mothergoose729

Monty you severely underestimate the average US voter. Minoritieis and the youth are massively under represented in the united states. The religious right and the elderly, say what you will about them, are avid voters and unfortunately extremely politically motivated. I definetely see factions in the republican party but for the time being the tea party ultra conservative wing is winning out without the republican base seeming to shrink. They view the fiascos of the debt limit, government shutdown, susan rice obserdities and many others as noble stand offs against socialism and a president that, to them, is as unamerican as fidel castro. The current trajectory of republicans is not sustainable, if only because there largest group of constituents will be dead in ten or twenty years, but they can do an aweful lot of harm before that happens. Also, do to the nature of our electoritorial system the face of the government is painfully slow to change. It all comes down to the next presidential election. If a democrat can win out I think it is unlikely the republicans will be able to marshall a veto proof majority, and by the time they get their next run at the white house affordable care will probably cease to be so contreversial and many people will have come to rely on it. My vote personally will be for hilary clinton 2016... would like to see her win but I think a moderate republican will probably win out.

Nearest I can tell, most countries with universal healthcare rigidly control the health care market. Its not the same eveywhere, france and germany are notable exceptions. Its on no uncertain terms socialism, but it seems to really work. I hold the minority opinion that health might not be best suited as a for profit industry. I understand the other arguments thought. One thing everybody agrees on for the most part is that everybody should be insured... well everybody with the right skin colors and ethnic backgrounds anyway, depending on who you talk too. I think with very little doubt obama care will be repealed within the next five years. Us cycle will swimg right nect presidential election and republicans will get their majorty, and the cost in political capital will be far too high to ever bring it back again. Shame. Obama care is a bad bill but at least its a step in some direction on the american health care crisis.

The comparison I am doing here is mostly vanilla vs AOS, with a some allusions to STEP: Environmental: The improvements to wind, storm, and water sounds are really amazing, and much better than anything in vanilla or STEP. The sounds of rushing water next to rivers and waterfall is exquisite (not to exaggerate). It makes the whole thing come to life. AOS in particular is much better than vanilla in varied water sounds. A rushing river is much louder and deeper than a little stream. The big bodies of water different from the latter two. STEP currently includes SoS, which modifies environmental sounds as well. I haven't played much with SoS. The reason I don't really care for SoS is they try really hard to add ambient noises to a lot of places. Sometimes this is really cool, but a lot of times it is, for me at least, rather distracting. In particular, the city ambient noises always confused me. There is the sound of random chatter, shutting doors, barking dogs, and no corresponding producer of the noise. Skyrim does suffer a great deal from a sense of emptiness, but I don't think adding phantom noises is the best way to go about remedying that problem. AOS adds and improves skyrim ambient noises but in a more subtle way. The noises in caves have indistinct echos, and sounds that seemed to be sampled from rocks tumbling down a cavern or splashing in water. In the outdoors, the sounds are mostly insects. Crickets chirping and when you pass by butterflies or dragon flies you can hear a faint buzzing. Its rather quite, so you have to be actively listening for it. Overall I really like it personally. Added Effects: AOS has added some features to the sound system in skyrim, some of which were already in STEP via other mods and some of which weren't. I want to talk about my favorite first; the echo and re verb for interior cells. I did not realize how much this effect was sorely missing until suddenly it was there. When you are speaking to an NPC in a cave or fort with stone walls, it is infinitely more immersive to hear their voice echoing, the sounds of their footsteps seeming to bounce of the walls, the sounds of combat and havok reverberating and hollowing, ect. All of the sounds, nearest I can tell, echo appropriately in interiors in a wonderful way. Combat sounds in interior with echo is really quite a treat. It is for this reason alone I will probably use AOS from now on, I personally can not live without it. The outdoor voices and sounds have a slight echo too, it you really listen for it. Sometimes I imagined that when next to the mountains or the mouth of a cave the effect became more distinct but I am not sure of it. It sounded to me like the echo effects in some interiors, like the interior of the halls in whiterun, where slightly different from cave interior and others but I am not entirely sure. AOS also has a sound profile for human footsteps depending on the equipment worn by the PC or NPC and by the type of ground they are walking on. I distinctly noticed differences for stone/roads vs land vs wood vs snow. The clanking of armor and packs can be heard with most armors, although not with the lightest armors or clothing. This mod does not, unfortunately, have a sound profile for horses, like the horse steps mods included in STEP. AOS also lacks any kind of splash effects at all. Jumping into water produces no noise and no corresponding visual. This is a flaw I am sure, and I plan to leave a comment on the mod page about it. Combat: AOS makes a lot of changes to combat. The weapon draw sounds are much smoother and less metallic. I noticed hardly any difference between it and smooth draw mod. The weapon impact sounds are not personally to my liking ( I would prefer something a bit deeper and less metallic) but they are very similar to improved combat sounds. There are different noises for swinging and impacts for different kinds of weapons. The sounds for two handed weapons are really pretty nice but I wish the one handed weapons sounds were deeper, especially for impact. The sound of bows shooting and of bow impact has also been reworked. The best feature is that arrows now whistle as they go by, making shootouts much more exciting. The bows twang very loudly now after each shot, which at first I didn't like (and I have to admit is probably not very realistic) but it does make the game a great deal more exciting. Its is the one feature in AOS I have warmed up to the most. Spells in AOS have been tweaked as well. The sounds of rune explosions is actually really, really loud now. The shock effects has been changed from something resembling a thunder bolt to something closer to a tesla coil (vanilla is more like thunder and AOS is more like electric chair). The fire sounds have a stronger emphasis on burning and crackling and a little less so sound like a blow torch. I am pretty neutral on those changes. Most of the other spells schools sound pretty much the shame, with an exception for summoning creatures in conjuration, which now sounds completely bad ass. The whole sound of summoning has been increased, so it louder, and there is really cool howls and screaming noises, like demons coming from the nether. Its actually pretty amazing. It should be also be noted, that all combat noises are positional now, including impact sounds for arrows and projectile spells. I am not entirely sure if that was in vanilla or STEP already. Creatures: AOS does creature sounds too. The biggest improvement I noticed was the spider footsteps sounds in AOS are much better than improved animal sounds, imo. It is a scuttling and scurrying kind of noise, I really enjoyed it. The mammoths and giants in AOS sound, simple put, amazing. Really, really really awesome, one of my favorite parts about the mod. When the giants crush their clubs, it sounds like the earth is literally shaking. The depth and bass in their footsteps is also much better in my opinion. I did notice that some of the smallest creatures, like foxes and rabits, had foosteps that were a bit to loud. You should not be able to hear a fox going by, it should be almost imperceptible. Instead I found that it was quite audible. Might come down to personal preferences. The dear and elk by contrast have a much more hoovy sort of sound which I very much appreciated. I mentioned it before and I will mention it again hear, AOS has no foosteps profiles for horses. They sound the same everywhere. It is pretty much exactly like vanilla nearest I can tell, and I am not a fan overall. AOS patches: I used all of the patches from michaelw and they all seemed to work. I think AOS completely replaces improved weapon impacts effects and smooth sheath and draw sounds and so they don't feel necessary. I didn't see the need for the enhanced blood textures patch (nearest I can tell everthing worked find with or without it). I am sure michaelw had reasons for posting it, so its probably necessary. The weapon impact effects patch is definitely needed for some cases, in particular the signs around whiterun will spark inappropriately and arrow heads fail to produce sparks at all with just AOS. I didn't get a chance to go through any dungeons in my playthrough last night. I really wanted to hear the sounds of traps and the ambient noises for tombs in particular. There are a variety of other sounds I either didn't notice or didn't hear as well so there is more testing to be done. The racial power for nords "rallying cry" was really cool, but I didn't get a chance to test any shouts which is unfortunate. The biggest flaws in AOS right now is the bug(?) with spalshes and the lack of horestep profiles that we have come to expect from other mods. I personally am a bit partial to the vanilla flame and shock sounds. I would have liked a slightly tweaked, maybe more baser version of those. The sounds from the smaller animal foosteps are a bit to loud. I would like it if the sounds of bow shots, mainly the twaning of the bow string, was quited a bit. I also think the impact and swing sounds for some one handed weapons could be a bit deeper. I had a sound mods ( I think it was smooth draw) that had a weapon sheathing sound that I really came to love. It sounds like metal on leather until it reached the bottom, with a light dull thud of the hilt hitting ths scabbard. It was the best sound sample I have heard for weapon sheathing, although it doesn't appear to be in AOS or the most recent smooth sheathe and draw in STEP. So if that could end up in AOS somehow that would be pretty cool I think... while I am wishing for things. That being said, overall, AOS brings so much to STEP that it didn't have before. Most notably interior reverb is an amazing feature that should have been a part of skyrim from the beginning IMO. I personally can no longer play without it. The sounds for water are really awesome, the sounds for giants and mammoths are top notch, and the improvements to rune explosions and summoning creatures. Everything in AOS is positional, which adds quite a bit to immersion too. Even with its flaws I hardily recommend it.

Just looking at the screenshots... I think its a great idea that author has incorporated, but I think the way they are going about implementing it just isn't right. It reminds me a lot of frosted cornflakes. The textures looks almost sugary, or waxy, compared to snow. The reason is simple I think, the now is being rendered in two dimensions but it has been give the two textures to appear somewhat translucent. This doesn't look like snow at all because snow has a thickness, it looks like melted plastic wrap. This mod is a great example I think of how getting closer to reality can actually break something, visually speaking. A flat white texture on something looks nothing like real snow, but in our minds eye we fill in the details of snow where the flat white is. If you add in a couple elements of snow but leave the rest out... technically it looks more like snow, but now I am suddenly aware that it is two dimensional, uniform, entirely two even, and a host of other flaws.

I played a while with this mod, and there is a lot I like, and there is quite a bit I don't really like. I am a huge fan of the echo and reverb going on and I am very reluctant to give that up. That being said some of the sounds are just really odd. In particular, the bow shooting sound is both too loud on the string vibration, and the impact sound for an arrow hitting is not at all positional, so even when you hit a target very far away and sounds like its right in your ear. The footstep sounds for the smaller animals are much to loud but its not too distracting. I much prefer the weapon sheathe sounds from STEP and a few others as well, but I do like the idea that AOS replaces about 10 of my sound mods by itself and does a better job than most of them. When I get home I will try out some of michaelw's patches and then do a run through with STEP only a post my opinions.

No it just a signed 1 byte signed integer (if you care to know more, see my first post in the thread). If they used some kind of bit arithmetic with bit fields that would be really wonky.

If the problem is a count variable then that is the only way to fix it. Whole thing kinda boggles my mind a bit. A programmer in c or java has to go out of their way to declare a variable of type short int, because the standard int is 4 bytes. If the papyrus log used a 4 byte counter variable then the largest number of mods would be in the billions... but instead they used a nonstandard short int, and then used a signed short int of all things . It is the smallest possible positive range of numbers you can give a variable in C using a predefined data type. Like they wanted the limit to be small on purpose.

The post isn't very specific. It seems that papyrus use a single byte signed integer to refer to mods in the load order, and reference their content. Items above 7F trip two's complement and you get negative. Negative is bad, the post isn't really specific why. Basically its how binary numbers work. In a 1 byte integer code, (8 bits) you can represent numbers up to 2^8, which is 256. This is all positive though (probably what bethesda should have used), if you want to store positive and negative numbers, then the last bit in the 8 bit pattern is the "signed bit". If that bit is 1, then the number is interpreted completely differently. For 7F+1 this would be signed -128 I think. This means papyrus is counting mods and the bit pattern is incrementing, la de da 126, 127, signed bit gets set now and oops, next mod is number -128. Which could be bad depending on what skyrim does with that number.

Just some general tips. If you are installing or uninstalling script based mods, you really aught to start a new game entirely. I didn't see any when I skimmed your mod list but just keep that in mind. Orphaned scripts will plague your game pretty much forever. I have read that skryim performs better without crossfire. You might consider disabling it when you play, if you haven't already. Also make sure to update your drivers to the latest version. If you haven't been using a texture optimizer program I recommend you try one. Optimizer textures is great and easy to use. Rootsrat is right, an infinite load screen crash is really hard to diagnose because it could be so many things. Try playing on a new game for a while and see if you can produce the same symptoms.

The bandit factions is the coolest part about this mod. Its also the reason I don't think I will personally use it. If bandits have factions it only makes sense that the larger world would be aware of those factions, if not that guards than at least someone the player character interacts with in the world. But lore consistency stuff is one of my top concerns in modding. Its not that way for everybody else of course.

I think this mod is a great idea, and many of its features should have been a part of vanilla, but... It wasn't. The biggest problem I have with mods like this is that there is nothing in the game to support them. It doesn't make sense for guards and other factions not to distinguish between bandits if the bandits are so obviously distinguishable. Mods like this are wonderfully made and very cool, but they stick out like a sore thumb in every play through. You are pretty much always aware that you are playing a mod. When a mod tries to improve upon something that always existed in vanilla I think that is the wrong approach.Â

Sennheirsers would be great for skyrim in particular, because their mid and high range is just exceptional. I owned a pair of HD 555's for years and they were easily the best pair of headphones I have ever used. A flaw in the senheisers, at least in my model, is that base pretty much doesn't exist. For movies in particular, sounds that aught to be impactful and full sound a bit light and empty. The low range, like for a bassoon or cello are wonderful, but it is not great for movies. Also, for about the same price you can get a decent pair of headphones with gaming features, like positional audio. Â Skyrim is almost exclusively mid range sounds, at least to me ear, and nearest I can tell doesn't have much support for positional audo, so I think a pair of senns would be a great fit for our game in particular.Â

Up, whatever happened to this? Looks pretty awesome.

There is something to be said for Bethesda seemingly deliberate choice to make weapons thicker and broader. I think the idea was to make combat look visually dense and impactful. The paddles swords do look like the hit harder. My biggest concern with this mod is whether or not it can be used with Cabal's weapon textures. I would be rather reluctant to give them up.

SkyRe has a similar component to its mod, and the features overlap quite a lot with this one. The advantages to this mod are obvious; no scripts, no fuss. Depending on the mod package you are putting together this one can make a lot of sense. As others have said before though, the racial powers can be more than a little bit obnoxious when EVERY npc is using in EVERY time, so for me anyway I would probably avoid using it in favor of skyRE or a similar vanilla tweaked AI mod.

This mods discussion ended a long time ago, but I felt it might be appropriate to add one final epitaph. The mod, according to the mod author, broke some time around patch 1.9. It appears that open cities fills up the memory and causes instant CTD with large cities. Arthmoor doesn't know how to fix this and apparently has stopped trying. He also mentions several other game breaking issues, and the he himself has stopped using his own mod.

There seems to be some kind of bug with the elbows on one of the textures, which bleeds into some other mods that borrow the same texture for different armors. The author has uploaded a mesh fix, which makes it incompatible with several body mods and a few others. He seems rather um... unmotivated to consider a texture fix in has last couple posts. I would also like to see a HDDLC res mirror instead of flat 2048 for each piece personally. That resolution seems a bit excessive for some of the smaller models, like gloves and boots.

Any chance for an RLO weather patch?

Its for this reason that I think Vurts approach is the best. Grasses need to be static objects added by hand in order to be appropriate for the different climates, rather than one grass textures for every place. Also, this mod has some issues with grass appearing where they ought not be, like through floor boards of some buildings.Â

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I am a huge fan of this mod author's work. A lot of members on here argue that skyrim has a "visual style" and that a texture mod need not be realistic as much as fit in with the style of the game. I hold the view that a texture is ultimately "better" or "worse" than a given texture based on qualitative assessments: namely 1) does the texture have technical issues (like seams or artifacts) 2) Do the textures appear to more accurately or better represent the object and mesh it is placed on than another texture. On point 1, all of these textures are technical masterpieces (imo). There is no technical reason no to use these mods at all, short of STEP moving in more of a parallax direction.  On point 2, I would argue that saying "does the texture fit better" is pretty much equivalent to saying "does it look more like a rock, or moss, or whatever than something else". This is comparison between the texture a real thing. This is a comparison of "realism" not a visual style. tl;dr I think they are great and believe that these with a combination of other textures should be part of core step.Â

I think the idea is really cool, but the plum of smoke is so large and the perspective just doesn't fit. I think if the artist had rendered it differently it might be more believable. If you could see the smoke from hundreds of miles away, it should either be very thin and indistinct against the horizon, or something like a large, formless enveloping cloud. For me its a no go because I just can't buy that 1) you can see the smoke from skyrim 2) even if you could, that it would look like something coming off a chimney.

If its a torch light then it doesn't cast real time shadows.

this seems like something that would have been a uskp candidate