exploiteddna

Vanilla-HRDLC Current STEP - Snow and Rocks 2K Hectrol Caves Med. Res 2K Scene: I am exiting Bleak Falls Barrow, immediately after the first word wall and obtaining the Dragon Stone from the boss draugr

Ive actually thought about messing with the cell buffer settings in the INIs but havent gotten around to doing it yet. If anyone is thinking about testing it out, just remember you should use a power of 2, i.e. 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36 i forgot about the bpreemptivelyunloadcells setting.. i remember seeing that a few weeks back but never did anything with it. thanks for the inputÂ

yeah and tes5edit cant tell me anything about textures. It can tell you which models are used, which can then be opened up in nifskope to see which textures are used. But theres no easy way of searching a texture and getting a list of models/meshes or locations in the game that use it. You can only go the other way: location --> mesh --> texture As Aiyen said, the best way to determine where to find textures is looking at the folder structure. But even that can only give you so much information. It can tell you the textures are in solitude, yeah thats great, but where in solitude? Some texture names dont give very much information about where they are used. A lot of it comes from experience. The more you do this, the more efficient you will get. However, doing a texture pack like this one is going to be tedious for anyone. And finding all of the textures and getting a compare for each and every single texture is almost unrealistic (if you want it finished in a timely manner) EDIT: It may help if you have photoshop/GIMP set up with nvidia tools/dds plugin so you can open the textures yourself and at least see what they look like beforehand. In fact, if I didnt have the ability to look at the textures outside of the game, it would make things a lot more challenging.

Pretty much... it took me forever to look at them and do the checking for SR. By looking at the file structure you can pretty much tell the areas the textures might appear, so might want to try them in groups. yeah i noticed that, but wasnt sure how detailed i would need to be. I mean, is it absolutely necessary to compare each individual texture from this mod to its counterpart in current STEP?? or can we get away with just getting some nice shots of scenes that have a significant number of these textures in use?

oh oops lol.. i just was going by the join date and wrongfully assumed that he'd been an MT at least most of that time :) This is a tough one to do compares for.. i mean basically its one texture at a time? And it's so diverse.

the only thing ive been able to think of is this: TES5Edit has a script you can run on any ESP/ESM you have loaded in the program that will basically create a report of all the records that have scripts attached to them. it will then dump this report into a file somewhere in your TES5Edit directory and you can open it up and do a search for the name of a script of interest to see how many different records, and which ones, are using that script. This way you might be able to better monitor its use. However, there is nothing quantitative about this approach. Well, you could at least see how many scripts are being used by each mod and how many instances there are of each use. Nonetheless, it is actually a pretty interesting report to look at so i think it does have some value, even though it may not be exactly what you're looking for.

it varies from person to person. it also depends on the situation. sometimes i will crash with a burst of 3125mb and other times ive had it as high as 3175mb without a crash.  However, I have never had it at 3200 or greater without a guaranteed crash. On a different note, its funny that iHUD is being called script hog. Is it actually using a lot of resources and adding significantly to the script latency, or does it just have "a lot" of script files included in the mod?

got it

ok im gonna wait for phazer to post his so i can see how the seasoned MT does things and maybe I can learn something :D

what do we still need done for testing on this mod? I havent made any contribution to testing this mod yet, so...

yeah where do we stand on this?

i can take some more if its necessary, i just never did because i thought these were sufficient.

thanks ill take a look at that. Man the majority of that stuff is way over my head. I dont know very much about computer science etc. Is he still active? Maybe i can PM him and explain what im trying to do and see if it is even feasible..

are you directing that at me? No, i do not use any 4k textures. Most of my interiors are comprised of 2k color maps, 1k normals. Â All of my exterior landscape textures are 1k color and 1k normals. Â But yes, textures alone can be considered the cause of reaching the ceiling. I mean, if we all ran nothing but vanilla textures, we probably wouldnt be in this mess. Its about finding a balance so you dont hit the ceiling, or finding a way to increase/remove the ceiling.

for some reason that function has never worked for me..and its one of the most important since i do a lot of weather editing for personal use. currently ive gotten pretty good at guessing the weather, then i just do 'getweather [weatherID]' in console to confirm, or if im wrong then i usually can get it in a few tries. Still a hassle though. Maybe ill PM manny and troubleshoot EDIT: Nevermind I guess it resolved itself. I hadnt checked it for quite a while because i thought it was non-functional, but i guess i must have inadvertently fixed whatever was wrong.

haha yeah, storing x y or z in memory isnt very useful at all if its just going to make you crash

wow. i didnt even realize that mod was in STEP. its never been the type of mod that interests me so i guess i skipped over it without ever really knowing it.

I mean, if there was some path i could use to point it to the "virtual" ..data\textures\ directory then that would be great and would probably work. however i dont think there is an actual path for this. I could point it to \ModOrganizer\InstalledMods but that wouldnt do any good because all the mods there are installed individually and are separate from each other. I guess when i need to use nifskope i can just copy and paste the assets into the real skyrim data directory, then do my work, then move the stuff out. Ive never seen anything like this before, sorry

i mentioned in my post that i do use pcb, purge cell buffer, command but it doesnt always help. the reason is, when you purge the buffer, it only empties out excess.. so it cannot empty out the data for the cell youre currently in. So, if you run 'pcb' right before you enter the interior it will only drop it to say 2000-2500mb, then once you enter the new cell it will load all the new data on top of that. Now, if there was a way to essentially 'pause' the loading process in between cells during the transition, then run 'pcb' command to clear the data down close to 0mb (maybe like 200-300mb, realistically), then 'un-pause' and it would load all the new cell data on top of that, then we would not have a problem. Unfortunately, we cant clear the buffer during the actual transition. But this is what ive been saying. The game will sometimes do this for us by completely flushing all the data and essentially re-load everything starting from ~300mb. But it only does this for some cells, not all. If it did this for all cells, I would *never* have a CTD from 3.1gb bug. Of course, one might argue that doing this for all cells could increase load times in between cells since the game has to re-load all the data completely each time you make a cell transition. However, if its choosing between an extra 5 seconds of loadscreen time versus a CTD, I would choose to accept the extra loading time. Here is a scenario: Im running around outside of Windhelm. My current usage is at ~2300mb. I run up to the main city entrance and before I enter Windhelm, i run the 'pcb' console command and I notice my usage drops to ~2100mb. I then activate the main door to the city, and enter into a loading screen. I instantly notice that my usage drops all the way down to 400mb, then slowly climbs back up to 2100mb and stabilizes around 2450mb. When it is done loading I am standing directly inside of windhelm main wall looking at Candlehearth Hall. My utilization at this very moment is hovering around the 2450-2500mb mark. YAY! No CTD. Success!! Here is another scenario: Im traveling by foot through the wooded areas between Falkreath and the Dark Brotherhood sanctuary that is close by. When I arrive outside, I see my current usage is at 2700mb. I know Im getting pretty close to that 3.1gb mark, so I run 'pcb' command in console. As a result, my usage drops to ~2200mb. I activate the door and enter into a loading screen. However, this time is different. Instead of dropping down to only a few hundred megabytes of data, the game decides to load all of the DB sanctuary data on top of the 2200mb I was at before entering the cell. Before I know it, I see my usage climb rapidly towards 3.1gb, and it jumps up to 3150mb for a split second, and next thing i know I amstanding inside the DB Sanctuary with my current usage at 3050mb. I quickly open the console and run the pcb command again and it wipes out nearly 2gb of data that was in the buffer from the exterior cell i was just in a moment before. I narrowly escaped a CTD. (The pcb command saved my butt on that second scenario. If I had not run it, I would definitely had a CTD. However, it does not always work this way. Lets say I ran the 'pcb' command but it only dropped my usage from 2500mb down to 2400mb. I would have had a CTD because I did not have enough "space" for an extra 200mb. Also note that, if the game had behaved in the same way as it did when I entered windhelm, I would not have even come close to CTD) Both of these scenarios are real. They happen to me all the time, just as I have described. 'pcb' command can be helpful but it can only do so much. you cannot use it in the middle of a cell transition to force the game to do a complete flush of memory all the way down to a few hundred mb. when you can use it, it will only (usually) drop you down about 1000mb at the very most and you would be luck to see that. Most of the time we're talking about a few hundred megabytes. Sorry for such a long response but I felt it was necessary because I often get people saying "hey just use the 'pcb' command in the console" and i need to explain to them that I have tried it and that it is only useful in certain situations. It is merely a tool to help give you ~500mb extra headroom before you enter into a new cell and can also be used to drop you down immediately after entering the new area. Use it once before, then if youre still very close to 3gb after loading into the new cell, run it again. It is helpful indeed, but we need a much better solution. Unfortunately, its the only thing we have at the moment (aside from memory management through the use of smaller size textures and other game assets)

yeah thanks. you dont load the textures yourself, but if you load a mesh it will look in ...\data\textures\ for the assigned texture and, if found, apply it to the mesh. If you open a mesh and it doesnt have a texture on it, that means the texture thats assigned to it either doesnt exist or is packaged in a BSA

For me the challenge is managing the buffer. I do not have any scenes in my game that alone require 3.1gb. I'd say the max is about 2.6gb when I'm in city world spaces, like solitude world or whiterun world. The problem is when I enter into an interior and the game tries to load the entire interior on top of the 2.6gb from the exterior. However, sometimes depending on the interior that I'm entering, the game will flush the buffer before loading the interior cell. For me the holy grail would be finding a way to force the flushing when interior cells are entered from an exterior. I have suspicions that there is some way to do this via flags or something similar, but have not done much investigating myself. Something must be there telling the game when to do this which is why it does it for some cell transitions but not others. For now I use pcb console command but that only helps sometimes depending on the situation.

Yeah I find a lot of interesting and useful mods like that by browsing the profiles of the more popular mod authors, like mannygt. Anyways back on topic, yeah it would be cool to see if something could be written into STATUS that could help for situations like this. It may be too complex

STATUS, what a great simple mod it is, so very useful. ive never seen anyone mention it on here, i thought it was my own little secret, haha

^ what he said

yeah i know what youre talking about ive seen caves look that way too, almost similar to rock caves where you would find stalagmites. With that said, the real question is whether the textures accurately represent that which we'd expect to find in Tamriel, as opposed to our real life Earth.