Daagar

Great find! I spend too much time playing with ENBs, and this will make the effort much less frustrating.

Oh, so we should still be using his Behave->Texture values? Since his response was to refer back to the original post, I thought maybe the extra values there were no longer necessary/recommended.

Some ENBs have actually begun to package these fixes directly in their mods, because it removes the need for them to ship various other textures that were done as workarounds. I of course can't remember off-hand exactly which ENB I saw recently that bundled it...

I finally figured out what I did to cause this to happen, and turns out it was a legit bug in MO (still caused by my own lack of paying attention, but...). The MO author patched it up immediately, so be sure to update to 0.12.5 if you haven't already. Sorry for the derail, but I figured this might be a decent place to mention this since most folks will be heavily using MO here.

The biggest issue with ENBs is that they tend to be very personal. Granted, you could say that about most any mod, but it seems to apply even more when it comes to ENB profiles. Just to give an example - I have an older system where I originally installed CoT with the "Project ENB" mod. For that monitor, it looked great and I was quite pleased. I now have a newer system available so I installed the same pair. And it looks awful now. But I went and tried out RCRN + RCRN Plus, and it was great. ENBs are _very_ particular to your monitor, especially if you have an old dying one like I apparently have :) Not saying that suggestions wouldn't be welcome, but it is hard to promote one over the other.

I think I narrowed down the MO bug that wipes out the mod folder. If you manually install a mod, by default it is given no name. If you aren't paying attention and fail to provide a name... I'll submit a report to the MO author if I don't see anyone else has already said something. Satyre - Grab Recuva (portable version), install it to a drive other than where MO was, and see if you can recover anything. I was able to get 98% of my edited .esp files back this way.

While I agree with much of what you said, just to play Devil's Advocate I'll say that Skyrim Revisited is not STEP, it is the personal config of Neovalen that he just happens to be nice enough to share and document at an amazing level of detail. :) What I might suggest would be to have Neovalen finish up whatever the 'last 15%' is that is not SkyRe (or other overhaul), and basically stamp it as "v1.0" and those folks that don't want any overhaul are good to go. Then, start up a v2.0 that delves into SkyRe. Or, a v1.0-SkyRe, v1.0-SPERG, v1.0-ASIS, whatever, depending on the level of effort involved and if he wants to try out various configs. People would then be able to follow the "mod pack" of their choice, or branch out from the base v1.0 and do their own thing.

Here's a link to SPERG since I keep bringing it up: https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/24445 It has some nice benefits over something like SkyRe - you can import an existing character, for example. And quite possibly fewer conflicts with other mods, since this limits itself to a perk overhaul. Worth a look, even if SkyRe wins :)

kryptopyr: Check out SPERG - it might adjust the perk trees in ways you find better for your playstyle if Neovalen ends up going the SkyRe direction. (My unconfirmed suspicion is that SPERG will be easier for people to add on their own to a Revisited build instead of SkyRe, which might require more magic by Neovalen to accommodate).

I have no opinions of SkyRe myself, but I'll suggest taking a look at SkyRe, Requiem, and SPERG if you're looking to add an 'overhaul' style mod. Based on hear-say alone, Requiem is the 'hardcore' version, SkyRe is a fairly massive overhaul, and SPERG focuses on making a much nicer perk system without going quite to the extremes of the other two. I've been leaning towards SPERG myself because of the approach it takes to the perk system: It makes a lot of 'mundane' things happen automatically as you level (damage modifiers, etc.), and changes the perks into actual "goodies" to strive toward. I believe the author at one point mentioned you could probably complete the game without a single perk, but you'd of course be missing out on all the fun bits. Interaction with Frostfall and Realistic Needs might drive your decision too (both of which I passed on because I'm not quite that hardcore...)

Don't give up hope :) In your MO priority list, disable everything, load the game and test. If that works, start re-enabling a chunk of mods at a time (in priority order) and re-test. That will let you narrow down the culprit. If you want to short-cut your debugging efforts, disable Fores, Apachii, and Automatic Variants as a first test. Fores and AV are sensitive to running the 3rd party process correctly, and Apachii can simply be a memory hog. For my own sob story, Recuva was able to find 99% of the mod dir that got wiped out, including pretty much all the edited .esp files. Huzzah! It only failed to bring back 377 out of 38000 files (representing just a handful of mods), and for those I can simply reinstall the impacted mod.

Sigh. A note for folks - Mod Organizer went wonky on me tonight (it could have been my own fault, I don't know exactly what happened) but it managed to wipe out my entire 'mod' directory. All those edits - poof. I figured darn, but no big deal, I'll just reinstall and grabbed the backed-up .esp files from the TES5Edit backups dir! Much to my chagrin, those backups are all made _prior_ to editing. Makes sense in retrospect, but I had it in my head they were post-edit backups (the original is in the mod itself! Why would I need it backed up?). So, don't be silly and keep a backup of your mod directory :) At least I don't have to go through the pain of downloading them again - that directory stayed put.

I'm not sure this is really needed, but figured I'd drop this here anyway - you might want to put a note about the UNP and Better Male mods to merely mention that 'underwear' versions exist. I just recently finished getting everything installed and hadn't really paid much attention to those particular mods, and was a bit surprised when I looted my first guard :) I only bring this up because I'm modding this up as much for my son as myself and that could have been... awkward. My own fault, obviously, but just noting it for others. Love the changelog. The guide would have been impossible to track pre-release otherwise! So far, everything loads and works without any issues out of the gate, though I haven't really started 'playing' yet. Looks amazingly impressive.

Ah, well that solves all issues then! However, for myself personally it all may be moot at this point. I had a chance to try TheCompiler's RCRN Plus, and unless something else blows me away I think I've found my preference :)

Eep... my mistake then. I'll go back and review my setup then, as most have looked terrible. I might be having conflicts somewhere with incompatible settings. (I use SweetFX in borderlands2 and settlers7, for example, and it works wonderfully there).

Nice comparison. What I really hope to see more of in the future though is a greater number of ENB presets that make use of SweetFX (SMAA) instead of FXAA. I've been toying with a few ENB presets on top of a Neovalen-based 'Skyrim Revisited' setup, and the FXAA just makes things a horrible blurred mess. I need to do some more tinkering to try a few of these without FXAA enabled to judge things better. I just found that TheCompiler has RCRN Plus, which _is_ SweetFX-based. Hoping to give that a shot too, despite the RCRN authors saying that it doesn't go quite far enough with fixing/preserving the colors of the original RCRN.

Someone mentioned it being too 'bleak'. That actually might be a feature - one of the complaints leveled against many ENB profiles is the over-saturation or adjustment to colors that take it too far from vanilla (which is in fact pretty bleak looking). That might make this one a good fit as an alternative even if it isn't "the" recommendation.

I tried re-converting the riverwood inn sign that uLoop used using 0.8 pre5b and it works fine there. I was able to duplicate the 'black' error with update 1. I haven't tried the other black textures yet, but would assume the same results there. EDIT: Beaten by PCGamer above. Doh!

z... way back on post #430, you have some suggested DDSopt settings in the form of screenshots. It seems that the last picture isn't displaying for some reason. And I just _know_ it is going to be the most vital setting :) Can you repost or put a text description of what that picture shows? Thanks!

These comments are in relation to the STEP 2.2.1 WIP guide, but pertain to the SIG info so I'm posting them here, though some of the comments might require a change to the STEP guide rather than the SIG (or both). I know all these guides are works in progress, so take the below suggestions as merely that! Skyrim Tab: * References to Skyrim Unplugged should be removed based on the past page of posts, I believe. Maybe replaced with a note that if Steam forces an update, it will be necessary to create a new backup/update/etc. If Unplugged stays, it might be handy to have a link/reference to it earlier in the guide. Currently, it is mentioned a bit out-of-the-blue with no context. DLC Tab: * The new STEP 2.2.1 guide asks for benchmarks to be taken at various points, however the first reference to benchmarking is _after_ one has presumably run through the SIG (per step 1.A). However, the SIG suggests different methods of doing a base texture pack install (ie., the official vs. optimized, depending on your video card's vram). I would suggest that the STEP guide insert a 'benchmark' step _prior_ to adding the texture DLC as choice of texture DLC will impact this baseline bench, and then a second benchmark after applying the texture DLC. Maybe something like: 1.A - Install Skyrim per the SIG (Steam/Skyrim tabs only!) 1.A.1 - Benchmark 1.A.2 - Install preferred texture pack per the SIG (DLC tab) 1.A.3 - Benchmark This of course means also moving the entire 'benchmark' section up in the guide... * The "HD Textures DLC Fix" mod now recommends https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=14719 as well. I would suggest adding this here unless it is completely unnecessary because of all the other STEP graphics updates that come later. It appears this would pertain to all installs, regardless of VRAM settings (the optimized pack includes HD Textures DLC Fix, but not the HD Textures DLC Tweaks, I believe). * It might be worthwhile to rename the DLC tab to 'Texture DLC', since other DLC (dawnguard, etc) aren't mentioned here.