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@DoubleYou Would you mind checking the CC locations this patch fixes to determine if MM 4.02 is effectively fixing everything this patch addressed previously? I'm not very familiar with all of the original issues this mod addressed and those locations, but the latest MM seems to have some differences in most of the Landscape records and a few of the texture sets, IIRC. I know Landscape records are beyond my understanding, so I suspect the diffs may be entirely valid. I do see evidence that this may have all been addressed with the new MM plugin, MagesticMountans_Landscape.esm

Yes. See the mod description. I believe the plugin is an ESL dummy to load the corresponding INI, so it's needed and costs no overhead.

If you follow 2.1.0 and note that post-release changes, you will be 95% of the way to 2.2.0. The patches are the biggest hurdle with current mod updates.

That's true, but I was spurred to ask about it, since Rudy seems to recommend the optimized version as well ... and those other ENB settings may be worth verifying. It's always nice to get better performance if there isn't any noticeable tradeoff with quality.

We may want to test if the Optimized option of this mod may be best for our recommendations. We will need a couple of screen compares to determine though. Anyone doing so should be running Step with Step Heavy ENB. Probably want to check giant fire in addition to a campfire or cooking fire. Day and night shots would be great for exteriors. It would also be good to test these settings.

We may want to also recommend the Optimized version in the guide. Needs testing though with some compares.

We should be able to release in the next week or two, but it depends on mods in testing.

You can also use shift key (I think) in MIC to see textures and other assets. See the MIC description on Nexus for details.

It looks like that model is using the wrong texture. Check the texture and model using MIC to see the name and MO to find where it's coming from.

Those have always needed cleaning. 44 vanilla plugins total need cleaning.

It's ENB effect of [RAIN] that you need to play with, and it can vary by weather if it's enabled to do so in enbseries.ini. Unless you are using rain textures made for ENB, you can get black rain like that. Even with rain made for ENB, I think. I messed with this a bit in the Step ENB and found that it is impossible to get it right for all ToD and weathers, so I disabled it. Vanilla rain effects just look better.

At a glance, I saw it had stuff for some of the other mods like Assorted Mesh Fixes, etc., and thought it might be a consolidation of all that. So it's a patch for a bunch of patches and other random stuff. Hmm, so many of those now that it's such a mixed bag. Very tedious to test it all, that's for sure.

Yeah, I can mention it to him. I'm sure he will be fine with it as long as I maintain it. Maybe it will be a separate mod.

For such trees, I always just use 'optimized' full models as sheson mentioned. Even sometimes for really thick straight trunks. The trunk billboards for most trees are too far away to really notice the minutia, IMO, and I'm just happy that they only use 4 or 8 triangles If you know what to look for, you can usually spot a billboard anyway (particularly if they are really fat billboards). I posted yesterday about possibly related issues with latest alpha and AMD. Completely removing Adrenaline by reinstalling "Drivers only" option (with "Factory Reset" option ticked) of 22.5.1 resolved my troubles.

I just want someone to do all the work of combining all of these mesh mods into one ... call it SMIM and be done with it! No, but really, it's something to check, so let us know what you think if you use it in your game. Well, after looking more closely at the mod's description, it looks like the MA is doing just what I wished someone would do (but he's calling it "A collection of mesh patches by Andrias Bartlett" ... instead of SMIM ). I hope he sticks to it and does them all!

After looking more closely, I can see some of the 'plasticy' look in a couple of the examples as described, but overall, they appear much more "in focus" than the originals ... so in game, it will have the effect of looking more crisp and higher res as intended, IMO. As long as nothing is really broken, I think it's fine and will seem like a net plus in game (which is likely why there are no bugs reported, and the mod is getting used and endorsed). TLDR; I don's see any issue with the normal though. Normal 'noise' is more forgiving and sometimes has a nice effect ... to me, the normal just looks like it has more wood striations than the original and will likely be a marginal improvement in game even with the original wood texture. But I would never upscale normals anyway. I would create new ones based on the upscaled diffuse. On a side note: Upscaling anything is extrapolative and involves adding missing information using a Bayesian sort of approach. It can never be as good as the original when scaled to the original resolution (one of the mip levels of the upscaled texture is a direct compare to judge how well the upscale performed ... you should find that information is actually lost). This is the one that emphasized the general limitation of upscaling, IMO. The right looks very much like plastic wood (to me), while the left just looks like a picture of wood slightly out of focus: This is because the 'noise' of the original is rather consistent, and it winds up looking cartoon-ish when upscaled without adding new noise to break up the lack of variation in the minutia. All that said, I agree that using the deliberative, non-batch approach is always going to result in a better outcome if for no other reason than the custom tailoring to the use case of the end result befitting the original.

In the OP, you mentioned MM and double-sidded. Vanilla then ... like I said, I'm not sure that water reflections are smart enough on their own or with EVLaS. If you want to know if it's associated with LOD though, use TLL console command to disable LOD. Or just load the game up without DynDOLOD active.

Just console TLL in game to turn off LOD to see. I'm guessing it's not LOD and possibly double-sided flag for the mountains. Magestic Mountains? That mod doesn't have double-sided flags set (not sure if that even works for water reflections though).

It looks like the upscale method used is 'good', but I only question the conversion method used. If each texture was upscaled and QA'd by a human, then it's fine, but it hundreds of textures were batch processed and batch upscaled (through CAO, fe), then there could be lots of underlying issues without proper QA. I think this and the other MA's mods listed are all worthy of consideration if some level of a hands-on approach was taken to verify that the treatments applied were not one-size-fits-all (unless it was confirmed that this is actually true). If any texture looks off or has bad mips or alpha-to-coverage, etc., that's a sign that they were batch processed with limited QA (potentially fixing some things and introducing new issues elsewhere). These are the kinds of mods that need testing or time for any bugs to crop up on Nexus if testing is too daunting. PS: at a glance of the Nexus page, this one does look good. Released months ago, no bugs, lots of downloads and endorsements, etc. So if it is true, then all of the other mods become more interesting as well.

Moved from Mods topic. Please read the posting rules at the top of a given forum. SSE support questions have a place, and that's here.

I believe it's because those water reflections aren't aware of the terrain uderside and/or the double-sided mountain meshes. I think water reflections might rely on some mesh flags that don't have any way to factor in the occlusion. These are just guesses though.

Yeah, I have always used Sniff to batch edit NIFs likewise. But if someone has written a script to do so via xEdit and it's easier to instruct how that's done, it would be suitable for the guide. It's all about how easy it is to explain for the layman. This is why we usually opt for a mod like this, since it's just simple. We could always ask T4 to do it or provide the file for him to incorporate into his mod or serve up on the MM page as well, which would probably be simplest.

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Ah thanks for the updates guys

Instructions updated. I'm not certain what the ENB Helper bit is about, so the install on our side is effectively the same as always.