Pretendeavor

For anyone still interested in modding SSE.. check out SSE Fixes!

Cool, I did that too for Purity in Oldrim but hadn't considered porting it. Time to try it out!

Nice list Paul.. stole a few ideas from it :) I'm wondering though, where did you get 'Purity Falls.zip (1D881099)' from? I assume these are the waterfalls only from Purity for Oldrim?

So for the SSE modders here, what do you think about the current state of ENBs/ReShade? CFL ENB, Rudy ENB and SkyrimSE Re-Engaged are all really solid presets already, but they really hurt my performance.. With JK's Riverwood installed for example, standing on the bridge looking towards Riverwood dropped me from 60 to ~40 fps with Rudy ENB with Lens and DoF disabled... In many other areas you can maintain 60 fps, but such strange and heavy drops make it unusable for me in its current state. ReShade presets caused similar drops, especially when DoF, Gaussian Blur and MXAO were involved. I do have a fairly heavily modded game already and insist on using a grass overhaul (UG/Verdant). I'm not using SFO though. I decided that for now I'm actually content with not using fancy presets at all. You can already make your game look really good with the current selection of weather/lighting mods out there. Btw for those that dislike TAA, try adding just a lumasharpen module via the newest ReShade! Costs like 1-2 fps and does wonders

Small updates: ENB is progressing well and is atm good to use for stuff slight tone changes, bloom, DoF and some sharpening. I especially liked the sharpening option that one of the presets on the Nexus included, it kind of compensates for TAA's blur while TAA itself takes care of aliasing. I do think that using ENB at this point isn't super necessary, for me it means I can't run the game at a stable 60 fps at 1440p anymore. I'm probably also one of the few people that likes the in game DoF and don't really need a reshade/enb shader for it. Think I'll wait for more features before I start using it again. A small tweak that I've seen on reddit a couple of times now that makes playing without an ENB manageable is to put fGlobalContrastBoost=-0.2 under Display in Skyrim.ini. It compensates for the overall 'blackness' that is especially notable on npcs. With just this tweak, Vivid Weathers, ELE, Noble Skyrim and Total Character Makeover the game already looks great. Also, the game itself has a Beta Update 1.2. It apparently increases performance in cpu-bound areas: link. The post is made by someone of the SKSE team too.. is it finally happening? :D As for Loot.. I think right now it's important to just check for conflicts yourself and use that to determine load order. I still find that I need to patch >50% of ported mods that I'm using right now because they don't include Update.esm changes for example.

Dang, that is one of the more annoying ones to patch as well.. I went with the other character overhaul because of it, haha. Also, ENB! I saw that the Somber 3 author is very active on those forums, makes me excited for new presets! Somber 3 is one of the best looking ENB presets ever made imo..

Still using NMM here, it is.. okay.. if you keep a mental note (or just a notepad file) of overwrite order. If you uninstall a mod that used to overwrite another mod's file, I'm pretty sure the original files of that other mod are restored. But yea it's still annoying with more than half of the files being bsa's, load order influences what gets overwritten, you need dummy esps unless you extract bsa's manually with an external program etc...... I really can't work with WB either, I'm not sure why people seem to think it's so amazing. Think I'll choose to be handicapped right now and pray for a MO esque update for NMM.

Right, forgot about that one. Should probably be used after NSM, but I didn't compare them yet. I preferred Vivid Landscapes and Skyrim HD Parallax Tribute over YALO for old Skyrim where they conflicted, but I guess I might as well try it now.

There's also a version of SFO up on the original Nexus page. Even without SKSE and SkyUI there's a lot to keep track of.. /r/skyrimmods seems to be a good place for keeping up with everything.

Hell yea. This is a perfect opportunity to actually play through the entire quest this time around. Maybe. For people interested in (official) texture (/meshes) ports, the main mods out there right now are Enhanced Textures Detail, Osmodius' texture pack, SMIM and Noble Skyrim. Right now I use Enhanced Textures Detail as base for improved meshes, Osmodius' pack as texture base, followed by SMIM, NSM Full 2k, NSM SMIM Patch, NSM SSE Patch. The whole SMIM/NSM chain is set up as recommended by NSM's author, not completely sure yet how I should fit Osmodius' pack in there.

A texture pack to keep an eye on by Osmodius: link

I've just installed Enhanced Textures Detail and SMIM, and right now I'm downloading the Noble Skyrim SSE update (found on the old Nexus). Let's see what this does to VRAM and performance

No clue. I think that largely depends on whether or not we get an equivalent of SKSE

This is exactly my problem. I gave up on installing mods that haven't been officially ported yet for now. Large builds are impossible to manage with NMM I feel.. For now I use it just to have a list for the must have mods that have already been released on the SSE Nexus. That texture problem is interesting.. and it might even be a good thing in a weird way. As in, simply stealing older texture packs without revising them might result in CTDs in SSE. Perhaps that will make people think twice before uploading the work of another By the way, I just went to enbdev to see what Boris is up to and it looks like he at least got his game running. There's hope!

Hmm I've had no crashes in about 3-4 hours total so far. I'm using the unofficial patch though. Another quick note: The official esm files are being loaded in the wrong order.. even if you change them using NMM they revert every time you restart NMM :/ See also this post from Arthmoor.

Alright, I got the game running at a flawless 60 fps with a 2560x1440 resolution now, hooray! Whiterun, Solitude, Riften, Markarth, it's all good! To mitigate the few minor performance dips I had I changed iShadowMapResolution from 4096 to 2048, iVolumetricLightingQuality from 2 to 1 and iVSyncPresentInterval from 1 to 0. I enabled a 60fps limiter in the global profile in nvidia inspector for now until SSE gets its own profile. Despite vsync being disabled I have seen zero screen tearing as a result of this, but maybe I'm just not 'sensitive' to it. Increasing fGrassStartFadeDistance to 18000 (the SR:LE tweak) fixed the annoying grass fade in. I'm a happy camper right now :P

By the way, a new nvidia driver has been released that 'provides optimal experience' for some new games, including SSE. There's also a new NMM which I currently use for SSE mods. Works okay for now, you just need to add "skyrimse" in nxmhandlers.ini in your MO folder to the line of games that are controlled by the Nexus Client. This way MO controls old skyrim Nexus links and NMM controls the SSE Nexus links. Nerdy milestone: I made my first SSE CR patch! :')

Some first thoughts: Performance wise everything feels really smooth. Started at 1440p ultra (launcher) settings right off the bat, and not dropping a frame below 60 in Whiterun felt satisfying. Of course this is unmodded except for USSEP, EBQO, Alternate Start and some of Arthmoor's other mods, so I shouldn't get too excited yet. I did drop into the high 40s/50s in some exterior areas, mostly in places that had a lot of fog. I arrived at the Helgen cave exit in a storm and fps varied between 50-60. I also couldn't maintain 60 during the intro sequence. Though despite it not being 60 fps, it still felt smooth and I probably wouldn't be bothered by it had I not enabled a FPS counter. I'll try it at 1080p tomorrow, but I think I might keep 1440p as default resolution now. Oh, and there's zero stuttering so far. Nada. No stutters walking up the road from Riverwood to Whiterun's stables and a steady 60 fps. No crashes either, but without 100 texture mods the engine isn't exactly being pushed to its limits yet. With downsampling and TAA, I'm not bothered by aliasing at all. What I am still bothered by is overall texture resolution. It's still bad. Spoiled modders like us will probably feel that many objects need replacements ASAP, but it's not as if we expected it to be any other way. There are improvements though and some models seem relatively okay, I was impressed by some of the vegetation for example. Impressed as in, I had no expectations it would look any better than old Skyrim. The road from the Helgen cave exit to Riverwood seems to have been decorated with a lot of vegetation and doesn't look half bad. Most of that probably comes from what they've done with the grass. The textures look okay in combination with what I think is TAA's doing and it is a lot denser. Grass fade in is very obvious though in areas like Whiterun's tundra, but that should be easily tweaked. Distant terrain still looks terrible.. after having used DynDOLOD for so long it was really obvious. Not sure if it changed compared to vanilla. I also looked out for Z-fighting and found that while it didn't occur on faraway mountains, Whiterun's Dragonsreach had some terrible flickering thing going on. I did quickly change the FOV via the console right before I arrived at Whiterun and saw this, maybe that messed some things up. Shadows look good, shadow draw distance seems fine while seemingly not compromising performance much. I haven't looked at the ini's yet but personally that means no more fShadowDistance tweaking to get the perfect draw distance/performance balance. I wonder if it will stay like this with clutter-heavy mods like JK's towns and Dawn of Skyrim. The godrays that were especially noticeable during the intro sequence were pretty impressive, but I have to admit that I'm a sucker for these effects. I like them, even if other games do them better. They seem to be performance heavy though, or it was the fog. Or a combination (TAA?). Water also looked pretty okay, and so did the splashes of rain. As you get close you start to notice the low resolution, but from the standing stones' viewpoint it looked pretty good in rainy weather. Waterfalls also look better than vanilla I feel, but that might be because of TAA+downsampling. Even so, I'd still love to get them replaced by Purity's superior waterfalls when possible.. The changes to the sky impressed me. Whiterun greeted me with a striking 60 fps sunset and I had to admit that they did well there. The night sky didn't look half bad either. Finally, I'm not sure what to think about the built-in mod menu. I just installed my mods manually and activated and sorted them in their in game menu, which seemed to work just fine. Hopefully we won't have to deal with it at all in the future though, because to get to your load order you have to get through the auto login screen for bethesda.net first. I don't have an account for it and I'll probably avoid the site entirely if mods can be found elsewhere. All in all I'm impressed. I'm not satisfied by how it looks right now and the absence of SkyUI + iHud is already killing me but I think it's a solid base for modding. (Oh, and one last thing for now.. apparently your character will keep sprinting if you let go of the sprint button.. Is this a new feature or am I completely losing my mind? Because I accidentally ran out of stamina about 10 times already..)

Yeah, I don't think I'll be doing that.. Perhaps Wrye Bash is a good alternative until we get 'Tannin's version' of NMM.

I read that you wouldn't be able to use the current MO for it, but I admit that I don't remember the source and couldn't find it just now by skimming the reddit SSE thread. I'll certainly be using MO if it's possible yes.

So I found that I'm more excited than I probably should be for the release of the Special Edition. I just preloaded the game on Steam, reserved a lot of space on my SSD, organized some folders for mods, downloaded some of the essential mods from the new SSE Nexus (Arthmoor's mods including the unofficial patch, EBQO etc.) and installed SSEEdit. I'm also keeping an eye on /r/skyrimmods as it has a SSE megathread with a lot of valuable information. It will probably take a while before any of the guides hosted here are ready for SSE, but that won't keep me from experimenting with it right away! Sadly MO won't be usable with this, so I'm wondering if I should use NMM or just install things manually at the start. I feel really handicapped without MO, but I'm too impatient to not try things out this weekend. Is anyone else going to mod it before any of the guides updates to it? How are you planning on dealing with installing mods/keeping up to date with everything? What about setting up things like LOOT? Or will you just check out the new features in SSE and then wait a couple of months for the whole modding business to settle down? PS Sorry if you feel this should be posted in an existing topic rather than in a new one. I wasn't sure where to post this, just curious about what others will do these next few days :)

If you mean the WATER plants plugin, that doesn't have the main WATER mod as master requirement. It also doesn't need patching with RW2 as long as you let RW2 load after it I think WATER does seem to have been updated recently so it might look prettier than RW2 now. Can't help you there though as I haven't tried it yet =p

Hey guys, a small question if you don't mind.. what your thoughts are about Aurlyn Dawnstone as a follower? I'm not a big fan of Vilja, Sofia and Arissa, but I like Inigo. How does Aurlyn compare to them?

For those using Claralux.. did you drop ELFX Exteriors or change the SR:LE lighting setup? And if not, what is the argument for using Claralux on top of SR:LE's lighting setup? Does it affect performance?

Ah yea I suspected something like that. Good to know I'm not going mad Well just that not every patch is made with ELE in mind, so if you copy a lot of records under 'CELL' into a new plugin and let that plugin load after ELE, there's usually some lighting changes from ELE that need to be carried over (but you could of course use your ele patches for that)