MontyMM

You can indeed. I like to darken and tweak the interiors with ENB, and for me it's one of the most compelling reasons to use it. If you bring up the ingame tweaking menu, you'll find several options relating to interior lighting, curves, fog intensity, fire brightness, and so on. All the changes take effect dynamically, so it's very easy to experiment and get things to your liking. I always tweak the presets heavily. In fact, I just consider them a starting point. I was recently playing around with a tweaked Phinix Natural preset on top of RCRN, and found it very pleasing.

I'd hate to think the forum was an aggressive place. Sometimes people get a bit pushy with their technical wisdom, but you always get that on techie forums. The response you got was unfair in this case, but just carry on posting and don't worry about it.Â

The first difference is that Newegg's primary interest is commercial, whereas modding is fundamentally and expressly a voluntary and non-profit venture. Secondly, STEP actually exists with the purpose of promoting mods, based purely on merit and no other consideration. That is very different from what New Egg is doing. The primary function of STEP is clearly welcome on the forum, but a proxy to the promotional activities of NewEgg may not be. But the third and most problematic concern is that, by your reasoning, anyone who wanted to use these forums to promote a commercial interest would be welcome to do so, as long as they attract attention by offering a free competition with no strings attached. You can see how that could get out of hand.

TBH, I'd say it's quite substantially different.Â

Agreed. I know the British lottery has odds of about 15 million to one, and I like to think of it in terms of betting on a horse race. To get a horse with odds of 15 million to one, it would need to have no legs, be dead, and encased in concrete. My slight concern with advertising these sweepstakes is that they are essentially commercial promotions. I know it's not the intention of the posters, but how do we fairly distinguish between these and other more cynical attempts to hawk things on the forums?

Exactly right. They're called fingerposts, and they were required by English law at intersections on highways going back to the days of roman milestones. You can imagine the consequences and cost if every cartload of goods got lost en route.

Welcome Warburg. I missed this one, and I really like the look of it. As Rootsrat said, I find the 3d map a bit jarring, and a nice authentic-looking map like this feels much better.

I use it, though I don't detect any performance improvements. It's a convenient way to shut down unneeded services before gaming, which seems like a good practice. What I would recommend is that you use an older version, before it became Razer Game Booster. It has become hideously bloated, forcing you to sign up for an online account and log in before you can use it, doing god-knows-what tracking, and generally being a piece of software that's not welcome on my PC. Version 3.4, prior to the Razer take over, seems OK.

I've also heard that 3d gaming really comes into its own when it's scaled up to projector dimensions. There are some damn nice projectors now - not cheap, but not crazy prices either. I'd go to a pro music forum to ask about the sound card. I think if you're really serious you'll want a high quality external DAC rather than an internal card.

Good work - thanks guys. Those puddles looked like they'd escaped from Doom 2.

TBH, even with a crazy budget, I'd feel pretty sore after paying a grand to Nvidia for one of those. Have you considered spending instead on some top class peripherals - a classy sound system, an HD 3D projector, and so on.

I think you make some interesting points, mothergoose. I'll take a close look at these before I use them.

Good work. I look forward to having a play with this when I have some time.

I'm not quite clear - you say you're not using any extra mods, but your list includes several. Can you clarify? I take it you're using an ENB. Have you tried running without that? Also, Your CPU is highly overclocked - have you tried testing at stock?

I did some testing way back when, where I mirrored my whole system onto an SSD and a two regular HDDs (to reduce the risk that a faulty HDD could taint the results.) There was no doubt in my case - the HDDs would CTD the game regularly, especially when travelling through the woods, whereas the SSD was almost entirely stable. I'm not aware of anyone else repeating the experiment, but my suspicion is that sometimes the engine demands a large texture load, and that some HDDs do not respond quickly enough. I'd say it's worth a try, though of course the perennial problem with Skyrim is pinning down which of the many gremlins may be responsible for each crash.

Steam is a pain in the arse for power users like STEPers. I think we have a policy of not including mods if they're only available on Steam.

That's interesting - that reducing your texture load improves stability, when RAM and ugrids are not a factor. Do you run from an SSD?

AFAIK, vram itself isn't implicated in causing crashes, just stuttering and lousy performance. Have you increased your ugrids settings above 5?

Trying to work out where problems might lie from looking at that long list of STEP and non-STEP mods is a bit of a tall order. Can you confirm that you can run OK using pure STEP only?

That'll be amazing if it comes to fruition, but I do wonder if that project is a bit TOO ambitious. Some of it was started for Oblivion, but Skyrim came out before release!

That's awesome. I agree - it would be great if this were used to create an entirely separate region that could be visited from the default game. I was thinking about this the other day - get a team of modders to build a new landscape, and then gradually fill it with NPCs, dungeons, quests...Â

That sounds right to me. I can run all of STEP with the maximum textures, and it's completely stable. But if I start raising ugrids, then memory use shoots up and I soon encounter crashes. As you say, this is also another variable - high ugrids demand far more memory, which may invite crashes, but they may also cause crashes for other reasons unknown. I would think that 2K STEP at default ugrids should look great and be pretty stable.

We're actually looking at building a new landing page, that will provide an introduction and an up to date overview, so there may well be some changes to the navigation.

There's sb on the boards with a GTX TITAN using 5.2 GB of VRAM without crashing. Not all VRAM is going to be mirrored in RAM - this remains a complete and utter hypothesis from our side. I didn't say that all VRAM is mirrored, or that high VRAM use would guarantee a crash. But many of us have found that RAM use increases as VRAM does, and that Skyrim become less stable when RAM use exceeds 3gb. This is not proven, but there is sufficient testimony to make it worth bearing in mind.

Have you tried setting your resolution manually in SkyrimPrefs.ini? The settings are iSize H=#### and iSize W=####. Try doing this after you've applied the recommended settings in the launcher. One other thing to be aware of (though it won't be related to the current error), is the instability that seems to occur at around 3GB RAM use. You may hit this very quickly with 3 monitors and high quality textures.