noobzor

Weird. I also had removed Enhanced Blood Textures, Deadly Spell Impacts, and Burn Freeze Shock effects to improve script latency. Something about the combination of those three was playing hell on my script lag, so I just axed all 3.

Sorry, I have been out for a few days. I did have to make some tweaks because of CTD's sometimes. One thing I did was exclude all of the animals from ASIS (e.g. all the the skyTEST and Real Wildlife and More Village Animals added to the mod exclusions for increased/random spawns), but I thought Egg ended up doing the same in his ini's. I also had to turn off the AI tweaks in ASIS...those just did not play well. I kept all of the spell and perk stuff turned on, turned off the random spawns (it leads to some weird situations anyway), and toned down the increased spawns a little bit (no chance of 4 or 5 extras, higher chance of only 1 extra). I do use the potion thing. With those settings, I am running smoothly. Edit: Oh yeah, I almost forgot the most important part to improving the stability of my game... As much as it pained me to do so, I dropped Hunterborn, Frostfall, and Realistic Needs and Diseases from my load order. As soon as I dropped these from my game, my random crashes (which weren't all that common in the first place) completely disappeared. I can only attribute this to putting too much strain on the scripting system due to having tons of stuff installed (lots of enemy mods, DCO, CWO, various magic mods...there is only so much Skyrim can do). I wrestled with that decision for a long time, and it wasn't even for performance/stability reasons that I dropped them. In the end, while I enjoy the challenge they added, they are ultimately just time sinks in a game that I hardly have enough time to play anyway. With those mods, I found myself spending a notable portion of my playtime gathering wood, hunting animals, looking for food and clean water, and so on. The challenge of those things paled in comparison to taking down a fort full of necromancers, or fighting gaggle of dragons (thanks to DCO and DD), yet they were taking up almost as much of my game time. Basically, I was trying to play two different games at the same time...one that was about survival in a harsh world, and the other one about unadulterated white-knuckle combat. I decided to cut out one of those and focus on the other, and I do not regret it.

I use ASIS and those improved ini files with REGS, Mighty Magick, Apocalypse Spells, SIC, SkyMoMod, SIC High Level Enemies, OBIS, SkyTEST, and a crap ton more stuff. It works great. The improved ini files do a pretty good job of making sure NPC's don't end up with player-specific spells. The perk changes from Mighty Magick don't make a difference...it still works just fine with the Automatic Perks from ASIS.

I have no idea. I may be mistaken about this and it was only the Dawn of Riften/Nightingale Hall that was out of order...I will double check Edit: I can't replicate it now. I was probably just tired and mixed it up with one of the other "Dawn of X" mods. It still wants to put DoR after Nightingale Hall. In this case, it looks like they are making it into the Inns anyway but just not sitting down...at least as far as I could tell. I might be mixing them up with NPCs from different mods.

Well, the ref marker just means it is referenced in some kind of package or quest or something. In this case, it looks like it is part of an AI package that tells the npc to go sit in the chair or in a nearby chair, but it could be something else...it's hard to tell for sure. If you have IP loaded after ETaC, it just overwrites ETaC's edits and the furniture is either re-enabled, or in the case of the chair, got moved back to its vanilla position...that doesn't really have anything to do with the marker. If ETaC is after IP, then the stuff will be disabled and the NPC's just won't be able to get to it in order to do whatever it was they were supposed to do. If that was a quest, the quest might be broken. If it was an AI package, the NPC may just stand around for a bit until it goes to a different state. The only time i know of that it will actually cause crashes is if ETaC had deleted the record, which is why deleted records are bad and it is part of the whole mod cleaning thing.

Yeah, I remember when that came up in the ETaC forum. I just wanted to clarify what the issue actually was (not intending to start an argument or anything). Adding ref markers to furniture is, in my opinion, even worse than adding new furniture, and is why Jenna was hesitant to make any specific recommendations about how to compatibilize it. On a completely different note, I discovered that for me, LOOT is trying to put Dawn of Riften after both Nightingale Hall and REGS - Riften NavFull. I had to make a couple of rules to get those in the right order. Something other LOOT users might want to be aware of.

But Immersive Patrols doesn't add any furniture to anything...that is not the problem. The problem is that it added ref markers to existing furniture that ETaC had moved or disabled. What they should have done was use X markers instead of attaching it directly to the furniture. I think the actual issue is much less serious than Jenna anticipated, though...she erred on the side of caution. I tried this out with letting ETaC overwrite the edits from Immersive Patrols, and the only issues I have seen is that some people won't sit down. There are always so many people standing around in inns, tough, it is hardly noticeable.

I just want to testify here real quick. After reading through this thread the other day, I decided to try undoing all of the BSA unpacking that I had done just to see what noticeable differences there were. It ended up being somewhere around 150 mods that I had unpacked. After I was finished reinstalling and leaving in the original BSA, I was pleasantly surprised to discover significant performance improvement in my game...much more than I expected. Loading times are a mere fraction of what they were with loose files, and all of the stuttering that I had when loading cells has completely gone away. Reverting to the bsa's was the only change I made to the game. A few days ago, I was sure that unpacking BSA's was the way to go, but I have seen the light. From now on, no more unpacking BSA's without a good reason.

I did just reinstall everything that was originally in bsa that I had unpacked. I had to re-download several things, but it wasn't too bad...I had most of it. I do have quite a few loose textures that I had optimized via DDSOpt, and I just left those loose.

In other news, after reading the BSA extraction thread, I decided to try out having as many things as possible inside the BSA. I went through my whole loadout and 'undid' the BSA extraction (with no small amount of effort). One thing I did not expect was how much of a performance boost I got out of it. I used to have load times of over a minute, and noticeable stuttering on loading cells. Load times are down to seconds, and no more stuttering on cell loads. I haven't changed anything else at all with my game except for switching all the loose files back to BSA's.

The part of this that stood out to me was the ETAC+NSUtR patch, which could add a noticeable number of meshes to Dawnstar and could push it over the threshold for the memory loading bug, if it was already close. If any of the four patches by themselves cause this issue, then that doesn't jive with my theory. My ISP is a small local company that has been contracted and subsidized by the city to handle all utilities in city limits since sometime in the late 1800's...it's a weird deal (mired in dirty politics and old money), but it is crazy cheap. They just started offering higher speed services earlier this year, but I keep forgetting to look into it...

First, a question for CJ: Why does the guide use Aethernautics ver. 1.1 (on TES Alliance) instead of ver. 1.2 (found on the Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/41754/?) ? Is there something wrong with the 1.2 version? Second, Dawnstar with ETaC can be pretty demanding on its own, and with the extra meshes from NSUtR (enabled by those 4 patches), it might be pushing your memory too hard. Are you using either SSME or SKSE 1.7alpha with the memory fix ini settings? If not, I can almost guarantee that is the issue and one of those will probably fix it.

...

Okay, I read all 13 pages of it. I am convinced. It turns out MO is even cleverer than I thought. I know what I need to do now.

Forgive me if I missed this somewhere...I had 13 pages of posts to catch up on, and only about an hour to spare, so I may have missed this... I saw somewhere Tannin saying that we shouldn't care how MO manages to prioritize BSA's based on install order instead of always being overwritten by loose files, and that an explanation would only make sense if you have a CS degree and lots of experience with computers. I do have a CS degree, and more than 10 years experience in software development, and I am very interested in understanding how MO accomplishes this. Not that I need to understand it, really, MO is just interesting. If this was covered already, can someone point me to it? Also, if we leave the BSA un-extracted, do the file conflicts still show up in the "Conflicts" tab when looking at an installed mod's details, or do they only show up in the "Data" tab on the right-hand pane? I am another user who always extracted BSA's, and I admit I did not thoroughly read the documentation and did not have a clear understanding of how the BSA prioritization worked in MO. I had always assumed that BSA's were always overwritten by loose files, regardless of the install order, and had no idea that files inside a BSA would show up in conflict resolution. That's what I get for not reading the documentation. Now, I know better. That being said, this behavior is contrary to what even someone with advanced knowledge of Skyrim modding would expect if they were using MO for the first time. I prefer the power and flexibility that MO gives me to order things pretty much however I want (and consequences be damned!), but I can see that posing a significant entry barrier for the average user. MO will always be an advanced-user-only tool unless it has a simplified mode that more closely reflects what users are accustomed to from other mod managers.

Oh yeah, I should have specified only certain subrecords of LCTN. What other record types, if any, have anything auto-forwarded? Edit: Nevermind, I found the list. Thanks! You know, this is something I never even considered...I just extract bsa's by default because it is easier to manage file conflicts. I am going to have to start checking for loose files before I go straight to extracting BSA's. :( If you take out any loose files, then extract the bsa, then overwrite with the pre-extract loose files, would that get you pretty much the same result?

For me, the LOOT order goes like this: Inconsequential NPCs InconNpc-CRF patch <20 or so other mods> Provincial Courier One thing to keep in mind is that Location sub-records are auto-forwarded...you don't have to carry forward edits to those if they are just adding things.

Yeah, I asked ripple about that because I was curious. His reasons seemed sound to me, and I think he made good changes.

LOOT does have the same concept, but instead of having a pretty much set list of everything, it just has smaller-scale rules that say something like, "X comes after Y," in order to resolve issues between two specific mods. Right now, that list of rules is pretty slim, but it is continuing to improve. All of the mechanisms are there for you to define your own user rules, and even to submit those rules to be included in the "masterlist". Honestly, when I was using BOSS, I had to create far more user rules than I do with LOOT. I had somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 with BOSS, and only 3 with LOOT.

I think it would probably be okay to keep going on your current game. I don't know of anything in REGS that involves changes to scripts that run on starting a new game. It's worth a shot anyway...

For following the REGS guide, you should probably just make sure that anywhere it specifically says what order things should go, make sure the LOOT order complies with that and make adjustments if necessary. Anything else is probably fairly safe to let LOOT sort it however it will. But something to keep in mind...right now LOOT, in my opinion, does require a little more knowledge on the part of the user to make sure things are ordered correctly. It infers the proper load order based on the actual contents of the mods, and it generally does a good job of putting things in a decent order. But, there are two situations where things sometimes break down... (there is also a possibility of a technical issue that LOOT misses, but this is not all that common). First is where a compatibility patch assumes that the original mods will be in a specific order...LOOT may not necessarily order it that way. One example of this is the ETaC - Winterhold & EWDR patch. There are a number of overlapping records between the two that are not addressed in the compatibility patch. It is assumed (I think) that ETaC will be first, then EWDR, and the patch addresses cases where the ETaC records are preferable over EWDR. But, if LOOT put those in the other order, then you would have very different results. Second is when two mods have overlapping edits and the order is arbitrary from a technical standpoint (as-in, either way will not cause any errors), but one order may be preferable for some non-technical reason (aesthetics, cohesion, etc.). An example here is ELFX and RCRN. These will technically work no matter which order you put them, but it looks better if you put ELFX after RCRN. Because the LOOT order can change based on what is in your load order, with the absence of any other rules to dictate the order, these sorts of situations may go one way for one person, and a different way for a different person. So, it is important with LOOT that you do some sanity checking and make sure the order makes sense. If something seems out of line, you can download the BOSS masterlist as a text file and look at how it ordered things. It is also really helpful if you can look at a compatibility patch in TES5Edit and understand what it is doing to make things compatible, and understand what assumptions it makes about the original mods. Edit: Now that I think of it, I may have been wrong about LOOT requiring more knowledge. BOSS was even less trustworthy than LOOT...

A lot of unresolved references, the game just ignores them. There are tons of unresolved references in the official ESM's (especially Dawnguard, it seems). I am not sure what the line is...which ones are just ignored and which ones cause actual errors. On my last load-out, I made one huge compatibility patch, but when I went updating several mods, it got to be a pain to update. This time I am trying a different route, merging most compatibility patches with one of the parents where possible, merging the rest of them into smaller batches, then doing one final handmade patch at the end to resolve remaining conflicts. Hopefully, that will end up less work later when I want to change things :-/

I am not sure if this is due to changes in ETaC, but I am seeing an unresolved reference in "REGS - STEP Patch.esp", for the outfit on the NPC Rustleif: [00:00] Checking for Errors in [12] REGS Patch - STEP Extended.esp[00:00] DOFT - Default outfit -> [0100FB84] <Error: Could not be resolved>[00:00] Above errors were found in :Rustleif "Rustleif" [NPC_:0001361E][00:00] Above errors were found in :GRUP Top "NPC_"[00:00] Above errors were found in :[12] REGS Patch - STEP Extended.esp This came up while trying to merge it. I was able to just assign him BlacksmithOutfit02, like it was originally in Skyrim.esm.

In the RRR+NSUtR pach, I notice it also has ETaC listed as a master. However, I don't see anything in the patch that actually edits anything from ETaC, and if I do a "clean masters" in TES5Edit, it removes the ETaC master. Am I missing something? Or could the ETaC master be safely removed from that patch?

I am pretty sure none of the quest mods or extra lands have any complex dependencies in the patches. I think you can (for the most part) just drop anything you don't want to use, with the possible exception of the stuff in REGS - Cities. When in doubt, check the masters on the patches. The only things that have any kind of patch inter-dependency will be referenced as masters on the same patch somewhere.