Aiyen

A massive overhaul of all of blackreach... trying to make it so the place is not so bland and boring in many places... in general adding more stuff to see, adding a bit more depth to some existing locations etc. oh yeah and getting rid of that horrible horrible HORRIBLE teal thing the developers felt would make it look good. Trying to go in once a day look at a few places and see what I can come up with that would make it look a bit more epic. But I am running out of real estate and ideas... since I try not to do the same thing twice. Just want to create an open beta so I can get some more feedback, I feel like I can do more with it but just do not have the ideas yet. And I kinda do not want it to be just another project folder on my computer. The thread is here in the skyrim subforum :)

I am currently working on my own project, which is taking up all my skyrim time! I would really like to get that finished and published! So I do not know if I will get the time to really look at the meshes and textures in detail for at least another week or so. Also I will need to go over it slowly to see what exactly you mean.. this being the first time I do it and what not.. I am afterall not the wizard you are sparrow :)

Some cards have excess power pins for no reason other then it is required for other versions and or setups. At least afaik.

Even for vividian you "need" to merge eventually. Neovalens guide does a great job of explaining it in detail. There is absolutely nothing to be scared of with merging weathers and regions. It is really as simple as saying "preserve formID´s" and hit the button and it will work. In that regard weathers are one of the most easy things to mod in Skyrim. The reason it is difficult is because of a really clunky interface in the CK with so many settings that you can only edit in really annoying and time consuming ways. As well as the CK preview not being an accurate representation of your changes.. so you always have to go ingame. But by all means try out this preset as well as vividan, both a great pieces of work with a lot of effort and skill put into it, and it shows!

The reason for the Nvidia recommendations have been mostly because for the past many many many ENB .dll´s they have been superior in every single way. With hacks, and weird bypasses, and general reliance on Boris´s mood if it even worked on AMD. It has nothing to do with one vendor being better then the other as such.. just for our little niche of the internet then it has been. It is only in these later versions where Boris´s have managed to get more control over the AMD issues and become faster to fix them as they pop up that it has improved. As for people reporting bad performance on various ENB threads.... in almost 90% of all cases it comes back to them not having optimized their mod lists or setups... some even tend to forget they set the shadow res to 4k in the ini´s. Which because the engine is so unoptimized will just never really work because it was never ever meant to. As for the more general recommendations around here with the current generation. As Daniel says... the power efficiency is so superior that whatever marginal gains in performance the current AMD cards have is entirely irrelevant. You will end up paying a premium using AMD cards.. and in some countries that premium gets much higher even after a 3 month period. Considering that most people tend to skimp on power supply choices the power bill gets even larger. But there are high hopes for the next generation from AMD.. they finally got the console market down, and as such more engines will most likely get more optimization made over the next decade that will make it the better choice. We shal see.

Hmmm interesting... guess I should take a look at that technique! :) Thanks for the heads up!

Okay I am in the progress of making a silly large gallery with lots of shots of how the preset should look. There are now stable links! So I just updated this little post with them! Enjoy! :) Here they are Random exteriors Random interiors Dawn dusk gallery Random Characters

Skylight does not include a custom weather .esp... design choice. I already worked on the CoT weather patch and that is the only requirement if you want a CoT based list. If you want to use vanilla or pure weather there are choices for that as well. Never understood why people think CoT is difficult... in these days with merge scripts all CoT related .esp can be merged at the click of a button and voila. The only thing that might cause a conflict at the end of the day is the regions, which are so easy to patch manually that it should not even be a bother... only sound mods touch that as well. Anyways, this nice preset have just made an .esp to complement its changes and make sure the post processing match nicely together. Vividan goes all the way and tries to support everything in the known modding world.... by again just utilizing that weathers and regions are so easy to merge and manage.

When you say restore do you mean load a save game or trying to get an old save to work with a new mod list ? If you mean load then FNIS would be the most likely suspect... if you mean trying to get an old save to work then it could be anything.

Afaik it should be... not really any other mods that touch blackreach that much.

Please post specs and enblocal.ini inside spoiler tags as well. Hard to help without facts! :)

Okay a progress update for anyone following this. I do think the mod is ready for some more extensive testing... at least I would love some input from others since my own ideas as well as the available real estate is shrinking. Mainly I am just focusing on adding small clutter items, as well as added detail to various locations currently. Currently there are hydro dams... lava falling from the sky... mysterious soul gem structures to name the highlights... but also lots of other various smaller and greater construction projects to add a bit more charm and a bit more to see. So if anyone wants to experience the new blackreach, as well as provide some feedback and suggestions for future expansion, just throw me a pm.

Higher playing resolution means more performance cost... the higher you go the more strain you put on your system. Hence it becomes harder to avoid all types of stuttering etc.

The only difference between the versions is that the newer ones include new meshes for tress, and new placement for tress and flora. The reason it is not in STEP is because of this. Most likely the newest version wont be included either since it again goes beyond the scope of what STEP is. That is not saying it is a bad mod. If you got the performance for it go ahead and try it out and see if your list can handle it or not. And ofc. if you like the visual changes.

You can start be disabling the auto detect feature and input numbers on your own by trial and error to find what works best with your setup. Also it is a good call to not use any monitor software while playing.. since they might be the cause themselves. Also ENB already allows you an FPS counter ingame. By freezeups I assume you mean stuttering, which can be improved by altering the values manually. CTD´s can be anything.. most often some incompatibility or lack of a proper general patch for your list. Looking at your list you do have a few issues I could point out. 1st on the list... if you can live without open cities.. do it. That concept is just not worth it imo. Cities are massive and complex areas.. and there is a reason they have their own worldspace entirely. Especially when you also run all those scripted mods you do. It would not be unthinkable that your CTD´s would go down if it was not used. 2nd... why are you using both the CoT interior plugin as well as the RLO ones ? You will want the RLO ones only I would imagine. 3rd.. whatever that autosave manger and latency checker is... just remove that. In a stable list there is no point in using such things at all, and again they will most likely just add to issues by being there.

It will be a sad sad day when my g15 has to go!... already the lighting is worn.. the buttons are starting to vanish and I have had a few cases of input lag or not registered inputs! Alas a good cleaning seems to save it every time still. Funny thing is the only reason I use it is because of the LCD display with the clock on it! :) As for the whole vendor thing... the only reason I keep using EVGA is because they in my experience have the most superior RMA and customer support. It is just nice to have that guarantee that if anything goes wrong during the 3 years I expect the card to live in that I can just send it in and get a new one with no fuss... I hate dealing with the middle man. That said the Gigabyte one does look sexy though.

Waterfalls are always a pain in the behind... Guess one should make a modified version of the dynamic meshes where their specular components are vastly decreased... will look dull without an ENB though. At least I never found something that looked decent without it and with.

You need a specific skin texture mod to handle hands, and skin in general. Those textures do look like they are more or less the vanilla ones. If you can afford it then go for some 4k textures for skin and a decent normal map. For males I think this one is the best around currently. for female it depends entirely on what meshes you are using.

It is impossible to see any difference when you are zoomed out that far. At that range you cannot see any features of the texture. go to 3rd person mode and open the console and type tfc then try to get up close to the hands. They should look identical at that stage, assuming all the mip map levels in the textures are good.

Until you start getting annoyed by visual artifacts such as flickering... in general around 0.5, and 0.6 are good enough. But it does depend on the overall preset how much you can get away with. But the lower you go the more performance you get. I can suggest you use "coc markarthexterior01" as a testing location. Look at markarth... it will be one of the areas that will flicker before anything else.

reduce sizescale and sourcetexturescale under SSAO and Reflection and you will get more FPS

Easiest way to not use it is simply to create the patch following the instructions on your own.. ignoring any of the ones that relate to it... which are quite a few. At least if you do not have that much tes5edit experience to remove all the records manually. That is what I always do anyways.. since I do not like the mod, just had too many small annoying issues with it to use it. If you want to do it that way, then again look in the guide.. all the details are there, simply use the search function and you will get all the records eventually.

Guess this is as good a time as any to really suggest this. tapioks over at the ENB forums have made a nice series of various videos showcasing what each thing does... I dunno if this is something we want to link to in the guide. Would probably be a bit better then still shots. Any thoughts from the wiki specialists?

Okay so version 7.0 is out now Main attraction this time around is a new new dynamic bloom method I have cooked up. Essentially this means that stuff will glow less when you do not look at it directly. Reworked most of the weathers and interiors, so that they look nice with the new tonemapping settings I have decided to use. Added back speculars and reworked SSS so that skin now should look rather good. Fixed tons of issues, and tried to get as many of the suggestions I have received into it as possible. I guess I could write a lot of other fancy stuff.. but guess all interested should just try it out instead!

If you use both then that is why.. however you will have blurred edges since that is all that edgeAA does. In combination with SMAA it will remove those last jagged bits, at the cost of some clarity for those who go pixel hunting. Some people just cant stand that. All SMAA are based on the same base code... just a few who have cranked up the settings to max. Specifically I think it was Oyama or midhras who named his SweetFX settings for Uber back in the day, and those settings files have since propagated around. However it will never be able to compete with MSAA in pure quality.. only in quality/performance ratio. And ofc. being software based it allows other effects to use the specifics that hardware AA normally would. Altering the SMAA is (in my opinion) also really easy... it specifically says in the default settings file what range the values go between, and how they alter quality. I personally just use 1440p and edgeAA... a few jagged egdes here and there at extreme angles, but that is to be expected... even 8x MSAA would have a hard time removing those.