Aiyen

Yes it does it fine without SkyRE installed, and then does it when it is. This stands just infront of ASG in the masterlist when you search for it in BUM. I guess it means that if SkyRE is installed it should not put it in the list as recognized. Also it does not matter if you create a manual override, since it is technically in the list already so guess it is a sort of bug that the BOSS team needs to take care of.

I approach I am considering working on is first an almost clean ENB install with vanilla color correction activated instead of ENB. This should provide vanilla colors but with the improved AA, Shadows etc. that ENB´s can provide. This is then going to be the "vanilla" ENB that people with little or no experience can just use to improve their vanilla game. Then I imagine one for CoT / RS with properly only a color correction shader in the mix to have more control and keep the colors vanilla close without ruining the changes brought up by the mods. This way its kept simple and tweaking can be done mostly ingame in the newest ENB versions to alter what people do not like or agree with. I also propose that DoF´s are kept as their own optional downloads so people can decide for themselves. But for now I want to make sure I have a stable Skyrim revisited base to start from, and I want to try to kill a dragon with a two handed sword! (Only had the game for a month now so everything is still weeee! ;) )

Yes COT and RLO have announced that they are making a (un)holy union, or just a smart divide and conquer, and focus on what they do best instead of trying to do everything twice. So far I have COT and RLO in my setups and are tweaking with those in mind. Atm I am figuring out which parameters strongly affect a setup with and without COT. But considering how close they both are to major updates, then I am spending my efforts on general tweaking and trying to design an intuitive setup for how to tweak colors and post processes.

I do not mind sharing what I learn about ENB´s. Ever since I got started last week I have swept the ENB forum and nexus for info and guides into setting up ENB´s and figuring out what the various shader codes do etc. Pretty much only been installing the Skyrim revisited model and tweaking that for max. stability on my machine, and most of that testing and tweaking is going into finding a good ENB that I could see myself playing with and not just getting a few nice screenshots. All this ENB studying (Pretty much my entire desktop is covered in ENB folders atm :S) would be nice to share with others so if ya need the help I will do what I can to help out.

With regards to the ASG (Soul gem mod) problem with BUM and BOSS then it will not recognize it if you have SkyRE or some other mod installed. This is because they are not compatible at all I think, and it actually says so in the blue rule which comes before ASG in BUM. I guess its a service done to lessen the problems running with SkyRE, but it would be nice if it was in plain text somewhere.

Okay so I have done some extensive play testing, and I got no problems entering or leaving Castle Dour. Only place I get problems is around Riverwood because of the high amount of stuff going on there. Â Full playthough up till the first dragon kill and only 1 CTD leaving Riverwood the first time, and 1 game frezze while in the barrows. But otherwise no issues. Might remove a few mods that I do not really think attributes anything vital to the game to improve stability.

In general it is a bad idea since that will alter the vanilla data dir, which the whole point of this is not to do so you always can go back to vanilla. Do you not have a normal disk that you use for storage and put the textures there instead? I will try to play the Legion story line later tonight and see if I hit the same problem and then report back! I would guess you first try to contact the original author and ask if he is working on the issue and planing on making an update, or if you can get his permission to upload it for him. If he does not respond then just upload it yourself but make it very clear in the description who made the original and give proper credits etc. As long as credit is properly given no modder can be offended as long as its only the nexus you upload too. But that is just what I think, might be possible that its totally wrong! :)Â

Before you throw alot of money after that please also remember to look at the rest of your hardware... It would be so sad to spend alot of money on just a gfx card when it is in truth the entire computer that matters when you run the game engine at these extremes! Heck even Neo have to halfsize the majority of his big textures mods, and his computer is almost as close to the best of the best as you can get today. Which just proves that the stability of SR is not purely dependent on having a great gfx setup. I currently have a problem with silly loading times just outside of Riverwood, the problem is fixed if I load another savegame first and then load it. But if I just load that first from the main menu then it will just show me a loading screen and I have to restart the game. Hence always have two or more savegames so you can circumvent this problem, assuming it is the same thing.Â

Generally you should not do it to the vast majority of your textures since then you will of course get something where you can see a clear difference. Also AOF mountains and LOD textures should not be touched unless you go to a lower res in general. This also applies to WATER and body and armor textures. Due to the special shapes and function etc. the optimization and half sizing will make a very visible impact. Instead of doing it on everything go with one thing at a time and try to play though to the first dragonkill... Riverwood requires so much memory now that if your system is not really stable you will not be able to run back and forth all the time without crashes. If you have to ddsopt and half size every single texture mod to get good stability then it is more worth it just to use the 1kx1k packages of many mods instead since then you get the middle ground between performance and visual experience... but yes it sucks to go to that once you have seen the 2kx2k beauty. Also I can highly recommend an ENB with just a DoF (That is not to invasive.) if you got a small gfx card. Should not affect VRAM but rather the general processing power of your gfx card. This will make sure to blur out most of the stuff you are not focusing on and hence make sure the apparent lower res textures are not that apparent while running about and fighting etc.

The way I understand it for normals, then what you say is true. However I think that the blurry effect is mainly done on meshes like actors, trees and other items that have a mesh with alot of small details on them. Also water textures are really sensitive since they are made to fit a rather specific role that if done wrong will be very visible. But interresting stuff to be sure and worth remembering if you find a really horrible texture at some point in a playthough. Also about Ars Metallica then there are a few other mods that got updated where Neo´s guide no longer applies since the author made the change him/herself. Also make sure to check if you are selecting the unofficial HRDLC patch in tes5edit since then some entries can get slightly different names.Â

You could always just make a user rule that overrides the masterlist and place it manually in BUM. Search for it in the masterlist to the right. Right click it and create override. It should now be on the left side and you just put it back into the list.Â

Also remember to load textures from one folder, and save the optimized ones in another... It just sucks if you have to redownload SRO 2k for example.

Look further back in the thread NotARobot, (about page 60ish I think) I made a small quick and dirty guide on how to do it if you need more "details".

I also had problems in those areas, persistent CTD, it was enough for me to just half size all the normal maps in SRO and optimize all the AV packages. If that is not enough try to get the 1k version of SRO and try with that. But also try to run with papyrus log and make sure it is not a script based CTD, by checking which scripts are executed before CTD. Saying that try to run a char without activating frostfall and other mods and see if the CTD persists. It should also go without saying that you start a fresh char every time... and make sure to run both AV and bashed patch every time you change an esp (These mods depend in some way on having an up to date list of your current loadorder to function properly as I understand the documentation)... and proberly also FNIS for good measure. Another thing worth checking out if it turns out to be RAM related is the SIMM installation. Many of the changes it brings are higher amounts of polygons in meshes, which all things considered requires more RAM and performance to render at all, and if the game engine cannot load in a mesh it will most likely just flat out crash, since it cannot draw a texture on top of it etc.

To "solve" this Just go to the enbeffect.fx and comment out the grain. Or just use his non cinematic version. What is nice about this enb compared to so many others is that the author have made it somewhat easy to change the effects by setting it up in a nice way in the files, and also provide a few comments about what stuff does. Along with a nice range of different pallets to try out. It is better service then most other ENB´s provide, since they just have "Look at these shiny screenshots" but they tend to forget that every monitor displays colors differently hence why it is so hard to find "The perfect ENB". Strange about the performance for you toshaka... on my old computer which only had a GTX 260 and 4Gb DDR2 ram I had a massive boost in performance going from .119 to .132 and even more going from injector to wrapper. But since there are so silly many variables involved perhaps it is a bit...stupid of me to say that performance increase when you go to higher versions since this is not always true for everyone!Â

STEP ENB´s are woefully out of date which means they just wont look like they are supposed to if you use a newer version. Hence even if the author calls something "vanilla" then there have been made so many changes to the core code by now that the author or you would need to compensate. And yes you could use the old versions, but there have been made major optimizations and improved performance to the code so you get better FPS and use less VRAM etc. so there would not really be any point. There is also the whole discussion about whether STEP should even suggest an ENB or not. I personally think they should just recommend a base install of ENB with activated vanilla color correction and then SSAO etc. Then it will be up to people to decide on their own shader effects, DoF etc. That being said, nice call on the unreal cinematic ENB neo, I am totally in love with its DoF and shader effects! Might tweak the colors a little bit. But it really does work wonder when you have enhanced lighting and RLO on, really nice and immersive, and also not that performance heavy!

Got caught up in trying to tweak ENB´s :S should never have downloaded the guide that explains what everything does! Now i cant stop tweaking! About stability, then I added a few more mods that I think I am going to try to go with if stability still allows it. Enhanced light n fx, RLO, CoT and various patches. Also added duel combat (Because I do not like vanilla combat), and skyrim unleashed (Because SkyRE is just to invasive with this list, and I kinda only want what this mod gives except the food part anyways.) and then immersive weapons and armor.

Where there not a version that just allowed one to simply move the objects around? Then at least the gameplay annoyance factor goes down, and you can still throw a spoon in someones face. I do not know if it will make patching simpler or keep it at the same level as now.

Okay found out the reason. I have not deleted the unofficial high res esp, only deactivated it, and when it is also selected in tes5edit then the entries get renamed to B instead of A! Strange that is the only entry in the entire guide that does that.Â

Here is a very short guide on half sizing using ddsopt for you. 1. Setup ddsopt as per the step guide. (There are nice screenshots showing every single setting.) 2. Go to the constraints tap and select the desired resolution (In the case of SRO 2k use 1024x1024) 3. Select a folder or file containing the unmodified SRO textures in the top. You should now see the entire file structure and textures. 4. Select the folder you want it to store the new textures in the bottom. (Use a new empty folder so you do not overwrite something you do not intend!!!) 5. Click the red cross button. 6. Type " *_n.dds " without the " " and press apply. Now in the list below you should only see files of that type. 7. Click the green select button to select them all. 8. Remove the  _n.dds and press apply, you should now see the entire list of textures with only the _n.dds ones selected 9. Click the process button and go for a drink and food depending on how powerfull your CPU is. Afterwards verify that the size of the files in the new folder is smaller then the corresponding ones in the folder containing the 2k originals. 10. Copy them into your modorganizer/mods/SRO folder and overwrite. (ddsopt should keep the entire folder structure intact during the process.) Remember to return the contraint settings back to 8kx8k so you dont do an uninteded reduction of quality when you do your next optimization.Â

Hmmm I only filtered " *_n.dds ". Guess there is no point in optimizing the _msn files as well as long as the game runs stable. Oh well tonight is ENB night! And then hopefully actually test run the game up until the first dragon fight! Oh yes and btw a typo in you GDO fix here (The last one before saving.) Expand "Dialog Topic">"0A00C497" and select the "000D5EC0" node. It should be: Expand "Dialog Topic">"0B00C497" and select the "000D5EC0" node.Â

Are you right clicking in the condition row or in the row that actually says "arcadia" ? You can look out to the left where the names for the various rows are. You should be able to right click on the condition row under the GDO esp name and say remove.

Half sizing the normals maps works wonders indeed, and if you are using an ENB with even one of the less invasive DoF's then you cannot really see the difference anymore anyhow. Also I tried about every single new ENB released this month and my computer just laughs at their petty attempt to make it sweat it seems. I get a good stable between 30-40fps in out and indoor depending on which ENB. This is using just the default presents and not doing any tweaks to the ENB ini. Sadly I got a few problems finding one I really like, most of them have a bad time doing so fire and torches look realistic, but I guess I will just have to make my own ENB based on the one I like the most until I get the desired result. Also did a bit more research on the VRAM/RAM CTD issues. I also did some RAM bench-markings to see how and what the game was doing with the RAM while playing. Since skyrim is a 32bit app. it can only max. actively access about 3.2GB of RAM. If your game reaches this point then as I have understood and observed it on my own machine then the computer has two options. 1. Create a buffer in the RAM for very fast access. While running Skyrim on my machine I have windows using about 3GB and skyrim about the same, however there is also a reserved buffer area of about 6GB. Once I shut the game down this buffer gets cleared, so I have to assume that it is the game using it to swap the RAM really fast. 2. If no RAM is available then it will access the virtual memory cache on your HDD, however this process is really slow, and will not be able to respond fast enough if you load in a complex cell while running your machine on the limit. The dependency on the VRAM comes in that it is about twice as fast at reading and writing as normal RAM is and is supposed to help the slower ram by storing all the textures and info required to render a scene. Hence if you can load all your textures in there then your normal RAM can focus on other game elements. If this is not the case then the RAM needs to store this info on top of everything else, and then even with RAM cache then there is just too much data and the game CTD upon loading a complex cell, or you get artifacts like objects without textures on them etc, which makes the game engine more unstable since it requires textures on objects to properly do other stuff. So in general if you do not have at least have 8-16GB DDR3 1600Mhz (Why would you not? RAM is cheaper then Pizza these days) and a decent modern CPU/Mb then you will run into more CTD´s then people who do have this while playing SR. However the puzzling part about CTD due to lacking memory is that in an ideal world then the game should only begin to stutter or experience lag spikes while it catches up and this is also what most people observe at some point or another while playing. The reason for CTDs hence also have a heavy game engine component which we can only try to reduce the significance off by cleaning mods, making sure the load order is correct, and that there are no scripts running amok in the background trying to access some game info and failing all the time, since this also takes up memory.

Okay continued my optimizations So far I have disabled the "punish your machine" and stick to "Ultra" shadow ini settings. I also reduced the sizes of all *_n.dds normal maps in SRO 1.6 2k to 1kx1k max and ran another go. No issues and VRAM stable around 1800Mb at max in all tested locations so far (Yes I even went to the ritual stone and killed the necromancer and danced naked in the moonlight!) No problems so far, so will continue to test activating lighting and ENB now. It is also clear to me that it must be a (V)RAM/Cache issue since every spot I have found around Riverwood and Whiterun where I could provoke a certain CTD I now only get a big stutter as the game loads in the new cells. For the FNIS 3.5 install will it be enough to remove the folders it made in the overwrite dir, and then remove it from the mods list and install the new version ?

No problem toshaka! :) Well I guess we got different computer setups, hence why we experience different things, but I think it is nice to have a few places with consistent CTD so that I can work out the chinks and optimizations from that. Also I just remembered that I removed the "punish your machine" part of Skyrim flora yesterday, and reduced to the 2k HDtrees instead of 4k. I have disabled all saves etc like the guide says. I do not recall any problems with the racemenu, if that was the case I guess some script or such would be visible in the papyrus logs ? One mod I have considered getting rid of was the more interactive objects... basically because I am tired of picking up wagons when I want stuff in it. Also I think it is very immersion breaking that you run about with a wagon in your backpack.Â