It's all on you TARRANT! WE BELIEVE IN YOU!

It's a major undertaking, I had not realized that the buildings were in place as normal, I'd assumed anything viewed over the deviders were just facades, but it appears the load deviders are there to enable NPCs and other aspects of the game as you pass through them, it's obvious the loaders have scripts attached probably pointing to some important quest related stuff, some on here will remember Open Cities for Oblivion, that was one hell of a project but had significant flaws like important NPCs not being in the new cells but remaining in their original cells, New Vegas "might" turn out to be easier because the deviders do not change the cell as far as I can tell, it just enables specific aspects of the cell.


I'm not sure I explained that very well, it's confusing me!

Roughly how many NPCs can be safely active without causing slideshow performance, or exaggerated CTDs?

I'm currently working on a script that moves the NPCs from the North cell to the South (NCR Embassy) cell and vice versa which I'm going to tie to a pair of activators in the center area of the Strip, most likely between the Tops and the LVB Station. NPCs in the center area (Tops casino area) will always be active. Currently with it not working properly and still often not seeming very populated I tend to have 30-40 NPCs actively wandering all the time. There is a noticeable lack of Securitrons which I would like to fix, and quest related NPCs are not spawning. I haven't tried to get those last two working as of yet because I want to focus on just making the area feel populated wherever you happen to be first. I would guess though that if I added Securitrons and Quest NPCs that the number of active NPCs in the new Strip would occasionally jump over 50, which sounds like way too many. Especially since I get occasional heavy lag already when moving between two populated zones, moving the NPCs doesn't seem to cause much problem, just being relativity close to all of them does.

If I have a set number to work with I think I could divide the NPCs into more sections that move around and have maybe 3-4 that appear to be entering or exiting the casino (or other building) you are closest to, 3-4 securitrons patroling with 2 stationary ones being moved around, and a set of maybe 5 that move around and are tied to a location. I'm not sure if that would work any better, and it would certainly not make it look as populated, and would require a hell of a lot more scripting than the one activator script I'm working with now. This solution would probably cut the amount of NPCs in the area to about half of what I would be using currently.

Also if anyone has any better ideas about how to populate this new strip I'm open to any suggestions. Currently I'm just trying to translate the scripts that run on the gates into scripts that run on ground activators and do as close to the same thing as possible for simplicities sake. I don't have a lot of experience in the GECK so Im trying to stick as close as possible to things that I see already working. Hence translating the gate script into a zone script.

Also as kind of a side thought, would merging to separate worldspaces be very difficult? I ask because if I can get the Strip working well like this I might want to try to do the same with Freeside as it would largely be the same thing, just with the extra project of merging two worldspaces, which seems like a logical next step to take in an effort to further learn the use of the GECK.

(Sorry if the post came out choppy and difficult to read, I kept bouncing back and forth between writing this and writing the activator script)

Yea to save on performance they have going through each door portal load all the fine detail in each chunk of the strip. So chances are this would need alot more work but it can certainly be done.

the number of npcs shouldnt really be an issue. i ran various mods that added way more npcs to imperial city in oblivion with no slowdown. there really arent that many npcs in the outside area of the strip.

why not try reducing the view distance? I know that should help with the frame rate even if its just a little. Instead of trying to find one or two things to reduce lag, why not try many different alternatives so that in the end they all add up and increase frame rate considerably?