MontyMM

This is my preferred option at the moment. I find having the land fill up with epic monsters and ninjas is 'anti-immersive' (emergent?) I much prefer the more old school approach, where levels are won slowly and feel significant.

"Bugs - The aforementioned troll incompatibility is a known issue." I might add that line to my forum profile. But seriously - that's an excellent mod report. I like the idea of the mod too. Let's hope the animation bug can be sorted out.

I've now seen a good few satisfied customers with that Nvidia 3D fix for water corruption. I think it's worth adding to the troubleshooting section. Also, a warning against using the 'quick' texture optimizers to mangle the water textures. Where is to be the place for that sort of thing - the Guides subforum, or a new spot on the wiki? EDIT: I know what torminator is talking about with 3D hardware and and guessing images. When you enable the 3D setting, it forces you to go through a little wizard to make sure you can see the 3D images correctly. You just have to guess which pictures it thinks are the correct ones, and eventually it allows you to enable the setting.

Yes, I think most of STEP is probably fairly innocuous in this regard. But, one exception I can point to with certainty is RWTT. Removing that and continuing with a save that expects it has a very good chance of disappearing some waterfalls from the game, and can be pretty resilient to PCBing. EDIT: In fact, I meant to mention this before - you may want to mention this specifically in the new STEP. I assume that RWTT is out, now that it is defunct, and there will almost certainly be users affected by this.

Frihyland drew my attention to the Bethesda best practices guide, and this is the most significant quote from it: "When you play Skyrim with a mod, in most cases, the new data for the mod will be written into any new saved games you create. For example, if you play Skyrim with Mod X and create a save, the next time you load that save, the game will expect Mod X to also be loaded. If you no longer want to play Skyrim with Mod X, it is best to unload Mod X (by unchecking the plugin under Data Files in your Skyrim launcher) and loading a save that does not require Mod X, usually an older save or a backed up save." My experience suggests that a good portion of the problems people suffer are related to this. The fact is, Bethesda's save scheme is just not very resilient to modding. In these terms, even an update would mean "Mod X' becomes "Mod X2", and so on. My recommendation is to tinker around with mods until you have a really solid setup, then start a new play through without making any changes at all. Some would probably consider that overkill - just my personal policy. I expect to be in the tinkering phase for a good while yet before I set off on a proper play through.

Seeing as the buggers harass me like glorified cliff racers, I'm happy to turn them into hats!

These are well done, lore friendly, and probably a good addition. For my tastes, I wish that dragon artifacts didn't all look like they were created by cavemen, but I guess that is the look introduced in the vanilla game. I would like to see some stuff that looks more like fine ivory.

For the water distortion, could you try testing with SLI disabled? It would be good to pinpoint if that is a factor.

Right - I'd only it noticed on the mountains so far. Would you agree that it only seems to affect LODs though?

Interesting. I believe that fSplitDistanceMult is related to the quality of the distant LOD, perhaps raising it beyond what the launcher sliders allow. Since the z-fighting seems to affect only the distant mountains, you could be on to something here. I would expect that there is a potential FPS hit for this, though it could be negligible. I will certainly experiment with this one. The strange water behavior you described I think is linked to SLI. If it is not already set, try this tweak, which helps in some cases: In NVIDIA Control Panel Check to Enable stereoscopic 3D Check to Hide stereoscopic 3D effects when game starts EDIT: Also meant to say, I believe that using FXAA can exacerbate the shimmering.

I would love to see something like OOO. I haven't heard of anything like that yet, but I guess it is still relatively early days. The levelling system is by far my biggest peeve with Beth games. For me, an important part of an RPG is that, depending on how far you've developed your character, sometimes you'll feel like a ninja, and other times you'll get splatted. When you are humiliated by the Orge Lich, you set off to level up, find a magic broadsword, and return to give him a damn good thrashing! I actually stopped playing Oblivion at around level 15, until OOO came out, because every two-bit mugger was wearing magic armor and crushing my non-tank character. :@

Good find. It'll bump heads with 101 Bugs because it's also messing with dragonfly spawns, but I would hope that letting 101 override it will be OK. EDIT: Tytanis commeth to torment the mod purists! It's perfectly fine for those that like that sort of thing, but is it really assimilating smaller mods that become unavailable independently? That's no good at all...

Yes, it's a difficult one. On the one hand I find it impossible to argue with a modder's position that their mod's purpose is whatever they please, but certainly feature-creep does not suit this project. Maybe we should look at a deeper level of custom installations, perhaps making changes in the CK, and implementing them through the BCF-type conversion procedure on the end user's PC. STEP does this already, to a certain extent, with partial mod installations. It shouldn't require permission either, since we would not need to distribute any of the original code.

Excellent work - thanks for the effort. Apart from anything else, it will be worthwhile to establish the best practices for this. I have seen a problem in the WATER mod thread, where textures mangled by 'Optimizer Textures' appear to cause unexpected artifacts.

I agree that the mod suggestion forum should probably be held to a higher standard of 'topic focus', as it's part of the project workflow. In general I think it pays to be quite relaxed about it - productive thinking is messy and unpredictable! I would rather see topics marked as defunct, or even locked, but I wouldn't like to see people's conversions arbitrarily cleansed in the name of efficiency. It seems that Z does most of the moderation with a light touch, and I think his judgement is very good.

That's a solid improvement. Those vanilla carved symbol textures in particular are dreadful.

Nope, sorry Z – not having that. @Starac At no point have I made any judgement of you, or criticized you personally, I just asked politely if you could avoid insulting speculation. I’ve worked in a number of countries, including a spell with a tribal culture, and I can assure you that the statement, “Your work is inferior, possibly because you are incompetent or lazy, or something else,†would have a remarkably consistent reaction across the cultural and linguistic spectrum. The reasons why you make this speculation are irrelevant - it is unfounded connotative rhetoric in any language. Your general argument is that you have greater knowledge and understanding in this matter than others, and therefore they cannot judge, whereas you can. That is a logical non sequitur, and is no more a matter a personal opinion than an arithmetic error. An argument from authority is inductive, and at best could be a matter of probability, yet you make deductive conclusions. That is simply incorrect. Your last response, attempting to support your argument by suggesting that I am immature and my lack of knowledge is funny, contains the same flaw as criticizing Nebula’s work by implying his personal failings. Ad Hominem; a fallacious argument. Please do note that I have still made no judgement or comment on you personally, this is purely a counter argument to the statements you have put forward. NHF.

I don't quite agree on this Z, but I'll do as you ask if you consider this beneficial to the project. Should Nebula ever join the discussion here, I just wanted to put on record that I wasn't comfortable with certain comments, and not impressed by fallacious arguments from authority. I'll stay off this frequency now.

Hmm... I might be tempted to suggest a few things, with MAYBE appended to them, safe in the knowledge that no harm will be done. I rather fear that it might not be quite so simple...

I am training in the TC school of "he who is a schmuck does not exist", but I am not yet a master. I must admit, I have been truly appalled by the conduct of people on the Nexus, to the point where I've really felt like shutting down my account and doing something else. It's almost embarrassing to be associated with. It's quite depressing to observe the proportion of that community which is rude, mean, and wouldn't know a valid argument if it slapped them in the face with a fish.

Could we steer away from insulting speculation about other modders inexperience or laziness? Positive and friendly discussion that respects subjective differences is the way forward, I think.

@s4n I couldn't claim to gain anything by that approach, it's just a sort of 'thinking bias' if you like. I like to see a list of clean, static archives, knowing that all decisions have been resolved, and nothing variable remains. Once I've chosen the colour of my high definition rabbits, I'm happy enough to live with that decision. :happy:

That fits with my experience. I don't see a drop in FPS as I load up on textures, but when I finally go beyond my VRAM I get an unplayable stutter as I look around. Other than that, I'm pretty well convinced that my game is CPU limited in most situations.

For myself, I never use the complex packages - I prefer to create a selection of simple packages if I want multiple options. Mainly personal preference - the simple archives give me a clear picture of overwrites, and have the benefit of being very easy to use manually or with other managers.