mothergoose729

That is a bit of a sticky dilemma. If STEP advertises a plugin as having "x structural issues" and these are not in fact errors are at all but essential parts of the mod, then STEP is doing that modder a great disservice.

Sweet mod. Downloading it now. EDIT: Checked it with TES5. Clean of dirty edits. Simple mod that only changes what it says it changes. Great find.

I use this mod too. It is nice to be able to go in riften as a nobody and just mingle with the common rabble. Having brynolf instantly sniff me out was kind of a buzz kill. Like sure, I will steal for you, but at least let me play hard to get for a while.Â

Nitpicky lore thing; jiub in dawngaurd claims to have slain all the cliff racers in morrowind. Its all kind of tongue and cheek, so it is not clear if this is supposed to be taken seriously as lore. It is also difficult to know if cliffracers are common throughout all of morrowind, or just the rocky peaks of vvardenfell.

I have heard that skyrim made a lot of concessions in terms of NPC AI and the number of NPCs to make the game preform better for the XBox and playstation. Could just be console hate though. Either way I always appreciate mods like this. Each city and village feel like islands when ideally they really shouldn't.

I am guessing that the way that TES5 compares two objects to determine if they are identical is not exactly accurate. I have isolated both files before with only the skyrim.esm and required masters and cleaned them, and found on more than one occasion that this removes functionality from the plugin. In the case of destructible bottles, cleaning it makes bottles no longer destructible. Moving it to a different position to the load order doesn't solve it, it has to be reinstalled from the source with no edits. In the case of improved close faced helms,I have discovered missing textures (invisible heads) after cleaning it. The missing heads correspond exactly to the items removed as ITMS, in my place a khajit head mesh variant for dwemer helms. I need to look into it more, but tentatively going to say that cleaning ITMs indiscriminately could, possibly, harm the plugin.

Been using this mod a ton. Just wanted to point out that removing ITMs can break mods or remove functionality. I know that destructible bottles and Improved close faced helms, at least, should not be cleaned of their ITMs.

I am too picky about voice acting to use this mod. Cool project though.

Can't they (meaning the graphic card co.) come up with a way of handling the memory externaly and make slots so we can puchase and add memory as needed? Just like a PC motherboard;) Unfortunately no they cannot. They DRAM is tied too closely to the cards bus for that. All of the DRAM is hard wired into the PCB and soldered in. There used to be a time when CPU cache was modular as well, when the pentium pro came out they moved it on chip,I believe for performance reason (I want to say latency issues). I believe memory in graphics has the same issues, where the demand for performance makes designing a system bus for plug and play memory impossible or impractical.Â

Optimizer Textures by AdPipino https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12801 STEP currently recommends DDSopt for optimizing textures. I think DDSopt can often times be a superior tool, however I think Optimizer Textures would be a better fit for STEP. The reason is DDSopt has problems with exceptions. To optimize a BSA you have to extract the BSA into loose files and optimize those, because otherwise DDSopt will ruin the BSA. If you select a file that DDSopt is not suited to optimize, than DDSopt can kill the file (read esm, esps, ect). When I optimized my own game using the tool, I noticed that the on camera blood effects from Enhanced Blood textures were corrupted, for example. DDSopt, if configured properly, can work all its magic and do none of its harm but the problem is the configuration process is somewhat involved, and not well suited for the average STEP user. Enter Optimizer Textures. Optimzer Textures does not even need to be extracted from an archive to work. You simply select maximum strength, click BSA, click select all in the BSA tab, and run it. At maximum strength I was able to get my textures folder down to about 4.5gb, while DDSopt forced it down to about 3.95gb using recommend settings. DDSopt does slightly better job with mipmaps, but texture optimzer actually seemed leaner on VRAM, probably due to not including as many mipmaps. Another advantage is that Optimizer Textures takes about 15 minutes to process my texture folder, and about an hour to process all of my BSAs. To perform the same task with DDSopt took somewhere somewhere around three or four hours on my system, mileage of course will vary. Also, I want to note that in the PDF section 3.A.7 "Increase Overall Performance", the hyperlink that says "texture optimization" leads to this page: https://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:Skyrim_Installation#tab=Graphic_Editors I believe that is a mistake. EDIT: I see, it in the utilities tab. There really should be a separate page for this. Advantages of DDSopt over Optimzer Textures: Better compression Better mipmaps Advantages of Optimize Textures over DDSopt: Works much more quickly Much easier to use Don't have to worry about exceptions - handles them on their own Optimizing BSAs does not requires manual extraction and repackaging cons of DDSopt: Difficult to use Need to worry about exceptions, and some of them may not yet be known Takes a long time to run I don't want to see STEP get rid of DDSopt or stop recommending it in the STEP guide, instead I want STEP to first recommend Optimzer Textures because it is easier to use and faster, and then I would like to see the community work on a better and more complete power users guide for DDSopt for the brave and daring willing to try it. I think that would give the best of both worlds. Guide to using Optimizer Textures to optimize your skyrim game. Download optimizer textures from the nexus. Extract the archive into a folder. Then double click on ordenator.exe In the window, click on the folder icon, and navigate to you skyrim data folder. For most of you, this will be in 'C://ProgramFiles/Steam/steamapps/common/skyrim'. In the upper right under profiles, click on the menu and select "maximum". In the menu below it, select "skyrim". Click on the box titled "BSA" and then on the tab called "BSA" to the right of "Textures". Check the boxes "Compress BSA", "unite internal files", and "Mark BSA". All of your BSA files will be shown to the right. Select all of them by checking each box. When you have done this, click start. Optimizer Textures will run and optimize your entire skyrim install. A window will pop up showing its progress. Wait until it is finished. My particular data folder has been optimized before, but there are a few textures that I have added sense the last time I ran it. Optimizer Textures will create a back up of every file it changes and all your BSA in a folder called "Texture Backups" located in "C://TextureBackups". Your texture folder will be archived. To restore you old unoptimized texture just extract it to your data folder in skyrim. Your BSAs will be backed up and renamed with the file extension ".bak" added to it. To restore you old BSA, just rename the file so as to delete the ".bak" extension, and move it to your data folder in skyrim.

Sweet. Did they fix the BOSS issue they were having?

Lol. I am in a thread about a texture optimizer recommending another texture optimizer! Running the program now.. i haven't got to test it in game but it is compressing texture further from the tool I was using. Pretty cool. On the performance question, I just want to point out that the whole topic is purely academic and speculative. Real world results for your system is going to differ from another persons, and is going to be very dependent on the architecture of the GPUs, sophistication of the drives, and other stuff. My biggest concern with overloading VRAM is the VRAM bursting problem. I don't know of a way to prevent that, and if there is a scene where the required textures to render that scene is greater than what the video card has in memory, than a VRAM burst is possible. I don't think, using an popular texture packs for skyrim, that a VRAM burst is very likely on modern GPUs with 1gb of memory. Especially using texture optimizer programs like DDSOpt or optimize texture. For people using 512mb cards though, I can't say its a good idea to overload your VRAM, mostly because of the VRAM burst issue.

[video=youtube] What do you guys think? My (rather negative) opinion/concerns

I appreciate your data link. Very interesting. Question though; did you optimize those textures at all? Very few of them ever exceeded 1k mb, if they were not optimized a very light run of any one of the texture optimizer mods could bring it under 1k. I have used this mod on the maximum strength runs, and found it both very effective and not detrimental at all to quality https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12801 (I am sure you are aware of this tool but w.e.) On the subject of testing the effects of VRAM overflow and performance I think that is problematic. For one, any time you are close to exceeding maximum VRAM you risk the "VRAM burst crash", so it can never really be recommended. Another problem is that performance is going to vary dramatically depending on what kind of scene you are surveying. An place that uses intense shaders, geometry, or particle effects is going to have greater performance costs but not necessarily high VRAM usage. The only way to isolate the variable would to be to create an artificial scene, which in itself would make the benchmark not representative of real gameplay. Another problem is that any software that monitor VRAM usage doesn't give you any information about system memory. If a program is reporting 95% VRAM usage that doesn't mean that there isn't 100mb or more of cache in main memory.It would be very difficult to determine how much of the other texture are in main memory and therefore get a baseline for how that ratio effects performance. I think, in general, it is best to to keep VRAM usage within 90%-95% of your total VRAM capacity as that is the only way to provide any kind of guarantee of stability and performance.

That theory is more or less correct as I understand VRAM. VRAM operates very similar to system memory really. In windows or linux OS you have a "swap" which performs the same action as memory does for VRAM. If you can keep the swapped portion small enough, it is usually ok to have VRAM full with a portion of the rest in main memory. I think, however, that the exact way VRAM works is different from system programs. Most of the video memory stored IS pertinent to whatever is going to the game at the time. In a system program all of the most frequented accessed data, the system stack and the system heap are all in main memory and what tends to get pushed off to the hard disk is the content of files that are loaded in memory at the time. VRAM has a stack and a heap as well, but the contents of VRAM memory are cycles through more often and more frequently than is main memory due to the fact that video cards often do needs to deal with very large files nearly randomly. So VRAM and a half in memory would be very close to threshold for acceptable performance. I think VRAM and a tenth or so would probably be approaching the territory where frame rates and noticeably effected. I don't have any data to back this claim up. However I could direct you to some very good articles on graphics and graphics processing if you are curious and want to know more.

Wow he responded very quickly. I messaged him about it just a few days ago. I had created a comaptability patch of sorts and offered it to him but he turned it down. On the immersive weapons front, probably going to pass. To many mods in that package that don't fit the game lore as far as I am concerned.

Discussion thread: aMidianBorn Hide and Studded Hide by CaBaL120 Wiki Link Hide and studded hide texture replacers. At the moment this is an independent mod from the book of silence mod by the same author: https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/24909 Presumably they will be combined in the future. As usually for the project the resolution is the same as the high res DLC from Bethesda. The quality is impeccable. Screenshots are source and one from my game here: Hide armor with studded ciurass. Added in 2.2.9 Core. Use until BOS update.

I want to say that SLI and crossfire cards have to keep copies of one anothesr VRAM, making their actual pool of VRAM resources closer to 1gb, even if they have 2gb of memory available (due to redundancy). I am not 100% sure on this... however I am confident that I have read something on the inefficiencies of SLI and Crossfire before when it comes to memory management. Some weak confirmation on this detail: https://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1331011 I am a member of the OCN forums with some 5k posts... I will do a search in their news section (I know I have read at least a couple articles on it) and post back if I can find something more concrete on the topic.Â

Very cool mod :)

I used to use this mod before the most recent SkyRe update made them incompatible :(.

I love that mod. Its one of my favorite mods in all the nexus by far. After a big battle with summoned creatures, your horse, and a half dozen slain NPCs with scorch markes, blood splatters, and a mess of footprints in the fresh snow, going every which way and crossing each other. It tells the story of the fight in their impressions.... It's really quite special.Â

You might want to try High quality LODs. If you make a good comparison between the mod you linked and mods STEP uses than STEP might adopt your mod. At least that is what they have told me so far :p.

Discussion thread: HQ Eyebrows by Regn Wiki Link Replaces the eyebrows on NPCs and player character with higher quality ones. Eyebrows seems very slightly thicker, and the detail is the individual hairs are much more distinct and even a little thicker. The best part of this mod, in my opinion, is the "New Female and Male Eyebrows - Ultra Light". This sets the eyebrows to be the same color as the characters hair, so that they match exactly. Default textures are slightly darker than the hair texture.

Does W.A.T.E.R replace LODs?

Anybody have an opinion about this mod? Its really good, I strongly recommend it.