Dante2904

Thanks EssArrBee, I will be looking at that shortly. The last 2 weeks haven't been enough of a waste of time figuring this all out... might as well dive in and start reading the details lmao. I finally finished each step of Neo's guide and man it was freakin awesome loading up and walking outside only to get my @!! handed to me by 5 dragons at once... then I reloaded because... well... that was just too dang awesome, and I CTD, restart and CTD same spot. However.... (there is a huge "however" here...) I was running Camtasia to capture the moment lol; im sure that had a heck-of-a-lot to do with it. I think this install is having a lot of stuttering from script bloating(?) and mod conflicts, so I have to research a lot more.

Yea, I kinda figured the above mismatches weren't critical at all, just wanted to know if I have the right idea as far as loading up Unofficial patches and carrying values over - really seems that if they match the skyrim.esm, but not unofficial patch, then I can safely carry over (outside of quest changes or whatever, depending on what the mod is supposed to be doing). There are 2 fields that keep getting mismatched called "MHDT-unknown (wiki is real informative with it just being called "unknown" on there too lol)" and the one for regions XLCR i think? I dont have TESVedit open atm. Neo did replace these in some files, but I have quite a few of them to fix if they need to be addressed. How do you check incompatibilities between multiple mods? Like how hes having you create around 8-10 custom patches for this? We just load up the entire load order just to browse around and then start loading the ones with mismatches together 2 at a time?

I have been doing that fairly easily, but might miss some things because some mods have tons of sub-sets. I wish it would highlight the top of the stack in red so I could find these lol. since the skyrim.esm data matches the mods data, but NOT the Unofficial Patch, i can safely mod the values over, right? Given that this mod is a Aela follower mod, i would expect it to modify skills, but in this case Skyrim.esm and the mod MATCH, so I assume i should move the unofficial data over (I don't think this particular set of data matters as for "problems"), correct?

I couldn't find a general guide for checking compatibility of mods with TESVedit, does anyone have a link to a wiki page or a video? Seems that in the Skyrim Revisited guide Neo uses a lot of TESVedit steps for fixing the issues and I would like to know how to find them and resolve them like he does. Example:

I would appreciate something like that, though at this point I have a much better grasp of everything just off watching Bergzore's toob animation tutorials. Tangent:

Directly from description: It would be awesome if that just said "Do this or Do that". Is it as simple as turning off/uninstalling the XPMS skeleton arm patch in WB I was previously using, then enabling this as something like an override?

Everything I seem to look at on the body mods has entirely too many acronyms, but I tend to avoid CBBE, UNPB, and BBB. Trying to stay as close to vanilla as possible, but the original body proportions (not breast) were terrible, same goes for male imo, but there is a severe lack of those mods around, non-nude preferred for both genders. As I said, I use Dimonized UNP Skinny version, if there are others that are better suited for lore-friendly play, im open ears :). As for the animations, everything seems to be working properly, but I dont quite understand the toggle option for "Skeleton Arm Patch" in the "Generate FNIS for user.exe" app.

Ok, so simply put, I can disregard the suggestions in Neo's guide for UNPB, and the other physics-related mods? The big thing that was getting me was UNBP-BBB compatible armors or whatever, but I care nothing for those and I don't think it causes conflicts if I don't want to use BBB physics. The only animations I care for are combat and a very select few idle animations. - the only 2 issues with immersive animations is my 1h draw/sheath is a dual wield animation from the back, and with 1h sword and dagger is kinda the same... the dagger is pulled from over the shoulder, but thats ok lol. I can't stand how most of the body mods alter the theme drastically. With it now working, I am about to revert back to my original body mod and remove the UNPB mod - if I am grasping this right then it doesnt matter because im using a FNIS compatible skeleton and I have proper animation packs installed, right?

This not good :( I am using this as it was listed in STEP: Max Skeleton "Use the "back hip Dagger" version. Also install "Magic-shield arm patch - Non FNIS user" unless planning to run Fore's New Idles." - Now I am planning to run FNIS, so I can just disable this, but do I need to put something in place of the magic-shield arm patch or does FNIS just auto-fix that? Magic-shield arm patch - Non FNIS user Incompatible with Dragonborn. If you are using Dragonborn DLC, Use the patch from NMM version or latest FNIS <--- I use DB lol... Sorry to keep this going, but this is all confusing. I use Dimonized UNP - Skinny if that makes any difference what-so-ever, with a couple of armor mods that I have no clue if I need a FNIS version for - im still sifting through them all atm. I believe the armor FNIS stuff is for UNPB variants, im not sure. I wouldn't mind some additional immersion with cloth or certain armors having female physics, but meh... ebony, steel, dragon, and daedric with physics is just not very realistic and im def not a fan of UNPB, nor do I care much for UNP, but at least the proportions are a little better than vanilla. None of the animations for female physics I looked at were realistic either, so I assume I can just run FNIS and install the magic casting mod with immersive animations and im good-to-go? Proportion perspective, oh my!: Or am i totally missing something here and the armor is skinned to the skeleton regardless and FNIS-compatible armor mods wouldnt exist anyway, just the body mod + physics variations?

I will attempt to follow Neo's guide to install FNIS along with this thread's titled mod and the Immersive Animations mod. I tried Immersive animations previously because I love his work, but it would not work for me - I assume due to the lack of FNIS, but idk. Hopefully following Neo's steps it may work. I am just terrified that having FNIS with all my body mods might have issues because I have chosen all non-FNIS files on them. I have 495 packages, otherwise it wouldn't be a big deal, and it is really tough to sift through and find out what needs FNIS updates. Hmm... I am pretty sure I actually run a lot of your mods if not all of them, if you have same/similar name on Nexus.

I appreciate the attempt to decrypt the description for me, but this is pretty far beyond me. I mean, honestly, I wish more than anything I could fire up 3ds Max, import some nifscope exported objs, build a custom rig or a CAT rig, skin the object file, and animate the hell outta it (my focus is layered animation), then tweak skin muscle morphs in Zbrush with a 3ds max morph modifier and put it back in data folders somehow... but... you know... IT IS NEVER THAT SIMPLE :( outside of the film industry. Raging animation rant:

I don't understand what you mean, especially with DB added animations - there are broken animations in DB? Or are you referring specifically to this mod? I run XPMS & Realistic Ragdolls atm and I have DG, DB, and HF. I haven't witnessed any animation inconsistencies running the aforementioned with S.T.E.P. 2.2.5.

I am currently skimming through your guide specifically for cleaning, but am actually finding some really nice mods not in S.T.E.P.. I had to use your guide like crazy to clean all these mods out, thanks for the guide btw! :D This mod in particular New Animation For Magic Casting seems to require FNIS (I dont care to use FNIS), but FNIS requirement wasn't stated in your summary - do I, in-fact, have to run FNIS to use this? FNIS reasoning:

Hes not using the vanilla meshes either. At this point I think I should prob just use my own meshes because there is a really strong correlation between my meshes and my textures. From what it looks like, hes using the same textures with new meshes - kinda like what I am doing but im spending mucho time on the alphas, thats whats causing those jagged edges in each of the strands. I am currently redesigning the haircaps based on where the hair's part exists (visible roots), then rebuilding the planes over that - I think this will have the most realistic/immersive impact. Note that I am just doing layout on this atm, I do styling in ZBrush. It appears that you cant use greyscale alphas, I havent confirmed, but I think I can only go 000000 or ffffff. Still very early in first phase, but once the first hair mesh is complete with the texture file, the rest shouldnt be too hard. If I can figure out how to add new styles (sorta like apachii, and apply them to npcs), I want to use the curly and frizzy hair variants that don't seem to be used. Those will require additional non-vanilla meshes. Of course Ill be recreating those textures as well, but sad that we dont see many (if any) NPCs or hairstyles that use those maps. At that point I might have to find a partner, because I don't want to use CK at all. Animating these is a dreamshot and something for another time, but man I wish I could lol (simple in max, prob impossible in skyrim).

I am losing a lot of detail in the diffuse map's alpha when I compress as 1k, but it's because of the texture space being horribly used - I have to remesh these, every single one of them, just unusable geo/UVs. However, the haircap won't be flat like it always has been anymore. The original file's alphas were using the hair ends pattern as the roots and the UVs weren't even sitting properly on the alpha's detail. This is far from done - its just a shot of the haircap (no detailed strands), but I have been tweaking my alpha for hours and this is what I am talking about: I will have to repaint the diffuse accordingly, obviously, but I think it is going to look pretty nice in the end. Still a lot of work to do on the alphas and I have a decent mesh tutorial I might can utilize (I can make primitive alpha or spline hair, it's not that, it is getting whatever I made back into skyrim). I still have a lot of alpha work to do, but the nice thing is that for any straight variants, I can just reuse the brush I am building. The alpha there is an example of why I just cant stand the vanilla UVs, that seam should have been welded... so I am going to weld it and reUV/remesh all hairs and pray I can get the meshes replaced with mine.

Thanks Aiyen, I exported as 2K into Skyrim/WB and it looked pretty nice, but still a lot of tweaking to do. I am really just working on Hair02 and Hair15 atm in order to establish a workflow. The 2K textures with DXT5 compression comes out to 5.33MBs each :( for normal and diffuse. Can I remove the alpha channel from the diffuse? I haven't seen anything that says it needs to retain that channel for diffuse textures. - note: NO, that seems to be the actual alpha, i didnt realize the hair had transparency ingame until I didn't have it lmao. There were MAJOR issues with spec because spec is stored in the normal's alpha (thats way new to me lmao). Though the normal map doesnt appear to do anything for some reason and finding a spot in-game to take screenshots that is well-lit = stupidly difficult for some reason. The images below are of me detailing hair in ZBrush from max and adjusting my remeshed haircap's (Hair02) UV layout. I doubt I can replace meshes anytime soon, that seems really difficult, but the meshes will all have my own revamps because they are just HORRIBLE (overlapping faces and unwelded verts... ZB don't tolerate those too well) so I'll eventually have to find a tutorial on how to import mesh replacers into Skyrim. The density on meshes aren't much different, just have been retopologized and some have had small adjustments or slightly more planes for detail. I would love to use about 2.5K polys per hairstyle, but I am not sure what the impact would be or even what the limitations are atm. Disregard the face texture, that was a quick remake so I had something to look at lol. The hair is really shiny in ZB because of how I have it lit, but that spec wont take hold in Skyrim, so it wont be so wetishly shiny - and I dun wanna export my normal's alpha just for rendering my diffuse :(  <-- My UVs and remesh, no testing in ZB yet, the idea here is to have cleaner diffuse warping and seems to work well in my revamps.  <-- It isnt super noticable, but this is why I dont wanna use vanilla meshes - due to the way these import or just how crappy they may be all-together (idk), I can't adjust the uvs properly in any way, shape, or form that is efficient.  No worries, I havent added dirt or dirt clumping yet, much more de-glamorizing to do lol. There is no normal applied to the face so no fine detailing; makes my light rig have her looking like plastic atm. - no plans on revamping vanilla skin textures/normals until I learn more about meshes though, that's just a render texture (not a fan of the nudes, so I need to adjust the undergarment geo for the "vanilla" meshes and Im not sure how to get that back into skyrim yet). Edit: New WIP - adjusting spec, opacity, and normals. Lots of work to do on braids and saturation. Assuming everything is properly setup and I do DX compression correctly, this should be what it looks like in game, but I am far from done and nowhere near compression stage (these are not the 4k RAWs, these are 2k). quick composite of a bunch of shots in-game trying to find out what needs work - alphas... i just cannot use the vanilla alpha at all heh, didn't want to build a new alpha :( but it is going to be required. There is just not enough detail in it to look decent. I am not sure how much to tweak the spec, but it's not quite popping like I expected, only REALLY noticeable in the flagon with Sapphire.

I have no clue where to ask this, but the STEP community seems to have much better technical advice than Nexus. My first mod attempt...hair... I don't think apachii hair is lore-friendly nor can I find hair mods other than AOF that is suitable for my STEP installation, so I am attempting to rebuild the vanilla textures and normals accordingly. BTW, color adjusting is a beast to match vanilla theme :( - I don't want hair to "pop" nor be unnoticeable, very hard to balance. What are the proper/most efficient sizes to export for the textures in-game? My RAWs are 4096x4096 and im working in 3ds Max (visual review), Zbrush (painting), and PS6 for minor adjustments and dds conversion. I do not think exporting 4096s is of any use at all, but I use 4k for fine details and renders. Eventually I want to actually remesh the vanilla hair (same style, more detail, minimal poly counts). That requires a lot more experience and knowledge though, so I am just working with textures atm. WIP shot - I dont know why max nitrous drivers won't display high res :( these are 4096 but viewport display is stuck at 512 unless I revert back to d3d which is slow. Interestingly enough I am having a really hard time figuring out which texture goes to which hair mesh - there has to be a easy way to find out what is mapped to what.

Whoops, I meant to say I ran DDSOpt on Dawnguard.bsa and TES5edit on Dawnguard.esm. Been in-game for many hours without much trouble so far, just a bug in "Waking Nightmare" because the soul gem next to the chain is not there, never spawned and SetStage D16 130 does nothing. EDIT: Because it is SetStage D16 170 I will be replacing dawnguard.esm after I crash again with a backup of the original without TES5edit cleaning this time.

I did use DDSOpt to optimize Dawnguard. I am pretty confident saying that I have minimized crashing down to, "just" Dawnguard related content. I can go on for hours without issues until loading Whiterun if thralls are there when I arrive, fast travelling to the whiterun stables also does this if those annoying dark dogs are there, and that's really about it. I don't like to admit console command "cheating" persay, but I have had Dawnguard content killing off npcs that imo are essential. The stablemaster, the guy that runs the general store in whiterun, and the guy with the fields outside of whiterun (near stables) were killed (used resurrect command). The guy that runs the blacksmith shop in whiterun I assume is also dead, but I can't find his corpse anywhere to resurrect; hes been MIA since like 4 hours on my game file out of 23 1/2 hours. Next 3 paragraphs are Extra Mod specific: I heard there were conflicts with the plugin "Deadly Dragons" as well, which doesn't seem to cause conflicts for me, but also doesn't quite do what I was hoping, or I am setting it up wrong - I just want more to show up, I have only seen 2 in the 23 hour game file I have going (1 from whiterun jarl mission and 1 random spawn in skyrim northwest of whiterun); countless in the vanilla file, but that was much further along in the main quest. In this playthrough I have been to the mountain and spoken with the "old guys" (trying to stay non-spoilerish) and really took off doing a lot of side quests I didn't do on first vanilla playthrough. I keep trying to stick with Dawnguard quests, but there are just too many side quests I get hooked into (still havent gotten to the first DG quest lol). I also run Locational_Damage, which I also do not like and doesn't completely stop bandits (WITHOUT helmets) from running around with their heads as pincushions - omg I hate that and it breaks my immersion so bad. Not to mention... WTH is with the auto-aimming, or arrow tracking (whatever it is) it is garbage imo and can't turn it off? I also use UFO, but I really only keep Lydia with me for balance purposes. Honestly, the only time I hire or bring more followers is for moving storage or looting dungeons I have cleared. Moneymaking posed a problem until I started skinning fine pelts from hunterborn (love the immersion on hunterborn thank you so much rootsrat!). My installed packages (restructured in root dir) are as follows: My load order: My BOSS Report :(  (I don't mess with files outside of the ESM files suggested in STEP wiki due to instability previously altering other mods): I asked for help from Vond (thanks Vond) a couple of days ago for setting up RLO+CoT+LoS properly and attempted to follow his mod order and listed mods, but would appreciate if someone could please double check those because that installation procedure was really vague imo and the global "night & indoor" (daylight is fine) lighting/brightness is too high with Project_ENB + in-game brightness=0. I assume this is better adjusted with the CoT-Night-Level esp (mine is at 4! atm). I did run DDSOpt on Dawnguard.esm. Yes, these are listed as Ex. in my list of installed packages, tested 1 by 1 for conflicts. - By the way is it possible to get a DLC checklist for all the STEP mods that require additional patches? I.E. required Dawnguard, HearthFires, and Dragonborn patches? I feel as though those can be easily missed sometimes despite the notes. I have since... uninstalled all video card drivers, re-applied thermal paste to both CPU and video card, did a thorough cleaning (you can even see it here lol), added additional RAM chips, wiped registry of all AMD, Phyx, and Nvidia drivers, and did a clean re-install with only the 314.22 drivers and phyx drivers selected. I then rechecked registry for conflicts and defragged. From there I did a complete reinstall of Skyrim and optimized settings via Nvidia Experience. Dxdiag report (truncated): Skyrim.ini SkyrimPrefs.ini

I just got through playing for several hours without issues until just now (whiterun included). I loaded up and instead of resting for 24 days, I released all followers and just set it to max and went and watched some TV. After that I had zero issues until just now, which isnt surprising - had gotten the new quests for falk done to work on new content, went back to breezehome and it was raining and I hit alt+W and right at the door... boom CTD. Edit: Nvm, that was to be expected, when I loaded back up vampires were up the hill; anytime vamps are in whiterun I crash on initial load-in :( . What do you know... all that and the new ini... I forgot to turn on logging. However, I am quite pleased that I actually got to get some stuff done, was very relaxing lol. Edit: BOSS says my load order is fine. I do have some dirty edits but last time i edited some of the ones listed I had really bad crashes (birdshf and distant detail being 2 of those). Other than that, everything seems clean and loading times are considerably faster. I assume this might be because I extracted the meshes.bsa into a WB archive, but I don't really know for sure.

Additionally, I cant get near Whiterun from outside. Oddly enough, I didn't try that before, but have been to falk, and done quite a few dungeons (namely one near the orc stronghold out west helping the ghost with the 4 shards, that dungeon seems it should have crippled my system, but it didn't). So far I just can't get near whiterun, and if i fast travel to whiterun it has to be nighttime and if a ******* spawns from DG, I have to fast travel, save, and reload or ill CTD. Tried turning off autosave and fast travelling to stables and the nearby locations (all fail). Now, I am trying to extract the meshes bsa and install it in WB, just to try. I also read somewhere to check loadorder in ../appdata/local/skyrim/plugins.txt for a dupe skyrim.esm entry, but i dont have any listed at all (full loadorder, just no skyrim.esm anywhere).Â

I have a lot of computers lol, really hard to maintain them all, but I do clean my main workstation all the time. I had a lot of stuttering on my quadro machine so i pulled a render node out for skyrim, works much better :) I only lag/CTD in Whiterun now and I REALLY think its a script problem and not system - system load/temps are all really low when the CTD occurs and it is ALWAYS same spot after a couple hours testing in Skyrim. Before I cleaned and re-pasted everything I was crashing after the vcard fan would start spinning up.

Go, go, DUST BUNNIES.... Solution was simple, yet time consuming... clean out the computer... All is fine now, no lockups and no crashes atm. Legend: Last night when everything was crashing, pretty sure I was running the exact same area of Skyrim as the second set of results 2013-04-30 22:13:37 , 822.7 , 1002.0 , 1640.0 , 84.0 , 72 , 3720 , 1429 , 99 , 32 , 0 , 1.0000 , After cleaning (No lockups or even crashes in Skyrim yet, bottom results are just from running STEP with ENB, top results are just idling im pretty sure) 2013-05-02 16:35:59 , 405.0 , 162.0 , 810.0 , 35.0 , 26 , 1140 , 88 , 0 , 2 , 0 , 0.9500 , 2013-05-02 17:31:58 , 822.7 , 1002.0 , 1640.0 , 63.0 , 53 , 2370 , 166 , 0 , 0 , 0 , 1.0000 , No clue what any of that really means, but I see the gpu temps are considerably lower.

It was just skyrim, now it's pretty random; just on this GTX 560 though Starting to seem like it is power-related.

I had originally created this in hopes of a solution for my frequent BSoDs in skyrim. I figured I did something wrong in the Nvidia Inspector panel. With Nvidia Experience, I still have the same problem... although, it is much more gorgeous after optimizing with that app. I get "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." in event viewer (314.22 drivers and 311.27), this will happen 1-2 times prior to a BSoD (and it aint blue lol, it is black because VCard is dead I assume). These are promptly followed by bugcheck and kernel-power issues afterwards. In my research I have found that some people can resolve this by setting the power management in Nvidia control to Performance rather than Adaptive; I am curious as to whether anyone else has had an issue like this and if anyone has a solution? Yesterday I was pushing GPU to 90%+ with no issues (not OCing), today it has done this 2x so far at roughly 40-60% loads on GPU. I have messed around with RLO, CoT, and Project ENB prior to these crashes happening and made some adjustments in Nvidia Inspector, but I am not running it atm (I assume that means the profile for Skyrim is not running, but IDK).