Valamyr

Ongoing updates have their value too. Sure, you lose a bit in terms of consistency and it may make bug reports more difficult to troubleshoot, but ongoing updates are generally justified and great for end-users. If we find a mod is buggier than we thought, neither releasing an immediate new version nor keeping it quiet are optimal. If there was to be a change, I'd suggest quietly lettering every single change. 2.26a, 2.26b, 2.26c, etc...

Frankly, given that it takes about two work days worth of time to build a proper new install that includes all of STEP and some GEMS (I'd know, I think I clocked 12 hours working on mine so far and nowhere done) - if you do that without reading the bug report thread first, you are Shivering Isles material ;)

I'll give this a try, though Im sure something this simple will work very well. The reason why being able to wait 30 days is nice is that thats the amount of time required if you want to do a mass reset of every 'resetable' area in your save, something that's desirable especially when you remove mods mid-playthrough. Even then, its not a guarantee you wont break stuff, but its definitely a good idea under some circumstances. I used to swap in the currently-recommanded 30-day file whenever there was a need, but admittedly, just having it as the default is handy for these times you need it.

Ah, thanks. I wasnt sure if I needed to overwrite them manually or if I could just use the organizer. Thank god (or rather whomever wrote 'em) that we at least have these programs to help us build an install :)

Ive installed STEP before but it was long ago. I could swear there used to be more specific instructions regarding conflicting graphics? If not, well, that wouldnt hurt, because while I understand the general notion, I'm not certain how to proceed. s it okay to install conflicting graphics via Mod Organizer, as long as its done in the listed order? If not, is it required to download the files and have them overwrite each other in the right order and then dump the resulting archive in the main directory? Id rather if there was a mod organizer friendly way to proceed, but I'm not sure. Part of my uncertainty is that I dunno if 'conflicting graphics' means that they conflict with stuff further down the list, or only with other mods in that sub-section. And I didnt really find any explanations. Thanks for clearing that up. I figure, better ask now than waste a day on a broke install ;)

Thanks for the infos. I checked out the weather differences and its negligible. Whatever bug I used to have that made the rainy nights pitch black is gone. The aurora thing is fairly minor IMO; CoT+ULO seems like a great combo for me.

Yeah, I just tried standalone Ultra ULO and Im very impressed. I think Im sold. As for pairing it, the only option on that list I think Id like is level3 dark CoT (realistic lights generally mean not enough lighting for me) - however last time I used it last year, there were a couple of bugged weather effects that made super dark nights appear, essentially ignoring the 'lighter nights' option and breaking consistency. Ill have to do some research to see if thats still broke in 3.1.

So I'm thinking about maybe trying this over a ENB for my new install. I have a 1440p monitor now and I want to play native, so I need to be conservative to preserve a decent framerate. I'm afraid it might be too dark, though? Unlike most, while I love prettier colors and better overall lighting, I very much hate dark ENBs that force you to use lightsources all the time. Would you say you strive to keep the game playable without light sources in the dark, or you're more into 'realism'?

Yes, I've used Elys on my last playthrough, it worked okay, expect one bug I had where Light armor started leveling a whole point for every hit I took at some point. Still I'll be trying the 1.9 system in my next run, probably when the next DLC ships. I think I could like it.

Yep and I'm pretty excited by this change. For both reasons. I dislike forcing myself to level skills I don't use. My typical approach has been to blow training sessions only on skills I don't plan to use (like 2h, an armor skill, etc) - but this is annoying to do because of the lack of a convenient "Save Training Sessions For Later" like Oblivion had. That was a must-have mod and to my knowledge, as of a couple months ago anyway, no such thing existed in Skyrim. Simultaneously, I sorta disliked the idea of an absolute perk cap. I like strategic allocation of resources but I like my caps soft. Its always nice to know that if you keep at it you can get better at more things, even if it becomes inefficient.

Despite my enthusiasm above, I ended up reverting to no RCRN, and using only Skyrealism, with a ENB ini built with midway values between the Vibrant and Vanilla presets, with 'Less Tint'. I have to accept that either somethings wrong with my eyes or my monitors, because even RCRN legacy is WAY TOO DARK for me to enjoy and rapidly becomes an exercise in frustration. To each their own I guess. But I still really enjoyed messing around trying to mesh together these two mods even if I ultimately gave up :p

I restarted last night, and though its harder to reach high memory counts with 'young' save games, I've been able to see a spike to 2.25 in use without crashing. No 'Apphangs' either. Only major changes are that I'm using 1.81 beta now and ugrids 5. Maybe something was wrong with my old save. The alternative would be too shocking to contemplate: That someone wrote "General stability and memory management improvements" in patch notes and actually meant it...

+1!!! Wow, this is really epic stuff. I couldnt decide between RCRN and Skyrealism... looks like I dont have to!! Are you still suggesting using Climates of Tamriel along with this, despite RCRN35's new weathers? I couldnt get Skyrealism+COT working totally right because the COT with more vanilla nights patch didnt work uniformly (Rain and northern auroras reset me back to super dark nights) so I got rid of it entirely for the meantime, it was too annoying for everything to go pitch black depending on the weather. Your mod's nights are fabulous, and the indoors are a huge lot better than RCRN35's Legacy, which still produces overly off interior lighting IMO. And your outdoor settings are a perfect match with Predator vision!

Makes sense. I tried to be conservative with the ini tweaks given they can be fragile and fickle, but I'm still getting crashes with a clean ini + ugrids 7 on my current save, so either ugrids alone are my issue, or the save is my issue. On a new game, its substantially harder to push my RAM use high enough to test properly, but its next on my test list.

With Skyrim being LAA since like December last year, IIRC, I'd expect the application to be able to draw 3.2 Go of RAM without issues before a crash happens. However I've noticed a re-occuring issue at around the 2.1Go of RAM mark, generally resulting in a CTD. Even with me being relatively careful and picking baseline texture mods instead of going for the phat 2048 textures, any full STEP install will run in the 1.5Go+ range of memory use the moment you're outdoors, so that leaves very little room for error. What I perceived as ugrids-related instability may in fact be due to a memory issue since I assume higher ugrids means more stuff in RAM. I've googlesearched on the issue and have found a few people complaining about 2.1go crashes with post-LAA Skyrim too but no obvious resolutions. I assume for most of you, it does go all the way to 3.25, right? And also, I'd like to know, does using a launcher or the Simple Borderless Windows mod likely to cause a problem with Skyrim's LAA flag? SBW is technically a separate exe so I assumed it might be the cause of my problem, but I've crashed once at 2.1 in fullscreen too. While I'm planning on starting a new game to get rid of the ugrids issue, I think I need to find the cause of this before doing so. Cpu: Intel Core i5 2500K Quad Core slight overclock Ram: G.SKILL Ripjaws X F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL 8GB 2X4GB DDR3-1600 Video: Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB Slight overclocks on all parts, good cooling, low temps. Current values battle-tested for a year with no issues. Game installed on a Crucial M4 SSD.

Yeah, that would be before uh, Helgen, since this was part of my initial settings, but thats what I'm resolved to do. I'll scrap this game and start over with default ugrids and a slightly lessened amount of mods, possibly with the new beta patch too. Bit of a shame as it was going great, but hey, happens. I still have another issue to track down beforehand tho, but thank you, youve all been helpful.

Yes, I did do refreshini, sorry forgot to write down that part. But absolutely did it. Thanks for the help tho. I was unaware ugrids was an officially unadvised tweak. I know its dangerous at upper values but had always believed 7 to be safe; perhaps not so much after all.

So, my first STEP game so far has been fun for the most part but I get a bit too many outdoor crashes for my tastes. I tinkered with removing mods or using clean inis and such, and the only fix I've found that seemed to work (on a new save anyhow) has been to revert my ugrids to 5. Apparently despite relatively beefy hardware, ugrids 7 seems to be a big part of the problem... So I've been trying the usual procedure to revert my main save to ugrids 5; loading it, alt-tabbing, modifying ugrids back to 5 / 36, saving on a new save. Once I do that, if I go to the main menu I can reload that specific new save, but as soon as I leave the game, and try to load that save, it CTDs mid-loading. It seems my save game has been addicted to ugrids 7 even though its bad for her :p I'd like to know if anyone has ideas to salvage this beyond starting a new game or accepting the instability? Thanks

I tried it on my new install this morning instead of Skyrealism and I switched back after an hour... It wasnt as nice for me. I like not-too-dark environments, so I tried Legacy, and it looked off in brightly lit areas, the wooden flooring around Riften was almost shimmering and the colors looked faded in places (Probably overuse of gamma to create Legacy), though me being used to Vibrant Skyrealism has probably alot to do with that. Finally, I ran into some issues with the new weathers; having had to disable Climates of Tamriel to see RCRN's new weather effects, the Lantern and torch mods I use weren't as bright anymore, because those had CoT compatibility plugins, and the old RNRC CoT plugin didnt really do the job. After a bit of juggling with these issues and comparing screenshots I realized that while it looks like alot of work went into RNRC, and I really like some of new features like weather changing when indoors and being affected by outdoor weather, I had a better deal with Sky.

Huh, well if that turns out to be true Ill have been extra silly to believe the first thing I read :D Theres that bit of code in the patch mentioning PS3 but that can certainly be meaningless/outdated.

Sorry I should have linked that and actually double-checked my sources, as it appears to be mostly a rumor at this stage based on snippets of code mentioning the PS3 in the beta patch. I first read it on Beth's boards in the latest DLC thread at the time and people seemed pretty sure of this because some of the gaming press picked it and presented it as an almost done deal. So consider my prior post amended to "maybe PS3 exclusive". I guess until Bethesda confirms it, we wont really know.

Is Ugrids 7 still relatively safe, though? To keep using your analogy, I CAN OC my CPU without extra cooling as long as its only a couple hundred Mhz, after all.

Hm, problem solved. After deleting the 3 map files from the combiner's output archive, and adding the mod back as a standalone, its super nice. The prior issue seems to be caused by two different maps being clipped on top of each other or something.

Bah, itll be a PS3 timed exclusive. 30 days. Oh well, back to my 200 PC-exclusive mods. :p

Thanks but hm, clearly somethings wrong with my copy. Look at how it looks for others, compare to what I posted above: If it looked like this Id definitely keep it ;) Oh well, will take it out for now. Hopefully it doesnt mean I have an odd issue.