aaltair

What an entertaining thread! Nail painting is ancient, for sure, and in places like Rome it was the men as much as and sometimes more than the women doing it. Considering how visible one's hands are, it's a great way to display your status, as someone else pointed out. The thing about nail polish though is that as soon as you actually use your hands for any practical application it starts chipping and looks like crap, which is exactly why it was a status symbol- only the very wealthy and important have the ability to do absolutely no manual labor and thus maintain their perfect nails. Which is why it doesn't make sense for me, personally, to see it in Skyrim- a land full of chopping wood and hard living. OK maybe Nazeem should have painted nails, lol. Not a fan of makeup in Skyrim for the same reason. Then again, as someone else pointed out Tamriel is not Earth so maybe the ladies of Skyrim just magic on their makeup and it stays forever! As for the bouncing boobies, john7, I think I can truthfully say I don't like them anymore than you would like watching male characters repeatedly getting kicked in the ..... throughout your game- you would spend all your time cringing in the knowledge of how much having to endure that repeated pain would suck!

hishutup, perhaps you can just load all your recommended oblivion mods into one giant file for download ;) I have been toying with the idea of trying Oblivion but one look at that guide and I realized how much I don't want to figure out a whole new modding setup right now, lol

I'll do that then. I wasn't sure if the changes to the USKP were intentional or not so I hadn't touched them so far

Well I picked up Origins for $9 and figured I'd give it a go. Too a brief look at the Nexus mod page for it and I'm wondering, should I even bother with mods? I found this: https://wiki.step-project.com/User:Neovalen/Origins_Revisited_-_Ultimate_Edition but all the mods are labeled 'TBD' and as I have no desire to spend the next 4 months modding DA:O like I did Skyrim, I'm just wondering if someone would tell me if I should even bother with mods for Origins and if so, are there a handful of must-have's you would recommend? I've never played the game at all so I don't think I need any story or mechanics changes, probably just some things to make it look a bit updated? Any suggestions welcome! :)

It would be great to have the mod updated with those forwarded edits, but in the meantime, where can I find these "instructions on how to easily convert the main file which has the necessary USKP edits to IL-only version"? And can't you just drag the changes forward yourself in TESEdit?

Well, the "things not rendering fast enough" would explain the weird mountain texture, but not the strobe-effect water and buildings. Check the video I linked.

@Aiyen Wow yes, everything you said there makes so much sense. Anything artistic you create generally is easier if you start from a blank slate as it allows you to understand how things come together, rather than looking at a finished piece and trying to unravel it and start over. Not a very good analogy but yes, I definitely see what you mean. And I suck at math. Now I just have a couple more adjustments to make...and a couple more...and maybe this one more thing... :)

I've had a really odd bug-type thing happening for a long while and I think I know the cause but I can't find anything on the internet that corroborates my theory or that has any explanation at all really. Basically, when I fast travel, more than half the time the place I show up in will have massive texture issues. This can take the form of strobe-light effect texture shimmering (particularly on water) to weird missing textures on rocks. Here is a video I found back when I was scouring the internet for a cause and fix, which shows exactly what can happen to the water. I sometimes also get this with the sides of buildings: https://youtu.be/pWhQMdMuEXA And here is a picture of what can sometimes happen with the textures when they're not flickering: The thing is, it only happens when I fast travel. Not when I use the carts, and not when I'm traveling on foot or horse. If it happens and I then fast travel out of the area and then walk back in to the previously affected area, the issue is usually gone. Since I don't actually do any fast traveling in normal game play, only when I'm testing mods, it's not a tragedy or anything although I really would like to figure out the cause and if there's any fix. Is this a vanilla bug? Because it does it on a vanilla setup, too. With a vanilla setup it happens mostly with the water, not the buildings and missing/messed up non-flickering textures. However as I don't actually have very many hours into a playthrough yet (unbelievably after 4 months of having this game I am playing "modding skyrim" far more than the actual game) I'm a little worried that I'm going to get however many hours in and all of a sudden this issue is going to crop up and ruin my game. I hate it when I can't figure something out >:-( Have any of you heard of or seen this before? Any ideas?

It would be cool if the STEP enbseries.ini guide could be fleshed out more, there are some areas of the guide that have no information, like the entire Environment section. Something about custom weathers would be great too. A lot of work though I'm sure. The weathers seem to really confuse people, and I think a lot of people end up trying to achieve what they want by adjusting ambientlight or directlight, but it's just so much more complex than that.

Thanks for your help JawZ, I tend to tweak things until either I get frustrated or my husband comes in and sheepishly inquires if we're ever actually going out to dinner, lol. Easy to lose track of time trying to get things just so but maybe someday I'll have even somewhat of a clue as to what I'm doing! What ENB is it in the photos?

Yeah it just seems like it's too much to try to force those rays with this preset. I assumed that getting the style rays from one into the other wouldn't be too hard, considering the two presets share the same parent (somber antique) but it looks like I'll just have to switch back and forth every couple of days or so to get my fix, lol

Well, I've done some testing with lukewarm results. The following picture is a definite improvement, but still nowhere near the epicosity of rays I was going for: The rays are better but you really don't notice them unless you're behind a tree. They're not nearly as far-reaching or as dense as the rays I see in the ENB I'm trying to base them off of, which is Grim and Somber Jyggalag. That preset has rays at high noon coming straight down from the heavens like a sunny transporter beam. The funny thing is, both these presets have the same parent, somber antique, so I feel like it should work and am frustrated at my lack of knowledge as to how to make it happen. It's like someone who doesn't know how to fix a car or whatever standing there staring under the hood, hoping osmosis will take care of the rest. These are the type of rays I am going for: and these: I doubled my sunrays multiplier bringing it to 2.50, raised the volumetric density to 10 and lowered gradient intensity and some of the sun glow intensity. I tried increasing the sunrays multiplier to 8 to see what would happen, and the moment I closed the GUI I crashed. So maybe I got greedy there.

Yeah when i tried just adjusting volumetric rays and multiplier I ended up with a very blown-out sky. I'll mess with the other settings you suggested and see what happens. It's definitely harder than I originally thought it would be! The preset I'm trying to add rays to is Somber 3 https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/54362/?

Completely random and trivial question here... Are "godrays" produced through adjustments to the Rays and Volumetric rays settings, or are they created through a more complex blend of ENB interactions I probably don't want to delve too far in to? I have two ENBs I love for different reasons, one of which is that one ENB has amazing godrays. I decided to mess about and try to give those godrays to the other ENB which has a sun that is more of a glow with rays you only really see when you're amidst trees at sunset, and they're still not as intense as the other ENB's godrays. I was given advice that I should be adjusting Rays and Volumetric Rays, including adding to the density of the volumetric rays, but I see little to no difference. They both use the latest ENB versions but the one with the more epic rays does not use weathers. I did adjust the rays within the individual weathers of the one that uses weathers to no avail. Am I simply missing some manner of ENB sorcery that cannot be explained by a simple adjustment of rays? To be clear, here's a picture of the godrays i'm trying to achieve: unrealistic, but i love them Pretty much the same shot, same savegame, but with the ENB that doesn't have the rays. This is after I adjusted density, rays multiplier, etc, to 3x what they were: need more rays Essentially I'm just wondering if this quest is far more complex than it would at first appear or if i'm missing something painfully obvious.

Well, it adds A LOT more music and categories than vanilla, so I imagine it's more work for the machine than vanilla. It's probably a pretty inconsequential amount of additional work for my computer but I did try out your mod last night, played for a bit and found that you're right- it's so nice hearing the full effect of all the ambient sounds AOS adds :D

I hadn't even considered before that music might affect performance. I'm currently trying to slim down on my mods a bit as I have enough that I'm starting to get a tad nervous. I've currently got Epic Music Overhaul installed which is nice because I have my own music in there and the combat music set so that it only triggers for high level enemies, but it's certainly not an essential mod and i'm wondering, do you think your mod would benefit my system more than EMO? I'm honestly not even sure if EMO adds further stress, or relieves some stress by "fixing" combat music.

Thanks! I think I just need something to distract myself from the fact that I can't really play the new Witcher until I get a graphics card upgrade :( Husband is playing Inquisition on xbox, looks fun.

Like the title says. I was thinking of playing the most recent one but then figured since I've never played any of them I should start with the Origins? Does it matter; do you get more out of the story overall if you start from the beginning or are they unrelated? Also from what I can tell, people hated the second one. Should I just plan on Origins and Inquisition and skip the second one? Thanks!

SMC works very well and is easy to use once you get to know it, however I would caution that you need to pay close attention to what you are putting into your pack in terms of compatibility with other things in your load order. I had issues with SMIM and a few others, in terms of load order placement. By that I mean that because of other things in my load order, I needed SMIM, for example, to be in one position and other items within SMC to be in another position, but since they were all together in SMC I lost the flexibility of moving them about individually. I also discovered that as I became more experienced with modding and had clearer ideas about the look I wanted for my game and what worked best with my ENB, SMC became more of a hindrance than a help to achieving my desired outcome. This is no fault of the program at all, I just found I enjoyed my results more when I could personally tweak things just so. I do still use it for keeping all the little textures together and neat, clutter and so forth. Finally watch out for your vram- when initially using SMC I found myself like a kid in a candy store with a pocket full of money and grabbed absolutely everything. Doing this caused me to hit the limits of my card (3gb) resulting in CTDs. Hope that helps!

If you run into something like that again you can always install the mod twice, selecting the different options you want for each and naming the new one something different from the old. Then you can arrange them however you like.

hishutup: my graphics card is an nvidia 760 I will take a couple more compares with it on/off and at a smaller angle as Spock suggested, tomorrow. Although, if the in-game effect really is so subtle that you can only notice it if you stand at just the right angle, maybe I shouldn't be worrying about it so much, lol.

It is, it's just the same result no matter what I set it to, whether enabled in the ENB or drivers or both or neither. That's what has me puzzled.

Well, I tried looking at roads with it completely disabled, then with it enabled in ENB only, then with it disabled in ENB and enabled in drivers, and I see no difference between the three. This leads me to believe that something, somewhere, somehow, is forcing it off no matter what, or on no matter what, or I'm really just that blind and can't tell the difference. It's bugging me either way. If you guys wouldn't mind terribly, could you just look at these three pics and tell me if there is any difference between them to you? If there isn't any difference between the three I really want to try and figure out why, and whether it's being forced on or forced off by something, maybe something I missed or something weird with my computer or skyrim install. AF is off in ENB, Drivers and Skyrim Launcher AF is On in the enblocal only driver-controlled AF Same road, same time of day, same weather. With the wiki picture of AF on/off I could see a very noticeable difference, but with these three pictures I can't, and judging from the blurriness of the road a short distance away I am inclined to think AF is off in all three scenarios. Edit: I did as Spock suggested and checked out a building corner. Here's the result: AF Off ENB AF On

Discussion thread: RUSTIC DRAGON CORPSE by Gamwich Wiki Link This person can rustic all of Skyrim and I will download it. Hodilton video: Compares Vanilla >> STEP >> Rustic Dragons

Thanks for the response, sounds great!