Spock

Just have a look and enjoy: This is rendered with 2 Titans in SLI, 1280x720. The guy doing it says the 290x should be much faster rendering it, and xfire supports 4 cards. Maybe we will see a new demo with much less noise soon :)

In Oblivion those were changes Bash could handle really well with tags :(

If you are short on time, I'd get the MGO, add Connary's textures, then adjust gameplay according to BTB.

That's unfortunate, I thought I found a good way of circumventing the work involved in optimizing each mod individually. I can't help it, I'm lazy ;)

If you play Morrowind, make sure to download Less Generic NPC Project (LGNPC)! They added so much well done content to the game it's amazing. Oh, and never use quicksave and never load an autosave (deactivate both!). Always only load a game from the main menu. Else you might break your save. I also hated the vanilla level up system, it always made me powergame. GCD was the alternative for me, it still has some bugs due to engine limitations though (be sure to get the lean version with start scripts, I think it's 2.03). BTB is also good if you don't want to fiddle too much with gameplay balances and changes (but be sure to disable some startscript to make it compatible if using GCD, read the readme). It has kind of a strong bias against permanent effect enchantments imho and I personally don't like having to use too many consumables so it's not perfect for me. His mod recommendations are fairly solid as well (he has a mod list up somewhere). All in all, MW is much more forgiving concerning conflicts, the game will crash less (you still won't see what gets overwritten) but the Wrye tool is less powerful in resolving conflicts (can't tell too much about Skyrim because I just started, but in Oblivion it could do wonders). All in all MW has a wonderful atmosphere and is worth every second you put into it. I'd put it in line with Planescape, Mask of the Betrayer and Knights of the old Republic. Hope that helps :)

I pretty much left the settings from Opethfeldt, I really really like the effect and from what I can tell it seems to be well balanced for performance vs quality. There is a bit of noise though but I hardly notice it unless I get really close and search for it. Maybe setting sizescale to 0.5 would be better. [spoiler=my current SSAO settings (from Opethfeldt)] UseIndirectLighting=true UseComplexIndirectLighting=true SamplingQuality=0 SamplingRange=0.2 FadeFogRangeDay=60.0 FadeFogRangeNight=60.0 SizeScale=0.35 SourceTexturesScale=0.35 FilterQuality=0 AOAmount=1.81 ILAmount=3.0 FadeFogRangeInterior=1.0 UseComplexAmbientOcclusion=false UseAmbientIndirectLighting=false SamplingPrecision=0 FadeFogRange=20.0 FilterType=0 AOAmountInterior=2.51 ILAmountInterior=3.0 AOIntensity=0.2 AOIntensityInterior=0.2 AOType=0 AOMixingType=7 AOMixingTypeInterior=7 UseOldType=false EnableDenoiser=true

Thanks! I did a little thread over at the ENB forums hoping to find more details by Boris on the SSAO features. Thinking more about it, SSAO and SMAA are relatively independent from other ENB settings (only SSAO indirect lighting should make a little difference). Maybe a preset for both shaders with some comparison screenshots would be nice. So everyone can have their favorite ENB with SSAO and SMAA that fit their taste and GPU power. What do you guys think?

It has to look good interior and exterior :) Well I think it's even more then high res textures or meshes. Because our organisms are optimized for visual perception we very much notice physical incorrectness in lighting. There are steep limitations of this for rasterization engines (for alternatives watch this: ) and SSAO is a kind of important "cheat" to approximate indirect lighting. A good SSAO setting will make every scene look more believable helping suspension of disbelief. [edit][Offtopic]Oops, just found out a brigade 3 demo was released, you can read more about it here: https://raytracey.blogspot.de/ The video is shot using 2 SLI titans, I'd really be interested in how this looks on 4 290x (they have the better architecture for computing, each one of them is faster then a titan)

I searched google for quite some time to see what the SSAO settings in ENB actually do. But besides 4 comparison shots by Boris about different shaders there is not much detailed documentation. To really test the settings it would probably be best to have a test cell where all textures look something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Screen_space_ambient_occlusion.jpg Preferably with a light source casting shadows so you can properly set up indirect lighting and ambient indirect lighting. From what I found out UseOldType=true has to be set to get a pronounced effect on edges. Sampling range works like the visibility sliders for other stuff in the game. You can see it by setting saturation to 0, add contrast and then adjust brightness. You will see a blob around you that changes lighting when objects come into range.

Without UseOldType=true I couldn't get shadows at the inward facing edges between two meshes. I was looking for settings that slightly shadow the space in those edges (like in the corners of a room). While this effect is not physically accurate I think it looks much better because it "grounds" seemingly floating objects (like rocks). You can see the difference when activating Opethfeldts ENB, search for a rock, open the ENB controls (shift+page down in Opethfeldts) and turn UseOldType on and off while looking at the base of the rock.

I must revert my older comment on lighting solution and SSAO. I couldn't find an enb that had SSAO settings to my satisfaction until I tried Opethfeldt (it seems the "oldversion" setting is needed to ground rocks). And in the process of trying it, I found Opethfeldt ENB to be just stunning! It looks mostly realistic, especially the weather settings, with a slight cinematic touch. Maybe I will post another step lighting pack in the future :)

Audio overhaul is featured on Mod Sanctuary 77. You can find it here: The video really made me want to try this out.

I don't really understand #2. You seem to be saying optimize all the texture files in Skyrim\Data\textures (which would take a very long time with DDSopt and optimizes many textures which shouldn't be optimized), then remove all the textures that shouldn't be optimized by reinstalling the original versions of the mods. That's exactly what I proposed to do. I already optimized the separately so I could just reinstall them as well. I'm not sure I'm getting what you are trying to say here. I'm not planning to manipulate anything in the bash installers folder. Just optimize, then copy the optimized textures and replace those in the datafiles folder. I doubt Wrye Bash checks for file sizes and datestamps of .dds files, so it shouldn't notice anything has changed. Yes, the method would have to be repeated every time anything changes. It is totally unsuited if you plan to change your mods periodically. But I'm still hoping I can install baseline STEP, a lighting solution and Requiem and then just play the game. I spend too much time with modding the previous TES games and ended up never really playing them.

Sounds like it would actually be preferable doing it the way I suggested :D Is the batch file separating the files significantly different from the way you'd do it by hand?

I took a little look through sharpshooters and ks enb SSAO settings. Seems like sharpshooters has the highest quality settings but they bug down my GPU quickly (samplingprecision=0 vs samplingprecision=-1 is ~18 fps!, all the other settings work fine as is). It's really hard to tell what the best settings vs performance are. Is there a mod providing a lighting test cell with only single colored bright grey textures?

I perceived the lighting placement of ELFX as physically more realistic (limited by the rasterization engine though). And a friend of mine who also is a lot into technical details of lighting solutions for engines pretty much immediately agreed. We also agreed that the colors seem a little too saturated though, needing an ENB to reduce that slightly. I didn't think that topic is so subjective. Thanks a lot for the shader recommendation, I will test this!

I'm sorry, I don't really understand the difference between those two approaches (if I don't want to re-size anything): 1. extract every single mod marked with "DDSopt recommended: yes"; use the batch file for mods to sort the textures; optimize according to guide; repack; install. 2. install everything; use the batch file for mods to sort all textures; optimize according to guide; overwrite datafiles; reinstall every mod marked with "DDSopt recommended: no" using BAIN (so the install order is maintained and the optimized textures get replaced with the originals). From what I understand the outcome in the data files folder should be the same. I'm not sure I fully understood the guide to DDSoptimizing mods though...

In my humble opinion ELFX should be considered for baseline STEP. The reason is, that ELFX' goal is to make the best out of the physical lighting model Skyrims rasterization engine provides. If you do not like the ambient lighting changes or the color saturation of ELFX this could as well be fixed using ENB (*this is subjective). Theoretically ELFX could be set up to look exactly like RLO but with a more physically realistic light placement (*but this is mostly objective). This still has the advantage of lowering the physical incorrectness of the lighting in Skyrim (to a pretty steep limitation of the rasterization engine) what could be described as generally desirable, thus qualifying for baseline STEP. Another thing about lighting (and shadowing): I'm currently trying Phinix natural ENB and I really like the color and ambient settings. But I think the SSAO presets lack a little (lots of floating objects). If I understand it correctly, SSAO can be controlled from the ini. Do you have a recommendation for a good/realistic SSAO preset (or an ENB with one)? Regards, Spock

Thank you so much Kelmych and all the others contributing to this guide! The development of the batch file is really, really helpful. The approach I'm currently thinking about is this: Install everything, use your batch to shamelessly DDSopt my whole data files folder, then reinstall each mod which shouldn't be optimized (BAIN is such a nice, powerful tool to do that :)). Maybe I can cut 95% of the time required this way. What do you think? Regards, Spock

Thanks a lot for doing this, and of course thanks a lot for the whole STEP community and all the mod creators for making this possible. I'm currently planning my first Skyrim playthrough and decided to try STEP+your lighting solution (ELFX)+Requiem. I hope to be able to play when my 280x arrives so I thought I'll have to start reading :) What baseline STEP mods have you found compatible with Requiem? Since core works, wouldn't trying to add the baseline mods one by one be the next step? Thanks a lot! Regards, Spock