MadWizard25

DDSopt is still the best imo. And its still being worked on. The new pre-release version is pretty amazing. Its not on nexus though, i believe the author is using github for beta and pre releases. Ok, its seems that its indeed SRO textures when it comes to the blocky snow. However, i also use better dynamic snow mod, which is meshes only. With this be a problem? Regarding the trees, most the tree textures are a mix of vurts flora overhaul, TreesHD, and Enhanced Distant Trees. Meshes are from lush trees. Im also using ultra high settings, but i also use ENB so i dont think i can actually compare fps to yours ;) If you would like a list of actually dds files let me know ill put it together.

So far not much improvement. Still crash happy at 7. I use the newest pre-release DDSopt on every texture i could get my hand on. It dropped vram use by about 15%, so im now well clear of my max vram use of 2GB. Peak is at 1.75 so far. Still crashing. uExterior Buffer does not seem to make a difference if its and 50, 64, or 100. I cant tell if selectivepurge works yet. Another user on the bethesda forum also reckons that crashes occur not just because of close to peak vram use, but also occurs due to far more scripting, ai mechanics, and pathing that occurs at 7 and higher. Therefore, it might be worthwhile tweaking papyrus settings as well as multithreading to help here. So i will be messing with those next.

Ok, i reprocessed pretty much every texture apart from .png and water ones using the correct settings. VRAM use is a little higher (prosb due to skipped HDR), but still about 15% lower. Not much of a noticeable increase in fps to be fair. Processing was done very quickly, about 2h for SRO, 2KHD, vanilla, and all other hi-res texture mods. Trees are far more fleshed out. However, it seems to have partially broken some trees, the fleshing out looks like its done on 4 planes (see 1 and 2), each radially sticking out from the tree at 90 degrees. This only happens to some trees, other are fine (see 3 and 4). Also tree shadowing looks odd. Also i dont think some snow textures are processed properly either, but im not sure if thats a vanilla look.

Had a nasty surprise this morning. Tried to launch WB and it told me that TESV.exe could not bet detected. This was after i had shut down my computer overnight. TESV.exe had indeed been deleted, and i had not even touched the skyrimlauncher.exe yesterday, or changed any settings apart from running DDSOpt and tweaking an ini value. Hurray for backups.

Another fine parallax suggestion here. Parallax mod of roads and bridges by Osmodius. I think this is one we have been waiting for ;) Link https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/18814

Found this post on bethesda forums; "Just a heads up to everyone, the Steam backup restore feature will not work to save previous patches of the game. As soon as you use it to re-install your previous patch version of the game it will automatically update you to the most recent patch. I had this problem with my 1.4 patch restore when I tried to get rid of my 1.5 patch. I asked steam customer service and the program is apparently designed/needs to function this way. All backups made with steam "backup restore" will always need to be updated after being installed(even if you set things to "don't automatically update my game".) Furthermore you can't be in offline mode to use the backup restore feature, so stoping internet access won't solve this problem. Cutting off internet before the game updates will simply result in the game not running/working." - hodge182 Source: https://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1382325-reverting-from-1689-to-1526-without-breaking-rules/

Yes, you are spot on, as far as i know in any case. A lot of phenotypes will have come from evolutionary ancestors of ours, its pretty certain that group hierarchies, social grouping, and complex social interactions was pre-homo spaiens, maybe even pre-homo. "we" was a bit narrow in this case. And if you believe in materialism, then these phenotypes are a function of brain and body biology, which will bleed into politics. One could even argue that the "leader" phenotype will have some common biological basis, and these biological functions will have a massive impact on politics since many of our elected officials in the highest positions will be of the leadership phenotype. There is also some debate about community and egalitarianism. Imo, it seems to work ok with people as long as everyone is on the same level materially. But as soon as unique material (or maybe non-material, perceived spiritual gain even?) gains are made by others the system falls apart. If greed is engineered out of the society then no or little issue. Once variables that induce greed appear, problems start. Have you ever seen the movie "the gods must be crazy"? Its an extreme and humorous example, but a single glass bottle almost breaks an egalitarianism society. Not read any journal articles on this exact stuff though, but i can infer from other research that something like this could/ may happen. Maybe the tendancy to develop power structures as you mentioned is an extension of this slow seepage of unique material positions per individual? Also if anyones interested, here is a open source journal article on how traders and their steroid hormones may affect financial market swings, sometimes to quite a drastic extent. From molecule to market: steroid hormones and financial risk-taking Abstract https://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1538/331.full If this hypothesis is every validated, then expect some traders to undergo "hormone treatment" to gain an edge

Enjoying the afterparty! I guess corporatism is not capitalism, just labor organization right? So not mutually inclusive at all. But at its roots, last centuries capitalism is still today's capitalism, dont think its morphed, it just has a few different flavors. I also think some radical social engineering might help mitigate social crunches caused by resource crunches, but ethically and technologically thats a bit of a non-starter...

Yeah, thats what i assumed, with UAC off and on an admin account, SkyrimLauncher will run in admin mode. But if thats my case, then I would expect to have TESV.exe and co deleted. But skyrimlauncher does not delete anything, and i run it often to generate default inis. Taking what sb4n wrote into account, maybe its the steam client service? But i also run that. I do not allow cloud syncing though. Furthermore, i have my ownership of the skyrim directory as full administrator. Im using win 7 64bit with latest service pack. Skyrim installation path is on a non-OS hard drive, within steam folder which is within a directory i created called Program Files (does not have same properties of OS Program Files). Skyrim folder is not a junction. TYPE - NAME - PERMISSION - INHERITED FROM - APPLY TO Allow - Users - Full Control - F:\Program Files\Steam\ - This folder, subfolders, and files Allow - SYSTEM - Full Control - F:\Program Files\Steam\ - This folder, subfolders, and files Allow - Administrators - Full Control - F:\ - This folder, subfolders, and files Allow - Authenticated Users - Modify - F:\ - This folder, subfolders, and files Allow - Users - Special - F:\ - Subfolders and files only -> Traverse folder - Allow -> List folder - Allow -> Read attributes - Allow -> Read extended attributes - Allow -> Read permissions - Allow Its pretty much exactly the same as yours.

Sorry, i have it my notes on the wiki discussion page to add, but not the actual suggestion in full. But it will be in there for sure. I ran the new DDSOpt last night on all textures apart from the vanilla, SRO, and 2KHD using zmans instructions (thanks!). Had a brief look today at some test areas, and it has worked wonders. THis is more an observation, rather than results from vigorous testing, but it has decreased vram consumption by as much as 20% in some places. I have also gained a few fps, but not much, i think about 3fps or so. But still, this is quite amazing :P Still need to test stability though. Optimization speed is also much faster using the 64bit version. A issue a noticed is that if you have WATER textures installed they are not optimized properly. Imo its worse afterwards. However, it is mentioned somewhere to leave these alone with the official version (non-pre), which i forgot to do with the pre version. Ethatron you are wizard :D Uh oh EDIT: I seem to have left unchecked the Dont process any high dynamic range images and dont process any already processed files. What will be the impact of this, and/ or why did you pick these settings? Should i redo the DDSOpt operation?

I think if you manually backed them up without using the steam backup option it will be fine. If you used steam it will probably cause issues, not sure if the backing up backs up vanilla, as well as all updates, or just vanilla 1.0 version.

Thanks for the tip, will give the lower exterior cell buffer a shot. I dont fast travel at all, so would the selctivepurge function still work? Im thinking that with these tweaks, and using the new beta DDSOpt i might be able to achieve ugrids 7! Time for some testing!

I run with UAC off in win 7 as an admin account, but with no admin rights assigned to the launcher. So far it hasnt decided to arbitrarily delete anything (yet...).

Well, im going to take the plunge and optimize all my remaining textures (only did 2KHD, SRO, and Vanilla previously). And then let it run while im at the lab. Hopefully this doesn't cause skyrim to implode creating a miniature black hole that wipes my computer out of existence. Will let you know. Edit: Actually, I have no idea what settings to apply in the new DDSOpt version. Should it be the same as in the wiki guide? Reading back a few pages makes me a bit nervous :P

Cant comment about education, since im neck deep in it. Too young to know how bad its gotten either. Actually, im too young to have experienced anything but a post 80's world in all its... glory? Too young to be wise :P So ill attach utmost importance to the scientific knowledge i have had access to. What i do know is that greed is here to stay. Neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience are two of my pet disciplines so im relatively up to date with the literature. If you believe in materialism, then capitalism makes perfect sense as to why it attracts the human race. Without going into too much detail, the way we have evolved neurologically basically predisposes us to economics flavors of capitalism. There is actually a fascinating sub discipline in the field regarding economics and neurology, as well as neurobiology and politics. Even made a presentation for an philosophy of international relations politics course i took on why gender differences do have a measurable and deterministic outcome of politics, purely based on studies in neurobiolgy (you would be surprised at how foreign an idea this is to political disciplines). The class was 80% women, so you can imagine how that went down... So greed is a phenotype that everyone has, and capitalism is a social and economic extension of that. Altruism is also a phenotype, but in a competitive environment such as today's modern society, greed usually trumps. End ramble. Oh and 2020 is a little early for the crunch, I think 2040/50 is more likely, but its coming. Hopefully it wont be too much a stumbling block, and humanities collective knowledge will come through mostly intact. Losing that is what worries me most.

Not sure if there is pdf guide like STEP, but a decent wiki site with all the info you probably need, even instructions on where to probably find guides like STEP for Oblivion is TESCosi, enjoy! https://tescosi.com/wiki/Oblivion

I looked at the picture first, without reading the accompanying text, and thought; wow someone has a nice skyrim setup. Total fail. I dont think i live in reality anymore :D

Landing in water from 20 feet is a problem if you impact stomach first lol.

Ill drink to that! @Fri and z92 Interesting points! Commentary in a bit.

For those of you who use ENB, the dozens of tweakable values can be confusing and opaque. Here is some info on undertanding the values, as well as a tool to make tweaking these values clearer and easier. Here is a link for "Guide to the ENB Series Mod" by --JawZ-- https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/8005 It should be used at the same time as the guide written by Tapioks, author of the Skyrim Enhanced Shader ENB. His guide can found in the ENB download. https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/822 Both these guides can be used with the ENB Customizer program, by osmiumbin. Its a great tool that creates a GUI for ENB tweaking, so you dont have to manually retype values in the ENB ini files. https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/17400 Hope this helps :)

Here is another guide with some overlap with STEP, which the author (lol at his name) notes as his inspiration :) Might be some useful info to pick out, maybe some more suggestions for mods. Will have a more detailed look this weekend or next week, but for now if anyone is interested here is the link; Online Guide: https://itcprosolutions.com/skyrimguides/modding_guide.htm SN: https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12161

Hmmm, totally missed this. Thanks for the info majin, always useful to have more information :) Especially thanks for the LOD bias article! Knew absolutely nothing on that, even thought i tweak it, and would not have checked it out without your link :D

No worries, we were all noob biscuits at one point :happy: You could wait. I would give it a month or so before almost all, and hopefully all, important mods are updated for 1.6. STEP should be updated by then as well, if the mods get updated. One problem is that the Construction Kit used for modding needs to be updated as well for the new patch, which has not happened yet. And maybe there will be another patch soon as well, this one feels a little incomplete. You could also buy the game and mod it anyways with the latest patch. A vast majority of the mods from STEP are texture based. Those will not have issues with the new patch at all. It will also familiarize you with the modding process and STEP, so you can be ready when then new version comes out :)

Discussion thread: Roosters At Dawn by schmidte Wiki Link Edit: Adding a little more info. This is purely a sound mod, similar to SoS. At in game dusk time, in certain villages and cities, there is a chance for a rooster crow. Thats about it. Still to test it out, but by the comments there seems to be no problems with it. I think its one of these minor immersion mods thats fits in well with the STEP philosophy. Enjoy! https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/17257

Different author than the other parallax mods, but does pretty much the same thing. Atm its just a suggestion, if anyone wants to check it out. Ill provide some screenshots this weekend once i have the time to review https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/17243