Aiyen

Kuldebar: For me it is exactly WYSIWYG... I see a properly sorted mod and load order according to the priorities they should have, and the assets are loaded according to this in a proper and logical way.. at least for me anyways. With the unpacking done as described earlier. Also like Neo says then one could make a separate mod instead of using overwrite.. but I have just been lazy in that regard. The outcome is the same, and should not matter in any way. The only thing I have in my overwrite is the cleaned .esm´s and then whatever .esp I happen to create manually for my own mods since the CK saves them there by default on my system. So really the only difference between the way you and I do things is that you use LOOT to sort (As I recall with respect to the unofficial patches then it sorts .esm/.esp , .esm/esp instead of just having all .esm before anything else.), and I do not. Which to me would more be an indicator that the LOOT list is not a good way of doing things rather then MO having a weird issue in regards to the way it does things.

Okay I guess this is as good a time as ever to voice this. I do honestly think you are making a much larger issue out of this then it needs to be (Or I am just failing rather badly in even understanding the issues you have)! As I tried to tell in the vampire issue thread.. I was not able to reproduce it the way I loaded my assets! I use all (cleaned) official .esm´s (in overwrite) before any .esp and nothing selected in archives at all. In mod order then only optimized HDDLC are before USKP fixes followed by everything else in profiles that have that. Other then the texture.bsa´s nothing is unpacked. I have never had any issues with this method at all, even during the giant weekend spent looking through every .esp for conflicts and fixing them as I went along did I see any issues out of what would be expected in .esp conflicts. My Data dir is as pristine as the day I installed skyrim... I could delete MO and all mods and still start the game without any issues what so ever! This was the main reason I even started using MO! It could do this where all other managers would require a revalidation of the data dir to make sure. The most elegant solution if any would in my opinion be to just remove the archives tab since it apparently cause a lot of confusion for certain folk. So to sum up 1: Data dir is as it is downloaded from steam 2: Have a cleaned version of the official .esm´s in overwrite. 3: Load the .esm´s before ANY .esp in priority order. 4: ALL bsa´s from mods are unpacked. Only the texture ones from official are. That is how it works for me, and I really am confused how it can confuse anyone at all. So sorry if this all sounded a bit angry or annoyed etc... but I am really getting confused as to the overall issue you seem to have.

Just finished testing, and I prefer it. It looks nice in most locations, and the places where it does not it is not really the textures fault. Gonna leave it in for now and see what happens in the future! But definitely worth trying out I would say!

You know you are bored when you moderate a banter thread about game blobbers back on track! :P

You always need an archive for installation... unless you manually copy the files into your data dir.. which you should never do! The general structure of the archive needs to be the same as the data dir. Hence textures go in a textures folder, meshes in its etc. As long as all assets are in the proper locations then any .esp should find them and apply them ingame without issue. Hope that made some sense to you.

Definitely a texture issue. It most likely have the proper .dds layers etc. so it will load, but the actual content is all messed up. Probably due to recompression failure.

Okay since this is apparently all the rage then I decided to just test it since I was fairly certain that I had no issues with my vampires skin... ever. Current testing profile is. Skyrim, Update, Dawnguard, Hearthfire, Dragonborn (esm´s) followed by USKP, UDGP, UDBP, UHFP (esp) Extracted unofficial patches as priority over Optimized official HDDLC. Nothing in archives section of MO selected. Issue is not present. https://www.dropbox.com/s/bil6gsj939alkxh/vampthingy.jpg Tested on my main mod profile... Different skin textures for vampires so I did not expect any issues and there where none. So must admit that I am confused about this issue! :)

coc bleakfallsbarrow01 Go outside and then player.placeatme # 1 (1 at a time is probably best.. since if you spawn like 10 you can just insta crash the game on some mod setups. ) spawn a nice load of dragons. type help dragon to get the various ID´s. 10feed and 10feee are two of them. killall All dragons will crash to the ground in good order... and you wont kill anyone vital and crash the game. Go to riverwood.. you will probably get one or more of the buggers following you. Alternatively you can provide yourself with godlike daedric gear and arrows... boost your archery skill to 100 and giveyourself all the perks... You can almost oneshot dragons at that point and if you also use DCO then you can laugh as they crash in funny ways when you shoot them midflight!

player.placeatme 10feee Put that in the console and you got a dragon that provide a soul. Kill it and see if it stalks you.

Afaik then the only way one can reasonably come up with the "performance" argument is if a user is on a PC where the CPU is rather old but is still able to run the game. More so if you have an SSD and or low amounts of RAM. However I am fairly certain that this does not apply to the vast majority of the player base. Even when one include the laptops. Even then most of the difference is in load times, and is measured in a few seconds tops... unless something is really bogging down the system. The only reason to do extraction is for convenience if you are going to alter assets. As for repackaging back when you are done for performance reasons then the above still apply. In general if one have issues with loading times and massive amounts of stuttering then it is much more likely that one is running way too many textures and high detail meshes. In fact I think the only reason some people still use this argument is because it has been around since oblivion where the PC´s where not as powerful, and where the differences where noticeable. All that said then nice to see that this discussion is producing some nice information!

Okay so I worked a bit on overtime relative to what I wanted to do.. but at least now I have both the vanilla and pure weather versions available for beta testing as well! Just pm if interested! Now I will cook some nice dinner and get all these digits out of my retina!

As tannin has said The only defining factor is the install priority... It does not matter if one use BSA or loose. It is logical, and I fail to see where the issue is. I can unpack my bsa´s get the textures, meshes whatever and create my "custom test mod" just before overwrite and make sure that the assets I work on are loaded in the game, and I can remove them afterwards and make sure that the vanilla contents take over again. As it is now it is a convenience that MO handles the unpacking of bsa´s... I hope it stays that way, even if it is hidden and requires activation. I must admit that as long as only the install priority is what you should sort after I fail to see how any issues can ever arise unless people sort by name and have their list entirely weird. Even custom assets would be loaded to the correct file path.

Do not merge the .esm with the patch .esp´s.. unless you are 100% sure you are not going to require any updates etc in the future.

I guess I can do a little bit of update/advertisement here as well! As some of you know the next major update of skylight is in the works, and it will offer brand new files all around. The emphasis is going to be on making the shaders much more user friendly, so people who are rich in passion and creativity but lacking in programming can get into making their game look like they want much easier! I have been dusting off all the old coding books, and learned quite a few new things, and tried to make as much use of the Object oriented nature of C++ as possible. So instead of having to deal with files that are several thousand lines long with a myriad of different settings and options... you get in the range of a few hundred. In fact the only thing the current files require is that you know how to copy paste... and you will get full GUI implementation and as close to the most optimal performance possible (Some real programmers might be able to optimize certain parts even more in the future!) I will also be getting out a full guide for the files so that everything will be documented properly... or at least so that non programmers can understand what is going on! I am not sure yet if this will come out with the rest or a bit later... really depends on how much spare time I have over the next month! Ofc. the actual preset will also get an overhaul... starting with the one for the CoT based modlists.. and then the vanilla and pure weather ones later. I guess I can show a few teaser shots here and otherwise link to the the enbdev gallery for those who want to see it all! https://enbseries.enbdev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=17&start=16980 If you are currently using a CoT based list and want to help out then I do accept a few beta testers in a few days! Just throw me a pm if you are interested! Sorry in advance that I cannot get vanilla based lists ready just yet.. but they are next on my list!

I know what you mean! I have it the same way... texturing if fun when you know wtf you are doing! Once you have to sit and try out several different layer techniques to figure out what works best then it gets annoying. At least there are many many many tutorials with inspiration! As for the crystal then no... like so much of my stuff I think it is sort of meh! In this particular case I had a location full of teal crystals... and I really hate how liberal the developers have been in their use of teal in skyrim.. it almost never fits in and just looks... bad imo. So I had to fix it! here is a shot of it. https://www.dropbox.com/s/g7c9ogwbtqsp2df/crystal1.jpg

Once you find the texture then try to open it up in a program that allows DDS viewing... easy to find. It looks as if DDSopt either rescaled the size of the texture, or did a wrong pick of compression. But getting a view on the texture outside of the game would tell for sure. If the texture keeps causing issues you can just exclude it from the process, or download gimp and its DDSplugin and just do it manually. Many options! :)

You do not have to disable the mod... it is most likely just a bad extraction from the archive it was in, or a bad install. It happens, most of the time it is easy to find the culprint, and then just reinstall the mod, and try again. In by far most of the cases you can also see which texture it is since it will have a size of 0kb ... which is just wrong obviously.

The following is something I was just thinking, so please do not take it like a (pffffttt this is easy.. get working)! :p I would think that you can copy the mesh effects over fairly 1:1 in most cases. At least as I recall when I looked at it (I have a thing with crystals (Redid azuras shrine and stuff in blackreach, so flasks where a logical extension). As an added benefit you can test MANY colors/settings quickly since you can give each potion a separate look. Also it is fairly easy to get all potions inside inventory and then test them quickly. Cuts down the "going in and out time" considerably. At least that is what I did with Azura´s shrine.... had quite the rainbow cave going on with many difference colors, specular, parallax etc. settings all at once. My main problem was having the 10 nifskope windows open at once! Even with my 1440p monitor! But that said then I think it is awesome work you already have done and entirely understand the need to take a break! :D

But can you get stuck! :o Sorry had to ask!

I just anticipate that when you have an comparison image where half the image looks different from the other half someone is going to get confused! Considering that the comparison is between the different images and not on each one. I can appreciate that you have an image with different lighting captured on it. Quite nice really. As for the rock.. you are probably right there! My bad!

Well I guess we should make a new thread for that... a bit silly I know, but for overviews sake. I guess we can wait with it until you hit up all the potions :P

That just looks funky... looks like you have two images next to each other in most cases. Partly due to the huge color difference between left n right, and that the rock texture also have a seam near the middle.

Most textures have what is called mip maps on them... which are scaled down versions which are rendered further away for optimization reasons. So all textures should behave like this. The lower the quality of the "top" texture (1k 2k, or 4k in skyrims case) the less mip map levels there are and the larger transitions issues will become. Would most likely just be this you are picking up on. Alternatively then you have altered the AF settings in either ini or control panel. If you go to down from 16 then you will get less detailed textures for more performance. Also ENB have a special forced mip level (Controlled in enblocal.ini) which can also control how detailed a texture will look. If you lowered this value then you will also get more clunky looking textures in the distance.

Make sure you tell what settings you are using. Also if you want to do closeup screenshots of an area just type in "fov #" in the console... if you go lower you will zoom in on a region. Could perhaps help show specifically what is the problem. I got to admit that based on just that one screenshot I do not immediately see anything wrong.

As long as you got good contrasts/tonemapping then the colors are easy enough to alter! Will have to take a look at it! Also wow... 10 hours of masking, I feel your pain! This was the reason why I decided to just stop messing with foliage altogether!