crime_syndicate

Answered you in PMs with more detail as to avoid making a long off-topic discussion on this thread but basically after doing a few tests I essentially didn't see anything wrong with using vanilla body meshes + the hand/feet replacers for UNP I normally use. If anyone knows the post detailing the issues TechAngel mentioned, please do link it.

That's what I thought as well (that he just subsurfed / subdivided / turbosmoothed / whatever), it was looked pretty obvious. It seems the result is pretty hit and miss depending on the original mesh, on Azura I thought it looked okay for the limited work he apparently put into it. Kinda like textures as you said, some times you can get away with just contrast tweaks/filters of vanilla textures (just don't call it a rework from scratch), sometimes it will look terrible... I'm only 90% sure of this (would need to check to make sure) but I think you can use any UNP hand/feet replacer already anyway because UNP kept the vanilla seams.

I'm quite noobish honestly but making a more "modest" version of the statue is pretty much as simple as importing the mesh, moving / relaxing a few vertices and exporting back. (for once the 3DS nif exporter didn't even mess up the texture paths, that's glorious)

/troll mode on Lacks a line in the requirements section : Must not fear laying down the banhammer on offending users /troll mode off

Could it be the normal maps ? they dont seem that good, on the other hand the meshes are really pretty smooth (and pretty high poly too). Well the mod is about adding 3d snow to stuff, not about making higher poly meshes to all vanilla stuff, you can always delete the worldspace edits or probably just replace the prometheus meshes by these if you want to.

This is coming from some cryptic advanced stuff that DDSopt is doing because recompressing the default files with the Nvidia DDS plugin (default settings) as DXT1 does nothing and with DDSopt as DXTx (so DXT1 too) it indeed comes out smoothed. All the default files are seemingly DXT1 as well, and they're all blocky, more or less, when viewed at 100% in PS.

Ah so that's where the .lst file is. Thanks a lot, gonna try this :)

Yeah it is, No Snow changes the meshes to its own which are the low-poly vanilla ones with snow on top, as I said. There's someone in the last nexus comments of Stunning Statues saying this, I wouldn't even have thought of it otherwise, had no idea why the high-poly meshes wouldn't appear in my game...

That took around 5 mins to do in 3DS (and 10/15 of wondering why the hell even his own high poly meshes wouldn't show up in my game when it was actually because of No Snow under the Roof redirecting the paths to its own vanilla + snow meshes) so if the author agreed to it it should be pretty easy to make a vanilla style / lore-friendly / less (.)(.) more pew-pew / STEP-friendly version :p

Yes raising the memory patch values (block 1 to 768) seems to be a requirement when generating with the high preset (I never tried any lower preset under as that runs well enough for me) : I didn't check in a rigorous manner but basically just standing around outside of whiterun stables (and in other places too) block1 usage appears goes from around 250-260 mb without DynDOLOD (I believe I had DynDOLOD static LOD objects still enabled) to 500-550 mb with DynDOLOD fully on. Also I remember you said something about overwriting some files with the content of notreelod.lst, is it the DynDOLOD_skyrim-skyrimesm-tree-xxx.txt ones ? I can't seem to get any changes to the billboard distant trees when making custom rules for them (I tried "landscape\trees" and "DynDOLOD\lod\trees"), there must be something I'm doing totally wrong ? :p

Yup, that place can indeed feel like a dark corner of the internet at times ... :p

If you don't fear going on the site "that shall not be named", there's also Morten Hairs and zzjay's hairstyles which are nice and do not add 200+ hairs and 1gb-2gb of textures unlike SG and KS (they're around 300 Mb each). I find Morten Hairs to be particularly good, well converted, and it also has proper .tri files unlike pretty much all other mod which means you can even morph it ingame with RaceMenu 3.0. I should be probably mention that like SG, the reason it's hosted there and not on nexus is because the permissions are not really "nexus-worthy".

Here are a few quick shots of this black magic with 2D billboard trees bypassed : It's working really well and once in game I had to remind myself that this is actually just ugrids 5 lol The performance hit from doing this seems somewhat hefty (then again I have stuff like bForceFullLOD=1 and fTreeLoadDistance=125000.0000 in my inis, so I guess that's not helping ? :p) but even then it's nothing worse than ugrids >5, the visual result is better and it's obviously so much safer script wise... By the way, could you guys give us the proper procedure for bypassing the 2D trees ? I did it sloppily since I didn't really know how to do and in some spots they were still there.

alright :)

yep, hopefully he releases the Better Males patch for his male texture first though :p

He's actually quite active, if not very active (see https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/2x3jlq/mod_wip_preview_finnvald_the_mage_adventurer/ ), just not on his texture mod it seems :p

I assume current STEP for landscape textures is Serious HD ? If so you might want to take a look at the SHD 3.0 update first before looking at anything else as it's really good, no doubt one of the best landscape packs you can get at the moment. Only problem is the author has not made 1k version yet I believe, so you would have to suggest the vram-starved to half-size them with DDSopt.

https://postimg.org/image/wz2uc62d9/ I suppose you mean the stuff that I have in green and yellow in this screenshot, if so as you can see it's part of the Bethesda mesh as well, it just clips through the body mesh in a bit more odd manner in their mesh.

Well, sure, but couldn't some sort of "extra" page still have some relevance for stuff that does not conflict/is safely removable at pretty much any given time such as SKSE plugins like this or assets replacers? For instance, there's like 20 different mods that retexture the farmhouses, you could have some stuff saying "here are a few quality alternatives for farmhouse textures other than what is used in default STEP", etc

No idea, I think if the STEP team is to include this it should be in Core, it of course does not have lore-friendlyness issues or anything of the sort, and even though it adds more stuff to render I doubt that would be enough to prevent it for making it in. The only valid reason I see not to have it in would be bugs/compatibility issues as already mentioned...

I don't know which version you're using but some of the older ones (version 1 and earlier v2 betas) had a quite gray-ish face, that was not a bug. A pretty easy fix would be to open the diffuse map in paint.net / GIMP / PS (need .dds plugin for the last 2), increase the red channel by around 10, save (as .dds obviously, and check generate mip-maps). Might need a bit of fiddling because if there's a too big color discrepancy you'll get a neck seam, but still not too bad. Otherwise I think last beta versions are not that anymore, but the look is very different and that's some uber high res stuff (8k body diffuse / 4k face) so if you don't resize them it could be tough on your vram / gfx card.

I may be going a tad off-topic here, but this is precisely the type of mod that makes me think you guys should have some sort of a "STEP additional suggested mods section" with stuff that does not necessarily fit the STEP mandate but that you can confirm is a great mod and works well with STEP. This is a very good mod that's amazingly simple to install (and uninstall if need be since it's a single SKSE plugin). Unlike the "competitor" mod Immersive First Person view that's a quite a bit more feature rich but requires a lot of fiddling in the MCM to get right, this justs works "as advertised" right off the bat, and it's really no hassle at all for your casual player that justs wants to install stuff and play ASAP (and it still has a .ini file for configuration if you need to tweak stuff, too). I personally didn't get issues with it (except that it doesn't work well with 360 animation mods, but that's expected). To sum up, I don't know if this mod fits the STEP mandate, but it definitely deserves all the attention it can get.

More sophisticated options for borderless window (in all fairness thats almost irrelevant), showracemenu precache killer (irrelevant too in STEP because RM has it) but it has an option to change TESV process priority on the fly (one setting for background, one setting for foreground). I remember I once got 3 fps more with OneTweak and that option on than with just using ENB for borderless window, but of course that was not in very serious test conditions etc. Up to you to decide if it's worth testing/including obviously.

You can try it yourself already by using DSR (downsampling) (unless they don't support it on mobile cards but I don't see why). You'll be able to see your framerate (it's probably not gonna be glorious) and GUI issues (none that I'm aware of) I googled the GTX780Ms and it seem's that's around a GTX660/660ti and SLI around a desktop 780 when scaling is okay, so assuming you're gonna be plugging this monitor on your laptop, and having a (somewhat overclocked) GTX780 myself, I can tell you that you will probably be getting anywhere from 10 to 20, maybe 25 fps with any sort of full-fledged ENB (what I mean by that is preset which has at least Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field effects enabled, since these 2 are usually the main FPS eaters). You have to get fps back anyway you can, starting by decreasing ambient occlusion sizescale and sourcetexturesscale, maybe reducing shadow resolution, etc. I don't have a 4k monitor so I can't tell you if the added sharpness and precision in the look is really worth needing such massive horsepower to push the 8 million plus pixels, but for Skyrim I'm kind of inclined to doubt it (for games with a lot of little details etc, no doubt it is worth it if you can afford it)

Oh well, tons of other mods come to mind like Expanded Towns and Cities, Convenient Horses, not to mention the million asset replacers I use but nothing that I'd rank as high I suppose :) I kind of forgot Skyrim Project Optimization though since that's pretty much a fix that everybody should use.