This still working alright in 2025? Cause i sure as hell could use some frames back whenever i'm more than a couple dozen hours into a save.

That or i need to chill the F out with Satellites.

Maybe both, lol.

These sorts of FPS optimization mods are definitely appreciated. Even with a high-end desktop CPU I end up with 30fps around shipyards, which probably puts portable gaming devices into unplayably low FPS.

It does and this just makes them a bit better for low-end hardware in terms of unnecessary rendering, not sure how it works in current public version, but this is an easy enough mod to re-make should I need too.

are you telling me this game doesn't have LODs at all???

I never could have foreseen this being useful on the Steam Deck, glad that it makes a difference, I set out to try mitigate sources of low FPS when doing things other than flying in empty space in a way that was not going to degrade the look of game in any overall way that stands out to the player, I am sure if you screenshot the game-play you will notice differences but overall the gains I got with it outweighed any of the cons.

Works on 6.x. This mod has made X4 playable on Steam Deck for me. The difference is immediately noticeable. Great job.

no clue

this mod will be compatible with 6.0 right.... right? :)

Thank you for quick reply.

Will check it out.. this is after all a technical demo it lacks polish

Causes very big reflection/anomaly on cockpit in Zyarths Dominion IV.

Yes and No
I make tweaks now and again and throw up a new version if they seem to benefit the FPS lows otherwise this was more of a proof of concept that can benefit mid-range systems and high-end users alike with getting marginally better average FPS.

I would to like to play around more with shadows see if I can enable shadow for ship hulls but remove shadow for all the modules and I could not shadow fall off to work.

This project aims to try and fix those stubborn FPS lows you normally get around the asteroids and stations, combined with my other mod of Large Asteroids only you get a full effect around asteroids, this project is all about render distance and lighting.

Is this still in development?

Matroshka
Nice find, I actually did not know that ship modules were another source of shadows I will try to find them in the parameters config and yeah that is a pretty good idea disable all those and enable just the ships hull itself.

Elric
NPC still need a lot of fine tuning on my end.
There are three separate references for these .

I can reduce the NPC LOD even further I will try calculate the math as in the file it has values which are equivalent to something in meters squared so if I do a conversion for say beyond 500M cull all NPC that may help the stations do have a lot of them let me see what I can do about this.

Along with working out how It too attempt to do shadow fall off the fear I have with this is it the engine simply may not allow on the fly shadow adjustment plus will need overhead from distance checking script unless I can find a way to do it by telling the game to use a different shadow setting for a certain LOD state.

Matroshka
Nice find, I actually did not know that ship modules were another source of shadows I will try to find them in the parameters config and yeah that is a pretty good idea disable all those and enable just the ships hull itself.

Elric
NPC still need a lot of fine tuning on my end.
There are three separate references for these .

I can reduce the NPC LOD even further I will try calculate the math as in the file it has values which are equivalent to something in meters squared so if I do a conversion for say beyond 500M cull all NPC that may help the stations do have a lot of them let me see what I can do about this.

Along with working out how It too attempt to do shadow fall off the fear I have with this is it the engine simply may not allow on the fly shadow adjustment plus will need overhead from distance checking script.

Upon investigation: It seems that ship shadows are disabled, _but_:
1. They are still cast onto dock areas - I assume this is on purpose?
2. The modular parts of the ship - engines, weapons, shield generators etc. - still cast shadows. Maybe it would be a better idea to disable shadows for these parts and enable them for the rest of the ship? I imagine keeping one important shadow and disabling dozens minor would improve the performance even more while making the visual changes less obvious?

@ʢMo¡stDreamsʡ
Yeah, I'm very thankful you decided to work on these FPS killer situations! As for more feedback, I definitely feel like shadow falloff would be better solution than outright removing them, even if the falloff distance is drastic, since yeah, as you said, you can only marvel at them from up close anyway.

The mass traffic shadow removal is a big help I think tho, since ALOT of traffic can come up, just too many shadows. I wonder if you can play around with the LOD for NPC's on a station if you haven't already, since while your changes helped ALOT, there is still lots of strange FPS hits just on stations.

Cheers

Is it supposed to only remove the shadows from mass traffic?

For some reason I still have ship shadows in my game. I think they did initially get removed but then came back, as performance dropped in dock areas.

Elric
Exactly! Thanks for the feedback.
My own struggles with the absolute worst of the low FPS situations is why I started to experiment with this project after a while I find I don't notice the shadows missing from ships on the hulls and stations it is just not something I pay attention too in this game.

TBH I did not test if shadows was the a major culprit I just expect it does not help so I will play around some more locally testing and play with shadow falloff instead to see if I can find a balance of shadows on ships fully enabled but distance of it heavily reduced as I would only really appreciate seeing up close anyway.

Well, this is THE mod that fixed game performance for me. The sacrifices made to achieve that are well worth it in my opinion and experience, especially since the situations this solves were the most stubbornly low FPS ones in the whole game.

This mod didnt change anything for me...

This is a great Mod. I get better FPS and a smoother game. Very nice. Thank you!

Great Mod, helped me in my late game to reach early game FPS again, especially the station render visibility helped a lot with my 600 part Stations to keep everything smooth on the Galaxy Map.

I want to clarify that I think this mod is GREAT, it's just not for me. I have a very high tolerance for low frame rates, preferring visuals over frames most of the time. But for folks who want higher frame rates over visual fidelity, it works pretty well from what I've tested.

Oh I am aware of this.
Counter argument, masstraffic and asteroids and the like add computation around stations this is not supposed to be a one fix all situation as even Ryzen 5900X's can crawl like a slug in this game I can just as quickly fix the CPU issue but you will wind up with a less lively universe.

If i had to conclude with anything I am barking up the only tree there is to reduce load as we cannot do much about CPU usage unless as I said we are all okay with a slower universe.

That said more powerful CPU's help this game way more then GPU.

As much as i am all welcome of any mod to help performance i think your barking up the wrong tree with all this stuff. it is the CPU and ram computations that slows x3 down more than the GPU changes you have made. ES themselves say they have made improvements to GPU utilisation but i fail to see a difference tbh

Balabalalde

That was the idea.
Trying to get the LOD to a point where its not impacting game-play and does not stand out like a sore thumb but still increases your FPS minimums under the situations where normally you would tank below 30 with even current gen machines.

Certainly worth a try. Looks like it has the potential to be one of the great Mods. Thanks for this.

Ah yes I had it backwards - but I still run into the issue where the ships look like plastic. Something about them seems too bright. Maybe it was because I was seeing a bunch of ships clustered together and there were no shadows at all, because they were the only things that would have cast them.

Arquebus X

Just adding to that if you find that you prefer ships having full shadows instead and you still get a performance benefit out of the project, if you have XTOOLS installed use the XRCatToolGUI and extract all making sure you have ticked the check box at bottom of tool which says "keep folder hierarchy"

Then edit renderparam_library.xml with notepad++ or vscode or any of the other good text editors delete lines 67,68,69 save the file and in the XRCatToolGUI click on clear and drag the entire libraries which got extracted back into it and then save over the original ext_01.cat that came with this mod or you simply delete the .cat and .dat files and use the extracted content without repacking it.

Arquebus X
Ships can have shadows cast on them, they just can't cast shadows themselves onto surfaces.
directly speaking they can receive shadows not cast a shadow.

Which tbh after about 20m of play testing I stopped noticing all together as it is not that often you are really in a station and paying attention to ships putting shadows on the ground.

Gave it a shot. It works. Don't like that ships can't have shadows cast on them, as it makes all of them look like plastic. I get why that's important for the intended result, though.

This mod has worked pretty damn well for me! It has turned my slideshow on medium options in stations into buttery smooth MSAA enabled goodness. Thank you!