gurugeorge

Great guide, which I used a month or so ago to set up FO4 (having come very late to the party!). It's been absolutely rock solid. I noticed you don't have an alternate start mod option. I'd like to highly recommend Start Me Up, it's a tremendous alternate start mod that allows you to really tailor your own roleplaying experience by taking the psychological pressure of the MQ away and allowing you to start in a number of preset ways or roll your own start conditions and really explore the world before engaging in the MQ. Much like any other alternate start mod you might say - but the added wrinkle is that the mod author has gone through the game and altered all the dialogue options that imply your fatherhood/motherhood of Shaun, so that with Full Dialogue Interface and Silent Protagonist mods, you're really able to go through the game as the character you want to be, like a proper, old-fashioned roleplaying game, without any jarring instances of people treating you like you're Shaun's parent. The character creation sequence is treated like a dream that you "wake up" from into your chosen start, and the MQ is treated as a "investigate rumours of a Vault" quest that you get from the beginning, but that you can initiate at your leisure (how it works is that you explore the Vault and find a holotape that gets you to report a kidnapping). I can't praise this mod highly enough, it's really cleverly done and makes "proper" roleplaying in Fallout 4, with a character whose story you create for yourself from your adventures, a genuine possibility.

Thanks!

Hi there, a little something I got a bit confused about with the STEP Extended Patch descriptions. I've now added Realistic Needs and Diseases to my Extended Profile in MO. But checking back with the info. re. the STEP Extended Patch, I see that while it's mentioned that Disease Descriptions as such is obviated by the patch, it doesn't mention whether the RND version of Disease Descriptions is also obviated by the patch or not.

Hi, I'm a fairly experienced mod user, user of STEP and of MO. I've just installed STEP Extended (using the Patch) with no other modifications in a fresh Profile, and started a game. Everything's going swimmingly so far, except for one minor but irritating thing - the novice hood I picked up in the torturer's room from the dead mage in the cage, is clipping (patches of my hair showing through on the back of it). Not particularly bothered about it, but just curious if it rings a bell for anyone - if it's a known thing or if there's a solution to it.

It's not HiAlgo's fault, it's the ENB guy being a diva graphics purist, disliking the HiAlgo concept on principle, and deliberately declining to accommodate it after ENB 240. I had a discussion with him about it on his forum, arguing it would be a cool thing for those of us with lesser rigs if he could make ENB play nice with HiAlgo again, like it used to. He just wouldn't budge. Which is quite sad. Before the incompatibility, on my first run-through with Skyrim, it was glorious that I could run the then-best ENB to have the eyecandy when just enjoying the scenery, but also have slick combat with the barely-noticeable (in the heat of combat) resolution shift when the mouse is fast-moving. It was absolute genius. Sadly, it's no longer possible.

Great work you're doing here! The more people know about MO and find a way to using it easily, the better. And as someone else said here, redundancy is the great thing, and I like that you have a bit of that in the videos. With good programs, there are lots of ways of doing a thing, and a person can find the way they like (e.g. shortcuts vs. mouseclicking). That sort of thing (showing the alternative ways of doing things) is good to have so you "catch" more people. Personally, I'd like to see something dealing with proper use of Overflow, when to make a mod from the Overflow, etc. While MO is tremendously powerful, and gets around the "Waaah, I've broken Skyrim by modding, now I can't play it any more" thing, precisely because of its power you tend to start stretching the boundaries of what you can do (which are waaaay beyond what you could ever have done with NMM or manual installing), and at that point, MO also has its own potential pitfalls you have to watch out for down the line (e.g. FNIS, quirks with execuables, Skyproc, etc.), especially when you start to get Profiles with wildly different setups (e.g. a STEP setup versus a Reqiuem setup). Some more "advanced" stuff on how to handle that sort of situation, be able to switch between such wildly different profiles smoothly, and not get oneself in knots, would also be cool. i.e., a section on "Power Using" would be a good thing to have too.

I think all of them have their plusses and minuses, vanilla even looks pretty good in some of the comparisons (it actually seems less "repeaty looking" to me than the others sometimes - WATER in particular can look very "repeaty" sometimes). But overall, WATER and RW2 do seem to be the best at moving waters, and Pure Waters is very good at clear still deep water and stagnant water. I wish I had the brains and experience to combine the "best bits" :)

The one mod that uses Script Dragon that I still use is Animcam, very handy for swinging round your character and zooming in and out while s/he is moving in a direction (just like in MMOs), although it still has the limitation of no vertical movement (i.e. it's set at the vertical level you are at when you press the key). If anybody's looking in who knows about these things, it might be worth making a version that works with SKSE and improves the mod to give vertical swingability as well as horizontal too, if that's possible.

I understand what you mean, and for me the problem is solved neatly by MO. I have an ongoing game that's full realism, realtime, etc., etc., where every moment is "precious" and it's not so much a game as a fantasy sim. This is fantastic for immersion in small doses, and the game is progressing at a crawl, but it's great to dip into now and then, nothing quite like it. But most of my MO profiles are more "gamey" - i.e. where one just wants to get on and progress. But I do find it interesting as an exercise to see how far one can push the realism. In a sense, the ideal would be a game that's exactly like real life in all aspects (so you know the "rules of the game" as it were), except it's extended into fantasy, s-f, whatever, but with each of these having consistent rules, and rules consistent with the real world as we know it. And of course, everything somewhat time-compressed and space-compressed (e.g. you don't want absolute real time, you want it somewhat compressed, same with space). But the "rules" should be same as real life (e.g. with the bag thing) so that things behave as one would expect them to in real life (fantasy things working with fantasy logic, all things being equal).

I've come back to Skyrim after a break, and of course nuked previous install from orbit and started again. Â One mod I had particularly enjoyed on my previous run-through was FortuneQuackers Real Furbag Backpack Equippable Cointainer. Â The mod is no longer available (Nexus thread here). Â I have messaged the author to get update on situation. This mod was a great boon for hardcore "realism". Â Basically while you were adventuring, you could carry it through a dungeon, say, but if you anticipated a fight, you could put it on the ground, and it would thereby lower your encumbrance in one simple move, which helped with mods that had encumbrance affect stamina. Â So the idea is that you're an adventurer with limited strength, and while you can hoard stuff in your backpack and cart it through a dungeon, you can't fight with it on, and have to put it down. Â The mod also came with a nifty map marker so you could put it down, grab stuff, put it in the bag, adventure further, and easily re-find where the backpack was. Â Again, only for hardcore "realism" junkies. It amazes me that this is the only mod to do this, and I was wondering why "realism" modders hadn't explored the idea before. Â Is it just too tricky to implement in Skyrim? Also, as can be seen, I was discussing the matter with the author, and talking about going a bit further with the idea (i.e. while wearing the bag, items go not "into" your body but "into" the backpack itself, so notionally the only weight that's "in" your body is the weight of your clothes and weapons that you are using, everything else being assigned to the container that you are carrying, the total weight of which is then "in" you, only when you are carrying it). Would also appreciate a quick brain dump from anyone knowledgeable about the state of "realism" mods in Skyrim, how they interact with STEP, future ideas for STEP and realism mods, etc., as this is one of my main areas of interest in terms of modding, and my thoughts on future modding ideas revolve around this.

First post! Ever since I first tried it last time round with Skyrim, I fell in love with Bronze 316's True Vision ENB (Realistic), which is currently built around ENB 0.221, and works with 0.236. I've tried them all and I keep returning to this one. Even the same author's Project ENB I don't find quite as good (although it may be better with CoT, which it's supposed to be designed specifically for). It also builds in SweetFX's SMAA and LumaSharpen, which gives, as the author says, a very realistic and sharp feel. It's apparently partly based on Opethfeldt's ENB, which is one of the first ones I'd thought was good prior to coming across True Vision. What I like about True Vision is that it strikes, for me, the perfect balance between gritty realism and fantasy otherworldliness. Most other ENBs fall firmly to one side or another, but this one seems to get the balance just right. I'd say it makes a perfect match to STEP Core or STEP Enhanced (which is what I'm using at the moment). Things get tricky when you start to introduce weather or lighting mods, so I think if one were using the Weather and Lighting Pack on the wiki, for example, it might be better to go with Project ENB or the recommendations there. But for an ENB that works out of the box with STEP Core and Enhanced, to just enrich and enhance the vanilla experience and make it pop out in 3-d, without too much exaggeration in any particular area, I don't think True Vision can be beat. The one downside of it is that it requires Brightness to be turned all the way down, and that's only possible to do in-game in fullscreen mode, so it doesn't play very conveniently with borderless window mods, so far as I can tell (it really doesn't look right with brightness up, and AFAIK brightness is left to the desktop settings when you're in windowed mode, which makes it a bit faffy to use).