Less Flickery City of New Vegas

LESS FLICKERY CITY OF NEW VEGAS

If you play NV at higher than normal settings or with high LOD values, you'll notice intense flickering in the city of New Vegas (e.g. when looking from Goodsprings cemetery). If you actually examine closely, you'll see extra white proxy meshes clipping into the generated object LOD meshes causing overlap, noticeable visible flickering and added Z-fighting.

This simple mod fixes that and reduces the excessive flickering to tolerable levels.

WHY IT HAPPENS

This was a workaround Obsidian did for the consoles by using Imposter meshes to have the city of New Vegas appear at longer distances (while not increasing the global draw distance of the game to save on performance). This was done because the consoles had an extremely limited distant object draw distance. By using these white proxy meshes, these imposters would give the impression of distant LODs and make the city of New Vegas stand out as the Jewel of the Mojave and look properly loaded in while other less significant buildings all over the map could have low draw distances thus improving performance.

The problem now is that if you use FNVLODGEN and use decent distant LOD settings the game will load both the proper generated object LODs and the imposters causing the meshes to concurrently render and thus clip. This will cause visible flicker and create an impression of increased Z-fighting.

If you wanna see what this mod fixes, just go to Goodsprings Cemetery and stand by the water tower and gaze at the beauty of New Vegas. You'll quickly see the offending white imposters raise their ugly heads with visible flickering when you pan the camera or move your character.

Honestly surprised this didn't bother anyone else and wasn't looked into sooner.

HOW IT WORKS

The mod uses a simple blank nif and an esp to make the imposters use the blank nif instead. It's not the most graceful way to fix this but it's simple and gets the job done.

Also, I reckon this would be better than disabling the imposters because if any scripts are referring to these objects this could lead to instability and crashes. This way, the objects are still there, just replaced by harmless invisible 1KB files.

I'll try to experiment and remove the imposters from the region data itself but for now, this works as intended and might work better.

IF YOU PLAY ON LOW SETTINGS, THIS MOD PROBABLY WON'T HELP.