 am I NEED YOUR HELP!!
I am slowly adding more NPCs to the Strip, but I have a problem. My computer is high-end, and I cannot reliably test whether the amount of NPCs I am adding are too much. So I need to hear from people if they are experiencing heavy lag and if so where on the Strip they are experiencing this.
The most common place I expect to hear about lag is when moving south towards the Tops sign. It is because the NPCs are densely populated in the Gomorrah area when the drunk NCR troopers are moving south from there. This is a scripted scene. The other scripted scene I am interested in is the one with NCR trooper women dancing in the Ultra-Luxe fountain. Those are the two with the most NPCs involved. Let me know if one of those scenes is in progress when you experience lag. There are maybe 5 other scenes though, so let me know if you think one is playing if you get lag.
I know that I won't be able to make the Strip run as smoothly as it did in 3 pieces, but I want to make it playable for as many people as possible.
INSTALL NOTES:
Do not install this on a savegame inside the Strip worldspace, as this causes strange behavior like all the NPCs spawning with nothing equipped.
If you are installing onto a savegame that has already visited the Strip you may need to walk the full length of the Strip once before all NPCs spawn correctly.
Known Issues:
Upgrading the Securitrons to Mark II sometimes breaks the triggers that move NPCs, or at least appears to move them to random places on the Strip.
During combat only 4 Securitrons are active. The rest either disappear or do not respawn. NCR troops are only active if they spawned before player begins combat in the area.
NPCs regularly disappear in the middle of the street near the location of the old gates.
In-Progress:
Adding persistent NPCs to the middle area of the Strip to make the area feel more populated.
New NPC paths to prevent NPCs from disappearing in the middle of the road.
Alpha.v5:
Added a noticeable amount of NPCs (5-7) to the center area of the Strip between the Tops, LVB Station, and the Ulta-Luxe. For the moment they are only sand-boxed (idle movement, sitting, smoking, walking in small circles, etc.) because they are for testing purposes.
Alpha.v4:
Fixed issues with Securitrons. They should populate the area correctly now. I hope.
Note: The triggers are smaller between areas of the strip now. I shrink them when testing things and just remembered that I didn't enlarge them again. Will appear to cause problems if you don't like running on the actual street.
Alpha.v3:
Fixes a few minor problems that were causing a few of the scripted scenes to not appear properly.
Removed the moveTo tags associated with Securitrons during combat. They should no longer teleport at seemingly random times while moving through the Strip.
Securitrons now should be spread out more appropriately through the Strip. There should be 8 total, 4-5 of them should move as you do.
Fixed a few overlooked scripts that would cause quest NPCs to disappear as the player moved to the North or South areas of the Strip.
Alpha.v2:
Fixes the South Area activator so that players actually will trigger the NPCs to be moved correctly.
Alpha.v1
Using Tarrant's The Strip Open - Modder's Resource I made as few changes as possible to get it in a workable state.
Modified and tacked the gate scripts onto cubic activators
- This moves the NPCs around as you move through the Strip to populate the areas as they (almost) normally would be.
Enabled a few quest NPCs like Billy Knight
- This is in an effort to make sure it is in fact usable, even if my triggered scripts don't work correctly for some reason.
Moved a few things that didn't look quite correct
- Most notably the wrecked bus to the left when you enter the Strip area
That's pretty much it...
I am slowly adding more NPCs to the Strip, but I have a problem. My computer is high-end, and I cannot reliably test whether the amount of NPCs I am adding are too much. So I need to hear from people if they are experiencing heavy lag and if so where on the Strip they are experiencing this.
The most common place I expect to hear about lag is when moving south towards the Tops sign. It is because the NPCs are densely populated in the Gomorrah area when the drunk NCR troopers are moving south from there. This is a scripted scene. The other scripted scene I am interested in is the one with NCR trooper women dancing in the Ultra-Luxe fountain. Those are the two with the most NPCs involved. Let me know if one of those scenes is in progress when you experience lag. There are maybe 5 other scenes though, so let me know if you think one is playing if you get lag.
I know that I won't be able to make the Strip run as smoothly as it did in 3 pieces, but I want to make it playable for as many people as possible.
INSTALL NOTES:
Do not install this on a savegame inside the Strip worldspace, as this causes strange behavior like all the NPCs spawning with nothing equipped.
If you are installing onto a savegame that has already visited the Strip you may need to walk the full length of the Strip once before all NPCs spawn correctly.
Known Issues:
Upgrading the Securitrons to Mark II sometimes breaks the triggers that move NPCs, or at least appears to move them to random places on the Strip.
During combat only 4 Securitrons are active. The rest either disappear or do not respawn. NCR troops are only active if they spawned before player begins combat in the area.
NPCs regularly disappear in the middle of the street near the location of the old gates.
In-Progress:
Adding persistent NPCs to the middle area of the Strip to make the area feel more populated.
New NPC paths to prevent NPCs from disappearing in the middle of the road.
Alpha.v5:
Added a noticeable amount of NPCs (5-7) to the center area of the Strip between the Tops, LVB Station, and the Ulta-Luxe. For the moment they are only sand-boxed (idle movement, sitting, smoking, walking in small circles, etc.) because they are for testing purposes.
Alpha.v4:
Fixed issues with Securitrons. They should populate the area correctly now. I hope.
Note: The triggers are smaller between areas of the strip now. I shrink them when testing things and just remembered that I didn't enlarge them again. Will appear to cause problems if you don't like running on the actual street.
Alpha.v3:
Fixes a few minor problems that were causing a few of the scripted scenes to not appear properly.
Removed the moveTo tags associated with Securitrons during combat. They should no longer teleport at seemingly random times while moving through the Strip.
Securitrons now should be spread out more appropriately through the Strip. There should be 8 total, 4-5 of them should move as you do.
Fixed a few overlooked scripts that would cause quest NPCs to disappear as the player moved to the North or South areas of the Strip.
Alpha.v2:
Fixes the South Area activator so that players actually will trigger the NPCs to be moved correctly.
Alpha.v1
Using Tarrant's The Strip Open - Modder's Resource I made as few changes as possible to get it in a workable state.
Modified and tacked the gate scripts onto cubic activators
- This moves the NPCs around as you move through the Strip to populate the areas as they (almost) normally would be.
Enabled a few quest NPCs like Billy Knight
- This is in an effort to make sure it is in fact usable, even if my triggered scripts don't work correctly for some reason.
Moved a few things that didn't look quite correct
- Most notably the wrecked bus to the left when you enter the Strip area
That's pretty much it...
Although the most recent release is mainly to begin testing the limit of how many NPCs I can safely add I don't have a lot of time to play the game right now, so please let me know if anything seems screwed up. I probably wouldn't find out any other way. My personal testing ability is almost limited to a single run from one end of the Strip to the other.
An undocumented change that some people here might like to know about; I commented out some lines in the scripts that disable unnecessary NPCs as the player moves through the areas of the Strip. For instance, the dancing hokers in front of Gomorrah will not be disabled as you move towards the Tops/Ultra-Luxe. As far as I have seen, they don't get used elsewhere so I just left them enabled as a small step to this stress test that was easier than dropping more new NPCs in. So if you see one of the hokers out of place let me know. I'm planning on pulling them from the area scripts (for the most part) as they are, to me, the most obvious of the visual NPC spawns, and I would hate to have them start disappearing after I do that.
