exploiteddna

yeah, i have never really used SoS myself (not for any real length of time) ... this doesnt help when it comes to making patches. If I have used the mod and know how it works and how it plays in-game, it makes decisions about what to patch a lot easier. Someitmes decisions have to be made about the author's intent, etc. and that type of thing is inherently difficult, much more so if i dont use the mod in my personal game. nonetheless, i just finished and uploaded the Requiem patch, so I will get to SoS soon. For now, im going to go actually play some skyrim.. for a little bit :)

i dunno.. i feel that if we could do away with the unique names and the formality of each clan/group/"faction" , id be more accepting. I like all of the cool shields and symbols, but maybe just add them to the bandits without having to give them proper names (maybe something like "bandit shield") I like the increase in the quantity of bandits, bandit encounters, etc. and also the increase of combat/difficulty .. but I just think they should all still be called 'Bandits' (and all the vanilla variations of) without the added proper names, like "Iron Blood", "Lightning Wolf", and "Butcher" -- and all the other bandit names like "bruiser", "puppet", "doll", "manakin" Its these added proper and generic names/bandit types that takes away from skyrim as i know it, and turns it more into "fan fiction" so to speak. Disclaimer :) : All of that being said, in no way am i discounting the hours upon hours of work that has gone into this project. I think it is a great piece of work.. much greater in size than any mod/project ive ever released, so i mean no disrespect

good deal. well, maybe when you're done, i can perhaps convince you to send 'em my way for a little bit of testing :Di could even download you enb :P (didnt know you had one, in all honesty.. been stuck on PNENB for a long time now)

probably just a formality (unless the "patch" is actually a replacement).. if you know enough to understand that install order is (usually) irrelevant for esp-only mods, then you'll be fine

im just trying to patch up everything, which is proving be an endless task. it really started as a favor to the author, but then grew to be much more, and eventually i couldnt continue without the infrastructure/tools that Nexus offers, so i decided just to open a new mod page to host everything instead of bogging down the main AOS mod page. The rest is history. I think Ive got about 20 different patches that cover all the most popular mods.

not to get off topic, but im curious how MO uses any more storage space than any other manager ..?..? I redirect all of my downloads to go to my HDD and only use the SSD for actual installed mods (and steam/skyrim/MO). If i saved all the downloads to the default MO directory, I'd run out of space really fast :) (especially since i dont like deleting mod packages, for fear they will abruptly be removed from nexus)

yes definitely should be noted.however, i know there is some reason that some authors choose to release mods with an empty ESP ... i think it has something to do with mod assets being packaged into a BSA .. i think its so the assets get loaded by the game?? .. but if you use MO and/or unpack your BSAs anyway, the need for the ESP is lost.Â

yeah thats kind of what i have been thinking. I may do some trial and error with my "glowing" meshes what are you planning to do with the 'fix' you're making?

yeah i could take a look at it i suppose. i first need to patch up requiem that someone requested like a week ago, but ill get to SoS sometime this weekend, maybe tomorrow.The other thing to consider is, a lot of the conflicts im sure are purely preferential. Also, if LK said it would be hard to get the two mods to play nicely together, that doesn't bode well for me. nonetheless, i will see whats going on with it and report back its odd that your arrow impacts are sounding as if they were right next to you when they should sound distant.One of the main features i love about AOS is that, when you cast the explosive fireball spell (not firebolt), the sound dynamically changes depending on how far you are from the point of impact. When youre in the mountains and the fireball explodes in the distance, it sounds super realistic IMO.. it sounds much more faint and has a "sound traveling" effect to it. But, I have not noticed any sort of problem with the bow, although I use my own custom sounds for bow release/fire. Based on the fact the author has implemented the type of acoustics that I described for the fireball, I find it odd that they would be lacking from the arrow impact. Either I just simply haven't noticed, one of the other STEP sound mods is overwriting (either the sound files or in the plugin), or you have some record conflict in your load order that is causing this.

honestly i havent really compared to a STEP-only install yet. My main priority from the beginning was to provide DLC patches and DLC versions (merged, so no patch needed). Aside from that, Ive basically been running around patching up little petty conflicts that people have. The majority a large number of conflicts ive seen are a matter or preference, not game-breaking or loss-of-function conflicts. There are several of the small sound mods (Improved Horse Steps, Smooth Blade Draw & Sheathe, Improved Combat Sounds) that definitely have conflicts.. but since these mods only have a few records in them AND tend to load after AOS, they dont really need patching unless you want AOS to be conflict winner (and if thats the case then you may as well just disable the small mod altogether) I think AOS is a great mod and has a lot to offer. It is definitely a complex mod just because of its nature (sound mods tend to be very far-reaching and edit lots of different record/subrecord types).  As far as STEP is concerned, i think it could be a viable option so long as all the checks and balances are accounted for, so to speak.

that was short lived .... lame  :|

Well, the "good news" is that the effect still occurs with only vanilla plugins + unofficial patches + skse its good news because at least its not something I did myself lol. i guess now i'll just open each of the individual meshes and take a look around, and compare to a similar mesh that doesn't glow, maybe theres some flag or something that i can add/remove. who knows...

ok well, disabling my smim meshes didnt do anything (no offense to brumbek for questioning his work-but was just thinking maybe the recent update was to blame :) ) anyways, this is the same bridge, shot from a different angle. The wooden hand railing next to it does not glow when hit with enchantment.. so.. the other thing is, aiyen got me thinking about the type of objects that are glowing, and it seems to be "complex" meshes .. things like smelter/forge/moving bridge are all complex meshes, i.e. they arent just a simple compilation of NiTriShapes. This observation is probably useless, but curious yes youre right, like in that haunted dungeon in ivarstead hmmm..

ok cool guys, thanks for the replies. ironically, i found a few conflicts between Audio Overhaul Skyrim and a few of my other plugins. I guess ive been so busy making patches for other people i have failed to patch up my own game lol. Disappointingly, however, the issue persists, even after patching a few of the impact records. I also tried disabling AOS altogether to see if it is any way related to this issue, but it doesn't appear to be. I will keep poking away at it and see if i can make any progress. EDIT: @ Aiyen - you think this could be some mesh errors? that kind of makes sense actually. it could explain why this is only seen on some statics and not others. im going to diable brumbek's meshes and see if that helps

As the title says, static objects (smelter, door, bridge, stone base of the forge) in my game are currently receiving glowing edges/surfaces when struck with an arrow shot from enchanted bow. (enchanted with absorb health, frost damage, shock damage, and soul trap .. obviously ive added extra effect slots). It's not all objects though.. the ones i listed are all that i've noticed so far. If i shoot at a wall, no glowing (as it should be) The glow is always a blue/purple color, and is visually similar to the glow that some enchanted armor/clothing/armor has.  The blue/purple color of the glow could either be from soultrap, shock, or maybe frost damage, but its definitely not from the absorb health enchantment. Ive opened up my entire load order to see what's going on. Ive looked at all of the Object Effect records/overwrites to see if anything is out of place. Nothing that I can see. Basically the only mod I use that edits these records is empowered magic. So, for the sake of time, i just disabled all EM plugins to see if that made it stop, but can still reproduce the issue with it disabled. Aside from the object effect records, I have skimmed through all of the magic effect records, but dont see anything there. I will basically keep looking through all of my plugins and hopefully something will jump out at me. I am posting this because, unlike many other errors, this is one that i wouldnt even know how to "make" on my own. If someone said, "hey can you make a mod so that (some) objects will glow when hit them with an arrow from an enchanted bow" I would have no idea where to go to start trying to make something like that. Because of this, i dont really know where, or what type of records i should be looking at. Does anyone have any ideas, or has anyone seen something like this before? GLOWING DOOR BRIDGE - NO GLOWING BRIDGE - GLOWING AFTER HIT WITH ARROW (glowing is hard to see here, but its there)

haha yeah, general biology not so much fun. micro can be fun, but i only took one micro course in undergrad so i guess its never been at the top of my list. cellular molecular bio, including biochem, is where it's at But as you said, back to Skyrim. I think you've helped make my decision a lot easier, I'm going to move towards getting a single strong card. As soon as i can grab one with 4gb vram or better, I'll be all over it. Grass... yes, i was afraid I would have to resort to removing some of my grass density. I certainly don't have it as thick as you see in ENB screenshots, but it's definitely above vanilla values with more grasses assigned to each landscape texture type. I'd say im pretty close to the default SFO grass settings, maybe a little bit less. I will mess with it and see what kind of gains I can get. Skyfalls.. im using default options and have default INI decal settings that the 'ultra' video preset puts in place. I certainly have some testing and tweaking to do.

geology huh? interesting. we have a geology dept at FSU (im pretty sure lol), but yeah i'm in the bio/chem fields of study so those were my first two guesses, naturally. Dual westmere? thats crazy.. running dual chips kinda' like a server... very interesting.Anyways, that's sad to hear about my 580 not doing much. I had noticed this myself but thought that I needed to tweak it or change some settings. If this is how it's going to be, i may look into a better solution. I do not know why all of the 780s are 3gb, it is very bizarre. im sure they will eventually come out with a 4 or 6gb version, but no telling when. i'm sure google could lend me some insight, but i haven't taken the time to investigate.

thanks again aiyen for the informative response. it always nice to get another individual's self-analysis of their setup.. put things into perspective a little bit. thanks Ess for your response too. Im curious what gpu youre running? you said youve got 6gb vram so its got to be either 7990 or a legit Titan, right? (and what are you using it for science? Protein folding? molecular modeling/interactions?) So a new problem has been thrown into the mix since yesterday. I had to get rid of one of my 680s, so I am no longer running SLI, and now i just have the one 680 (still with 4gb vram) and im using an old 580 Lightning for PhysX .. needless to say my performance issues are now a lot more prevalent than they used to be, no longer only in the Rift, but i dont think i can really even hit 60 frames ... ill need to put the water block back on the 680 and crank up the volts for real :) If there were any 780s with more than 3gb vram i would considering going that route.. i could get another 680 to run SLI again, but rather not reinvest in last gen hardware. thoughts? At the end of the day my rig is still at the high end of the spectrum IMO and im having a hard time hitting 60.. what gives? Aside from ENB, grass density, and SMIM farmhouses im not sure where I can start trimming back to improve exterior performance. Skyfalls.. have we done any proper testing on that mod yet? I was under the impression it didnt contribute very much to performance costs... is this still true? (sry for going off topic a little, but my direction has changed slightly) EDIT: thanks for the recommendation about SMAA injector settings.. i completely forgot there was an INI for smaa :)

first off, i appreciate the detailed response. very informative, thank you. i want to discuss the framerate of 30 a bit more... i dont inherently have a problem with 30fps, i dont like to keep 60fps bc it sounds cool. for me, it seems that anytime i drop sufficiently below 60, i get lag sort of like things are moving in slow-mo. i mean, in a literal sense, the human eye/brain really shouldnt be able to distinguish between receiving 30 or 60 frames in a single second (i dont think). that being said, i can visually tell when i am running at ~48 or less. I dont think this is because im superhuman and can actually differentiate between the two rates, but more so because i feel there are other factors that are causing other "rendering inconsistencies" that i am able to pick up on it. Maybe my other video settings are fubar'd or something.. or maybe my monitor is crap (simple LCD panel, ASUSvw246h), maybe i should go back to running DVI instead of hdmi.. idk Point is, the reason i like to keep 60 is because it seems to be the rate at which everything runs smooth.. drop down to a little below 50 and things are not smooth anymore. :throwshandsinairindisgust: :)

ok cool, youre just the person i was hoping to get a response from :D Will def start with those suggestions and see if it helps. Ive not really messed with any of the parameters under ssao/il in the past, so ill see if i can get familiar with them and try to find the best balance between performance and quality. If i turn off skylighting, i will lose everything under [sky] i would imagine.. or can you still adjust some things like stars and aurora? Ill play with it some more. Out of curiosity, which (if any) profile do you use as your base? What is your general setup and what type of performance hits, framerate spikes, etc. do you play with and experience?

so basically the deal is that im trying to stop my fps spikes and overall choppiness that i get when im running through the Rift area that runs east to west on the southern border of skyrim, tons of aspens. Anyways, i run a pretty standard/mild enb profile, using Phinix Natural (medium performance) as a base, I disable sun rays, and dont use DOF or reflections (which are both disabled by default on his profiles). I use the standard SMAA that is provided, and don't enable any other form of AA.  AF stays enabled at 16x.  I cap my framerate at 60. Overall I would say my mod setup is pretty well optimized.. nothing too outrageous.. (really, the only 4k textures I run are on glaciers, body skins, and Book of Silence has some 4k scattered throughout). Im not using any type of 'lush' mod that increases polycount of grasses, plants and trees. I use SFO basic, and overwrite a few of its grass/tree textures with my own. My grass density in the Rift area, I would say it is moderately dense. Ok, so thats a basic rundown of the parts of my setup that could be relevent to this issue. If you need some more info just ask. Here is waht happens. 90% of the time while playing I max out my framerate cap at 60fps. Sometimes it drops a little here and there which is fine and is normal. When I venture into the region i described above, I am seriously hit hard. My max will be ~50, average is ~40, and can get as low as low as 30 frames sometimes.  But if I open my ENB GUI and toggle the "Use Effect" (which essentially kills the ENB), all of my framerate woes disappear. Their are 2 implication of this behavior. One, the ENB is a major contributing factor to my performance (or lack thereof), which is no surprise, everyone knows this.  Two, the ENB is not the only thing at play here, otherwise it would not be localized to the Rift region. So, this is why I have already gone through my current profile to make sure I dont accidentally have a performance-hogging mod active, that all of my settings are where they should be, etc.  But Im at a loss. Basically, I am hoping someone can offer me somethings that I don't know or havent yet tried (other than "hey dude, disable the ENB" lol).  Since I know there are a few people around here that are a lot more experienced with ENB than I am, it would be nice if someone would check out my current INI and see if they can find a few things to "turn down" that could help the situation. My only stipulation is that I will not (preferably not, anyway) disable AO or detailed shadows, since these are the two primary reasons for running enb in my opinion. Of course, suggestions and ideas do not have to be limited to ENB EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention is that I did try simply turning down the quality of some of the parameters, but it seemed like the picture then became slightly blurry, which i do not like at all. I also tried raising the size of the memory buffer in enblocal.ini and i do think it helped with the stutter a little bit, but i could have simply imagined there was an improvement...who knows. Thanks in advance Here is my current profile:

tree LODs are a tricky thing. I highly recommend people to learn to edit their own dds files and then tweak the LODs yourself. It's always good to have a good starting base like vurts, but depending on which tree textures you use for your pines, aspens, etc., you can adjust the color properties of the tree LOD accordingly. The end result is always much better IMO. Of course, I know not everyone has the time or patience to do this.

nice compares. albeit only one sword, but i like the 3 different viewing modes that you used.

lol @ too long name - thanks for the moderation Good ideas from both replies. I know if I put enough time into it i will be able to locate the texture(s) im looking for. If I trace all of the fog objects in CK or tes5edit (object record -> model file -> nifskope -> texture file) I will eventually find what I'm looking for. I was hoping someone already had the information, which would save me a lot of time. With respect to ENB, their are two types of fog -- the fog you can adjust under the [sky] settings and the fog under the [volumetric fog] settings. The former tends to be more general/ubiquitous/pervasive type of fog. The volumetric fog tends to be concentrated into cloud-like formations. This is what I'm looking for. I will dig into some of these fog mods to see if they include any vanilla asset replacements, and if they do i will attempt to identify which asset is responsible for each type/instance/iteration of fog.