[Relz\WIP] Collision Redone for Eloth's Overhaul

(Updated 11 August 2011}

(This version is for those using Eloth's Visual Overhaul. If you don't use any texture pack or if you use Hashmi1's Hi-Res Texture Pack then see this thread instead.)

As of 11th August 2011, this version contains the following:

-Flora
-Hlaalu Exterior Tileset
-Redoran Exterior Tileset
-Telvanni Exterior Tileset
- Exterior Rocks (excluding Slostheim and Mournhold)
- Bonemold Armor (Geometric Optimization)
- Ingredients

This version does not yet contain Imperial Exterior tilesets, unlike the other version.

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Description:

This mod includes Morroblivion meshes with their collision\Havok redone with Blender.

The original collision meshes had several errors, were ill-optimized and did not always fit well with the visible geometry; hence being the cause of several issues like:

- General Performance hit compared to Cyrodil.
- Sudden Extrememe Lag when in certain cells, or when near certain objects.
- Being able to fall through the floor in some caves.
- Being unable to pick up or interact with some clutter items ( e.g bread, Dwemer Coherer)
- General Game Instability.

The new collision meshes should hopefully solve most of these issues (when they get done).

Please do test and report any bugs\feedback.

Last edited by Hashmi1 on 11 Aug 2011 - 00:31.

Sweet. I guess I'll download

Sweet!

I have a vista desktop that runs Eloth's overhaul and a windows 7 laptop that runs without. On the laptop I installed just the normal collision redone. On the desktop do I install the normal and then the Eloth collision, or just the Eloth. I assume just Eloth, but I wanted to be sure.

Thanks Hashmi!

Beautiful results! Thank

Beautiful results! Thanks hashmi!

@iceburg333: Just the Visual

@iceburg333: Just the Visual Overhaul version.

Cool. Thank you.

Other areas for investigation

I had to sign up just so I could post here. Wonderful work! I had this exact problem the other night, and I've seen other people suggest doing exactly what you're doing, so THANK YOU! As it stands, I do have moderate blender skills, and am very interested in helping if I can. I also wanted to mention that I had this problem in the Ald'ruhn Mages guild. As a whole the guild hall was slower than most areas, but I went into a closet hoping the lower number of visible meshes, etc would reduce the effects, but it got much worse (especially now that I figured out how to get HDR to play nice with AA). Let me know if there's anything I can help with.

Updates, the pack now

Updated, the pack now includes exterior rocks.

Hashmi, would it be possible

Hashmi, would it be possible for you to add collision / havok to the miscilanious items? I noticed that a lot of these items have no havok.

Related to that: is havok the same as collision, or are those different? Do you have any links to good tutorial sites for a noob like me that is possibly interested in learning how to add havok / work with blender or nifskope? I managed to add a collision box to lava, but beyond that I don't know what I'm doing as far as that goes. If you could point me in the right direction that would be really cool.

Thanks.

Iceburg

Hashmi, would it be possible

Hashmi, would it be possible for you to add collision / havok to the miscilanious items? I noticed that a lot of these items have no havok.

Thanks.

Iceburg

Quote: Hashmi, would it be

Hashmi, would it be possible for you to add collision / havok to the miscilanious items? I noticed that a lot of these items have no havok.

Examples would be useful ;)

Related to that: is havok the same as collision, or are those different?

'Havok' and 'collision' are (mostly) used to refer to the same thing, though this 'thing' is much more than collision detection ... it includes data for several other parts of the Physics engine ... like friction, damping, mass, joints , inertia etc. etc.

Additionaly the BSXFlags in nifs makes a different distinction between the two: Havok enables interaction with the Grab key, whereas collision simply prevents you from walking into the object.

Do you have any links to good tutorial sites for a noob like me that is possibly interested in learning how to add havok / work with blender or nifskope? I managed to add a collision box to lava, but beyond that I don't know what I'm doing as far as that goes. If you could point me in the right direction that would be really cool.

http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Blender/Custom_Collision

Thanks Hashmi!I skimmed the

Thanks Hashmi!

I skimmed the link. Later I'll sit down and do my best to work through it. I think my biggest weakness/ area I'm worst at right now is the 3-d modeling stuff. I'd like to get into the 3D stuff to understand it better, and you seem like the expert to ask help from. ;)

Alright: I mostly notice the lack of havok in light sources like candles and lanterns; a lot of them just float in the air when I drop them. I also noticed that the drum that you find in the corpaseum doesn't have a bottom. I think the rest of the miscilenious objects work with havok fine, but I *think* I notice some lag whenever I drop a couple items at a time and they havok with each other. I notice a lot more lag in Ralen Hlaalu's *cough MY cough* house than in my skingrad house, even though I think there are about the same amount of items laying about. I thought this might be do to bad miscilanious item collission, but it could be something totally different.

EDIT: I went in-game and poked around my house. These are the items I noticed didn't have collision: Gaurskin Drum (has collision but doesn't have a bottom), Dwemer Cylinder, Brass candlestick, Redware Candle, Candle.

I think I remember other dwemer articfacts not working. The Coherer thing works, but maybe the tube doesn't... I couldn't find it.

Cool. :D

Bread has no collision, and

Bread has no collision, and cannot be currently picked up as a food item. Found all over taverns and homes.

Bread apparently has

Bread apparently has collision in the base install ... but it gets removed in Eloth's Ingredient replacer.

Anyways ... I'll see what I can do.

Cool. Thank you.

Ingredients(including Bread)

Ingredients(including Bread) are done (download link on first post).

The Misc items are in need Geometric optimization more than collision optimization (there's are things like glass bottles with 20,442 vertices :O ... It takes my outdated workbench 5 minutes just to open them in blender).

Thanks for this update

Thanks for this update Hashmi1 :)

20,442 vertices?? Whoa!

PS: Sometimes, I notice that in exteriors, my game just slows down to a crawl, but doesn't crash. At this time, the console also does not react, and there is a tremendous lag in what I do vs when it happens on screen. Trying all the usual troubleshooting methods (purge cell buffers, walk instead of run, disable distant LOD) doesn't make a difference. The only way to "solve" that is to restart from a previous save. coc or fast travel to another location, but the crawling slow performance persists.Loading from a previosu save doesn't have this problem...

Doesn't always happen, but happens near the volcanic rocks as one heads from Seyda Neen to Pelagiad. No apparent cause for this, as if I try to monitor VRAM usage or texture memory usage etc. using tdt console command, it doesn't really go up. My rig is fairly powerful, and this issue doesn't happen in Cyrodiil, so I guess something needs optimization. But what it is, I am not sure.

Nearly all rocks were covered

Nearly all rocks were covered in the previous version, are you using that?

If yes then it might be related to trees instead (or the imperial tileset in Pelagiad ... try using the normal version with Eloth's version installed over it).

On a side note, the visual overhaul can use optimization in other areas as well ... for example, for Flora, Ingredients and Misc items, most textures have height data in the Alpha channel (for Parallax Mapping) but the meshes themselves don't have Parallax Mapping enabled (so memory gets wasted without any visual enhancement) ...

I have the updates you posted

I have the updates you posted earlier, so rocks are fine. I tried to recreate the slowdown near Pelagiad, but it didn't occur - so I am not even sure what the cause of that is...

PS: Kagoutis clip through the player character. Often, I am attacked by them, and as I run, I see the kagouti's mesh clip through the PC's body as it attacks me.

I made a fix for the

I made a fix for the Kagouti's but it didn't get included in v37 for some reason (probably because there wasn't enough content to make it worth more additional support files).

Dang! I've only made my way

Dang! I've only made my way through half of the Blender intro Chapter. [or maybe that's halfway through chapter two... hmm...] (from a link on the page you gave me a link to to start understanding blender), so I don't know. But 20k vertricies sounds like a HUGE amount.

Is that something you can / are working on Hashmi?

I'll download the fixes before the next time I play. Thanks Hashmi!

Massive poly-count

Hashmi is quite correct. I have found the the bottle was approximately 18k vertices, the cork was another 4k or so. I made a test bottle of the same size - it's now 4k for the bottle. There are another 9 items in "Clutter" that are over 500kb filesize. To put that in perspective, the 18k vertice bottle was over 1 MB, while the 4k bottle was about 300k. Also, some of the labels are actually seperate meshes. It might help if they were instead simply part of the bottle's texture, but I'll have to investigate to see what effect that has.

Bottles

I think bottles and the remaining clutter can look fairly good while remaining between 500 to 1000 vertices and hence below 100 KB;

To put the vertex count into perspective:

- Oblivion's Silver Goblet is made of 474 vertices.
- Oblivion's Silver Carafe is made of 459 vertices.
- Oblivion's Xivilai is made of 5,438 vertices.

Bottles take up very less visual space and are barely noticed in normal Gameplay ... so they should take up less vertices than the Xivilai for sure.

Spot on

Exactly. Thanks for bringing some more precise numbers. Currently, I'm going through and replacing all the obscenely over-verticed models with what amounts to simple cubes (that have been given equally simple depth). I can see all the places these objects were showing up. Trying to walk through the Gnisis temple without doing this had my fps at around 5. I certainly woulnd't wish my current replacements on anyone else, but I can (and will) get around to creating nice, but simpler, meshes as replacements. Really, with items as small as these, the textures are really were the magic happens. And thankfully, we have people far more talented than I doing that part.

Once I get around to making more performant meshes, I hope I can get them included in the source packages for everyone else. I can't imagine anyone's getting anywhere near as high performance currently as they could be.

I can get you better models

If you need better models, just pack the old set plus there textures and upload them for me to download. I can always look at them and fix them if needed.