echo451

The iTexMipMapSkip was set to 1. All fixed now. Thank you for the help.

I recently reinstalled Skyrim using the STEP 2.10.0 configuration. The Vivid Cloud and Fog mod renders smoke and fog rather oddly. At the load screen you get: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1g1r4EicCwZZSm8YlQO107kHfE_59J4mg In the game you sometimes get: https://drive.google.com/open?id=16hqLiMDRs93DQxkFuKJfFiYVI5DgsTDm Disabling Vivid Cloud and Fog fixes the problem. Load order is pure STEP 2.10.0. All installation instructions were followed. It has not gotten any faster and this is my 3 STEP build. I've sort of got the steps down. ;) ENB is configured to STEP default. All mods are latest from nexus loaded from the STEP pages. This is a clean install using MO. I have not tried the ENB version. (Not sure how to put a picture in a post. Google Drive does not seem to allow for using the picture URL.)

Licenese for windows come in two forms. OEM and what you can buy at Staples. At least they use to. Someone builds a machine and installs an OEM version of windows. If Audely is upgrading and they are already running WIN8.1 then I was curious about the $100 set aside for the WIN10. Was it an inability to upgrade the license.

I have never noticed anything like this. I have ~60k, 72GB, files under my MO folder. It's installed in a secondary drive. Do you have a major windows update pending? Windows Defender and other file system services use the service for a host, could not help it, of services. Out of curiosity what version of windows are you using?

The AA setting for the game have serious performance impacts with, as far as I can tell, no benefits. Most folks recommend using the driver control software to set these in any case. When I was first setting up the game, I turned off AA and lower the graphics setting. At one point was getting 140 FPS. The game is unplayable at this framerate. Anything over 60 will break the physics engine and causes some very strange graphic annomilies. Creatures floating about. Riderless horses. The original xbox version of the game ran at 30 FPS, or so the story goes. Higher framerates, for me, lead to tearing and other graphics oddities. I experimented with lower the FPS. Turns out if you have ENBoost installed, with the default key mapping, you can hit <shift><home> and it will switch to a FPS limiting mode. <shift><home> to toggle off. NUM8 to show a FPS counter. I find that I can't tell the difference between 30 and 60 FPS as long as the framerate is constant. Your mileage will vary. Consensus is that VSYNC needs to be enabled. This is again a function of how the Skyrim game works. Except good things from your new card. I would.

I though that WIN10 was a free upgrade for WIN8.1 users? That's how I got my copies. Is this am OEM thing? Check out the App store and see if they have a free copy for you. Save a few dollars.

All of z929669 recommendation are spot on. Your case choice will last you a lifetime. Coolmaster was also my choice. HAF series. Dead quiet. Lots of air flow. These also have the option for water cooling kits. Power supply. As big as your budget will allow. 500W+ Another possible lifetime buy. Easy to replace with a good case. Memory, pick a good brand name. Make sure it's on the motherboards recommended list. Buy from some place with a good RMA policy. NewEgg was my vendor of choice. CPU choice, Intel vs AMD, changes. Review the latest reports from Toms hardware and see which is leading the pack. This will impact you motherboard choice. Most quality vendors provide motherboards for both. Hypertreading, make sure that the motherboard BIOS supports this. Most modern one do. Extending this a bit into accessories. An external SATA case with drive for backup. Hot swappable. Relatively inexpensive. You can recycle an old drive for a backup device. More than one monitor if your desktop can handle it. Work flow can be drastically improved with multimonitor. The only drawback is it's really hard to go back to one. CPU speeds are reaching their physical limits. More core and as fast as your budget allows. Last, talk with the other graphic artist and see what they like or don't like about their setup. GPU's come with sticker shock if you get the latest and greatest. Budget and need drives this choice. Keep posting your questions. We may not have the answers but some one in our community does.

Leave it to Sparrow to spot the anomaly.

Scripts are inside of BSA as well and will be missed by the filter. Unless you unpack all your mods you may miss some mods with scripts. Also GetFormFromFile targets a specific esp. If you change the name of the target esp, as say, the result of a merge, then the function call will not work.

Nothing, that I can tell. The mod turns up on a list indicating some potential problems. I wanted to understand what they might be. At no time have I advocated the removal of this mod from STEP. My work was done as an investigation. If that is not clear from my posts I apologize.

Great feedback. Thank you for taking the time. Having a look at the Skybird script would be interesting. Alternate examples and understanding why folks may have changed something is important, at least to me. I will get my hands on a copy and have a look. Mixing different features, birds and flora, in a mod seems like a bad idea. That said, not a lot one can do if that is what the author decides to do. Only have a peak using the tools we have and judge for yourself. I realize that this analysis is after the fact. Birds and Flocks are part of STEP. Thanks for taking the time to pull that list together. I will most likely pull another example for the list and pull it apart. Any suggestions?

Thank you for the feedback. I am not sure about what the Skybird mod does. I kept that out of the equation as it is not part of the STEP LO. Yes, the missing height field data in the world space. Depending on the load order it gets fixed a number of times by other mods installed after it. This data field seems to get beaten, deleted, replaces by every other mod that makes worldspace changes. Changes to this would have a serious impact on object placement I suspect. If the original of a given mod used a different set then the effect could be bazar. The version that I used had no error, at least none that were reported by TES5Edit. Everything appears to be generic. Using the original game scripts and resources with the one exception. The script uses states. Once it runs, that it. The cell would have to be reloaded and the script reattached. As far as I can tell this only happens when a new game is started. I examined a save file using the save file script cleaner to see what was happening. If placement can introduce an error I would be curious as to what these might be? Changes to the geometry of the worldspace? Changing the location of other objects? From what I can tell and I am new to this the activator was dropped at a few spots. How would you detect these changes? I have looked at the TES5Edit output with a very simple LO and with a STEP Extended LO. Ok. I think I see what you are talking about. It looks like a number of changes were made. It looks like some placed items were moved. Clouds. Leaving the cell touched and in some different state. As the Birds and Flocks mod has no heightfield data I have no idea what this implies for the activators that it places. Here is the code in question. I am not sure what would happen with a change to load order. I am using this mod to explore. What makes a good mod or a bad mod. Seeing this mod on the Dangerous Mods List got me interested in what makes a mod dangerous. The changes, as far as I can tell, are all inline with the original source. Some minor edits to a few placed objects. If there is a failure with the script then it is a failure with the original script. Given how programers work, code tends to be templated and repeated. If there an error in the script? Is it replicated by accident into other scripts of a similar type? Do other script of the same type use a different mechanism? To be honest, the mod adds more of what is already in the game. Not a lot more if my count is correct. The user info from the CK gives an accurate count of the added objects. A few other generic activators were placed. All from the FXBird* and FXBat* lists. I suspect that if this mod was dropped, most folks would have a hard time telling. A fun learning experience. The caveat with this is of course how right or wrong I am about the scripts and how they work. How they get recorded to a save game. The interaction between the various components. In no particular order. FPS slow down. Save file code bloat. CTD. Missing world items. Broken quests. Missing Textures or meshes. Bad INI settings. These are the things that make or break a mod. Am I missing any others? I used this as a simple check list. As an example, given that the bird effect is a particle effect it could be possible that an ini setting to change the particle effect could impact performance. Using the STEP instruction as a base no problems were detected. Do you think it would help if I had a look at the Skybird mod. This is another mod on the dangerous list. I like the list the author did a good job of putting it together and for a good reason. That said I like to understand the underlying cause of something. My love of puzzles. Complicated should never be confused with complex. Feeling my way around mod testing. I have the title but I have a long way to go before I have earned it.

For simple text file compares notpad++'s compare plugin is an easy tool to use.

I had a look at Birds and Flock. Version 2.4 from Nexus Site. The scripts used by this mod are generic. USKP make a small change to delay the playing of the bird flock sound. A single animation is played. The mod makes use of the FXBitdFlockFleePine.nif. A large file at 227kb. A particle effect. The original activator is used in 67 places for birds and 11 places for bats. This mod adds 18 bird and 11 more new bat activators. The mod adds a new activator for birds. The only difference I can see is the addition of an activation sound. The original form has no activation sound in its form. The sound is part of the script. I wonder if someone with a background in nif’s, animations and particles could have a look at the animation file used and see if it is unusually in any way. My background is programming. From what I can tell there is nothing usually in the nif file. A single instance of the bird animation is started and stopped. Perhaps someone with a better understanding of how Papyrus works could have a look at the fxbirdfleescript.psc script. Again I can see nothing usually in the script. I really don’t think it a problem. The activator does not reset. Unless the cell resets you won’t see the animation again. In the grand scheme of things adding 67+18 animation to a save file seems rather small in its effect. As for save file code bloat, the best example I have seen of this is the Horthgar voice quest. This is a side effect of a seriously over a stressed script engine. To many running and the termination conditions for said scripts not being meet. I once managed to create a 45mb save file before it crashed. To see the number of scripts running on an actor I used the mfg console mod. A small and I mean small change to the Papyrus setting might offer some aid. I would NOT suggest doing this. Rather look to remove some heavily scripted mods that you can live without. If this mod is adding to a save file and causing bloat it is NOT the cause. Look else were. Too many mods with too many player attached scripts. Just going from STEP Core to STEP Extended, the number of PC scripts goes form ~9 to ~54. Add in Frostfall and RND and script numbers climbs even higher. I ran the Horthgar quest with no problems, using STEP Extended. I have no script numbers for the mangled LO that I used to create the bloated save files. It was a while back, before I knew what I was doing. If you want to see an example of the animation, as you leave Riverwood and cross the bridge, birds will fly from the tree to the right. Any FPS effect from Birds and Flocks were impossible to detect using the Skyrim Performance Monitor. As to the age of the mod, its original form, I can offer no insight. As it sits right now I can see no serious problems with this mod. This completed my analysis of Birds and Flocks. Suggestion on how I might improve this analysis are greatly welcomed.

It is a very good thing that an alternative exists. It will be interesting to see what the sites traffic is like over the next while. The current save file fix mod feature in MO is a very neat. The only thing missing are the mods without a plugin. To be able to generate a manifest, from a profile. Checksums on the mods contents. References to the original install package. That would be a very nice feature. I am a pack rat when it comes to mod packages. Spool then away to a secondary storage for safe keeping. I suppose you could repackage the installed mod and simplify the manifest.

Audley, Your observation about this forum and Nexus are spot on. Nexus has a lot of information. But the signal to noise ratio is high. As the primary source of mods it's a must read. Those that post there also make good contribution. When evaluating a mod it is required reading. Posting there always seems a chore for me, so I lurk. The Steam forum also has a few gems. But it is even worse than Nexus. I avoid the site except when Google turns up a post. This is probly the first online community that I really wanted to be a part of. To everyone that start this site and to those that make contribute great or small, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your love of your hobby shines and is infectious.

I can't imagine trying to do what I do mod wise without MO. Good summary.

ROTFLMAO, this has me in tears. Some great finds this Friday.

I am blown away again. This is a very cool find. The thread. Well everything in the thread. A small contribution.

I use KDiff3. Works as well for two files as three. I like the simple window explorer integration. Click and select a file to compare later works for me. That and if you use git at all it is a tool you need or something similar. Best feature is the price.

I find bad meshes also make my list. Duplicate or overly complex. Poorly designed. Over the STEP Extended what mods do you have loaded? Any mods from this list? Bad mod, bad!

Also as an experiment turn off AA and AS. I let the applicable drivers software manage these. AMD Catalysis in my case.

As an experiment try disabling the following mods Serious HD Retexture Skyrim Skyrim Flora Overhaul Skyrim HD - 2K Textures Static Mesh Improvement Mod v1.88 See if things improve at all. I have found these to be FPS intensive in spots. Story Book mode. 2 FPS from 60.

If you do happen to want to change the scaling on you displays but don't like the effect is has on the Skyrim menu's you can disable scaling for a given application. Find the executable. Right click and select properties. Select the compatibility tab. Click the 'Disable display scaling on high DPI setting' Your set

My eyesight it getting bad, old age does that I hear. I rescaled the display to 125% which helps a great deal. The side effect is that the last few tabs on the information dialog become hidden and you either have to resize the dialog or click the tab scroll button. Is there a way to change the default size of the information dialog and make it permanent? It's nice to see all the tabs at once. I just found a workaround. I did not know that you could change the order of the tabs. Just found that out. This does carry over after you close the dialog.