frihyland

This looks to be a very well conceived and executed mod, its a 3rd gen mod standing on the shoulders of some great predecessors. It fixes a huge amount of stuff that was just plain broken with followers and adds a bunch of stuff that could be argued "should have been in vanilla". It goes a bit beyond what I'm comfortable with for a vanilla experience but if those features can be disabled I'd be strongly in favor of this one.

anyone running windows with full file protection going (the default) will have everything backed up automatically, I just reinstalled windows myself so I've got nothing.

Great idea, I'm a little concerned with how it was done, as it edits almost every cell in skyrim change the name. Obviously there will be conflicts, I suggest running it with several other mods that add content to the world space (non city outside space) to test compatibility.

Actually the header of the update.esm is changed by 4bytes, so the old exe may not read it correctly, this may result in missing sound and textures in your game.

They are definitely not common but when you find one the prices are quite reasonable (in U.S.) I'm looking at buying 2 gtx 560 2GB @ $150 each, but I'd really rather have a 3GB 580 when the prices get down around $350, won't be too long I think with the new 680 out.

Not if you turn off those components :D Most of them are silly safety and compatibility stuff, who needs that. But yeah this is not a path for the feint of heart, bsods will occur, its just how often. And you can create a RAMdisk for the swapfile if you have 32GB of memory which is my plan, all to fool the silly operating system that can't use it all but thinks it needs more and more in order to function. Good catch stopping I was thinking aloud about my own build while giving tuning advice, not a good combo, wouldn't want to be responsible for that mess.

lol, I made a typo and recommended the DLC fix mod twice instead of Optimized DLC at the end, now I understand your confusion. Wiki updated.

You'll get much more performance gain by moving the swap off of the system drive (windows) than you will by increasing its size past 100% of your memory and anything over 150% is a complete waste. The swap file is actually a leftover from twenty years ago before RAM was cheap and plentiful and if your on a machine with 16GB RAM or more you're better off getting rid of it completely for great performance gains, note that in rare cases this will cause a bsod (you never get something for nothing). The optimal setup for performance and stability would be 3 ssd's one for the system files (windows), one for boot files,the swap file and system temp files, and one for your games. At $70 bucks each for 64gb ssd's its pretty doable for the first time ever. Personally I live fast and cheap so I'm going with 2 ssd's and no swap file on my new build.

If you have a rig with more than 1GB of VRAM the quality improvement is noticeable with absolutely no performance loss, there's just not much to be gained from optimized dlc unless you go with the drastically reduced quality in normals, if you don't notice that kind of thing than by all means stay with it. I recommend it for all 1GB machines its a good trade off for them. There are plenty of alternate ways to do the same thing, if you want to just zip up all the files create a BAIN and install them with bash that's a much preferred way to do it, its out of scope for the guide. I am trying to stay as vanilla as possible and not assuming any previous knowledge. Technically you could just install optimized dlc without the real thing at all but its not something I have personally tested, what I did was make my own version using ddsopt. I already wrote that whole tutorial, I think it was on the nexus forums. I've considered going through the normals and picking out the ones that really make an impact in graphic quality than deleting all the rest, my guess is it will likely increase performance close to van's version without reducing texture quality at all and an unnoticeable reduction in normal quality. One day maybe. Remember this is just an introduction and overview, its not an advanced highly technical and complex best practices guide. After I'm happy with this one I may move on to write that guide. Thanks for the questions, reactions are really helpful to keep me moving forward.

Haven't had any issues with new posts remaining flagged as new (after being read) for many days now. So one more issue put to rest.

Wow I wish I had come here before my trek through the sewers over on alexanders site, I don't think that smell is gonna fade anytime soon...

Check out my new DLC section over in Skyrim Installation Edit: not sure why i posted this here, must have had multiple tabs open and posted to wrong one, but yeah while you are here might as well check it out :P

Lots of editing and a fair amount of content added. Brain dump nearing completion, I will have to actually research and use the remaining utilities before writing them up. Now would be a good time to jump in if you have expertise in an area that didn't receive much attention.

Apparently its caused by a memory leak, it can be fixed by forcing a refresh. Alt-tabbing out and back in to the program should do the trick if it happens again.

The new beta turns on AO on quality so yeah fps drop. Anywho nvidia claims the 20% performance gains are real (but only apply to 560, 570, 580 models) however the bugs that remain unfixed until the next official release seem even realer. Good news is that they are really working on some serious issues, good luck to them!

An update on the skating bug, it only occurs when the mod is added to an existing game, if a new game is started with this installed all is well. Once again another savegame error to confuse and confound.

I am realizing more and more that there are quite a few mods that fit into the "graphic immersion" category that theCompiler suggested. So any mod that adds to the visual experience without adding content that is interactive would go there.

Yeah my impression is that the author just added higher level versions (and higher spawn quantities) to the existing random spawn tables. Anybody actually used it or opened it in an editor for a peek?

In other words, just make sure that mods that you want to overwrite other mods are listed later in the package list, than highlight the whole shebang and right click, select install and wb will intelligently select and install all the appropriate bits and pieces for you.

Yeah a few dozen unique story based boss encounters would be ideal along with a slower leveling i think, I hope that's the kind of content beth is working on for the first paid DLC. I am much less excited about the idea of tons of lvl 50 randomly generated bandits roaming the earth, that just sounds tedious. Hmm I think I just talked myself out of this mod.

I use these, they look good and the balancing makes good sense. I'm down with monty on the whole caveman thing though, I don't know what Beth was thinking, just because something is made of bone doesn't preclude a high-level of workmanship and according to the skill tree it demands it! Maybe someone will release a mammoth tusk armor and weapons mod to satisfy us. :D

Another extremely viable option is a mod that slows down leveling making it 3-5x slower, that would probably keep you from ever experiencing the high level blues. That would be a solution for a vanilla style game-play, ultimately though just the addition of some really tough, lore friendly, high level content would do it for me.

This is just one of the many awesome mods in development based on the skyproc java library, there are a lot of game changers in the works just a month or 2 from release.

Go ahead and start up a best practices and troubleshooting guide on the wiki, I have no doubt it will balloon pretty fast.

Hey I'm all for any mod that leads to more quality utube vids :D