Modding Fallout 4 for Image Quality & Immersive Gameplay @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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Modding Fallout 4 for Image Quality & Immersive Gameplay - Fallout 4 has been out for several months and it is possible that you might find the image quality lacking overall. We take some of the most popular and highly downloaded image quality mods and find out how we can improve the environment in Fallout 4. We modify for visual improvements to give you more immersive gameplay.
 
Great article and some impressive results from the mods. Now we just need mods for the mechanics, story, writing, and animations.
 
LOL@ the sand by the water. Not everything needs parallax up the ass. Sometimes sand by water is flat and monotone.
 
ianken said:
LOL@ the sand by the water. Not everything needs parallax up the ass. Sometimes sand by water is flat and monotone.
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Yea, as with any fan mod, these do deviate from the overall art style of the game to do something different. Some of the wood texture choices also had be wondering.

But thanks for the writeup. I'm getting back into FO4, and will need to try these. Particularly the lighting one.
 
The Vivid mods look terrible. It just makes everything covered in an extra layer of black dirt and exaggerated parallax. Also the tiling is horrible on those textures.
 
When you talk about the framerate imppact, can you give a rough estimate... 5% difference 10%, 20%?
 
Haven't played the game yet, but I've heard pretty good things. In looking over the tree/ground/rocks modwork, I have to be honest, they look worse. I am in the woods A LOT, and truth be told, the default textures look really good. Moving the slider back and forth, you can easily tell it's missing something. Yes, the default looks rather bland, but nature is fairly bland. If a tree is missing all of it's bark, there are striations in the wood, but it's very uniformly dull brown. Sun baked, or dark from moisture. I live in the NW, maybe in other parts of the country the modded tex packs look more realistic. I mean, they do add something, just not realism.
 
Modred189 said:
Yea, as with any fan mod, these do deviate from the overall art style of the game to do something different. Some of the wood texture choices also had be wondering.

But thanks for the writeup. I'm getting back into FO4, and will need to try these. Particularly the lighting one.
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I agree. It seems like these textures were made just for the sake of being "HD." I've used Vivid Landscapes for a bit and I'm kind of starting to get annoyed by it. The tiling issues and deviation from the intended art style are immersion breaking. I feel the same way about the HD Texture pack for Dark Souls. I much prefer the LCD Texture pack in that case because it sharpens up the textures without drastically changing the art style.
 
Skripka said:
Kyle/Brent:

You left out some of the simpler things you can do. http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/102/?tab=2

Cranking the LOD fade settings and so on. Fo4Tweaker has a ton of capability over the stock launcher in exposing better graphics options.
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Our goal was to stick to mods to improve image quality, that was the scope of the article. There of course, other ways, but that wasn't within the scope of what we wanted to cover in this article.

As for some manual LOD tweaks, I tried one here which had no affect for me at all in the game - http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/808/?
 
NickJames said:
The Vivid mods look terrible. It just makes everything covered in an extra layer of black dirt and exaggerated parallax. Also the tiling is horrible on those textures.
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Naturally, IQ is subjective, but from personal experience installing the vivid mods and playing the game I saw IQ benefits with them. The improvements from the landscapes were quite strikingly better.

Tiling wasn't a big problem in-game at normal resolution. Some of the screenshots were taken at lower resolution to fit within the guidelines of our page format. At normal resolution they looked fine. Also, you really have to blame the game for some of the bad seams, like the one on the pier, that's just the way the object is constructed there.
 
Mugato said:
Haven't played the game yet, but I've heard pretty good things. In looking over the tree/ground/rocks modwork, I have to be honest, they look worse. I am in the woods A LOT, and truth be told, the default textures look really good. Moving the slider back and forth, you can easily tell it's missing something. Yes, the default looks rather bland, but nature is fairly bland. If a tree is missing all of it's bark, there are striations in the wood, but it's very uniformly dull brown. Sun baked, or dark from moisture. I live in the NW, maybe in other parts of the country the modded tex packs look more realistic. I mean, they do add something, just not realism.
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There is a major difference when looking up close. The default vanilla textures don't hold up when looking at the textures close. However, mods like Vivid, especially when using 4K, hold up real well at very close view with a lot of detail. And, they hold up at resolutions like 4K. This is a primary benefit of mods like these.
 
Note: You are of course welcome to not use any texture packs at all. We are simply showing you what is possible and capable right now in the game, something a little different than we normally do.

I think we can all agree on the fact that the vanilla textures can benefit from improved resolution and detail, especially up-close. The vanilla textures have potential for improvement. I wish Bethesda would release an all encompassing HD Texture pack for the game, but it hasn't. Therefore, we have to rely on third party mods, and as of right now, this is what there is. In time, give this game a year, perhaps there will be even more options down the road.

I think we all care about improving IQ in games, and mods like these are just but one way to achieve this. Not the only way. Of course there are other things out there as well to improve IQ like config tools or post processing injectors that improve sharpening and color, but today's article focused on the modding aspect of the game.

If you don't want to change the textures I might suggest looking up lighting and environment mods and re-shades, these can affect vanilla texture quality and made it better without changing the art assets.

The freedom to make this game how you want it for you, is great.
 
ianken said:
LOL@ the sand by the water. Not everything needs parallax up the ass. Sometimes sand by water is flat and monotone.
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This. While I like the work he did on quite a few of the textures, not everything needed to be cranked up to 11.
 
Brent_Justice said:
I wish Bethesda would release an all encompassing HD Texture pack for the game, but it hasn't.
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This is what burns me. They did this for Skyrim, and it was fantastic. AFAIK there were no known issues with the update either. So, I'm not sure why it wasn't done here unless there are two entirely different teams working on the two games. That said, I'm not sure that's an excuse given that they use the same engine.
 
what are the chances of Bethesda releasing an official HD Texture pack??
 
polonyc2 said:
what are the chances of Bethesda releasing an official HD Texture pack??
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With Skyrim, they were talking about it soon after launch. FO4 has been out a while now, and we've not heard anything. So I'm going with "not likely."
 
And today, patch hits adding in extra particle effects and ambient occlusion settings for Nvidia.
 
Skripka said:
And today, patch hits adding in extra particle effects and ambient occlusion settings for Nvidia.
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The ambient occlusion settings are for all all card, HBAO+ is a feature that works on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. The particle effects however, are NVIDIA only.
 
I've been running the easy hack and lock pick addons, The ground texture addon,. the true weather addon, the lower your weapon addon which I think is awesome and a few others. Very pleased with the mods and honestly, they make the game so much better. Dare I saw they should have been part of the original game!

I however I did not like the seasons add on as it really impacts my performance. Even with a 980ti with a 5820k @ 4.5ghz I took a massive hit once that addon was installed, I lost maybe 40% of my FPS to that one addon alone.

And yes, I do not use vsync. If you use vsync, turn it off ... it's horrible with Fallout 4.
 
A lot of these definitely look better, but some of them(like the sand) actually way over do it and look worse.
 
SixFootDuo said:
I've been running the easy hack and lock pick addons, The ground texture addon,. the true weather addon, the lower your weapon addon which I think is awesome and a few others. Very pleased with the mods and honestly, they make the game so much better. Dare I saw they should have been part of the original game!

I however I did not like the seasons add on as it really impacts my performance. Even with a 980ti with a 5820k @ 4.5ghz I took a massive hit once that addon was installed, I lost maybe 40% of my FPS to that one addon alone.

And yes, I do not use vsync. If you use vsync, turn it off ... it's horrible with Fallout 4.
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I can't pick locks at 200fps. That's one of those things tied to the frame rate. Last night played for a few minutes, hit a lock and just the quickest of touches, and the pin broke. Didn't even see the damn thing shake. Immediate snap.

I tried using the adaptive vsync option in nVcp and it made the game very stuttery. I don't wanna be locked to vsync due to possibility of dipping down to 15fps. I'm at a loss :(


Topic: Great write up! I hadn't even thought about mods for this game, or that they were this extensive. I like the better weather and the improved lighting. I may give those a try this weekend when I have more than a few minutes to tinker.
 
alxlwson said:
I can't pick locks at 200fps. That's one of those things tied to the frame rate. Last night played for a few minutes, hit a lock and just the quickest of touches, and the pin broke. Didn't even see the damn thing shake. Immediate snap.

I tried using the adaptive vsync option in nVcp and it made the game very stuttery. I don't wanna be locked to vsync due to possibility of dipping down to 15fps. I'm at a loss :(


Topic: Great write up! I hadn't even thought about mods for this game, or that they were this extensive. I like the better weather and the improved lighting. I may give those a try this weekend when I have more than a few minutes to tinker.
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This is why I had to find a solution. Use the easy lockpic addon. Personally I do not like cheating but if you think about it, you're going to eventually get or become skillful enough that it's going to happen regardless so just use an addon that makes it that much easier.

With the addon you can play at high FPS and automatically unlock anything
 
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