Kraggy

I'm asking this even though I fear it's an 'obvious' because I don't want to destroy my existing game while plodding through STEP. :) I currently have a reasonably new Oldrim installation which I've used Vortex to manage after getting back to the game after nearly 4 years (previously I used STEP for that). I now want to start a new installation from scratch using STEP's method and of course MO2, while allowing me to continue to re-acquaint myself with the game for some time using my current installation. My plan is to rename my existing SKYRIM directories in the STEAMAPPS\COMMON and the MY GAMES folders to, say SKYRIM-VORTEX and then use Steam to re-install a clean new copy, after which I would rename the new SKYRIM directories as -STEP, then I would write some simple .BATs to set up the playable SKYRIM directories from whichever installation I want to use at any particular time. Long ago I did the same thing for a CD-installed Morrowind to great effect, but with Skyrim there's one great 'unknown' to me: STEAM. It doesn't seem to allow for two installations of the same game (hence the copying/renaming scripts to 'fool' it) but it's a black-box to me and I don't know if it stores data somewhere other than those two locations I've noted above which will mean it would be confused by my changing the directories from beneath it, as it were. Before I spend a lot of time preparing all this and plodding through STEP only to find my current game somehow got trashed due to something STEAM did I thought I'd ask here if there are any obvious 'gotchas' which means this is doomed to failure before I start. Appreciate any comments. :) [edit] The thought just occurred to me, I think I should be able to use separate trees under STEAMAPPS\COMMON to play the game without having to move one of them to a SKYRIM tree, and only need to manage the MY GAMES tree since the name of the is presumably hard-coded into the SKYRIM.EXE itself; again as long as STEAM doesn't mind if there's a tree in COMMON that isn't actually a game it installed there. Would this work?

How funny, in the time since I posted that I've been browsing around and was literally just reading up on ENBoost which I had come across while reading STEP's infro about ENB, and wondered if indeed it may be relevant to my problem. :) I am already using 1.7.2 SKSE for SkyUI, so I'll grab ENBoost and see what happens. Thanks.

I am finding the game unstable after installing DynDOLOD. The first time I ran it the game started, I got the opening movie, then the logo and selected 'continue' The loading image appeared with the floating 'tip' text but the game didn't load, in fact the loading screen and text continued, music played but the game didn't appear. Moreover, when I ALT-TABBED to the game it was a black screen, the mouse disappeared and refused to re-appear. It seemed locked-up in the graphics system somewhere and in the end I had to CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up Task Manager and kill sthe TES5 process: the mouse remained invisible throughout and I had only the keyboard active. I tried again and got into the game, I put the crash down to 'caching' (no idea if that's something that exists in this game but whatever) and was content. Sadly I've had more cases of the crash with one or two times getting into the game. I haven't spent any time trying to identify what may be the problem, I'm not at all sure if it is graphics (or simply that the gfx system is initialising when something else breaks and leaves it in an intermediate state) or what. I haven't even tried disabling DYNDOLOD.ESP yet as it's the only thing that changed in my system from the clean install I mentioned in my first post. I created the LOD with 'high' settings and was thinking about maybe going lower, but before that maybe someone here can suggest where I could look for obvious 'issues'?

Thanks for that, I realise the main video for DynDOLOD is edited those linked in the Nexus page for TESS5Edit didn't seem so but maybe they were working on a subset of data. Whatever, it's nice to know there's nothing missing. :) Well I don't know how much credit *I* can take, to be honest had I just what's written on the Nexus page for DynDOLOD I doubt I'd even have started, it was GP's video that spurred me to try it. I watched it twice, then had it playing on one PC while I followed each step, apart from one place where I went wrong (can't recall now, but I'd mis-undestood something I think) it call came together. I have to admit I'm not really comfortable with Mod Organiser and now I've been through the process using that I'm going to try to follow the video in the OP of this thread for non-MO users to try to get it going in NMM: yes, I know NMM is considered to be a poor tool by many and I do find it annoying at times but I don't care for MO's 'virtualisation' of the 'data' directory, from the point of view of trouble shooting and also of backing up a working game tree from 'steamapps' down without the need for include other tools.

I've only just installed this tool today, and also MO as well which I've never used before, so it's highly probable it's a 'noob' error, so please be gentle. :) I'm working on a clean install of Skyrim, with all DLC and the Unofficial patches, also SkyUI, a couple of savegame mods, the Quality Map and Atlas mods and that's about it. None of the mods add anything to the world. I think I've followed the video accurately .. I have no idea how I'd have got the thing running without that! .. and DynDOLOD is running apparently okay in the game, but I have a bunch of errors when running the script, they come in blocks like this one example: [DeepwoodRedoubtWorld] Generating LOD <Note: TreeDeadShrubSnow [TREE:000A731D] LOD not found Textures\Terrain\LODGen\Skyrim.esm\DeadShrub01Snow_000A731D.dds> <Note: TreeFloraSnowberry01Snow "Snowberry" [TREE:000BCF34] LOD not found Textures\Terrain\LODGen\Skyrim.esm\FloraSnowberry01Snow_000BCF34.dds> ... <snip> ... TreePineForestSnow05 [TREE:0005C06E] using LOD Textures\Terrain\LODGen\Skyrim.esm\TreePineForestSnow05_0005C06E.dds TreeTundraDriftWoodTree01 [TREE:000B8F53] using LOD Textures\Terrain\LODGen\Skyrim.esm\TundraDriftWood01_000B8F53.dds [DeepwoodRedoubtWorld] Trees LOD Done. Watching the video carefully, and also the videos linked on the OP of this thread I don't see errors like those appearing, so figure I've not done something I need to but can't fathom what. I've no idea if I'm missing a billboard file, or what. Can someone offer some idea as to what this is? Cheers.