Spock

Sorry in advance for further OT talk :) The Aielund Saga, a NWN 1 module was extremely well done too btw. I never cared for the vanilla story in both games though. MotB on the other hand is a true masterpiece and very undermentioned when listing RPGs with great stories and writing. Thanks for the info on the mod setup. I did use something similar when first installing it. But I never got very far into the game because I couldn't find out how to do some stuff in the interface.

Mine is NWN2 Mask of the Betrayer followed by Knights of the Old Republic. I never got around to finish Planescape:Torment but the world and dialogue is saw was amazing.

Skyrim is really single threaded, at least the cpu intensive stuff of rendering and game logic. It is not inherently favorible to outsource some tasks because the main thread might have to wait if this is not optimized. The additional threads do not really use the cores to their fullest, so there shouldn't be a problem adding havoc threads. It might be beneficial to set heavoc threads to physical cores-1 to help the main thread.

Interesting, NVidia seems to have remedied it's lack of async compute capabilities, finally bringing it's shader architecture up to date. This card's architecture should remain relevant longer then it's predecessors. AotS (true parallel dx12) benchmarks are still not impressive for a next gen card though (this has nothing to do with vendor preference, AotS just uses what next gen APIs can do, it's a glimpse in the future). This thing is a bomb for neuronal compute! Also, the lack of physically correct sound is a major problem for VR. Polaris won't be a bomb either though, but it will probably be the faster card again. [edit] Sorry, I fell for the marketing. Apparently the 1080 still doesn't support async compute on a hardware level, which explains the mediocre Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks (even though it is probably highly driver optimized). https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/nvidia-gtx-1080-review/2/ This might become a performance problem for future releases as games start to use the more advanced features of compute shaders.

If you can get most of your money back, RMAing that card is a really good idea. Kepler has major weaknesses in it's shader architecture. Once it flew out of the current driver optimizations for NVidia and shaders in games advanced to the next level, it's performance broke down more then one price category (and NVidia cards are pricey to begin with). The 1080 is very interesting because it might get way better performance for stuff like NNEDI3. It also has to be seen if it fixes the async compute problems Maxwell has. Maybe we can finally get an NVidia card with decent openCL compute performance.

Strange, I do see underwater effects with the current version of NLA. They are very subtle though.

These things are so easy to overlook, Bethesda games are plagued by them :confused: If I remember right, qucksaving and autosaving could break scripts in Morrowind. So I went and disabled autosave. Thanks again for your great tool! I think I and probably some others could benefit from a warning feature that warns of potentially harmful values, if you would be willing to invest the time.

Thank you for your continued work on the project! Please don't forget about this. I would also add the recommendation to move AOS after realistic wolf howl sounds (after the STEP mod compilation). The current sample selection reminds me a little of this : I would also like to recommend Noble Skyrim.

I'm not that much into video encoding, but can't the GPU do that way faster then the CPU anyway (especially AMD)? Shouldn't HT reduce Skyrim performance when the threads are really used? My reasoning would be that HT reduces performance per thread and Skyrim is pretty much single threaded (the important stuff: renderer and game logic).

Apparently there is a fix for this: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/61452/?

I agree with your assessment. But the colors in those shots look a little unnatural anyway. Is there some ENB or weather mod at work?

Opinions differ on the matter of firewalls vs updates. Afaik if you have a secure firewall, you are also safe from the exploits. Last time I looked (about 2 years ago), there where only 2 security relevant updates anyway. It took me a long time to read through all the updates but I was quite surprised that I found only 2 relevant updates (SP1 installed). The method I use is only possible with the pro version of windows.

My method is to never activate windows update in the first place. It caused too many bugs in the past. Just shift the windows firewall to group policy so no program can add exceptions. It is a really good, lightweight FW solution. You have to have a secure FW if you disable windows update.

The narrator doesn't seem to really know a lot about the workings of PC graphics :X I started PC gaming with an Atari Mega with 1 mb ram. My first addiction was to Hack, I only recently managed to beat the game in the form of it's successor Nethack. This is an exciting era, we are close to getting away from the rasterizer and manage real time path tracing. AMD is very close to providing the necessary shader power, they just need to keep the usual pace, fully use the bigger die and implement fp16 double performance.

If I were you, I wouldn't do it. The reason is you only upgrade by one generation. I'd definitely wait for the next generations of GPUs atm.

While it is possible to make the game not run properly with some ENB settings, it is also quite possible to reach solid 30 fps with all ENB features and high res textures enabled. Just don't use 4k textures and use good ENB settings. My GPU is an r9 290, so basically the same as your just with slightly lower clock. There is nothing I am aware of to turn up the game's visual fidelity except for higher resolution at this point. 4k textures are kind of pointless as you really won't see the difference 99% of the time, 2k really is enough. There may be a slight margin for higher SSAO fidelity but tbh, I cannot see the difference. STEP doesn't include some high fidelity options for compatibility reasons and the need to stay true to vanilla. If I may advise on some basic changes, I'd try a newer SFO version, Verdant, Vivid Landscapes and Lumen or NLA for an ENB (NLA requires a no ELE STEP install, NLA is the more realistic one). You may want to follow Confidence Man's advice on skin textures. You might also want to try Tamriel Reloaded and Noble Skyrim and select your favorite textures manually.

Did you find the time for new recommendations? I'm still following this with great interest! Did you try this: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/71400/? It contains parallax maps for Noble Skyrim. Dunno how good they are.

Please don't. The mod is great but it is incompatible with the best ENBs. Or if you do it, implement it like ELE.

That kind of FPS is expected at that resolution with an ENB preset that uses all the features.

I was fairly anti religious in my youth but I think that is a mistake. Religion doesn't make better or worse people. It doesn't make smarter or less smart people. The thing to understand is the flaw in our brain. Many people require some form of shortcut to be happy with the increasingly fast and complex world around us. Be it belief in the paranormal, "thai chi" and similar stuff (which really isn't thai chi in the traditional sense), esoteric or conspiracies. It all serves the same purpose. Many humans seem to be dependent on that kind of coherency for their mental health and happiness. The movie Transcendence is brilliant at describing how humans think (although it has weaknesses in it's narrative pacing, still highly underrated). Often ideas under the influence of THC seem great at the time, but sober they are often BS. It's philosophizing under psychotic experiencing (that's what a THC high actually is). It's as sound as the next homeless babbling to himself might be philosophizing, only less psychotic. And I'm not some kind of anti drug propagandist, I'm all for recreational drug use. I just think the underrating of the side effects of THC is dangerous (I'm a dry addict).

I'm just asking the question if life shouldn't feel like a memory lapse when every memory is gone in the event of death. I'm no native speaker, I tried to express the event of forgetting because of an alcohol dosage. But the Fermi Paradox describes a civilization developed farther (several star systems). I'm not saying there are no class m stars with planets older then ours, there are plenty. But gamma ray bursts where probably more likely earlier in the universe too and the number of class m stars with planets increased with time. Maybe the time at which a line of events leading to a civilization like us is probable isn't as far back as necessary.

I don't believe in ghosts. Our minds play us so many tricks, I think ghosts are one of them. There is something philosophical I would like to share though from a rationalists point of view: Did you ever go blank from a higher dose of Alcohol? It happened to me once. At the time, everything is 'normal' but because you forget afterwards, it feels like the time in between never happened. If we die and forget, shouldn't life feel like going blank? About Aliens: Very, very likely! Complex aliens like in Scifi Movies: Probably not in a distance we can presently observe. My explaination for the Fermi-Paradox is, that the Universe is still too young. It takes time to gather all the heavy materials in sufficient quantities in enough places to raise sufficiently raise the chance for life. That life takes time to develop technology and even much much more time to colonize any other star system. Given that most of what we see of the Universe is much younger then us, we probably still have to wait for a very long time. [edit]About the logic/belief discussion: I just wanted to throw in, that Goedel demonstrated that every mathematical system is incomplete or false. So logic has it's limits.

As far as I can tell there are some restored banter mods with maybe one or two new quest dialogue options, but the amount of content added is very, very little compared with what is already there. Besides, I do not know if or how how BG mods are packaged for Linux. The other thing with BG is difficulty. With some system mastery the difficulty will become trivially easy, especially with some of the crazy overpowered BG II artifacts. There is a great mod to fix that, which mostly enhances AI, it is called Sword Coast Stratagems. But that one makes Mages brutally hard, especially in BG II. I would say you could use it for a first play through if you are a min-maxer who is o.k. with some non-spoiler advice and likes a serious challenge.

Afaik they fixed some engine bugs in the EE, but they probably also introduced a few new ones. There is also a list of EE compatible mods. If I recollect this correctly, WeiDU is an .exe install system, so I would guess it is not Linux compatible. But I'm a Linux noob. There is a compatible mod list for BG II: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/23726/bgii-ee-compatible-mod-list After a very quick search I only found outdated BG I versions of that list. What are you looking for? Content addons? Rebalance mods?

I'm not sure we understand each other. I think the shading works fine (mostly), but I found some oddities with certain textures and tiled surfaces. SSAO darkens the joints of tiles as it should. But if the color maps are designed without SSAO in mind and are already imitating AO, the effect will be too strong if you add actual SSAO. Like adding SSAO to a light map.