godescalcus

It seems like iAFT will have issues with any quest mod that alters follower dialogue options (seems obvious...). I've found references to Beyond Reach (which I am indeed using). Not home at the moment but I'll try to investigate this further. May I ask, why was EFF taken down in favour of iAFT (no SKSE/no updating, maybe?). I only mention this because I didn't have these error messages with EFF (which doesn't mean there couldn't have been conflicts).

I'm getting consistent error messages from iAFT. Tried to recruit Illia at the Darklight Tower after completing the quest to kill her mother, she says "I suppose it's better than staying here" or something of the sort. But she's not following. I talk to her again and telle her again to follow me (different dialogue option), THEN she's following, but the error message from iAFT pops saying "TweakMakeNeutral parameter missing (mod conflict?)". Yet, she's following. Then, if I try to dismiss her, she also leaves but another error pops saying "Unable to dismiss through AFT (mod conflict)?". This happens with most followers I've tried so far, vanilla or from mods, including Sofia, Toccata, Zora Fair-Child.

Not a problem.

Until now, even with the highest DynDOLOD settings I dared cast upon my machine, really high vantage points always gave me the impression of looking at a model rather than a landscape. This fiddling with LODGen changed that. Using both programs, landscape now does look continuous. 2 hours every time I regenerate, wow - that's almost what professional, static 3D rendering takes. Thank you Sheson, Zilav and everybody who's testing this and sharing their impressions.

Screenshots. ;) And check out this comparison from the old DynDOLOD thread, still valid: https://forum.step-project.com/topic/5011-dynamic-distant-objects-lod-pre-2xx/?do=findComment&comment=80862

Glad it worked. Did you use, these settings that alt3rn1ty mentions later (page 8 of the discussion, with texture size as he previously set in page 3): I'm using those exact same settings now, only with quality 5,10,10,15. Optimize unseen 600 greatly helps to get finer contour around water bodies. What Optimize Unseen itself does is merge polygons that are hidden (as in below a water surface). As you can imagine, when doing so the contour of that water surface may be drastically changed, especially shallow ones. To alleviate that problem, you set a depth that will be given to the vertices of those merged polygons (the number 500, 600, etc... that alt3rn1ty's talking about). That results in a much better defined shoreline and especially much better pond, lake and river margins. Exaggerating that value will cause flickering and wellden, another user, has set his sweet spot at 550, which I tend to agree with (just didn't have the patience to update just to get rid of some minor flickering I get with 600). I also use DynDOLOD High preset, the rest of the settings according to the guide. It seems to me that a much better defined and vivid distant terrain looks rather empty without the extra rocks and general objects that only render with High.

Lexy, because of the comments here I was checking both Req'tified and Yash'd Up. While Requiem isn't available for the SSE (well, there's a conversion guide at LL but it's still the user who has to do the port), YASH is and, looking at it, seems like multiple mods here tend towards the same goals: disparate races, combat and gameplay overhaul... The extensive compatibility description leads me to think most conflicts with other mods are easily handled by loading YASH first (don't mean all by any means, since I haven't tested it myself)! I wonder if YASH could be used as a base for gameplay changes, complemented by other mods in the guide and, eventually, replacing a few? While I've been an advocate of the exploration-driven gameplay that LOTD suggests (if you ever want to find most of the relics and unfold the story), in my current testing playthrough I've been trying a bit more of roleplay, no fast-travel, enjoying iNEED's pace of a daily routine (I swear I had NEVER slept before in Skyrim, except for 1 hour naps to trigger/advance quests). I really liked being totally worthless in any sort of combat for the first 10 levels (still using the previous combat combo) and having to hunt game for training (and some gold, actually by selling their Hunterborn yields). The progression is really noticeable until at least level 25, where I am now. Skyrim still doesn't play like Mortal Kombat, nor do I think it should play that way, but some tactics, workarounds, companions and, yes, postponing of certain quests are required. Overall I think these gameplay mods offer a refreshing Skyrim experience. I might venture into trying YASH with this, unless you have tried already and it really doesn't work.

xLODGen's LOD level 32 replaces "A Quality World Map"s textures. In that mod, the roads are painted on terrain textures and to get them back you'd have to do the same. With xLODGen, the map looks even more like an aerial view of Tamriel, Solstheim, wherever. You lose the roads but you gain much more vivid detail on rocks and other objects. For me it makes it even easier to navigate and locate stuff. If xLODGen were to be adopted as part of this guide, it would make both "A Quality World Map" and "Better Falskaar Map with Roads" redundant.

It looks like a bird or insect with a corrupt texture...

The DBM - mystic condenser patch in the LOTD patches installer.

That is the one, yes, I think I did grab it in Helgen. I actually started in Solitude (to gain immediate access to the museum) and eventually got to Helgen following the LOTD story/quests. Helgen Keep was abandoned and everyone dead as per AS-LAL, the warden's chest did contain the token. I don't know if conflicts are possible if you advance in Helgen Reborn before getting the token. I only read the book that starts HR adter having visited Helgen and letting some time go by, as the author suggests. That was over a week ago and I haven't even used the token! I'm using Solitude as my base (safehouse) and I usually go back there. The condenser in the safehouse is added by the patch, whichever version of MC you're using.

I'm using Mystic Condenser and it IS a practical way to reduce the amount of clutter you carry in terms of weak potions, by combining them into stronger ones. To preserve compatibility with eventual home mods, Snazzy, etc... I'm using the "token only" version (which doesn't place anything into the world, simply gives you a "token" that you can place anywhere you want. Regardless, if you use the LOTD patch it'll place a Mystic Condenser in the Safehouse. I also merged both the mystic condenser and the patch with other "new item" plugins and it works without issues. I haven't seen any conflict with other mods in this list.

You need to trace those to the mod that's actually originating them. I had that problem and had to do it the painful old fashioned way, removing batches of mods and testing the game, always rebuilding the bashed patch first, until no CTD. Then slowly reinstalling them until I got to the source of the problem. Once I traced it to the character retextures section, reinstalled the whole section and that fixed it. I've also had to take down other mods I had added after isolating them as sources of CTDs and not figuring out what exact conflict was causing them.

I second your opinion... And I don't know if Skyrim SE will still glitch from having too many esp's (including those that aren't active in the load order) present in the root data folder (as with previous TES games, which led to Wrye Bash's ghosting feature).

I don't move things around but, as said before, also don't have "copy general assets" active when merging. I think both options to hide the esp's are valid, or you could even manually edit their extensions to something that the game won't recognize. Using MO2's optional esp's, in my experience, makes it quicker to reverse if you want to tweak or rebuild the merge for any reason.

Great, thanks!

And here's Sheson's answer (reliable as ever): "TexGen updates LOD textures for object LOD. So you run it and install its generated textures before running DynDOLOD to generate object (and tree LOD). Generate terrain with xLODGen before or after as it is independent from object and tree LOD. However, if there are mods that make a lot of terrain elevation changes (like some house mods do when they flatten a corner in the mountains) it is better to generate terrain meshes (and textures) before generating object LOD, because object LOD generation uses the terrain LOD meshes to remove unseen triangles from object LOD for optimization."

Short answer, yes. Digression: I used to do a mix of both, in the case of merges that have mods that mainly merged into the bashed patch (examples: even better quest objectives, rs-children, most patch merges) I'd simply not make the merge and let those go into the bashed patch. It worked but I guess you lose some control over load order, since the bashed patch always gets loaded last. Even so, I think the merged plugins don't necessarily have their records carried into the bashed patch - if a later plugin that doesn't get merged has overrides, those will get carried in the usual last-to-load-wins way. Having said that, I tend to think it's best to do the merges as per the guide, especially since when using MO2 you don't use Wrye Bash's ghosting feature. That means the plugins you merge into the bashed patch will still be in the virtual data folder (but excluded from the load order because they're deactivated). Some people say the game can become unstable if you have too many plugins in your data folder, regardless of whether they're loaded or not. In that light, you should merge first, following the guide and moving the merged esp's into MO2's optionals - that way the are effectively invisible to the game, as they won't be in the root data folder, unless you want to go through the trouble of doing the same for each plugin that wrye bash deactivates.

All mods that are tagged NoMerge show in purple on the mod list in Wrye Bash. Currently in this build there are none, unless you set the tag yourself. The normal behaviour is that Wrye Bash recognizes certain plugins that it can safely merge into the bashed patch. Those are listed in green. When you rebuild the bashed patch, it will ask you to deactivate those mods that will be merged, and this prompt does that for you automatically. Those mods will, then, be merged into the bashed patch and you won't have to reactivate them. When you quit Wrye Bash, it tells Mod Organizer about the mods you deactivated (basically because Wrye Bash manages the load order) and they'll also be deactivated in MO. No further action will be needed. But, if you had one or more mods tagged NoMerge (purple) they'll be deactivated during the bashed patch rebuilding process and you should manually reactivate them once that is finished. I'm not sure why you should deactivate those in the first place, if you want to know more about all things Wrye Bash I suggest reading the discussion at afkmods.com and posting any questions there.

If I use xLODGen and DynDOLOD, do I still need to run TexGen? In that case, would the best order be TexGen, then xLODGen (terrain only) then DynDOLOD?

I'm having this problem with most followers, just tried Lydia but had the same with Toccata. As I mentioned before, 3dNPC follower Zora Fair-Child is broken, too. I checked my load order and amazingfollowertweaks.esp is indeed loaded before ICAIO. Oddly enough, the patch for iAFT and 3dNPC only has 3dNPC as master and therefore loads before amazingfollowertweaks.esp itself. It's also merged into the bashed patch. I'm trying to sort this mess out so that iAFT loads after ICAIO as you suggested, to see if it fixes the missing parameter error, and so that the 3dNPC patch also loads after amazingfollowertweaks.esp.

Check out version 16 beta here at S.T.E.P. and read through its forum. In now generates distant terrain meshes and the result for terrain alone is way better than DynDOLOD. You still need to run the latter if you want dynamic lods and tons of extra objects. xLODGen allows for object and tree lods but what I do is to generate only terrain lods, activate and then run DynDOLOD. xLODGen offers a lot of customization. I tried first with Sheson's suggested parameters, then alt3n1ty's (3rd page in the thread) and the improvement was out of this world. What I did was similar, first TexGEN, then xLODGen (which now generates meshes AND textures, so I'm not sure TexGEN is actually necessary), then DynDOLOD. Get ready because xLODGen with alt3rn1ty's parameters takes well over an hour in my build, twice as long as DynDOLOD. I suggest reading the thread (there aren't that many pages yet), try Sheson's suggested parameters for a quick first look, then try alt3rn1ty's for a much finer outcome.

NP. Here, a couple of screenshots with eye-candy of the far-off variety ;) It's a shame the images don't open in full resolution, I'm amazed at the level of detail with xLODGen and DynDOLOD combined!

I'm having a probelm with Zora Fair-Child. When I use the dialogue option "follow me, i can use your help" she says "you have my steel" but that's it, she won't follow me or become a follower. I have iAFT and its patch for 3DNPC installed as instructed.

Have you made any changes to loot rules other than those in the guide? And have you removed/not installed any mod that's being used by the guide's custom "load after" rules? Try comparing your load order with Lexy's (if you read a few posts back you'll find a reference to it, I can't help you more because never used it myself). But it's possible that when you remove a mod your "conflict-resolved" load order gets scrambled next time you run LOOT. Also what Lexy said before. If you're using Sofia the BSA version you may have any mod's loose files overriding assets, regardless of left pane placement. If that's the case you can extract and check for asset conflicts.