toolbear

I've yet to figure out a complete enough mod order to run with proper parallax turned on. Invariably some texture designed for buggy vanilla parallax remains and these just look awful (squiggly lines or overly pitted or just weird distortions). It doesn't matter how great the rest of the world looks, when I come across one of these it just ruins it for me. This is truly going to take a mod or mods that replace (or at least review) every single texture in the game before it's usable for me. Also, the quality of the new parallax textures is real hit and miss with all the current mods. PPR has some great textures and some terrible ones. Same for the Vivid series. PPR also completely replaces the look of some vanilla textures as opposed to just being higher res, proper parallax; one particularly bad case is the fort texture being swapped from a generic rocky surface to one that looks like stone blocks, except at least one fort structure in Helgen the "blocks" looked like they were stacked at a 45 degree angle on a doorway arch so it looked doubly wrong. TL;DR - YMMV, but the texture packs aren't quite there yet for me

I recently added Hold Border Banners to my STEP Extended based modlist. Although I agree with the points that stone or wooden markers would be more realistic, this mod along with other mods like (iHUD, Even Better Quest Objectives, etc.) allows a play style where I don't use the world map or compass. I find this play style way more realistic for my current character and completely offsets any distraction the border banners might cause. I see no reason to hold out on the mod author releasing a more realistic version before including this in STEP Extended. I'm even using Designs of the Nords which some could argue make the banners even less realistic, but again this is still less immersion breaking than popping in to the world map.