Greg

I suspect that may be depth of field making everything outside your immediate field of view blurry. If you aren't using an ENB, you can disable this by changing the setting in SkyrimPrefs.ini [Imagespace] bDoDepthOfField=0 If you are using an ENB preset, you can disable it by changing the setting in enbseries.ini [EFFECT] EnableDepthOfField=false

I shouldn't respond to this for fear I might incriminate myself. Let's just say that first stopover at a certain Draugr crypt right outside Riverwood is a bit much for rank novice with zero combat skills.

Skyrim HD 1.6 is back up on Nexus. EDIT: The sad part if you really think about it is that Skyrim HD has a little over 8 million unique downloads with 150 donations according to the description. I really can't blame him for wanting to find some way to increase donations for all that work.

You can safely go into the Skyrim menu and increase the difficulty there. Press Esc to get to the menu, click Settings, click Gameplay, and move the Difficulty slider to the right. This basically just makes the player a bit weaker and the enemies a bit stronger. The default is Adept is usually too easy once you become familiar with the game, so you''ll want to bump that up a notch or two. This is the cheapest and easiest way to bump difficulty without using mods. I haven't looked into any of the enemy AI mods available yet, although I should add this to my growing to-do list.

I thought you were using fraps?

The installation instructions for SKSE are in the Skyrim Script Extender page.

Since you seem to have your STEP profile all configured and working now, do this from within Mod Organizer: Click Configure Profiles to open the Profiles dialog Click your STEP profile Click the Copy button Enter a name like STEP Customized or STEP Extended CustomizedThis creates an exact copy of your current STEP profile. Now in the Profile dropdown just above the left pane, select the custom profile you just created. You can now feel free to add and remove any mods you want without worrying about clobbering your STEP profile. If you get to a point where you want to pull your hair out and start over, go back into Configure Profiles, select your custom profile, and click Remove to delete it. Now you can copy your clean STEP profile back to a new custom profile and start fresh. This is a really nice feature in Mod Organizer and the profiles use very little disk space. Just make sure you do all your customizing in the new profile instead of the STEP profile.

I had to do a bit of digging, but I found some relevant information in The new mod order in 1.2.5 thread from last year. The basic issue is that Skyrim (and other Bethesda games like Oblivion) won't use loose files if they are dated older than the BSA it should override. In other words, let's say the High Resolution Texture Pack BSAs are dated 1/1/2015 and you install a texture pack containing loose files in which the textures are all dated 1/1/2014. In this case, Skyrim won't use loose files in the texture pack. So, in short, click the Back-Date button to make sure your BSAs are older than any of your loose files.

No, ENB presets don't have anything to do with memory management. ENB presets are basically just "eye candy" provided on top of ENB, although there's a bit more to ENB presets than just changing the ENB settings. These typically come with custom shader functions, custom meshes and/or textures optimized for the ENB preset, customizations for lighting and weather, SMAA or SweetFX plugins, etc. on top of the ENB settings. If I use an ENB preset, I always add it in last after I get the base STEP Extended profile stable and bump to 2K textures.

You can install Mod Organizer wherever you want and it'll work just fine. It doesn't even have to be on the same drive with Skyrim, although you'll want to keep Skyrim and Mod Organizer on an SSD if you have one.

I don't think it really matters because the relevant setting in enblocal.ini should be set to Total Available Video Memory - 170 for Windows 7 or -350 for Windows 8 or later if you using a 64-bit operating system with 8GB or more RAM. Guide:ENlocal INI/Memory ENBoost

Click the Image icon in the toolbar and paste the URL to your image, but it may depend on where the images are located. I use copy.com and it works fine. I've also tried using SkyDrive/OneDrive/Microsoft's name of the week drive and DropBox, but I couldn't get these to work well. I'm not happy with either of these cloud drives, so I uninstalled them and tossed the installation files in the trash.

He's basically using the same video card I have (dual R9 290s versus my single R9 290X), so he should be fine using 2k textures.

Yes, I'm using Vividian Vanilla ENB... it's the last one in the list in the above post.

I initially installed STEP Extended with 1K meshes and textures and DynDOLOD on medium. After testing to make sure everything is relatively smooth and stable, I made a copy of the STEP profile named STEP HD (for lack of a better imagination) and bumped some of the meshes and textures to 2K, reran DynDOLOD on high, and it worked fine. I'm concerned about the uGridsToLoad setting because this should be set to 5 when using DynDOLOD. You might get away with 7, but I don't think it's really necessary with DynDOLOD and just eats more memory because you're loading significantly more cells (I think 49 cells with uGridsToLoad=7 versus 25 cells with uGridsToLoad=5). This is the list of mods I bumped to 2K resolution, although I'm just trying to find a middle ground with decent performance and a decent in-game experience.

Has anyone noticed a difference with bReturnTo1stPersonFromVanity? I set fAutoVanityModeDelay=5 so the vanity mode camera activates after 5 seconds, and tried this in first and third person but it always returns to the same state I was in previously. In other first, if I am in third person view I remain in third person view after I cancel the vanity mode camera by moving the mouse. EDIT: I don't notice a difference with fVanityModeMinDist, fVanityModeMaxDist, fVanityModeMaxDistFlyMult, or fVanityModeMinDistFly. I had expected these to be affected by objects close to the player character so I tested all these by varying my distance away from Half Moon Mill -- standing against the door, at the edge of the wooden walkway leading to the door, and a couple of steps away from the wooden walkway. In all cases the vanity camera switched to the same zoom levels as the house obstructed the view. I also experimented by standing in the open and letting the vanity camera do its thing for about 10 or 15 minutes to see if it would change the zoom disatance, but I didn't notice any changes.

I checked Windows Update and found KB3087608 in the list of updates waiting to be installed on Windows 7, so I hid it and will key an eye out for the others. I'll check Windows 8.1 on my laptop later today.

I suspect it's looking for a file with the same name as the plugin, so if you merged these three into Bathing in Skyrim - Merged.esp the strings file should probably be named Bathing in Skyrim - Merged_Englished.txt to match to plugin name.

This is an interesting observation and it certainly makes sense given the difference in speed between hard drives and solid-state drives. I imagine this might be more pronounced on 5400 RPM drives as well given the higher rotational latency. I just checked and see I'm still using the default value since I don't have this entry in my Skyrim.ini.

I read through that thread and this is very interesting. I wonder why 65536 turns out to be the magic number in this case, though. FYI: I also discovered that is an interaction between iConsoleSizeScreenPercent (in the Menu section) and MFG Console in that as the size of the debug console is increased, MFG Console reduces its font size to make everything fit within the remaining available space above the debug console. I probably should have expected this, but i didn't think about it until I needed to grab a FormID for an object and saw dinky little 6pt text that I couldn't read.

Give some time for someone knowledgeable in merging scripts to come by. This is a long weekend in the states so some folks may be out. My naive response is to run Loot to make sure you have a good load order, but I think there's more to it than this because I seem to remember the mods you intend to merge should be sorted together. This is not my area of expertise, so wait until someone that knows how to merge properly respond.

I'm using the default options and haven't experienced any issues, either.

You might treat that 1TB portable with kid gloves. Every portable drive I've owned has died horrible death after a short time due to cheap electronics in the enclosure. Having said this, I haven't used any portable hard drives in a few years because they were too unreliable. The 1000W power supply is overkill, but that's a fairly cheap price for a 1000W modular power supply. It looks as if prices on power supplies is really coming down from when I bought mine last year.

Fast forward to about 1:30 in Hodilton's video to see the compares between vanilla and this mod. The differences are somewhat subtle, but this mod is so much better than vanilla. I tried watching the second video, but that constant downward scan makes me dizzy.