exploiteddna

Surprisingly, no. I guess I thought that my idea was so far-fetched I didn't even test it out. I figured if someone on here with a little more experience thought it was plausible they would tell me to go test it out. I will go test now and update

So as the title says, I need some help troubleshooting texture/mesh problem. Â I can see the outline of the mesh responsible for one of those magic blue beams you see on the pathway up to Winterhold College. Here is a screenshot showing you the problem. My first thought was that one of the textures from a mod is screwing it up. So, Ive found the mesh (mgmagicfirepillarsmall.nif) and loaded it up into nifskope and looked at all of the textures associated with it. However, none of the associated textures have been replaced or modified by any of the mods/texturepacks im using. Also, I am certain that this is the correct mesh because it has the same shape as the in-game outline when i load it into nifskope. So, since it seems that none of the textures being used by the mesh are being altered in any way and are thus still being pulled from the vanilla BSA (no highres DLC installed), it seems that textures arent the culprit. Â Ive also checked to see if any of the mods im using have replaced or edited the mesh itself. Â However, it is still vanilla as well. The only other thing I can think of is maybe a lighting mod is changing the imagespace in such a way that it reveals the seams??? But I dont know, that is a little out of my league. Â I am using the relatively new RLO Weathers module (not the legacy one) that i know modifies the imagespaces a lot, but again, i dont even know if that makes a difference. Any help from anyone who may have experienced this or something similar in the past would be greatly appreciated.

ok. well i guess them im stuck with trying to decrease memory load for the db sanctuary interior as well as the pine forest exterior cells surrounding the entrance. Â that being said, im clueless as to what else i can do to decrease it. The interior is built with nordic ruins stuff so i have completely optimized and reduced texture size of all my nordic ruins textures. Â Ive disabled all of the interior fog. Ive switched my pine forest tree textures to lower res versions and cut the resolution of the normal maps to half of the diffuse maps. Â Ive tried uninstalling lush overhaul but that had little effect in this situation. Â I looked into using Skyrim Project Optimization mod to reduce the interior load, but it seems that mod hasn't even touched the db sanctuary. I suppose I could use the assets from the mod and hand place the occlusion planes myself, but thats something i was really hoping to avoid if theres another alternative. All things considered, Im sure there are plenty of people running the same mods as I am not having any issue with this so im struggling to see what makes my situation unique. Im running a 4 core cpu and have plenty of gpu power, so i know thats not a factor. Suppose Ill just keep troubleshooting the best I can, maybe ill stumble into something.

Hey there, So Ive been struggling with a problem recently pertaining to entering the dark brotherhood sanctuary.  The problem is, when I am in the open worldspace surrounding the outside of the DB sanctuary, my mem usage tends to hover around 2200 - 2500mb.  When I then attempt to enter the sanctuary, there is no purging of the cell buffer and the game attempts to load the DB sanctuary interior on top of the 2.2-2.5gb already loaded from the exterior, I quickly shoot up to 3.3gb and freeze/crash. Ive found really the only way to get in 100% of the time is to  enter a small interior like Gray Pine Goods, run PCB in console to clear out any excess which drops my mem use down to like 1.1gb, then i just 'coc' into the db sanctuary from there and im good to go. Originally I thought I could just run the PCB console command right before i enter the sanctuary, but I have and it simply doesnt help any.. even with the cell buffer empty im still sitting at ~2.4gb on the exterior... unfortunately it cant purge the cell im standing in lol.  Ive also tried to reduce my mem usage both for the interior and exterior.  I was successful in dropping mem usage a little, but not enough to prevent maxing out while entering. So here's my thought.. Many times in the game when you enter into a relatively large interior, the game will completely flush any exterior data, dropping your memory usage down to like 300mb, then load the new interior so that the only thing in memory is the interior cell(s) you are now standing in. This type of process occurs when you EXIT the db sanctuary and load the tamriel worldspace again, but it does not happen on the way in. I need this to happen on the way in.  There must be some flag or something i can do in CK to signal to the game it needs to behanve this way when entering the db sanctuary from tanriel world. Does anyone have any experience with this type of thing?

lol thanks for that ::embarrassing:: i dunno why for the life of me i never saw that filter box before.. like my grandma used to say, if it were a snake it wouldve bitten me. thanks

ok ill have to mess with the "show recursive" and the red x box. when you say "filter for _n.dds" im not sure how youre doing this.. this is exactly what i was asking about in my original question but i dont see anywhere that allows me to define a filter.. EDIT:  :facepalm: i see a filter box now lol... cant believe ive never noticed that before.. right in the middle of the window between the input top half and output bottom half .. :facepalm:

Im having a hard time seeing an efficient way of doing this.. Since i dont see a way to tell DDSopt to "skip" diffuse/color maps and/or only process normal maps, I have resorted to manually removing all of the diffuse maps from the source folder so that only normal maps remain.. then go to the output folder and copy over the freshly optimized normal back into the original archive.Surely there must be a better way of doing this..

when and why will you be unable to play skyrim? .. just curious :D

thats a pretty good idea.. i like that and may give it a shot. ive just about finished optimizing all my exterior/landscape textures and a good number of my interior/dungeon/cave/clutter textures, and have noticed a huge difference in my in-game DRAM usage. Many interiors are hovering at around 1.5-2.0gb, and most of my exteriors are staying between 2-2.5gb.  Oddly enough, ive noticed that my DRAM usage while in solitude world (and some interiors like blue palace and temple of divines) is staying between 2.8-3.2gb and ive had a few CTDs there in the past couple days.  Ive tried optimizing all the textures there but it didnt seem to have any effect on DRAM usage like I saw in most other parts of the game. Thus, unless anyone has any specific knowledge of this issue, I'll probably try and constrain all the solitude normals to half the res of the diffuse maps and see if that yields favorable results.

Do not spend that kinda money because you expect more wonders in Skyrim. ENB is rather unstable with SLI since it is not optimized for it at all. And the game can be run with a single card in the 600 (now 700) series and max out FPS without any issues. Spend smart... if you are going to spend that much on something then make sure there is a point to it! Skyrim alone is not a good point! lol i hear you man. fortunately i didnt spend the money on these cards for skyrim. i got them for professional reasons but have since managed to get myself hooked on skyrim :)i guess ive been accustomed to *always* being hardware limited when it comes to the things do with my computers, but im finding out this is not so much the case when it comes to PC gaming (which is still fairly new to me, within the past few years)

ah thats convenient.. i dont have a g15 though .. darn mechanical keyboards are boring when it comes to fancy features like that loli use precisionx too since i have evga cards (even though i know that makes no diff, more of an ocd thing.. dont wanna use afterburner (MSI) to tweak evga cards lol) anyways, yeah im currently running through all of my texture packs and using the STEP ddsopt settings, but ive put the max resolution at 2048^2 in case theres some 4k scattered throughout. I mostly use "stock" textures and packs, but some of my packs have been mixed together using textures from multiple sources, and some textures ive made myself using bethesda hd textures as a base. I do my best to keep all my textures very organized in such a way as i know where each individual texture has come from. But, I digress... The main thing i think for me right now is to monitor my DRAM bc im fairly certain im not even crossing the 3gb mark on my 4gb card(s). In doing this I will continue to make sure im using only textures that are 2k and below. The next thing i need to try to do is find the will to remove one of my graphics cards and thus stop using SLI .. but, it pains me to even think about it. .. then again, if its likely going to improve my gaming experience (for skyrim), well.. hmm.. i dunno.. meh EDIT: i just read your sig and youre running two evga 670s in sli .. so shouldnt be any reason for me not to run two evga 680s in sli EDIT 2: for the life of me i cant find where to setup a signature for my account .. i did read somewhere that sigs are for registered users only.. does that mean only moderators or something?

wow im so glad i ran into this thread. similar to the guy/gal in the original post, I have tried multiple configs and setups and still struggle with CTD, freeze, and hanging load screens. I have never read anything about this DRAM limit, i suppose i just havent read enough or have been looking in the wrong places. Im relatively new to the STEP forums, but unlike many other forums, there seems to be a fair amount of experienced modders here, which is good. my current setup is (2) gtx680 4gb Classified in SLI (tweaked myself in NVInspector), i7 3770, 2x4gb 1866 dram, win7 x64 on 64gb ssd, Steam, skyrim, and mods on 120gb ssd, and storage on 500gb hdd. I was actually thinking about upgrading to 16gb of dram just because i feel like im running out of options. but after reading this thread, i dont think it will do me any good. I will definitely try removing one of my cards and see if that makes a difference. Another thing that concerns me is what im reading here about only running the 1k textures of Skyrim HD, low res SMIM textures, etc etc etc.. I mean, i understand the logic (kind of) but it almost seems like im buying nice hardware and getting nothing good out of it. Why buy beefy hardware to run only 1k textures? It's just slightly disappointing that's all. Im curious, how are you all monitoring your dram and vram usage? i know i can use gpuz to monitor my vram, and i guess maybe windows' resource monitor for checking dram? or is it easier with a program like AIDA64? Lots of good insight in this thread, i will definitely keep my eye on this! thanks again

I was able to get it set up in MO but when I would go to add a new object to my mod (a new clutter item from TESA modders resource pack, for example) CK would look for the nif file in the "real" data folder, which of course has nothing in it because it is completely vanilla. So, if I were to navigate to where the file was actually located (i.e. skyrim\data\modorganizer\mods\TESA Resource Pack\meshes\clutter\newclutteritem.nif) then the game would always look in that location for the model, when instead it needs to be looking in data\meshes\clutter\...I guess I could then manually enter in the file path of the correct location, but I wouldnt be able to actually navigate there and select the model in CK.. Does this make sense? Not sure if im explaining it well enough but if youre familiar with how one adds new objects to CK then I think it should make sense. The point is, it seemed like even though I was launching the executable through MO, it wasnt actually setting up or looking in the "virtual/temporary" install folders

Im new to STEP and the forums so I would like to say hello to everyone before commenting. I decided to try the SR guide and follow it as closely as possible. However, as a wrye bash user, I found Mod Organizer to be a little difficult. Dont get me wrong, there are MANY features of MO that I like and would love to see in wrye bash (i.e. direct nexus download and ability to tag mod packages with categories). At the end of the day though, it was just too much of a change and I felt too restricted having to channel ALL of my mod-making and mod-using tasks through the MO interface. Creation Kit was a mess.. If I wanted to add some resources to a project im working on (i.e. new weapons or armor models), I CK would not be able to "see" them.. so I would have to install the resources into the actual Data folder instead the MO virtual Data folder. Anyways, this is merely one example of one issue that I found when trying to use the MO program as my sole utility for modding activities. Unfortunately, I have switched back to using wrye bash, but have continued to use and enjoy the rest of the SR guide. I feel that MO is more suited for average mod users and a little too restrictive for advanced users and/or mod makers. Its too bad, because I was really liking the idea of keeping the native Data folder 100% clean and vanilla.. I think that is a really great idea.. Maybe with some updates to the MO program it will become more viable of an option for me. As to the rest of the SR guide, it has gone really well and I appreciate your hard work. Thanks for always keeping it up to date too; I notice how you update it many times per week on average and it definitely reassures that everything is current and reliable. Cheers