Nearox

Yet another JK masterpiece. Winterhold was my least favorite ETaC modded town, happy that JK covered it now!

Most quest mods will work well with it, though they may need some patching here and there. Have a look at A Real Explorer's Guide to Skyrim, it has a quest section with some of the best mods available. You can opt not to install any of the city overhaul mods but to limit yourself to the quest mods. Still, run the REGS patch installer that you can find at the end of the guide. Good luck :) Edit: Oh yeah also in the REGS forum thread, some people have succeesfully merged quite a lot of ESPs. I did a quick search but couldn't find them, though I believe they were posted somewhat recently so check the last 10 pages or so.

BCE already adds some things there, we thought it to be sufficient. There was also a bit of a FPS drop with MREU as I recall it adds quite some grass patches in the area.

Yesterday Boris pushed a silent update of 0.265, where he added parallax for (vanilla) terrain. This is pretty interesting stuff! https://enbseries.enbdev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=58293#p58293 Already a mod has been released that uses the new functionality, and it's looking good on the screen! Coast Beach Textures for ENB

Those esps probably originate from Neo's SRLE instructions here. The CoT-WeatherPatch.esp is not actually the weather patch, but is simply the name of a merged ESP so that it doesn't need custom BUM rule sorting. With regards to ELE interiors / ELFX / Relighting Skyrim, there is a version of RL used in SRLE that is specifically tailored to be used with ELFX.

Neo, I was wondering if you have already tried out Verdant - A Skyrim Grass Plugin. Looks amazing from the videos, and author claims that due to incorporation of Grass on Steroids tweaks it doesn't cost much performance. Basically he combined grasses from SFO and a few other mods and made it all look nice together. The guy in the video below says he got the same performance with much denser grass compared to default SFO grasses. .

Is that with SRLE? Hmm I believe someone reported here something similar a while ago, I believe it was related to merging ETaC - Complete RS Patch.esp Patch - Inconsequential NPCs - RS Kids.esp Patch - Interesting NPCs - RS Kids.esp . Try to keep the default SRLE RS Children merge patch and just BUM those 3 individual patches to be loaded after it. Hope that helps. I updated the regs-srle instructions to reflect that.

Oooh, I forgot to mention but SSAO also played a major role in FPS slowdowns on my system with JK's / ETaC. You can try the settings Aiyen posted a while ago in the Vividian ENB thread here and see if it helps. I didn't get any artifacts with these settings, plus I also lowered SizeScale=0.65 to =0.50 (as is the default of Vididian ENB). There's a bit of quality loss with the rest of the settings, but to me it was acceptable. I'm pretty sure I saw Boris mention once that there probably won't appear artifacts with SizeScale and SourceTextureScale as low as 0.3 or 0.35. Could also try disabling SSAO completely for testing purposes just to observe whether it is a major culprit. EDIT: Neo I believe you are using the HQ version of Vividian right? In that case I'd try disabling just the complexIL and complex AO and supersampling parameters first.

That might be a contributing factor indeed, out of necessity with my GPU I have worked with fShadowDistance=4000 for a long time.

I think that could be mesh related indeed, even on my 6950 I only got about half the FPS drops you are getting (back in september when I was still at home at my gaming rig)... Though I trimmed down a lot of the SRLE mods, and used the light version of SMIM and performance version of Vividian. I know in Whiterun there are a few spots where the FPS drops considerably, such as looking at the main gate, but in most other places it was manageable for me (about 30-35 fps). ETaC used to cost more FPS as well in earlier versions, but around last summer or so MJB (with the assistance of CJ I think?) optimized some of the towns (like Falkreath) by removing or relocating some of the small clutter objects/ropes etc. from the exterior enironment (and also be completely redisigning some). Maybe JK will do this too, at some point :)

That'd be great, thank you :)

5.5gb VRAM use, sweet :P What kind of FPS do you get? It doesn't show in the graph (probably cause you had to turn experimental/safe mode on in SPM).

Seems JK released both Morthal and Falkreath recently. I am so impressed by his overall approach! The towns and cities just feel so well done... Like a truly better version of Vanilla Skyrim locations. IMO it's becoming a serious contender for ETaC now, although it lacks some of the compatibility patches that MJB or other others provide for ETaC.

1. I don't remember why, CJ put that instruction there so it was probably for good reason. Perhaps to ensure none of the files get potentially overwritten by another mod, although ETaC has a patch for BFT so idk. 2. Well we have always intended to keep as many of the REGS mod below the STEP/SRLE mods in the MO installation order. This I find makes it easier to keep the overview simplified and organized. Personally I simply hide/delete the conflicting files and don't move any mods around in the installation order. 3. Yes, we considered adding Moonpath last year during one of the earlier REGS versions, but if memory serves me right (sometimes it doesn't) I think CJ found that Moonpath had some issues somewhere. Maybe it was a navmesh conflict in the Dead Man's Drink or with the quality of the mod itself, I think he (partially) played through it as some point. Although ETaC has a patch for Moonpath now so perhaps it's ok to use. You could use the conflict filter in tes5edit and check if there is a navmesh conflict (other than with ETaC) with another mod. If there's no navmesh conflict it should be pretty safe to use. Like I said in an earlier post, I hope we can get together at some point again and revise REGS a little bit. That said, I am still abroad and have no access to any half-decent gaming rig so I can';t test anything myself right not :(

Amazon currently has a 12-day video game sale: https://www.amazon.com/Video-Games-Deals/b/ref=hqp_vg_deals?ie=UTF8&node=409566&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=hero-quick-promo&pf_rd_r=0E96FW7T51SJ6H2GESCS&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=2006740682&pf_rd_i=B00GDHDB14 Edit: almost all of them seem to be US only, damn...

Thanks for the suggestion, however REGS does not include player homes :)

REGS is nearly 1 year old now and although it has seen major changes and additions perhaps soon may be the time to do a revision and to reconsider some mods. I'm not doing this without CJ though, not least because he started the project and also since his skills are crucial to check whether the mod is not only aesthetically but also technically (navmesh, npc packages etc. etc.) good. personally I'd like to see some new additions such as Skyrim Better Roads (which in my testing seemed compatible, but again, need CJ to actually verify). Also for all you explorers, new mod was released recently Skyrim Convenient Bridges . The bridges are all unique and look nicely done. My main concern is that it will reduce incentives to go into the water at all. But it might be worth giving it a try in your setups and let us know what you think!

I agree this is something REGS could be improved upon, hopefully we'll get to it in the future.

Keith says it spot on: REGS is a guide... and is designed to offer as many choices to the end-user as possible. That being said, in my opinion JK's work so far is superior to ETaC. However since ETaC covers so many places, and it does it so well, JK's mods are at the moment not a replacement for ETaC (full version). Considering however the recent fast releases of JK's town mods I think it is exciting to see how many towns he will eventually cover. The decision between ETaC and JK rests on quality, quantity and consistency (between towns). If you ask me, at the moment, ETaC wins on 2 out of 3 fronts, but JK is likely to be a serious contender. Quality wise his work is better than ETaC imho. Let's wait and see what JK is going to release in the near future...

There is a video for that mod here, shows some things pretty well. Must say I am impressed by the scale of things he did, must've been a hell of a lot of work. CJ have you seen it?

We have had extensive comparisons and discussions on farmhouses already, but I couldn't help but notice Aron's new mod... Vivid Landscapes - Orcs and Farmhouses Especially after watching the Hodilton video, I think Aron did a really beautiful job once again here (At around 1:20 the comparisons start) I like especially how everything integrates so well since he covered all textures related to the farms and longhouses. The fence looks better than the one from SMIM (plus VL has a patch that reduces the flickering from the fences). Colors blend in really well between interiors and exteriors. The rooftops are refreshing and realistic with some mossy stuff on it. The parallax (something which not many farmhouse texture packs have) gives everything some extra depth. If only I could sit behind my game PC right now and observe this ingame! What do you think?

Hmm I didn't know that the DDSopt previewer has a built in diff/normalizer. You are right, however I do recall some textures looking bad ingame nonetheless but perhaps my testing wasn't as thorough as I thought it was. It would be a nice improvement indeed if we could use R5. Either way there is a significant reduction as you said, and considering that it is such a large mod - especially when compared to the recommended quality of other STEP texture mods - it would imho be good to provide this as a download sooner rather than later.

I don't remember exactly, but I believe I left some of the *_msn.dds (as you can see in the guide) deliberately at R8 because converting them to R5 created borked textures. Hence why I left them at R8 but instead reduced the size to 1k. It was strange because a certain *_msn texture would react very different to the same settings that worked on a similar *_msn texture (e.g. body of khajit male & body of breton male), was weird cause it wasn't like that on any other mod I can think of.

As I said, I already sorted them out individually... back when we were discussing them in this thread. You can only optimize some of the textures, a few will turn black and/or low quality if you optimize them. Others can only be reduced in dimensions, changing the format will have a bad result. I tested all the textures individually ingame. If you use the settings I describe here then they should all look good and should bring down the total file size of BM from 300+ to 100 something. Can't remember exactly as it's been a while since I wrote the DDSopt guide for SRLE and I'm still not at home so I don't have Skyrim installed at the moment. Feel free to check those settings on the textures yourself and to provide the results as a package on the mod page. There is very, very little quality difference between those settings and the original.

Spiffyman, I wrote a DDSopt guide to Better Males in my Guide to Run SRLE on Medium Systems if you follow that then the quality difference should be mostly unobservable. Also regarding vanilla 4k... Tech, if memory serves me right the vanilla body MSN is 2k uncompressed (R8)? And the other textures (hands, face etc.) are not originally 4k either, certainly not fully uncompressed (I believe they are R5). Most definitely, Better Males in its Nexus form will increase your VRAM use by a significant amount vs vanilla, as has been discussed earlier in this thread...