Aiyen

Back when I got my last MB, I have a hefty discount price for a one year norton subscription so I tried it out... initially I was actually quite pleased with it. It did its thing, had a nice swift interface and never bothered me. But even during that year they overhauled the UI, and everything else and it ended up a worse (slower, more noticeable) product then when I started using it. These days.. just MSE, and if a website seems dodgy... disable javascript and move on. Seems to work nicely enough.

There is an overhead of having ENB on... since internal functions etc still needs to run. The cost of this depends entirely on your system. You can think of it as the cost of doing the memory things. You do not just get it all for free. And 40 FPS is still quite good. If you do not like the fluctuation between 40 and 60 FPS you can just lock the FPS at 40 at all times.

Even with everything but the memory manager and parallax fix enabled there is still a cost. Also the sweetFX profile you link to will also cost something... even though it is not much. In general it sounds a bit weird if you go to super low FPS using just a sweetFX profile on the card you are using, so most likely there is a setting somewhere you have missed.

No Just get mods that do not have parallax enabled. It is a setting in meshes that determine if the effect is used or not. ENB just provides a fix so it behaves properly.

Parallax effects only work properly with ENB on, since it fixes the underlaying bugs that the default game have with that particular effect. If you do use parallax textures and meshes without ENB you will get weird stretching due to those bugs.

The CoT installer does have an option to not install the interior plugin... as I recall it calls it keep using default vanilla. Even if you do install it, just remove the interior .esp manually. Any ELE files you use should just come after relighting skyrim .esp´s and you will be fine for the most part.

Well i guess I should post mine in full detail from the main menu open the console coc riverwood (no need to use live another day or other mods... this is the fastest way to get ingame and it does not matter if you start properly or using this way... any CTD´s in the char generation can be isolated using showracemenu from the console as well.) Wait for all mods to load... and activate the mods you want to use during the test etc. You can make a save at this point so you do not have to do it all over again. tgm (High speed running will cause your death due to fall dmg!) player.setav speedmult 500 (increase move speed to 500 units, trigger by running once) Using only the main roads as far as possible run riverwood -> Markarth -> solitude -> dawnstar -> winterhold -> windhelm -> riften - > riverwood The specific way you decide to take does not really matter... what matters is that you take the same way in each run. Assuming that goes all well and dandy then coc to somewhere out in the open... I normally just use coc whiterunexterior01 ... spawn 10 mages of varying types, and then some saber cats or mammoths etc. Heavy spell casting is a CTD candidate of choice... but this test should show it (If you do not know the formID´s for mages just type "help mage" and use pgup and down to get some NPC ID´s) after that coc solitudeavenues Spawn 3 dragons while in the city (Does not work as intended with open cities mod... but using that on large lists is a no go anyways) Give your self a daedric bow or a crossbow and go hunting... you should be able to kill all three dragons without the game CTDing on you. Dragon fights are heavily scripted and depending on mods used some rather complex AI n stuff. This will make sure you will be able to handle three dragons in a stressfull environment... solitude is full of people and dragons love to just go nuts. It will also test spell on hit effects etc. Good stuff. Other areas and regions of interest: Dragonsbrigde... known play for CTD´s even in a pure vanilla game. So do not think all is lost if you get one there. Same applies near the ritual stone on the road between whiterun and windhelm. Jorvaskarr.... this place can cause all sorts of weird bugs and issues. So it is always a good idea to check it out. There are plenty of others but those are the ones that I normally use. Ofc. once you think you got it all down then comes then big one... you should be able to start a new game using the default start and using godmode and whichever weapon or spell etc.. you should be able to get to the first dragon kill without a CTD! or at least very close to it! The intro is a mean badass thing that can smash stuff... hence it is good for testing. Bugs are allowed to happen... CTD´s are not. Most of the events up to the first dragon kill will showcase just about all aspects of the game and will take about as long as the average playing session would be for most people. If you do it without god mode it will take even longer ofc. The reason for god mode is because we do not want the loading of a game to interfere. Keep in mind that some mods will disable god mode after certain effects apply to you.. like learning a power word. The whole set of tests... excluding the actual playing of the start of the game should only take about an hour or so when you have done it a few times.... also depends on how cooperative the dragons are in solitude. phew.. another wall of test! enjoy! edit: each test can be performed by loading the initial save made, or just using coc from the main menu to test... hoping the game stay alive through that entire amount of tests is in most cases wishfull thinking ofc! :)

What can I say.... the classics never go out of fashion! :)

We had a long debate about vurts way of doing it a while back... I am in no way an advocate for it since in short it is not a good test for more complex mod lists. It can work for less advanced ones and if you just want to test bandwidth.. which is highly relevant for vurts mod since it does add a lot of extra polygons to the calculations. In general there are no 100% reproduceable and reliable stability tests... since all mod lists and hardware are unique. Also skyrim can and most likely will always CTD at some point! Due to the complexity of the game it is simply unavoidable. The main thing the user want to achieve is hours worth of playing in one go. However what the tests like the one vurt does is good for beyond testing if your rig can handle the bandwidth is finding basic errors. After you have done all the tes5edit patching to make sure there are very few to no inconsistencies in your load order then you can fire up this sort of test and see how it does. My own test is the following. Movespeed at 500 start in riverwood. Run past falkreath to markarth to solitude to dawnstar to winterhold to windhelm to riften and back to riverwood. The reason for using movespeed 500 and no flying is because if you fly then you tend to move beyond the cells and do not load anything anyways... also the AI does not really like flying it really does mess it up (try to see how dragons behave when you fly.. quite hilarious). All this can and will produce false CTD´s. Another reason for not going faster is that you will tend to overshoot several cells in a row hence the game never actually loads your content at all.... which is again kinda counter productive... also it can provoke CTD´s since the game starts some processes which require certain things to be loaded. My criteria for a successfull test is that I can get past dawnstar three times in a row. After which I will try to do the test in reverse as well. In general this will allow me to cover a large portion of the game world, and see quite a few random encounters, and events and spawns... all things which should just work if the conflict resolution have been performed perfectly. If the list is really complex I will also do the same at higher player levels in order to check the high level versions of the content. At higher levels you will have more diversity on most lists and it is again vital to check so you do not end up with a borked game at lvl 40. Ofc. this is not the only test I personally do.. I got plenty of other hot spots for trouble I go and check out and see how they go as well. In general it takes me about an hour or so to stress and stability test. You can ofc. ask what all this is good for if it is not 100% reliable... well most common issues will be rooted out and if you for example get a CTD in the same spot over n over, or in the same general way (IE you get a CTD where you know a spawn will appear) then you can reduce the amount of records you will have to double check in tes5edit. That was a bit of a long and semi complex rant... hope it was somewhat useful.

It is a common spot for issues... most often related to shadow calculations. If you reduce your shadow quality to 1k it will (almost never) happen at all. The most common culprit for that area was the chandeliers.. but afaik then brumbek fixed the issues with those ages ago.. perhaps you have another mod which overwrite those meshes.

I used to have a separate linux silly security machine.. just for testing out stuff like that. Funny enough some scammers via chat try to actually help you when you say that their links only provide error messages when you click them. Ah the good ol days n stuff.

Removing the alpha channel shows several artifacts even before compression.. so with added compression it is just going to be worse I would imagine. Anyways.... if dxt5 compression produce artifacts then you are more or less going to have to rework the texture since you are not going to get much better then that. My first approach would be to go to 4k, which will reduce size of the tone gradients and perhaps remove the artifacts that way. Other then that then I only see a rework of the texture from the ground up as an option sadly! Clouds are annoying since they require delicate alpha channels, cover a rather large area relative to the pixel size of the textures... and must most often cover a rather large amount of greyscale values. Not the most optimal conditions to work under. Part reason I dislike working with them at all. On a side note... it seems like there is a vertical pattern in your alpha channel... like you used a brush with vertical lock on every other place on the texture! Dunno if that was relevant... but something I noticed, might also be part of it due to how touchy cloud textures are with the alphas.

Run tes5edit once loading all mods and it will tell you why you CTD at start.... I assume that is what is happening here. It is not much but it is far easier and faster to do then skim over the entire load order etc. Especially in these days with loot load orders that vary from run to run.

In theory no.... in practice.. then it entirely depends on the specific hardware involved.

I never touch most of the stuff that goes in there either... in fact I love having it since I know that stuff that is in there will ALWAYS take effect.. hence I do not have to worry about load order etc. when testing out stuff. All of my own personal mods are in there since well... no reason to create even more folders and clutter the list even more. With respect to various tools and skyprocs then as long as files are made in there then the next time you run they will still have the same name, and hence just be overwritten. So yeah in principle if you do not know what is going on in detail then try to keep it clean and tidy.. if you know what is in there and why it is in there.. just leave it. At the end of the day it is only a "special" folder where everything will always overwrite everything else by definition.

Depends on the mod and the changes it makes. Minor updates to scripts etc. can work just fine, however major revisions etc. will most likely bork something up since the effects are already part of the save. For stuff like textures and meshes, you just update on the fly as you see fit. Also unless you find something really gamebreaking there is no point in going through all the fuss every single time... better to just play an enjoy the game and then take all those issues next time.

Short for environment... in this case it means you need to use a 64bit windows installation to make proper use of it.

If Boris have said it then it must be so... not really any way for us to test it.

Okay since I felt I had to do something here I just went over a few things... Since I am still utterly noob when it comes to editing and doing wiki stuff then I hope someone else is going to just double check what I have added! Windowlight: Have added the info that only meshes with the glow shader are actually affected by those values. Fire: The current start mentions that this also affects waterfoam.... well it only does that if you do not use the particle patch, which is kinda a prerequisite I would say. Specifically then Fire only affects things that have the fire shader attached to it... which should only be a few eyes and fire effects most of the time. Everything else should be affected by the particle settings only. Subsurface scattering: The entry here is kinda plain wrong the way I see it. It says to not touch the values if they are set by a preset.. but that is kinda wrong. Since the SSS effect is entirely dependent upon the texture choice used, then the end user will most likely need to actually tweak these values if they find that their characters are too red etc. I have just made a note of it, since I thought we should have a little chat about it in here. The same applies to the water section, it also depends on the textures you use... what looks good for vanilla textures, will most likely not be the most optimal solution if you use RW2 or pure waters etc. That should be it for now. Edit: I really need to double read my posts >_>

Keep this on track please.

If your ENB is running with weather system enabled then the enbseries.ini wont be the priminary .ini file in use.. depending on weather then it will be one of those. They are normally found the the enbseries folder. As for enblocal.ini then that is a bit weird, but most likely something system specific. I am not clear if you mean the file does not work at all .. ie every parameter, or only a few of them. In the case of a few.. then again something driver specific is overwriting them.

If it is not an external program (it almost always is), then it is a driver issue. Those are the only two things that can prevent the hooking ENB does from working. I know it can be frustrating to only get that response, but that is really all there is too it. Often time it is something you think does not matter and then it turns out the program has some sort of GUI overlay or new function in a recent update that suddenly made it a problem.

Try without ENB managers of any kind... just plain and simple copy paste. Just to eliminate it.... god knows they can mess things up but I guess not even god knows why.

What the the conversion rate between your "bucks" and any real world currency? :P

You are going to melt his mind at this rate! :P