Spock

Well, which of those values should be carried over really depends on the Requiem balance. To be honest I actually do not know how "accurate" those values are anyway, Requiem's balance probably has it's own little weaknesses here and there. And remember it's a computer game, "realism" is very limited by gamey combat mechanics and whatnot, so it's really open to interpretation of the fantasy world. A side note: In medieval Scandinavia a decent sword and fullplate was probably worth several months of good food and shelter. If you are for some reason unhappy with certain changes, changing them in T5E is really easy. I would unequip the items in question first and create a new save game though (dunno if that's really necessary, just as precaution). The only thing I wanted to have a second look at are perk changes. The way I understand things, some of the WAF keywords need perk changes to work but my knowledge of how perks work really is way too limited to truly understand what's going on.

Since you probably want to resolve those conflicts anyway, I would just create a new patch file, put the resolved records in it and then load it after the STEP patch. You should be fine that way.

One very useful tool not on the list is IfranView. Two firefox extensions I would recommend are DisconnectMe over Ghostery (non proprietary, presumably better coverage). Self destructing cookies is also nice little privacy addon. Prism break has a lot of useful info regarding privacy. Lastly I would recommend the use of a Host file. Either from someonewhocares or mvps.

I have watched some mod testing videos by Gopher, mostly offline though and skipping some stuff. Just to give you my 2 cents on the matter: I generally do not think you should entirely stop live mod testing, but I have some suggestions for improvement to maybe make it work better. If you review your testing of the Stable mod for example (the one that added stables for inns). It was suggested by the mod author in chat, I think your choice of words when you found some glitches where a little unfortunate. Since he was in the chat you could have communicated with him and maybe ask him if you should revisit the mod another time. Generally establishing some sort of encore if something went bonkers during the testing would be good imho so people can improve things if they agree with problems you see. Another suggestion would be to do the testing with someone in chat, preferably someone who successfully installed the mods you test. That would give you a second set of eyes for potential installation issues, reading the manual and potentially knowing some background about the mod.

I tried to make a small T5E guide on how to resolve basic conflicts, but the language barrier made it relatively difficult for me. Also while I usually don't have a problem holding a lecture in front of people, just talking into the microphone was really weired for me. Using T5E is really really useful when extensively modding your Skyrim, imho it is the most important Skyrim tool (rivaled by the bahsed patch though). After looking at quite some mods I found that even experienced modders sometimes make mistakes. There really is no need to be shy of T5E. You will likely see certain basic conflicts in your load order when you fire it up. Once you get a little used to the tool there are are some really self explaining subrecords you can easily fix yourself. This video is a good start to see what I mean. If you already know the basics of load order, the part relevant for conflicts start at 12:00. At 16:35 you see exactly the most common kind of conflict if installing Requiem with STEP. He explains it only briefly but I hope it helps. What Gopher calls "value" is also called subrecord by some people (like me). Most Requiem conflicts are not very difficult to resolve. Most of them are just texture conflicts, where the othermod.esp record simply changes one subrecord pointing to a different texture path while the requiem.esp record does other, unrelated changes. In those cases simply right click on the requiem column (right at the top) -> copy as override into -> scroll down to new file (or the file you created last time you did this). You might get a warning that you are editing files, since you choose a new file or your custom file don't worry and click "yes I'm sure". After doing this, you can just drag and drop the texture path into the new column you created from the override (whatever you named it). T5E should display every column as green/grey now. When you exit T5E it explicitly asks you which esp files to save. So if you misclicked or something strange happened simply deselect the esp files you don't want changed. My Requiem - Animated Weapon Enchants patch is a good and simple example. To see what I did just start Requiem and Animated Weapon Enchants only (on the T5E startup menu you can right click to deselect all, remember that T5E requires all masters to be loaded). If you then load the patch in addition you will see how things changed. Many subrecords in T5E are fairly self-explaining. There are some though that are more complex like keywords which are usually required for scripts and perks, patching them may have undesired consequences. Perk and quest records are also more advanced and require some CS knowledge to successfully patch without breaking anything. When in doubt about a record, better ask someone first. Hope this helps

Interesting! Personally I do agree with Nearox that mod tables get crammed up really fast if you want to add some information. What I sometimes wished for was a table for some advanced info/instructions in case a user want's to know more about what's going on or how to do a custom install (e.g. Requiem with killcam). Another brainstormed idea: I do not know how many packs actually do overwrite STEP mods or require uninstallation of some mods (I'm hoping for a parallax pack ). For the Requiem pack having icons indicating the conflict would be nice. Maybe clickable with a quick info on what is meant by e.g. texture conflict or esp conflict and what consequences can be expected. For texture conflicts MO icons could be used so people recognize it.

I honestly have no idea what might causing your issues, never heared of that. But some skeleton/FINIS bug might be the right direction. Or maybe you forgot to patch the game? And then there is the possibility that one of your downloads got corrupted, or something didn't install properly due to a security feature. Those are shots into the blue though.

I PMed MadWizard, he was one of the people having the issue. If it's fixed for him, maybe it is fixed for everyone. I might have the issue too, but it may also be due to my unstable GPU.

Some people got crashes when enabling ExpandSystemMemoryX64=true with the SKSE 1.7.0 alpha implementation of the memory patch 3.0. The discussion about the source of the issue got so heatet that Boris disabled the feature for a while.

My r9 290 can keep the 30 fps very safely @1200p with step extended (although 2.2.7, so no distance overhaul)+NLA and ugrids 7 (10000 grass distance, grass on steroids with 90 density). Make sure you go for 2048 shadow map resolution though. I use 16x ENB AF, all ENB AA options and texture filtering quality high in CCC.

As a general rule of thump: Any mod that adds or alters NPCs needs a patch to work with Requiem. Maybe this will be different with the new version and skyproc patcher. This is because NPCs lacking perks will be very weak in Requiem. It won't break the game, but possibly break game balance. I haven't actually testet this but afaik most of immersive weapons and armors is included in Requiem anyway. For me personally that means enough diversity.

Did the update fix the issues some people where reporting when using the memory feature with ENBoost?

I know Relighting Skyrim as RS, didn't know about Neo's version, definitely have to check it out. NLA has the convenience of requiring only one lightweight plugin for weather and the lighting really looks spot on. Especially sunrise, sunset and twilight look like you're in a nordic country. It doesn't work with ELE though (shadows become too deep, maybe NLA disables color correction, dunno). Fun? Did you play too much Dwarf Fortress? ;) Thanks for asking! Rather turbulent RL atm. Lots of math exams coming and I have to work again to keep my bed warm. But I can't complain, things work out pretty well at the moment :) And you?

If you load the STEP Core patch after Requiem, there will be some Requiem settings overwritten. An example are weapon/armor entries. The Core patch has some entries to make GDO and WAF compatible, so if you load it before Requiem you won't see some GDO features, if you load it after Requiem you won't see some stat changes and possibly some keywords to make certain equipment work with certain perks. This doesn't break your game in any way, you just miss out some features. Some mods won't work if you do this though. For example Avrak Rewritten uses the esp to point to the textures. Requiem changes Avrak's perks. If you load Requiem last you won't see the Avrak Rewritten textures. @ Smile: I just took a quick look at your LO. Is there a specific reason you use RS with ELFX? Afaik they are incompatible. Have you tried NLA instead of CoT? It's currently the best looking ENB/weather mod imho.

Just a small headsup about the patch: The silicon lottery really really hates me. I bought an r9 290 vapor-x in hopes that it will be more stable then the pcs+. Well, the card I received is even more unstable then the pcs+ ones, producing black screens more frequently and putting BSODs in the mix :( I spend a lot of time troubleshooting my hardware, testing the card in other people's stable systems, testing other cards in mine. Despite the fact that testing a Syrim pack on an unstable system is kind of useless, all the troubleshooting kind of reduces my motivation to sit down and do more trouble shooting in form of a pack patch. Hopefully I can resolve my GPU issues in the near future, maybe if I keep sending cards back one will eventually work. Regards, Spock

Wrye Bash was never laggy for me. The Bashed patch is a godsend powerful tool to automatically solve certain types of conflicts. Only too bad there aren't as powerful tags Skyrim as there where in Oblivion/Fallout.

There is no way of displaying grass further then your loaded ugrids. The default value of 7000 seems to be right to make grass not pop most of the time. This isn't optimal because grass appears in a radius while cells are quadratic, if you approach a cell boarder at 90° you will still see some popping.

No, this is about using the dll for parallax and shadows as well. The performance loss occurs as soon as you enable effects in the ENB.ini. I do not know if ENBoost costs performance, I would assume it's neglectible. The way I understood it, the dll does even more, it has to "talk" to the renderer. This takes render time every frame.

Before we started looking at the code we started deleting stuff. You can run the d3d9.dll with ini files only (we deleted the palette and fx files). I don't know much about engines, injectors and shaders but the friend I did this with does. He told me this is most likely caused by the dll itself. The FPS loss might not be very system dependent but only testing can tell.

I just wanted to input some findings for the ENB for parallax and shadows question: Today, a friend of mine and me tried to lift up some of the performance cost of ENB when enabling effects with all individual effects disabled hoping some of it comes from shaders running. We found the performance cost most likely comes from the d3d9.dll and is caused by intercepting API calls requiring additional render time (necessary for any injector). You should be able to replicate this by only installing the d3d9.dll+enb.ini+enblocal.ini, disabling all features and then test the difference between UseEffect=true and false. Just intercepting the API calls costs as much as 6-7 FPS on my machine (faulty r9 290, i7 920@3,8 gHZ) but this probably shouldn't differ too much from machine to machine. There is pretty much no way around it except for asking Boris (unlikely) or reverse engineering the binaries (very time consuming and probably against Boris' wishes). Reverting to older binaries (afaik 0.221) might help a little as it may make less intercepts but you would miss out on some ENBoost updates (from my understanding some of those updates are in the .dll file, please correct me if I'm wrong). I didn't test this because of the later. I still think the ENB shadows and Parallax are worth it, but there pretty much isn't anything that can be done about the performance loss if you wish to use the latest ENBoost. The vast majority of STEP:Extended users will probably want to run an ENB anyway and their systems should be able to handle the performance hit. Imho Project Parallax Remastered and Vivid Landscapes would make great STEP:Extended candidates with a Parallax/Shadow/SSS ENB provided (I could do that if you want).

Interesting. I think the game lived off it's atmosphere which was good, but after a while I found the dialogue and quests kind of boring. The dialogue was very black/white and lacked any edge. Party dialogue was very steriotypical as well. This is something many Bioware games I played have in common, but most of them make it up with a great plot. I found the DA:O plot not that intruiging, parts of it where cool though. The city elf starting plot and the mages plot where really good imho. The best RPG I played so far was NWNII:MotB. It has a superb plot (if you know a little about Forgotten Realm lore) and superb characters. KotOR 1 was also really good. PS:T and The Witcher are still on my list to play.

In the comparison by phryxolydian on the first page you can clearly see an improvement in texture quality, VW and vanilla are just too 'clean' at times. Especially the Windhelm shots of RW look much better imho. What I really don't like are some of the glow colors. Many of Tech's shots (mostly Solitude) look like the buildings are neon lit inside.

Supposetly vanilla shadow settings should cause it. I had it if I deactivated ENB, but since I use ENB I didn't bother looking any further. My shadow distance is 8000. On a r9 290 the ENB shadows cost less then 1 fps, even on highest settings. UsePatchSpeedhackWithoutGraphics=false alone did cost the fps, even with all effects disabled. I cannot test anything atm, it may be some shaders in the fx files, it may be ENB intercepting API calls. I asked a friend of mine to take a look at the shaders and see if anything is running, but that probably takes a while as he is even lazier then I am. And then I just had another idea, maybe it was deffered rendering.

On my rig just enabling use graphics in ENB cost around 5-7 FPS (if I remember right) without any effects enabled. That was with custom fx files though, maybe something isn't disabled properly. But the shadow fixing alone would be worth it imho. If you are on a low end machine you can optimize FPS because high quality ENB shadow filters+lower resolution shadows look better then higher resolution shadows without ENB (or lower ENB shadow settings). I would still be interested if you can see a shadow quality difference related to the lod switching bug (maybe you found a fix for it?). If you set the shadow distance to 3000 you should be able to reproduce it by changing FOV back and forth from 75 to 80 ingame.

Interesting, if you have the time, could you check if you don't have it with vanilla settings? If you get the same bug with vanilla settings, could you copy over your ini changes to see which one solved it?