Spock

For 2.2.9: Sure, especially sound is very subjective! I would go with the more realistic variant for STEP, because it's very hard to recommend sounds if you have two high quality samples. AOS reduces the gamey feel of the combat sounds. Impacts sound less squishy bashes cling shorter and harder, blocks sound more like cold steel on cold steel. For me this leads to a more raw, brutal feel in combat. I think it's an improvement in atmosphere.

Just tested my own sword. A blunt chinese 1 1/2 hander with a wooden scabbard and it sounds almost exactly like AOS' sound (the one in the blade1hand folder). You can hear the blade scratch on the edge of the scabbard a little. [edit] LoRdKoRn already answered. He reduced the number of samples for performance reasons:

I just started looking through the samples, this should be comparible by samples only. The AOS samples again sound more real to me, they do not seem to cover all the draw and sheath sounds though. Maybe the esp makes the game only use one or maybe he forgot to include them. I will ask LoRdKoRn about this.

Just tested this briefly against AOS in samples and ingame. Doing sword fighting myself AOS is much more realistic. I would recommend removing ICS in favor for AOS.

This should go back into testing until it's proven that it's better then what AOS 2.0 does.

LoRdKoRn has gone through significant efforts to make his sounds as realistic as possible and he is a professional audio designer. I think the best approach to sample selection for STEP would be to assume AOS got it right and only overwrite it when proven that the other samples are more realistic (looking at Ultra Realistic Crossbow Shoot Sounds and the ones mentioned in my post above).

It's "just" some of the 290(x) series of cards suffering from blackscreen issues. It might have been a bad batch, the cause isn't very clear. The best explaination I have found so far are problems with memory dimm power.

Sounds of Skyrim - Dungeons should be obsolete now, as well as Improved Combat Sounds, Better Weapon Swing Sounds and Smooth Blade Draw and Sheathe. [edit] I think Ultra Realistic Bow Shoot Sounds should be removed from STEP as well. The arrow whisle you hear with those sounds is not there when shooting the bow yourself. You do hear that whisle when an arrow flies by but AOS does that. Besides AOS's sample is of higher quality. This is a good example (I hate "medieval japanese weapons were superior" documentaries, they are mostly false mystifications, this is about the sounds only): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir5GKAQG14g In the slow mo shots you can hear the difference between bow string and the arrow whisle in stereo. If someone shoots a bow at you Ultra Realistic Bow Shoot Sounds is like what it sounds (in which case the whisle is covered by AOS), if you shoot the bow yourself AOS is what it sounds. Another video for good bow sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtTyOf8OCKg

2.2.9 seems to be coming along nicely. EssArrBee is on it, I would presume that the release of AOS 2.0 requires some development time though. I just hope for a pre-release patch for testing purposes I can link to, there already are so many versions and patches to keep track of, it would be nice if the STEP patches wheren't among them :)

I asked EssArrBee if he already has a 2.2.9 patch and if he would be willing to release it as WIP. It would contain all the changes necessary. If not I will have a look at it when I find the time. I will wait for full AOS 2.0 integration though as imho it's one of the most important mods in STEP (the impact of good audio is very underrated imho and this mod is outstanding in a world of outstanding Skyrim mods). Last time I chopped the extended patch I did it manually, loading the mods into T5E and deleting the patch records. There shouldn't be too many, just check Ars Metallica and Diverse Priests for conflicts, delete them from the patch and then update masters. I probably will put more work into WAF Requiem compatibility as there is more to be done with the keywords. Before I can do that I need to really learn how to mod perks though.

Well that makes little sense to me, why should boris make that value for Vram+Ram available for textures? Why not use that value to input vram and use ram anyway? That way ENBoost knows how much textures it can cram into Vram, it is fairly save to assume there is enough ram anyway. To me that sounds like a more logical explaination why Boris recomends setting VideoMemorySizeMB to the actualy VRAM.

It doesn't sound like a Skyrim issue, probably hardware or drivers. Some r9 290's are unreliable. Even though I didn't try a clean install I'm having similar issues. It might be the install as well but I found out (through other applications) that my card has the infamous blackscreen bug. It's very prominent for me in 3DMark, I cannot even run through it once. You could also try lightcoin mining for 2 hours. Maybe try with a fresh windows and driver install to rule out driver issues. Problem is these instabilities are kind of random and hard to pin down, for example heaven runs completely fine for me. Maybe you can find your problem.

Thank you again. I found out my card has the blackscreen issue, RMA ... again

Yay! My third replacement r9 290 produces blackscreens I really lost the silicon lottery :confused:

Thanks for the info! I kind of have a bad feeling that my graphics card might be at fault. One time my system crashed right after exiting Skyrim, blackscreen. A known problem with powercolor r9 290 pcs+. At best it's the driver, I switched from ATI to NVidia about 5 times with this install (once for my 280x, 3 times for each 290 since my replacement card was an old 8800 gts) and crashed it a couble of dozen times during overclocking. Even windows 7 can only take so much punishment. Did you try that with an ENB btw?

Hey, does anyone with STEP:Extended, ugrids 7 with extended far visibility (grass, objects, foliage), skse memory patch and a demanding ENB have data for Vurt's stress test (tcl + player.setav speedmult 1500 and fly around for 5 minutes)? I usually crash about 2 minutes into it, but I could probably use a new install anyway, windows included. It would be helpful to know if people can get a setup like this stable though. Thanks in advance!

From what I understood he posted ExpandSystemMemoryX64 is still important to enable certain memory management features (obscure again I know, sorry). Speedhack and ReduceSystemMemoryUsage are the main ENBoost features, ExpandSystemMemoryX64 is an addon feature to increase stability. I did a medium google session on ReservedMemorySizeMB and couldn't find a good answer to what it does. Recommended values are ranging from 1024 to 64. I expect this feature to reserve memory for other processes (like Aero) so you do not run into problems when ENBoost preloads textures, I would like to understand what the difference to setting VideoMemorySizeMb lower then you actual video memory size is though. The default seems to be 64, I left it at that. [edit]After a very brief testing, setting ReservedMemorySizeMB to 1024 gives me more noticable load stutters. From the windows performance monitor ram usage is still the same, plenty left. It could be explained by me hitting the remaining 2976 mb vram faster (got a 4 gb card, VideoMemorySizeMb=4000) or less vram being available for preload. This would require much more testing for confirmation though.

Sorry, I meant Improved Combat Sounds. I had the abbrevation in my mind because it was mentioned in the comments of LoRdKoRn's post and even wrote it down wrongly here :confused:

MadWizard summed up everything I wanted to say about the video and more exceptionally well! There is a very good book in german, Animal Irrationale by Franz Wuketits. Sadly I couldn't find an english translation. It is about how evolution did not design our brains to grasp the very complex coherences of our modern world. During the stone age thinking in patterns that are simpler then our modern scientefic understanding of the world meant an evolutionary advantage. Not much has changed in our biological evolution since then. It also explains why people see correlations too easily and fall for illusions like god, the many conspiracy theories on youtube or racist propaganda (just to name a few). Those offer easy explainations for complex and scaring coherences. What amuses me is that a believer using a computer is a little like a scientist going to church just for cookies

It seems like an update is imminent which will make ILS obsolete.

I mean the STEP:Extended patch and the Requiem pack patch. The Requiem pack patch doesn't cover all extended mods though (it's built for core) but can be built upon to save plugins. To use the STEP:Extended patch you need to delete it's Ars Metallica entries using T5E. If you do, it would be welcome if you are willing to share the file so it can be provided on the wiki. I made 2 patches for individual extended mods a page back, if you add the Requiem Bring Out Your Dead patch and the Requiem pack patch you should be good for all Requiem conflicts with extended. Not that the Bring Out Your Dead patch doesn't forward a single Consistent Older People entry and some of Requiem Hard Times' changes (mostly skin color and marryable flags). You won't miss out on anything cruicial. Requiem Bring Out Your Dead should be loaded after all other patches. I'm currently pretty occupied and won't be able to make new patches for a while.

If you use the STEP:Extended patch a lot of plugins can be removed. I'm currently at 140 with some lighting mods, some extras like parallax, weather, Requiem and Faalskaar and I have some redundancies. Have you tried that? 1) Not that I know 2) I don't have experience with the merge script. You should read very carefully how it works. If anything it should make compatibility a little easier because you have less plugins to go through. For such a massive mod setup I would advise you to learn a little T5E, it's really not that difficult and helps a great deal solving conflicts. It's always better if you can look things up yourself. If you want a big Requiem install I would personally recommend to go with STEP:Extended and then add the LE mods you want. The texture mods won't conflict. Except for the body mods (which I really don't care for) there isn't too much left not covered in other packs. For weather and lighting I would try something like Natural Lighting and Atmospherics for ENB by Confidence-Man or Opethfeldt 7 when the new version gets released. Or Serenity ENB if you like it a little more cinematic. It saves some slots and looks stunning.

On my system UseEffect=true, all individual effects disabled costs me ~8-9 FPS in some areas. Especially in the forest near Riften.

Yes, all core mod's conflicts with Requiem are covered by my patch. REGS Incompatibility with Paarthurnax is something to be adressed in the REGS thread. Maybe they are willing to provide a patch. If that patch conflcits with Requiem please inform me. I finally got a working graphics card! Powercolor r9 290. And it seems to be a good one: Currently @1140/1500, stock voltage +20 Power limit 77° vcore max, 97° VRM1 max. under heaven 4.0. No extensive testing yet though. I still need to find out why ENB drops my fps from ~55 to ~35 without any effects enabled in some areas (only "use effects" makes a real difference). Maybe it's one of the fx files or some other hardware limit. But that's an issue for another thread.

The Requiem patch is designed as a base to patch all the requiem conflicts with core mods. The step patches patch conflicts within step (not covered by my patch). To keep extended as modular as possible the patches required will be available at the nexus. Since it contains Ars Metallica entries the extended patch needs a little rework, not much though. Hopefully Complete Crafting Overhaul will be used instead in the next STEP version. What this means is for Core use the STEP Core patch and the STEP Pack Requiem patch. For Extended use STEP Extended patch (version without Ars Metallice will be provided soon), STEP Pack Requiem patch and 3 individual patches. Namely for Animated Weapon Enchants, Unique Potions and Bring Out Your Dead (version with one Consistent Older People entry forwarded as well is WIP). Load order should be: STEP Core Patch STEP Pack Requiem patch Requiem BOYD patch Bashed patch.esp The rest can be handled by BOSS (for extended install only, additional mods might need to be moved before Requiem). BOSS probably won't recognize the other patches, just move them after the two mods patched.