Bealdwine

Detailed Cities by DexOut of curiosity more than anything - would we consider this a 'Content' mod? The mod itself adds assets (trees, shrubs, barrels, &etc.) to the major cities, but afaik no new items or textures only assets from the vanilla game. Dex also claims that in most cases these are assets that already appear somewhere in the location. I'm mostly just interested in where we would catagorise something like this.

@Anosognos Thank you, a very competent review and an interesting 'heads up', I will add this to my Watch List.

@Asimov Unfortunately Monty is right and there are no guaranteed ways to absolutly be sure an older save isn't still 'contaminated' by previous mods. I have reinstalled, remodded my game several times for testing and tweaking and usually just recreate and restart my character. However... ...Making no promises of success this is the usual procedure to attempt cleaning a save: 1) Get out of the main game 'grid'. So go to a city and into a nice small 'cell' that has not been modded, in other words go through a door transition to an indoor location. 2) Open the console in-game using the key directly below the [Esc] button - I believe this is the tilde (~) key on US keyboards. 3) Type pcb - press [Return] - close the console. (Doing this should have cleared the cell buffer). 4) Make a new full Save (not a quick save or a save over a previous one). That is the save you will want to back up and try to use after your fresh install and remodding... and the very best of luck :) That's the best I can do if anyone else can add to that please feel free.

@torminater Could you be a little more specific about what actions you are taking or settings you are changing? I'm pleased you are managing to eliminate or at least control these visual issues, but it would help the community at large a lot more if they could see how you have done it. Someone else may well find themselves with the same problems down the line :)

I'm planning to start a new charity called "Save the Dragon" as at this rate they will become as endangered a species as the whale!

The most frustrating thing is that at least 4 friends down the pub are playing the Xbox version and keep asking me "have you seen x", "do you know about y", "isn't z so cool!" Aaaargh!!! No I haven't been there, seen this, done that! Stop with the spoilers! ... But my Skyrim does look beautiful :D My only revenge is that every time they complain about some feature or glitch I get to say "Oh, there's a mod on the PC that fixes that" :)

I can't remember the name but I believe there is a similar mod for NPCs that allows actions/animations they wouldn't normally have - such as your House Carl cooking up some dinner... Further down the line I will be looking at immersion mods to apply, and I expect this sort of thing will be considered for an immersive addon 'pack' for STEP but it isn't really STEP core material.

Lol, same boat... currently level 2, again So looking forward to next STEP and finally finding my optimal performance/quality setup so I can actually play rather than test!

On another note: For those of us scrabbling for every FPS from our older rigs I have been trying out FPS Background Booster in conjunction with iObit's Game Booster 3 and seem to be gaining about 3-5 fps which finally takes me up to around the 20 FPS mark out of doors. FPSBB uses a technique employed by Microsoft in their Media Player that encourages the CPU to reach it's maximum (safe) capacity. Therefore it is not Skyrim specific and if it works at all on your rig (there are a number of variables and it may be of no benefit to some systems) it will increase performance for any games you play. As my main bottlenecks in Skyrim (apart from Bethesda's own code :P ) are CPU and VRAM I did gain some benefit but 'mileage will vary'. I am less certain about the gains from Game Booster 3 but it doesn't hurt to try and they work happily together. Some people have found the instructions for FPSBB confusing according to their thread, basically run the .exe before skse_launcher and simply leave the cmd box it opens alone until you finish the game then end it before you shut down the PC. There are instructions for using a bat file to get everything running in one shot if you prefer that method.

Excellent stuff zMan, thank you :) I do hope you are right about the cumulative benefits for VRAM and as there appears to be no appreciable reduction in quality I will be trying the technique on the major texture packages on my next clean install for 2.1. The process is a bit involved but as s4n said it's worth it for the visual corrections alone. The 'smudged' trees always dig bug me badly ;)

I heartily second that zMan, especially now you are looking at the effects on lower end rigs as well :) (even though you really have no personal need to, that's at least as impressive as the 'selfless' work done by modders). I'm looking forward to implimenting optimizations based on your dedicated work once STEP 2.1 goes live. I tried out a d3d9.dll from 'Gigantic Skyrim FPS Performance Patch' today and may have clawed back 2-3 fps but it is so hard to tell :P Unfortunately it seems to be an nVidia specific improvement for older cards, but responces on the forum are extremely mixed and confusing. Obviously it has the usual problem in being superficially incompatible with ENB series & FXAA mods - nothing a rename and file [proxy] wouldn't cure.

I'm going to grab this one now in case it stops being available as a seperate install Tyantis is well beyond the way I want to mod my game at this time.

Definitely agree. There is a worrying trend to add in the 'kitchen sink' once a mod has succeeded in it's initial purpose - without options this actually detracts from the quality of the mod imho.

@Nachtfrost Hi and welcome to the wacky world of Skyrim performance. I'm afraid even people with 'uber' PC kit have found that Skyrim can stretch their system resources, partly because of the nature of advanced 3d graphics and partly due to some rather poor coding and design on Bethesda's part. I know it can be a tedious thing, but if you read through some past threads both here and on the Nexus & Official forums you will find much mention of problems incured and solutions found for these issues. Note especially that shadows in Skyrim are rendered using the CPU (main PC processor chip) and not by the graphics card. Also that game performance can be strongly influenced by the amount of VRAM (dedicated graphics card memory) available, however your cards 1.5Gb should be sufficient until you seriously stretch it with Hi-Res texture mods. Even on Ultra shadows in the game are very poorly handled and rendered, however some improvements to the base code of the game have been made through the Bethesda Updates and it is worth allowing the game to update - although we could argue all day over which update version is best to run at this time ;) Personally I envy your PC rig and fps results and to be honest in your position I would simply turn FRAPS off and enjoy the game as your experience is going to be more than pleasant :) In fact you may want to limit your fps to not exceed your monitor refresh rate for the best results. Happy 'rimming :)

Ooops, sorry I did know that one but forgot to mention :facepalm:

The only things I can think of would be the introduction of the grass shadowing effects in update 1.5, and iirc, there was a tick box option related to this in the version of SC I used. Will check properly later.

Maybe better to suggest it's use with TheCompilers tweak advice, problem being all those pesky ATI users ;) But obviously any ini tweaks can be tried using this app.

@z929669 - A comparisson with what you have found using DDSopt would be really useful. I tried the NIF tab in SMCO and had no files processed, not sure why yet, as you say the documentation is poor for both that and TO which is a shame. I'll review the relevant forum pages to see if there is more info available there.

I am sure you're right zMan, however my interest in these other apps is in their use by the less technically astute 'rim mod user. If they actually DO offer performance benefits, especially for the more 'limited' PC setup then one or more deserve a recommendation. However DDSopt is by it's very nature - "many, many more options and bundled features" - much more daunting for a novice to approach, especially IF a 'subset' of it's abilities are all that is really needed to achieve at least some worthwhile improvement. Whereas something like SMCO, with it's 'one touch' approach is much kinder on the general populace who are more concerned about what it does rather than how it does it. If the base technology is the same, then the question is (in light of my previous point) are the 'quick fix' options - OT & SMCO - providing the correct settings to actually get that quality/performance trade-off right and will the majority of 'rimmers without 'uber' PC rigs benefit from their use? Unfortunately just seeing a size reduction in the files is not enough and I hope to do some comparisons to check for visual degradation when I have time. But if it came to the choice of - 'vanilla' graphics < 70% of Full-STEP gorgeousness < Full-STEP gorgeousness I'm sure many, including myself, would be content with the middle option to keep the game playable.

Interesting one as it always bugged me that the patterns in carpets almost disappear once Skyrim HD-2K is installed. I would have prefered a mod that simply improved/returned the original pattern style though. Celtic and Saxon/Norse style decoration did differ quite a bit (arguably the earlier Celts were more advanced in artistic decorative skills - I say arguably as I actually prefer the germanic/scandinavian styles).

I used to be an adventurer like you... until my follower shot an arrow to my knee :( ok, sorry, I will never again even come close to this quote, and he actually only shot it into my back :@

Not sure it was , but either way I've been perma-logged in since it started up so had to re-log to activate the permissions.

Do you mean the Dark Creations site? I need to check that out fully yet.

Not sure how this would work with Possessive Corpses, it would help if the braket was closed ;) Is anyone aware if these parts of Possessive Corpses got included in the Unofficial Skyrim Patch? Finding a simple list of fixes (outside the changelog) and their relationship to mod fixes is... eluding me :P