Bealdwine

Ooops, I'll take a look :) [EDIT] Done... although there must be a better way than simply splitting paragraphs down to shorter lines? I'm studying zMans DDSopt guide to pick up bits of wiki code, as I'm much more used to BBS stuff :P I notice they've tagged you as a Wiki Editor now torm so presumably you have permissions (if not the time) to support and maintain this for yourself as well :)

I've now had a chance to go through the latest update to this guide - very impressive stuff, can't wait for a summary/explanation/recommendation based on the test results. I'm certainly going to have to redo this process before installing the next STEP :) It occured to me that this (at least the vanilla/HDDLC and possibly the Vano Opt stages) would be a wonderful automation project. Is anyone else looking at this? If not, I might look into it once I shake off this damn 'flu :P By automation I mean creating appropriate folders, unpacking BSAs, correcting, combining, DDSopt'ing, replacing non-optimized files (if necessary), and tidying up (or deleting) files and folders afterwards. To a large extent I suspect this will depend on the 'accessibility' of DDSopt to external control. There is a version on Git Hub but whether this is uptodate I'm not sure. If it comes to it I would contact Ethatron for permission and an idea of what methods might be hooked into to set preferences, file locations and 'process'. Anyway just chucking about a vague idea atm.

Done... as best I could :P https://wiki.step-project.com/Z-Fighting:_the_flickering_of_LOD_textures_due_to_overlapping_planes#How_to_Reduce_Z-fighting_in_Skyrim_Significantly A couple of very small edits torm, hope you like the result. Linked, but couldn't embed, your proof of concept video - not much point trying to show a still shot ;)

I agree with TC, the Base STEP setup should be as he describes it - a rock solid platform that can be expanded through user choice. There are a number of mods either already being used by STEPers or WIP that take the vanilla experience 'further'. They can be dealt with as seperate groups (packs) and offered as additions to Base STEP for specific expansion on the vanilla experience. That is why we are happy to receive all sorts of mod reviews - if not appropriate for base STEP it doesn't mean they cannot be considered for later expansions.

Checked it through. It's a really nice piece of work torm :) so in the end I decided to just use it 'as is' LINK @s4n - If you want to check it out as well you may have some suggestions for changes or additions. @zMan - I've not had a great deal to do with the wiki as such, but torm's work may well deserve a place there? I can send you the original post for you to place it if you agree.

More excellent work zMan :) really looking forward to checking that out.

Sorry, meant to get back on this one... unfortunately, no, it didn't work for me either. @Vond, when you've tried the other possible settings could you drop a note back here please.

Out of interest do you have any performance data? That and a screen shot might help others here. Have you disabled game & graphics card AA? And which card/CPU does your system run? Thanks :)

RL comes first torm :) Best of luck with the Uni stuff and we'll see you when you're done (TheCompiler had the same problem and this was one of the delays to the latest version, so you're in good company).

Just go through the guide as it is laid out, the over-writing is intentional as TheCompiler has selected which textures appear best to him in game - some from one mod, some from another (very few, if any, mods cover all the textures in the game). The mods marked as CORE should always be installed, others are to some extent optional depending on personal taste and the capabilities of your PC system, however all the mods have been tested together to ensure that they will work without conflicts if you follow the steps correctly. I assume you are working from the 2.0.1a guide - this will work, however you should know that the 2.1.0 version will be available very soon and will change some of the mods selected to improve the guide and work effectively with the latest revision of the game. This will probaly be best combined with a new game start if not a fresh install as there are issues with Bethesda's game save format. On the other hand this is a good practice and will at least show you just how much better Skyrim can look with the help of STEP. It will also give you a chance to see just how your system can cope with the combination of such mods so that you can approach the new version with a better idea how to select the optimal set of mods to install. Good luck and enjoy :)

@torminater I've started a thread in the ini tweaks section and intend adding your findings and solutions into the first post in that thread - if you would like to write a clear summary of your work and PM it to me I'll edit and include it in there :) If not you'll have to trust that I can understand what you have done and achieved, you get the credit either way, lol. Do you mind if I use your vid link as well as it is both a good visual explanation of what z-fighting IS and a proof of the value of your work?

If you are not familiar with the term Z-fighting it refers to the flickering of textures in the mid - distant terrain, often most pronounced and visible in distant mountain textures during camera movement both in first and third-person view. Not everyone seems to suffer this effect, although it is graphics card independant (can affect scenes rendered by nVidia or ATi GPUs) and appears to be worsened by certain combinations of game/graphics driver version. Thanks to some investigation and persistant testing by one of our members - torminater - we may be able to offer some .ini tweaks that will significantly reduce this intrusive effect :) ------------** The work offered below belongs to Torminater and we thank him for his determination to research this topic **------------ How to reduce Z-fighting in Skyrim significantly What is z-fighting? Z-fighting describes a very complex problem which spreads across many games and many graphic cards including the two big companies nVidia and ATI. In game it shows as a very fast flickering texture. This is because the texture itself consists of different layers. If those layers cannot be strictly separated from another as it is with z-fighting you see the flickering. If your interested what it is exactly, have a look at this article:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-fighting'> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-fighting Do you have z-fighting? Before you follow the tweaks you should be sure, that your Skyrim actually has z-fighting. Before testing, copy your skyrim.ini and skyrimprefs.ini located in your Documents/My Games/skyrim folder to a separate folder and delete the originals. Now open your game via the Steam Skyrim Launcher. Choose Ultra settings. If your rig can't handle that use either the settings you used so far or pick the High/Medium/Low-setting. Preferably the maximum setting your rig can handle. Now click on Options>Advanced>View Distance>Distant Object Detail>Ultra. For testing purposes only increase Specularity Fade and Light Fade to max. Check that Object Detail Fade is unchecked. Now run Skyrim. There are two spots where you will be able to see z-fighting definitely if it is there at all. One is when you come out of Helgen Keep (the dungeon you first go through when you start a new game. Straight ahead is a mountain range. If it is foggy or bad weather you might not recognize the z-fighting. The second spot is when you leave Dragonsreach through the main portal. Stop at the beginning of the stairs and look at the mountain side straigth ahead. It is very important that the weather condition is the following: daylight, clear, sunny. So in other words: no clouds, no fog, no precipitation. At both spots move your character and camera slowly and look out for a flicker in the mountains. If you see something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orcXIA3gnBg, you belong to the pretty large group of players who have the same problem. If you don't have ANY z-fighting, then I kindly ask you to post your 1: OS 2: Exact Video card model 3: Driver version 4: Video card control panel settings 5: In-game settings 6: ini tweaks 7: mods 8: dxdiag The Skyrim community will thank you! Why do you have z-fighting and others don't? There are systems that have really big problems with z-fighting and others that have little to no problems. Why it is that way nobody can really say. There are certain hypotheses but nothing certain which is in some way due to people who don't have z-fighting but don't reveal the details of their set-up, so others cannot find out why they have'nt got it but others have. Most certainly z-fighting has nothing to do with the power or performance of a system. The only reason why so many people with low-end rigs don't notice any z-fighting is because they have low-medium-high Distant Object Detail settings. This can eliminate z-fighting on distant objects. The down-side is that very distant mountains look very ugly. Especially for high-end rigs and players who want to improve their Skyrim experience to the absolute maximum of graphics quality that remains a big problem. If you don't belong to this group set your Distant Object Detail to whatever eliminates z-fighting at the spots mentioned above and be happy about it. If you want to minimize z-fighting and keep Skyrim's beautiful mountains you are welcome to read on. How can I get rid of z-fighting? Unfortunately there is no known solution which eliminates all of the z-fighting so far. It can only be reduced so much, that you barely notice it if at all. There are two ways of trying to get rid of z-fighting. The hard way and the easy way. The hard way would be figuring out what constellation of drivers, forceware options, general Skyrim settings, mods and ini-tweaks presents you with the the best result concerning your specific interests. Please share your results in these threads https://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1336456...-fighting/ https://forum.step-project.com/showthread.php?tid=154 The easy way: benefit from my work on this matter. I have done it the hard way, and it was indeed hard. Especially as I found out, that 99% of my work was so far was useless and luck eventually stumbled me on a very good fix. What did you do to solve the z-fighting issue so far? First of all I did a complete reinstall of Skyrim 1.5.26 and didn't include a single mod in my testing. Not even the HD-DLC-pack from Bethesda itself. I will do this in the near future to find out, what can help reducing z-fighting additionally. Then I followed my own guideline to systematically reduce z-fighting with every step I took. STEP 1: Testing many different nVidia-drivers No driver fixed z-fighting. There were some that had less z-fighting than others but even the "best" driver was still really bad. My general rule of thumb: use the newest driver available for your graphic card model. You can test the official and inofficial beta-drivers, too. If they present you with similar z-fighting, better performance and don't cause any glitches you didn't have before, stick to them. They are usually safe for use even if they aren't WHQL-certified. STEP 2: Testing nearly all of the different settings in NVidia Control Panel and nVidia-Inspector Certain settings like enable stereoscopic 3D and deactivating the effecty when a game starts (Skyrim SLI Water Bug Fix) seemed to worsen z-fighting, but since I was the only one evaluating about 40 videos which all had about the same amount of z-fighting, I cannot prove that any changes made there altered the amount or strength of z-fighting for me. STEP 3: Checking the different Skyrim Launcher profiles I found out, that at High-setting I don't have any distant mountain flicker. Instead I had flickering on closer mountains. On Ultra settings only the distant mountains have flickering. I found the setting which caused this z-fighting and found out what it does in SkyrimPrefs.ini. The bad guy is "Distant Object Detail". Set on lower values moves the z-fighting closer to the player. On Ultra it is the furthest away. For obvious reasons I sticked to Ultra-settings. STEP 4: Extensive ini-tweaking I have tried out many many many ini-tweaks and have found a tweak combination that drastically reduced z-fighting for me. Here you can find the proof of this: [video=youtube]http-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYjebsn_27g&feature=youtu.be I am very happy about my discovery and hope that many of you will be able to enjoy their skyrim a lot more. What is your fix? The thing is, not everybody gets the same z-fighting or the same results when applying my fix. You can post your own rig, drivers, skyrim version and the results of my fix for you personally. I'll have a look at it and try to make an educated guess as to what you could still improve. Important for you will be, that this fix costs you some FPS. In wide-open locations like the plains of Whiterun you might experience a severe drop of FPS depending on what other mods or ini-tweaks you use. If you cannot live with that you got 3 choices: -take the fix and cut down on other mods or tweaks -forget the fix and live with z-fighting -go to your skyrim Launcher - Options - Advanced - View Distance - Distant Object Detail and set it to Medium or High and live with fugly mountains. IMPORTANT: This fix is only approved for Skyrim Ultra-Settings from the original Skyrim Launcher. Whatever tweaks you made personally might cause problems. If you have a doubt copy your ini files to a separate folder. Then delete them from the Skyrim folder and open the Steam Skyrim Launcher. Pick Ultra-settings. Then start the game to create new .ini's. Now apply the fix(-es). After saving your ini-files make them "read-only" so your skyrim launcher cannot change any of the new values. FIX Part 1: Open your SkyrimPrefs.ini. Usually it should be found under Documents/My Games/Skyrim Scroll down until you reach the [TerrainManager] section of the file. Change all the values so they look like this: fTreeLoadDistance=75000.0000 fBlockMaximumDistance=500000.0000 fBlockLevel1Distance=1400000.0000 fBlockLevel0Distance=75000.0000 fSplitDistanceMult=4.0000 bShowLODInEditor=0 Now search for "fSkyCellRefFadeDistance" and change it's value to 500000.0000 Save and exit Open your Skyrim.ini. You can find it in the same folder you found your SkyrimPrefs.ini Under [Display] add the following line: fNearDistance=25.0000 Save and Exit. The normal setting is 15.0000 (even though it's not there, the game calculates with this value). 25.0000 is the maximum approved value. everything above can cause severe graphic glitches. So try out values between 15.0000 and 25.0000 to find your own sweet spot. (Thanks to hlvr for this information. check out his thread here: https://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1336456...-fighting/) FIX Part 2 (optional and only for very good rigs): Please do look at this thread to weigh the benefits against the problems of doing this tweak: https://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1274926...ult-57911/ Open your Skyrim.ini. You can find it in the same folder you found your SkyrimPrefs.ini under [General] add the following line: uGridsToLoad=7 change uExterior Cell Buffer=36 to uExterior Cell Buffer=64 Save and exit. You may try setting uGrids to 9, too. It's just supposed to reduce the z-fighting whilst closing in on structures, e.g. running from Whiterun Watch tower (where your first dragon attacks) to Whiterun. The walls start flashing at some point. High uGrids help against that, but you should know what you're doing before you mess everything up. "This fix costs me too much performance! What can I do instead?" First of all: do NOT apply the second part (uGridsToLoad) of the fix. Skip it entirely. You can try the fix on a clean Skyrim install without any mods and see if it's still too costly performance-wise. If you run a stable Skyrim config at Ultra-settings (>35 FPS recommended) you can try to change only the value of fSplitDistanceMult to something in between 2.0000 and 3.0000. You find this value in your SkyrimPrefs.ini. It makes the z-fighting less prominent. What you can try, too, is applying my fix in small steps. So instead of copy and paste, do some testing yourself. If you find a good setup please post it here https://forum.step-project.com/showthread.php?tid=154 and if possible your: 1: OS 2: Exact Video card model 3: Driver version 4: Video card control panel settings 5: In-game settings 6: ini tweaks 7: mods 8: dxdiag This would be very much appreciated by the Skyrim Community in general and the STEP community in particular! Do you want to contribute to the research work done on z-fighting in Skyrim? Everybody who wants to help is welcome to do so. Try to build on the work already done on the topic of z-fighting and expand on it. Do your own research and post your interesting findings in this thread here please https://forum.step-project.com/showthread.php?tid=154 Is this it? Will there be a continuation on this work? As long as there is z-fighting in Skyrim and I am playing video games I'll work on this matter. Anything new will be added to this guide and mentioned in the Update-Section. Feel free to join the STEP community and contribute to our project! Credits: Thanks to hlvr for his dedicated work on z-fighting (his own thread can be found here: https://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1336456...-fighting/) and his own fNearDistance-tweak that helps a lot against z-fighting Thanks to the STEP community for testing a whole lot of different settings and thus providing me with a wider range of experiences Thanks to anybody who is working on the z-fighting issue

I'm not a great fan of DoF as most often the effect is made too strong to be 'naturalistic', but that's just personal taste - more to the point is the performance hit. An example can be seen in Enb preset - Vanilla Look For Independent Bokeh DOF Only by MarMScA which attempts to allow the use of a Bokeh type DoF without the other ENB effects. If you check the screenshots and note the FPS counter the hit is quite significant.

Just an update on this one as I consider it a great WIP. Firstly Leviathan is still actively working on this mod, hoorah! ;) Second, some mod authors (StarX for one) are not releasing their packages for use with AV on Nexus until AV reaches at least a stable beta release... if you want to try these AV packages for testing you may need to go and register with TESAlliance (TESA) but it's an interesting site anyway :D

SkyTEST - Realistic Animals and Predators by EtaYorius I came across this mod while checking out Automatic Variants (by Leviathan1753). What intrigues me is that this mod deals in the creature AI rather than textures/models, aiming to bring more accuracy to their behaviour. It does introduce more spawn points, changes to animal speeds, and small prey critters for the food chain, but I won't list all the changes as they are pointed out in the description. However there is a list of compatible mods which I will copy here: [MOD COMPATIBILITY] Deadly Dragons 100% Warzones - Civil Unrest: 100% Wars in Skyrim: 100% SkyMoMod - 100% Real Wild Life Skyrim: 90% (There may be minor issues with Factions and LeveledCharacters Lists) Birds & Flocks: 100% Prides of Skyrim: 95% (There may be a faction issue that will make Lions & SabreCats to attack themselves) More Village Animals: 100% Summon Animal Pets: 100% WARNING: As with many mods now this is another "It will work best with a New Game start" so probably best considered prior to a clean STEP install for maximum safety. For me this is a definate one to watch/test come STEP 2.1

Lol, I thought pride was a sin? ;) Obviously it will only work, if at all, if you already notice z-fighting on the distant/mid-distance mountains in vanilla... I honestly can't remember as it's so long since I had a vanilla setup :P

Will do boss ;) I have some material about tweaking ini settings for shadows I may place in there as well. Torminater uses nVidia cards and so do I - could I ask if anyone with ATI card(s) could run a quick check on these ini settings please. I'm assuming the z-fighting issue is experienced with Radeon cards/drivers as well?

@torm Went back to ugrids 5 with your suggested tweaks and yes, this does appear to have almost as good an effect - no z-fighting where I was testing (outside Whiterun stables & at the top of the stairs inside). Well done and thanks for your hard work :D I'll use these settings on my next install and do more extensive testing then.

I'll be very interested to see that torm, unfortunately I may not be able to use these settings permanently (until I can upgrade my rig) as my old 1Gb 8800 GT can't afford to leak anymore fps, unlike your 570 SLi setup ;) But it will be very useful to others I'm sure, and I was happy to test it out :)

@torm I made those changes and tested outside Whiterun, as you said, no noticable z-fighting, grats :) However it does cost me around 3-4 fps although this may simply be down to setting my ugrids back up to 7. As yet I haven't had time to do a visual before and after test to check on any other changes this might bring in, but as far as the distant to mid range mountain flickering, it certainly seems to help. I know that the actual z-fighting can't be shown through still screen shots, but if someone gets the chance a good long distance mountain screenie from pre and post adjustment would settle my mind as to whether I was noticing any differences.

I'm sure most know about this MS one - Dreamspark - they've tightened it up a bit for access but if you are at college, or have children there, it's a good way to get otherwise unaffordable dev software to play with. I know the top 3 fri, but will look with interest at the others :)

@s4n I did see that one, and despite liking to quote Einstein I find the idea of dynamic time a little 'upsetting' ;) I really just want longer days to get more done before dark descends on the land 'for the night is dark and full of fear'. Thanks for pointing it out tho'.

New Update 1.4 has now removed the chests.

Cloaks of SkyrimAuthor: NoodlesI haven't seen a seperate thread for this one yet although it was mentioned in another. A definite contender now [26/04/12] on version 0.8 I have used this mod without problem, but only the craftable PC only version (although I intend to move to the regular version now that there have been no obvious conflicts). The mod adds cloaks both to leveled lists and as craftable and hand-placed items in game. These cloaks are not armour and are fully lore acceptable. They will however count toward warmth for mods like Hypothermia so have a valid use in the game. The 'Winter is Coming' cloaks are now also compatible through a patch. Overall, very well done and immersive.

This (these) look excellent and I will be keeping track of them for 'one day' when I finally get a chance to completely explore the vanilla Skyrim content :)