thunderclam

Before I respond, I wanted to report that I played something like 4-5 hours of a main-quest playthrough last night with NO crashes. I got to just after Dragon Rising and even used the Sofia Follower Mod during the dragon fight with no issues. Very plum experience that has reassured me that I'm not wasting my time with all this stuff yet again, haha. That said, I did have an issue with Extensible Follower Framework and Faendal not healing himself, he died in Bleakfalls Barrow :(. Probably just something I don't know about the mod. They are full on CTDs. I've had no CTDs with Inigo or any other modded companion, actually. Not nearby or actively following my character, at least. Inigo was recruited and then sent away in the save most of my crash notes pertained to. How do I install the Memory Block logger? I looked at it but wasn't sure whether to manually move the plugins into the necessary folders or to do it as a normal MO mod. Isn't it now advised not to enable Papyrus logging in the .ini? Should I do it temporarily to check, or will this cause more problems than it solves? I am not clear on this as the previous versions of STEP I followed did include that tweak if I recall correctly. The interactions of scripted mods seems like the most reasonable place to look for the problem. I was hoping there was a known issue I could fix with TESVEdit or something, since these are all mods that are fairly popular and (I figure) widely used. If you're saying to go ahead and enable Papyrus logging, I will do so and check the save where I'm having the reproducible CTD (only one outside Driftshade Refuge, which I believe is a mod conflict). I did fast-travel away from the area and the game seems okay. I am not eager to return to see if other saves, or that save, have the same problem but I suppose I'll have to in any new games I try with this build. I have checked that out. Not sure where to begin because most of the thread seems to concern ILS and issues with the memory patch not working... issues I don't seem to be having. Can you point me to specific posts or concepts in that thread that I should pay special attention to in light of my particular issues? I haven't seen anything in there about "crashing when saving" which has been an intermittent problem in my Skyrim modding experience since I started using STEP and Mod Organizer. Not blaming these elements, though... who knows what causes it? it's not a common issue.

Hi guys. I finally have a somewhat stable game! I've put 8 hours into an LaL playthrough and the first several hours were very solid except for some graphical stutter (framerate drops from 50-60 to about 20-30 before shooting up again) which I haven't resolved yet. More on that later. I am just now starting to experience some CTDs as I get out in the world and was hoping for some advice. I followed STEP Extended to the letter before adding additional mods. I played around with ENBs to fix some graphics issues and while that worked somewhat, I also found that I was having framerate issues at random. I since went back to JUST ENBoost. I fixed a .ini edit (biPresentInterval=1) which I'd left since using ENB. I have also removed Even Better Quest Objectives since initial install. I've also swapped out the two STEP hair mods in favor of one I prefer. You'll see the wide list of additonal mods I've added since Extended, all of which being mods I've used before but am of course not 100% sure aren't problems for this install or in general. I am completely new to using TESVedit to resolve mod conflicts manually. I am a bit afraid of it, actually, and haven't been able to find a user-friendly tutorial except for the "Basic" one offered by STEP. Hopefully the information I am providing here will yield some helpful insights into steps I can take to improve the stability of my load order and resolve CTDs like the ones I mention below. Specs: Windows 7 64-bit AMD Radeon 6950 2GB (dxdiag says Approx Total Mem is 1768mb, which seems wrong as I remember 2048 last I checked) 8GB RAM Intel i5-2500k @3.30GHZ (4 cores) Direct X 11 Load Order: Stutter and GFX: -I have not DDSOPTed any textures. I had problems in 2014 when trying to use the utility properly. According to STEP 2.2.9 none of the mods I'm using should be beyond the scope of my system. -I am using performance options across the board, except SMIM -The only additional graphical textures I'm running are for NPC clothing and the Mage Robes, is there a way to provide a list of the left panel installations from MO? I can provide that if needed -Stutter takes for the form of an FPS drop from 50-60 (which I run at pretty solid exterior and interior) to below 30 for about a second before it climbs up. I know this is supposedly hardware related so here's what I've done to try and fix it without anything conclusive except that I think it must be a general memory issue as opposed to a GPU issue. 1. Ran a pure STEP: Extended profile (FPS stutter ONLY when loading a new Cell like a city or exterior, and only sometimes) 2. Sequentially added in mods I believe add more GPU strain, such as Inconsequential NPCs, and the extra clothing mods. Had results similar to pure STEP: Extended profile. 3. Tried my fully modded profile (Step ++) and noticed stutter again. 4. Noticed bad stutter in Dawnstar. Shutting off Footprints when there reduced issue considerably. Suspect that this will be a thing in Winterhold as well with all the snow and entities. Personal Crash Log (I jot these notes down after every CTD): The final CTD in that list is the one that's really getting me down. I can't figure it out. :P

I think that I overreacted to this issue at the time. I do think the Wood Elf missing hair patch is truly odd, but other hair stuff (floating bangs and the like) seem to consistently appear across Skyrim screenshots taken by others. As a result and, correctly or not, I've resolved to ignore the issue for my own sanity and just select hairstyles for characters where the issues are not prevalent.

So are there any non-STEP mods in particular that this (Aiyen's) method revealed the limitations/liability of?

I did see that post but somehow missed the links! Must have been skimming or something. I'm still going to ignore it on this profile at least. I had an afternoon of frustration when I copied my "STEP + experimenting with mods" profile once I concluded the build I was messing with was pretty stable. Managing my profiles unticked every plugin from my plugins list (right pane) which is a thing I forgot MO does. Reactivating things, remembering which mods to leave disabled cuz of dummy .esps and so on... ugh. I'm good for today I think but thanks for pointing me to those links.

Is it safe to use this mod without the updates and with some mods it has outdated patches for such as EFF and LaL? Is it safe to remove it and keep playing an existing save (I made a "clean" save)? I ask because I kind of want to do the MQ and am worried EBQO is in a state where it should not be used.

Yeah, your overwrite folder shouldn't look like that. STEP Extended only contains 3 mods/patches that require manipulation of the overwrite folder: Fore's New Idles, Dual Sheath Redux, and your Bashed Patch. Each time you run those (and you should run all three every time you change your load order from what I understand), you have to move the contents they generate from the overwrite folder to their mod listing in your left-panel MO list. Glad to hear you resolved the enboost issue, but it is seemingly a bad idea to use any program with overlays while gaming on a PC. All I ever hear about this, doesn't matter which game, are horror stories. Looking at Dragon Age Inquistion as a recent example, people had a field day over not only Origin's overlay but 2-3 others I can remember.

No, I use Expanded Jewelry Crafting w/ the Leveled List .esp. I do have Immersive Weapons and Armor though!

So I get a well-known message window after rebuilding a patch. Basically, it's the warning about a mod having a leveled list that exceeds 255 entries. According to Sharlikan, this is an issue with SkyProc or LvL Lists compiled with a TESVEdit Script of some kind. I'm not very conversant in this stuff, but I suspect the issue isn't with DSR, the only Skyproc mod I'm using. Is there a known weapons/armor mod that has this issue? I want to narrow this down, but am having a lot of trouble figuring out which mod it could be that is eceeding the LvL List limit.

I will try this. I think the best way to do it is to use that near-vanilla Preset I've seen discussed here. I'll track that down and give it a whirl. There seems to be a general problem with my system and this specularity issue. If so, I would need to alter many textures this way and would only do that as an extreme last resort. For now, I'll check into ENB presets and report back if I fix the issue or discover anything else. EDIT: Tested with ELEP Performance version (Aliasing option) and the snow looks a ton better. However, I could not find a specific "specularity intensity" setting. Rather, there were many specularity settings split up between sunrise, day, sunset, and night. I changed a few of these as a test, turning them down to 0 and monitoring for any effect. There was no effect on the texture shimmer/flicker/flashing I experience the snowy ground, much less the chunks of ice in the river, wood on the boats, rims on the barrels, etc. This again seems to be some sort of general aliasing problem with my setup or hardware. I can never figure it out, but at the very least the snow doesn't look like white paint spatters any more. Is there any advice you guys can offer about the shimmering textures? That is much more distracting than the bad snow, but its effect has been somewhat lessened on said snow at this point.

The textures I'm using are STEP recommended. The problem persists in vanilla as I said. Can you elaborate? I am not using an ENB preset. Can you elaborate on what you mean about turning down specularity?

Those settings are untouched and at default. My graphics card doesn't have a "LOD Bias" setting that I can see, though. Okay. That may also explain other horribly flashing/flickering/shimmering textures like grass shadows and the like. How can I fix it?

BUMP: I am experiencing this problem where XCE Textures will not appear in game though the mod is active in my plugin list (Mod Organizer) and has been installed (and reinstalled) according to STEP guidelines. I have no idea what is wrong, but my investigations have shown no conflicts with other textures. EDIT: I seem to have fixed this by reinstalling the mod again. Not sure what happened there, but it's held up again thus far. Will report back if anything else goes wrong with XCE.

My vanilla Profile is fShadowBiasScale=0.1500 My STEP extended Profile is fShadowBiasScale=0.2500 (but I did not change this... it is not in the STEP recommended .ini tweaks so I have no idea why it's a different value or how this could happen). My STEP+ (personal mods and experimentation) is fShadowBiasScale=1 as per a tweak that has given me some relief from the shadow/stripe line that follows you around issue. I still see it, but not as bad. Are there other Bias settings to check? I will try a Vanilla Skyrim save in Windhelm and confirm if this problem persists there. I have only checked with STEP so far and will have to play quite a bit to get to Windhelm. :P EDIT: Tested with vanilla. Issue is a bit different, but not better. Not sure if this is what these textures are supposed to look like or not. Still getting texture flashes, but a little less noticeably due to the larger patches of white. Nearby water textures flash a lot, but the ice in the river does not flash/flicker as much as in my STEP Extended profile... makes me think that's a shadows issue perhaps tied to the Bias setting? I should also mention that my Vanilla install only runs with ENBoost since that's embedded in the Skyrim folder. https://i.imgur.com/SWA4I0j.png https://i.imgur.com/B9CpYwk.png

Hi. I'm aware that on many textures, in modded and vanilla, the white snow in Skyrim has kind of a paint-like look. Today my issue is specifically a sort of low-res white "paint spatter" snow texture visible most readily in Windhelm and Windhelm's docks. This snow effect flickers much like some of the other "transparency AA" textures do on my system. They vibrate, shimmer, ripple, flicker... whatever word seems appropriate to describe it. I'm not sure what the issue is, was hoping someone could enlighten me. I've had it before but that was when I was playing whack-a-mole with Skyrim graphical problems (shaders, transparency AA, alpha transparency, etc) with very little victory. I'm trying again and have had better luck thus far fixing some of the stuff that plagued me 2 years ago. Screenshots (where the effect is subtle because I'm not moving, please try zooming in): https://i.imgur.com/bthYlzz.png (on the stone blocks) https://i.imgur.com/wJYqYMb.png (more readily visible here) https://i.imgur.com/wJYqYMb.png (really shows up if you zoom in on this one) Specs: Windows 7 64-bit AMD Radeon 6950 2GB (dxdiag says Approx Total Mem is 1768mb, which seems wrong as I remember 2048 last I checked) 8GB RAM Intel i5-2500k @3.30GHZ (4 cores) Direct X 11 Monitor is a Samsung 32" LCD HDTV w/ 1360x768 native resolution Mod Organizer w/ extensions, fixes, and 3rd party exes as per 2.2.9 Guide GPU settings (Multisampling) and .ini tweaks as per 2.2.9 Guide w/ additional Z-fighting/Shadow Tweaks as per a Step Thread on the subject. Install: STEP Extended w/ Arthmoor's LAL (for testing purposes) EDIT: Now with video, though admittedly it doesn't really do the effect justice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nWYyd-tnhk&feature=youtu.be

Sounds good. I just wanted to confirm if it was Wet and Cold before I actually changed anything.

I've seen a few people say this mod conflicts oddly with Wet and Cold, but I suspect it's something else. Both a vanilla dialogue and CRF dialogue when first going to Whiterun will trigger with missing NPCs and the culprit appears to be WaC IF the weather is bad. The vanilla dialogue is the blacksmith lady and the Battleborn fella who is trying to order weapons. The CRF dialogue is the stables scene with Uthgerd and that other fella (one of the first examples users of CRF encounter). The scenes play out with the present side of the conversation speaking all their lines as normal. If there's not some faulty interaction here, any clues about why these NPCs are missing and yet the dialogue plays out anyway?

I too have come back after a long hiatus and still have these issues. :P I've ruled out every possible culprit we've discussed in this thread. Personally, I think it's something with AMD. I believe that it's most likely "transparency" AA-related as I've had AA problems with Skyrim since 2013 including stuff like shimmering transparency (noticeable in loading screens, mountains with snow, etc). It definitely has some effect on hair as many of my hairs have floating textures with invisible connective stuff, meaning you get issues like the screenshots I've posted. But that said, some of that is just the way Super Realistic Hair and other hair mods exacerbate the issues with vanilla Skyrim meshes, where some of the hairstyles simply have "floaty" parts that aren't properly connected to the "head" parts of the hair. I'm frustrated with my inability to find any info on transparency AA and fixing it. The best lead I've ever got was stuff Neorox had me try almost 2 years ago to no avail. Then there's people who blame Adapative AA which I don't even use. I think it's time I finally settled on enjoying Skyrim and letting these issues just be.

UPDATE: I purchased a 1920x1080p Acer monitor and the issue persists. That is... very disappointing. FURTHER UPDATE: I've narrowed it down to a mod. I'm not sure which one but it's definitely a STEP mod. I thought I had vetted them all thoroughly but now I'm going through them again to make sure. When I find the source of the issue, I'll report again.

Thanks guys. Phazer, that monitor is gorgeous but too rich for my blood. My 32inch TV, which cost $700 when I got it, is still awesome except for this crap so I'm not sure I want to turn around and spend another $500. That said. I need something close to the same size. I bet I'll end up with a 27" monitor from frigging Best Buy.

I believe my card is HDMI, it's got the port. The TV does not have a GAME mode, but the picture modes are STANDARD, MOVIE, and DYNAMIC (which is bright, like a monitor, and the mode I use). Welp. The trouble with that, as I've said, is the loss of AA features. The whole world goes wavy/shimmery when I drop to 1360x768. It's REALLY odd because back in the day, I played Skyrim exclusively in 1280x760. It's only when I started having all kinds of AA problems that I upped to 1920x1080. Anyway, I am going to buy a flipping monitor. All sources seem to confirm that it'll fix the issue.

Thanks for the responses everyone! @Mangaclub I tested it. When I do this, my AA doesn't work correctly and every single texture shudders like GTA5 on a 360. It's brutal and I'm not sure how to fix it. The last time I tried w/ driver tinkering and tinkering with Skyrim, ENB, and .ini files just kept trading one problem for two more or else a worse problem. By the time I was at my wit's end, I had no idea how to go back to normal.I almost always run at fullscreen. I just tested borderless windowed because STEP suggests it for AMD cards. Also, your prefs.ini seems to have a lot of changes and additions that I've never seen approved anywhere. Can you explain some of them in a PM before I go tossing them into my game? @Aiyen Yeah I'd say it isn't the borderless thing. I am running in Fullscreen and getting these problems. I don't think I have access to another monitor. I guess I could go buy one and try and then take it back if it doesn't fix the issue? I'm sorry, I don't really follow. Tone variation? I don't use ENB, just the hack without effects. I have tried ENBs in the past and had problems. I don't know how to force 8x MSAA through drivers without using Radeonpro which I've had nothing but problems with. It's likely that I simply don't understand any of these elements of the issue well enough? @Kuldebar No parallax textures. No temporal AA. I've tried temporal AA via ENB before from suggestions made on this forum, but it never worked for me. What it seems like is that certain ground textures and textures with "transparency" elements just hate the camera moving. When I move the camera in any way, the world twinkles/glimmers/flickers just a bit in some places and very dramatically (the ground strobing in grassy dirt areas like around the path from Helgen to Riverwood) in others. It's similar to the effect of a strobe light. The textures seem to brighten/darken so rapidly that it's almost imperceptible except that it hurts the eyes to look at it. It's very much like when you have a monitor or TV with its refresh messed up.

phazer11... please refer to my thread in General that covers the issues I'm having, presumably with my monitor, in more detail.

Hi. I've been around the forums on this subject already, around 8 months ago the last time I tried to install Skyrim w/ STEP and other mods. I am hoping to get some more definitive solutions or ideas or troubleshooting on the graphics related problems I have. I have searched the forums, google, and Nexus for updated information on these sorts of issues and have found very little besides solutions Nearox tried which did not work for me. These are the details as clear as I can give them. Please let me know if there's anything I've left out: SPECS: AMD Radeon 6950 w/ BETA driver 13.35 Catalyst 14.3 Intel i5 2500-K (4 core 3.30ghz) 8gb RAM Using a Samsung 32inch LCDTV as monitor (60hz refresh, 1360x768 native resolution) HOW I AM RUNNING SKYRIM: Resolution at 1920x1080 Step Extended 2.2.8 install including a few extra gameplay-related mods but NO GRAPHICS OR LIGHTING MODS AT THIS TIME. All STEP graphics mods are run with BASELINE/LOW quality options but are NOT OPTIMIZED. .ini settings AS PER STEP but with a few tweaks to iShadowBiasScale to fix the weird crap that goes on with field of view (where a halo of shadow surrounds and moves with the player in-game). Card settings and in-game graphics options (including AA, VSYNC, etc) AS PER STEP 2.8 ENBoost and Memory Patch 3.0 are enabled. uGrids are at SKYRIM DEFAULT. PROBLEMS: ALL LISTED PROBLEMS OCCUR PRIMARILY WHEN CAMERA OR PLAYER IS MOVED IN GAME. There appears to be an issue with certain textures at this resolution. Certain "ground" textures strobe badly in such a way that it looks like a refresh problem. By this I mean there's a kind of "lightening" effect when you move. It's headache-inducing but difficult to describe. Lowering the resolution eliminates the issue but also kills the AA making everything else flicker and swim on screen. It also manifests on trees. EDIT: This video shows (roughly) the issue I'm describing. I don't know that mine is this bad, but this will give you an example. Consensus online is that it's a TV-as-monitor issue or a cable issue: AA is still pretty bad. I learned last time around that AA was likely responsible for problems I've been having with flickering/twinkling transparency. I've noticed on other PCs that this is just a Skyrim thing, but it seems to be more pronounced if I use lower resolutions. The AA problems manifest themselves in things like texture and shadow shimmer as you move around or move the camera in game. This is especially apparent a certain distance away from the player, about middle distance. Camera Stutter usually occurs when I pan the camera diagonally, but can happen in some areas without this. I was told in another thread to try using ENB settings to fix. This did not work, I reported it, and there's been no response as yet so I'm folding into this general help request. Anyway, using Borderless Window and such also doesn't work as it kills AA the same way lowering resolution does. This is the least bothersome of the problems I've been having. WHAT I HAVE TRIED/NOT TRIED: I haven't tried using a different monitor and I haven't tried any ENB profiles or custom weather (RCRN) to see if it helps. I have tried tinkering with ENB effects and AA but have not been able to reliably fix the problem without introducing other graphics issues. MY THEORIES: I think it may be my monitor and the resolution settings, which perhaps this TV can't properly do for Skyrim or something. I think it's POSSIBLE that I could get a combination of settings I like by overriding STEP's recommendations for game/GPU settings and tinkering with the .ini even more than I have lately or in the past. I am loath to buy a new monitor if this is not REALLY the issue. And honestly, going down the route of testing 3rd party programs like RadeonPro, rolling back drivers, playing with .ini and the STEP recommended settings, etc DROVE ME AWAY from Skyrim for over half a year now. I really hope some ground has been gained in solving issues like this.

I am back! Can I enable those settings in ENBoost without using an ENB profile? If I do, are there CCC settings or .ini settings (or both) that I need to change?