oqhansoloqo

I think the quivers in BSW look better too, from your comparison pics. The only issue I see is potentially that when arrows are drawn from BSW quivers that they aren't the proper length - from someone who has it installed, does that happen?

Yeah, I'm wondering if some popular mods that add animations to the player might look strange. Once you or someone else gives some more feedback, I may decide to test it out in my mod list and check on some of the animations added by non-STEP mods I have in my list too.

Do you get any of the known bugs/issues stated on the mod's description page?: Known Issues ------------ - Going into ragdoll mode when weapons are out causes you to be launched into the air. - There may be a lighting bug with torches. - Some animations might not work as well with head bob disabled and may move the feet oddly. - Player shadows may be oddly drawn on the 1st person body (noticeable with shields). - Magic shaders do not appear on 3rd person body in 1st person when weapons are out. - There may be increased body clipping with high fov or fneardistance values. - There are some visual glitches when your character performs flips or rolls. Various bugs with werewolf/Vampire Lord or horse/dragon riding: - Camera view is not saved in save game. - Mouse wheel cannot be used to switch point of view. - You may be able to rotate the camera to face your character. - Other minor visual bugs.

Hmm... OK - didn't know that there was something else in the works. Looking forward to that. :)

What about the metal bars in the regular forge? The mod kind of messes them up (you can compare this difference in the pics EssArrBee provided up above in a previous posting).

OK, so the question remains... "If you don't want this to be in STEP, then can you recommend an alternative mod that is not reliant on ENB that looks better than this one? Vanilla certainly does not."

Dude, I think its about time you add a note about that in the guide for that mod. lol Oh yeah, that link reminds me of something... when I started running the game with admin privs to stop my modded setup from acting really wonky, I did some other things to try to get my modded setup working correctly. One of them was deciding to unmark "read-only" on the falloutprefs.ini file in my MO profile folder. I think I also merged all of the settings information in fallout.ini and falloutprefs.ini together, so that both files had the same exact game settings information. Prior to doing that I had noticed that some of the settings were in both files and yet other settings information was not. That left for a very confusing situation regarding making manual edits to this information. I read somewhere that the game will ignore certain settings if they in the wrong ini file. In response to reading about that, I decided to merge all the information into each ini so that I would make sure that whenever I made a manual edit to the settings (which I always do in both ini files, btw, to be safe) those edits were not accidentally being entered into the wrong ini file (and thus never being recognized by the game). I forget what else I did...

Then why was the last sun mod in STEP? - it didn't even look nearly as good or realistic as this one. Granted, the non-warm version of the mod might be preferable to some (although that version of the mod would have been better if the actual sun body was distinctly separate from the corona and rays. I have an office window facing the sunrise over an intracoastal waterway at work in Florida, "the sunshine state", and I get a good view of the sun every day. I even walked outside and have taken my glasses off (so as to not be looking through any lenses beyond my own natural ones in my eyeballs) - there are rays around the sun, and they rotate around and shift as I move my head around. The previous STEP sun mod looked bad because the sun body part seemed to have a very pixelated edge to it (that's what I was seeing in my installation, anyway), and the sunglare from it looked bad in situations where the sun was behind objects... Then talk about the the vanilla sun textures without any modification - just awful. People talk about the "procedural sun", but isn't that a feature of ENB? STEP isn't supposed to rely on having ENB installed, I thought. I thought that STEP was assuming that an ENB is not installed, and that modifications should/must be made to a STEP installation if ENB is installed. If anything, a note could be made to say something like "you may choose to disregard this mod if you use ENB with the EnableProceduralSun feature enabled or a weather mod that adds a preferable sun". There are STEP mods that add other things to the game that aren't even modifications of elements of the vanilla game - what they add are completely new to the game. I ask the question: are shooting stars and rainbows in the vanilla game? ... They do make nice visual improvements to the game's outdoor environment though. If you don't want this to be in STEP, then can you recommend an alternative mod that is not reliant on ENB that looks better than this one? Vanilla certainly does not.

It's there - https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/13268 The author did some weird combining thing with all his mods into that.

Yeah, the plugin order is not the issue (because of LOOT). It's the order of all the non-plugin mods in the left MO window. I guess in order to see what I'm talking about, you'd have to be logged in as a Windows user without administrative privileges. But first... before you do anything different from normal, you'd have to save your mod list load order (left pane) so that when MO rearranges things you can quickly and easily revert those changes. So now, if you load MO without admin privs, then quit MO, then load MO again afterwards with admin privs, you will see that your mod list load order gets rearranged (I forget if it does it alpha-numerically or some other way). Then it will rearrange again the next time you switch the way you load MO (w/ admin privs or w/o). I don't know exactly why it does it, but that's what happens... At least it used to a couple versions ago - I haven't experimented since then. I just always load with admin privs anymore.

Aiyen, if you are buddies with prod, do you think you could convince him to make us a new alternate version that has a center that is closer to the brightness/color of the rays (but still distinctly different)? Maybe slightly smaller rays too - is that what the consensus is?

Damn... That's why I said to make sure you go and save your load order in MO, so that when you change something and MO mixes everything up, you will be able to restore it again easily. I don't know why it's so touchy, but it does the same thing if you decide to open MO with admin privs one time and not do it the next time you open MO (or vice versa). I learned the hard way before, and so now I remember to save my load order regularly when I make changes to mods.

True, though when it's cloudy the rays and the body of the sun itself get faded and blocked by the clouds (or fog I think). In real life though, I guess the sun doesn't always have a lot of rays coming out - depending on the weather conditions, time of day, or how high on the horizon. I guess what it comes down to is, in the game - does it look better with rays, or without them? I think it looks better with some kind of rays coming out and what was done with the glow effect with this mod when looking at the sun.

GrantSP - yeah, that's probably exactly what it is with the bashed patches...

Windows does something weird to try to protect programs installed in "Program Files" and often those program protection functions end up making life difficult for modders (or pirates, lol). Look up UAC. DecorativeLamp - sounds cool.

I actually have that happen too - the thing with bashed patches. With FNV & Skyrim bashed patches going into different places - one (FNV) into it's own mod folder and the other one (Skyrim) going into overwrite instead. So every time I create a new bashed patch for Skyrim I have to remember to move the "Docs" folder from overwrite to "Bashed Patch" mod I created. I used to have weird issues with MO. I did a bunch of things at the same time to try to remedy the issues, and I don't remember all of what I did... but one of the things that may have fixed issues I was having was start loading MO using administrative privileges every time I load it up. Though make sure you save your mod order before you try that because it will get jumbled up the first time (or any time you switch methods of loading MO if you aren't normally logged into Windows using an admin account) and that can be a major put down if you have no way to restore it. And I didn't even install anything into "Program Files" so I don't know why it seems to make a difference... but anyway, you might want to try that. EDIT: oh, I think you may be having issues because you installed into "Program Files". Not 100% certain, but I do know it often does cause issues with a lot of software. Try my recommendation of loading MO using admin privs.

Yeah, SRB, I understand what you mean. With the "warm" version, the actual body of the sun is very distinct from the rays coming out from it. I agree with you, and think it would have been better if either the rays were brighter or the body of the sun was closer to the color/brightness of the rays. Basically, there should be a distinct difference at the edge, but the brightness/color difference between the two parts should be more subtle than it currently is. I wonder if the author would be willing to make another variation of his mod (especially if he's aware that it's to possibly get it into the STEP guide) - probably wouldn't be difficult for him to do.

"I didn't realize the MCM section was so lacking." You're right. The MCM is not lacking anymore. What I should have mentioned was creating a section that mentions some of the mods that add in extra commands that aren't configurable through the MCM. They would be features of mods that could easily be overlooked completely if you didn't read about them on the mod(s) Nexus page(s). I believe the Powered Power Armor mod is one of them. (Oh right, PPA = Powered Power Armor... You just mentioned that) mooncarver - I seem to recall an optional in FCO where it added extra eyes or something... Actually, it might be eyebrows - not sure. Crimson13 - So what have you done with your programs or mods between the last time things seemed to be working OK and now? Did you update MO or TES5Edit or anything else?

It might help with some newcomer questions, or help people who already have had everything installed for a while but forgets some of the specifics about certain things sometimes. By having the information in an ordered way of locating it within a guide, then people are more likely to be able to get their answer there rather than ask questions on the forum - that's a good thing. Personally, I'd like to see a section in the guide at the end that's like "STEP 3" from the STEP guide (which is kind of like your #4 & #5 ideas, but instead of being for specific utilities, for the whole guide installation in general). And more added to the MCM Settings list. As far as information about utilities, more info about ENBoost - maybe how it compares the ENBoost in Skyrim or something (because for me, as an example, it seems to run great in Skyrim, but last time I was intensely trying to get it to work well in FNV, it just wouldn't run well - so some more info about what you know about it might be useful maybe). Although I'm fairly familiar with FNVEdit, I guess some more basic info or tips about that might be useful for a lot people. I dunno - just some ideas.

I really like the way wolves look with this mod - it is part of my mod list now.

If you want to be sure that you are getting the intended results of the F&L guide, you must clean all of the mods recommended by the guide. Otherwise you may end up with mod conflicts and get odd results in-game.

I liked it more than the other sun and sunglare mod that used to be in STEP until it was removed from the Nexus.

EssArrBee - you should install them and see what they look like in the game rather than those screenshots provided on the mod page. The red-orange look has a lot to do with whatever lighting they had going on when those screenshots were done, because I felt the silverware mod especially looked much better when I had it installed and was viewing it in the game. Like someone else had said, from the screenshots it almost looked like "stone"wear to me, but in the game it looked much more grey and shiny. The pottery was just far better than whatever is currently in STEP too (I thought).

Maybe mention the idea on the Nexus mods' forums (both crossbow mods) and see what some other people say?

"I still seem to be getting stutter despite having NVSR, fairly consistently, but I can deal as I am used to it." I fixed that myself by not using ENB or ENBoost at all. It was mainly macrostutter for me, when I would turn quickly. Also, the FPS was just lower in general. I did not try to newest few versions though, so I don't know if anything was improved since I last tried it. "I guess I'm one of the only people that doesn't get that error. I know what the problem is, but don't know how to fix it. I have an idea how, but it would take a few more steps in FNVEdit. I'll have to gage how interested people are about it." Hell yeah! I'm interested in that. I'd love to be able to use the crossbows without the issue. I haven't touched those crossbow mods at all only because of hearing so many people report about the FPS drop issue, but I've always been saddened over not having those mods installed. They sound badass...