mothergoose729

Yeah that's a good point rootsrat. My favorite music overhaul was popular on the nexus on the 2010/2011 days, and then I think the author took it off. Want to say it was something like skryim music overhaul. To bad too, it was a great mod. Maybe they ran into copy right issues. The demo track on the mod page is really rather good. I am very picky about my music, and a slipshod orchestral piece is much worse than vanilla music. The tracks on there though where really appropriate, and while different and experimental (some of them), technically well done. If I have some time I will have to try the nonreplacer version, and give each track a specific listen through.

Love this mod. Music is one of the most important parts of any good game, and skyrims music, while not bad, gets old and repetitive. Nothing breaths new life into a playthrough more than new music for me.

I love the idea. The screens look great to me, but others will have their own opinions. One thing that worries me though is the memory impact all these decals will have on a given environment. The decals are static, so if the author is judicious about it it might be fine. Combined with a lot of high res texture mods though, if there are literally thousands of them in the game, it might be too much for the engine to handle. Something to note if this mod ever goes to testing.

Vanilla improved mountains is actually, surprisingly nice, and compresses to 1k really well if you have a 1gb card. I have a certain fondness for SRO and vanilla mountains as well though.

Techangle, you're my hero. This post made my day :D

Either works. Tex.ture folder is better

This happens if you use tes5 edit to clean the esp for improved close faced helms.

There are issues with STEP though. Lots of issues. People report bug threads here and on the nexus all the time, but the diagnosis is complicated because 1) some issues are system specific and some aren't, and there is no good metric whatsoever to distinguish between them 2) most people use mods not included in STEP, and that disqualifies their post from being taken seriously as a bug report. In my own testing with just STEP mods I have found many surprising things about the STEP package to be true. I am not yet ready to publish my results, but I can assure you that STEP 2.7 is far from stable. I can also assure you, that based on my own testing and also based on what has been generally echoed by others in this thread, safety load solves a lot of the problems that are inherent in STEP CORE and even in the vanilla game itself. There are still some troubling things to sort out with saftey load, namely the menu crashes and also, it would be nice to have some inkling of an idea as to how it works. That being said, not including safety load as a default part of the STEP mod package would make about just as much sense as not including the unofficial patches or any of the bug fixes.Â

Last time I tried to run IHSS with AOS, the human footstep sounds became the same regardless of terrain type (obviously bad). I spend more time on foot then on a horse so I had to forgo IHSS, which made me sad.

I full STEP patch would probably be really cool michaelw. In particular, IHSS isn't compatible with AOS last time I tried.

I didn't know that. Will have to play around with it more. It is my understanding that a higher ugrids is not recommended because of numerous issues. Maybe safety load can solve at least one of them; preventing game from crashing when entering and leaving cells. Anywho, just repeated my results for a cross continent speed run. Again, this is a test that would fail on vanilla skryim unmodded and without the HDDLCs. I have managed to complete the test successfully twice now without failure, minus an experiment with higher ugrids in between. Going to try and combo this with ENB booster tomorrow and see what might be possible. So far, unless it quite the coincidence, this thing seems to be helping a lot.

Ran another test with ugrids 7 and exterior buffer 64. Game froze on the path from solitude to windhelm, near a place that has been frequently giving me trouble. Doesn't mean it doesn't work. Does suggest to me somewhat that its not invincible.

Well I tried it out today, and my results seem promising. I have been running a test for a while now. Essentially I save right as I leave helgen, and then run by foot with a speedmult of 200 through riverwood to whitrun, whitrun to markarth, markarth to solitude, solitude to windhelm, and windhelm to riften. I take the main roads and I don't fast travel. As I approach each city, I enter the gates, visit the jarls palace (because its usually in the middle of the city and its usually the largest interior) and then leave. Doing this on a completely unmodded skyrim I have been able to produce a ctd, an ILS, and a freeze. I have tested the crap out of my PC for hardware problems, and update drivers and windows, so the only thing to explain it is skryim has a game engine flaw that it universal, at least for me, no matter the mod setup. I have never been able to run this entire test without a crash before. Using safe load, I ran the whole thing successfully for the first time. This is with all but a few of the STEP Core texture mods (compressed and resized to 1024x1024, but with full res un uptomized HDDLC), the unnofficial patches, water, skyfalls and mills, distant details, and 101 bugs. This is an on going test I have been doing for weeks now, that predate this thread. I am going to try and run it again to see if I can reproduce my results. With this setup on vanilla, I was having trouble on the path from solitude to windhelm, right as it gets snow around the dawnstar region. My game will no crash in this region 100% of the time, but it will crash regularly. With safe load I haven't experience a crash there yet, and I have been doing my best to focus test this. To be clear, nearly all the crashes I get in my game are CTDs. This mod seems to have reduce my CTDs in ways that I haven't been able to produce even with vanilla. Tentatively going to say it works.

I had a blast playing skyre sometime around version 19. I got up to level 80, and it was tough until about level 60, and then I couldn't sleep on stuff until I got into the 70s. An old school rpg fan, I rather enjoy getting to uber high levels and wrecking everything. The trade of it that high level needs to be difficult to get through or its not really worth playing. I have been hearing so much good stuff about requiem. I read the change log... so much stuff I fundamentally disagree with. Might have to try it out though and see how it actually feels.

That texture isn't missing, just bad. Install amainborn caves and be happy. Overwrite all when preompted.

Make sure to set the jars default program to run with java. Also make sure to run it as an administrator. You should also try SUM, linked on the main page. I had problems with it too, running it as an admin seemed to work for me, but this was after I tried SUM first.

Ray tracing is a long distant dream ATM. The most powerful graphics can render only low resolution images, in stationary, controlled environments. The amount of processing power it needs is a quantum leap, not an incremental leap. In the tech word it is foolish to say "never", but it is certainly a ways off. To run games like our own with it would take well over ten times the amount of power we have to day, and that is probably conservative. Ultimately if and when we have that much power, it might be the case that something else just as good or almost just as good has come around and can do the same thing for less resources.

I hate that meme. Seriously, its like you are broadcasting to the world "hey, I'm an ******". ...my feelings about the meme not yourself :p

hey there menmatre. I am going through a similar process, and have been testing things out for weeks. I am not done yet, but based one what I have learned, here is what I know about textures and STEP: The VRAM limit for 1gb cards, at least my 1gb cards, is pretty high with textures. The SRO 1k/2k, with HDDLC optimized 1024, and the HDDLC pack 1 can all work together. Nearly all of the miscellaneous texture re placers can be added on top of that so long as you use the low res versions of each. I have forgone Beauty of Skyrim - Dungeons and the HD Serious and HD2k packs. I don't recommend terrain bump or any of the LOD re placers for the time being, because they add an incredible amount of burden to your system. Skymills and distant terrain are all stable, even if a bit of a frame sink, nearest I can tell. My system can't handle Vurts at the moment. I don't really know how it effects the game, my guess is a lot. Use with caution. I can say with some confidence that a full, unadulterated install of book of silence and all associate packs is A-ok. Its a pretty small burden because there is rarely more than a handful of actors on screen at a time, and when there are they are almost always in interior cells. I also have been using bellyaches meduim res version and W.A.T.E.R meduim, SMIM with the half size textures but full mesh high poly mesh replacements, Visible windows, and XCE, better beast races (low res) and coverkhajits 1024 res versions. With all those installed you get some occasional choppyness, uncheck HDDLC 01 and most of that will go away. Tentatively going to say all those textures are safe with 1gb cards, and this is without doing any optimizing or compressing. The HDDLC pack 01 had the weapons, armors, and actor normal maps. In particular, XCE really shines with the HDDLCs 2048x normal maps for NPCs and PCs face and body textures. It also had the HD effects, so you get better smoke, steam, moss, and spell effects like lightning and fire. It will shave a couple fps though and I am not entirely sure that it doesn't lead to instability with other mods present. Manaully unpacking and removing the effects folder might be a safer bet. Something to note here, skyrim is not a stable game even at vanilla. I have tested so much with so many mods and been very confused as to why I get crashes. Recently figured out that skyrim crashes on its own even with no mods installed. I am currently working out a way to figure out how many mods you can add without making skyrim MORE unstable, but for the meantime, that is my best guess. I am unsure about a few STEP mods, so I would test them yourself or leave them out: Footprints Wet and Cold - (have some reason to think it adds to instability) Bring out your Dead Improved Puddles (I think it causes some weird behavior with diverse priests. Unkown Enchants

Whatvwe really need is someone to take the time to patch aos for step. Anything that does a cell edit could conflict. There is at least a half dozen or so that might conflict in small ways.

Is there a presedence for dds causing any kind of instability? I have wrecked several mod installs by over optimizing over the last two weeks. I am not 100 percent certain that optimized textures caused my in game instability, but when you have done it a few times as I have you start to see patterns. I have settled on a group of textures now that appears to be very stable, and I have forgon oprimizng to get this far. This is after starting over many times because mysterious ctds would persist no matter what i did. In one memorable case i mass resized all textures to 1024, cutting my texture folder size in half. I had to remove my texture folder completely and start over, because even with all esps disabled i was getting frequent ctds. My theory right now is that some special kinds of textures, such as effects in the HDDLC and water textures sont respond well to optimization, but I have no proof of it.

Its a community resource mod. If you think you can do better, record yourself reading some books. I will probably contribute a few nyself if i get the chance.

Damn this thread. I have no where near enough time to get back into morrowind. Regardless, just bought it on steam .

I had both of them loaded before and what I got was correct horse step noises, but all NPC and PC footsteps sounded the same regardless of the ground type. I let BOSS sort my load order, so it might not have been optimal. In any event a compatibility patch would make the whole thing a lot simpler. As of right now I am using AOS over IHSS, but I do miss IHSS quite a bit. AOS was updated yesterday and I haven't had a chance to try it out. Reading the update log it doesn't appear that AOS has changed anything in regards to my own issues, but they have introduced some pretty cool new features I am excited to play with. Namely, there is a different impact effect now for arrows on shields. That aught to be really cool. edit: Can't wait to try out the sneak step changes.

I am playing now with AOS, ultra realistc bow shoot sounds and crossbow sounds, smooth sheathe and draw, improved combat sounds, and improved horse pain sounds, and a couple others. This mod really thrives with ambient noises and with its judicious use of echo and reverb. I am pretty sure at this point there are different sound profiles for different interiors, which is wonderful. I was pleasantly surprised when ultra realistic bow sounds overwrote the somewhat distracting bow string twangs but it kept much of the impact noises and arrow whistling. Whistling arrows is not at all realistic but it is a great deal of fun :). Biggest flaws for me is the lack of compatibility with IHSS and the random splash bug I have come across. michaelw if you would consider patching IHSS that would be wonderful, because IMO IHSS does foosteps a lot better than AOS in pretty much every way. Hoping for a fix to the splash bug in the next update, but its a minor flaw so I won't be too disappointed if it doesn't happen. I am playing around with immersive thunder in place of default AOS thunder. AOS has a rather faint, distant thunder sound, which just feel inappropriate when using minty's lighting mod.