MontyMM

Yes. I'm pretty satisfied through my own testing with SSD vs regular HDD, that demands on disk transfer play a role in stability.

That fits with the article I saw (can't find it now) where they tested on a really silly super rig, but still found that anything above 9 would CTD after a certain amount of time. I think the chief culprit is memory filling up. Skyrim would be a very good candidate for a 64 bit exe.

Excellent! A Gene Wilder pic, in keeping with the monster theme!

@Raistlin, If you look in the STEP guide, in the INI tweaking section, there are two links to other guides that cover all the options very well. I don't think that people will really be able to offer a tailored profile to everyone that posts their system details. It would be nice, but it would take up a lot of time. @Venkman My logic (such as it is) is to test the texture mods with vanilla settings first. I find that they don't hit my framerate until I start to overload the VRAM, and it's good to have a clear view of where that point is. Then I mess around with the engine processing options - AA, AO and all that, and finally the 'extra-engine' post processors.

Z I AM a hopeless romantic, but I try to keep it off the forums. If I read it correctly, I don't think you've upset Bealdwine - I'm pretty sure when he says "keep to himself" that's in the sense of "adhere to himself". I might be wrong, and we'll both get a speaking to, but I think that's just the old "Two nations divided by a common language".

I haven't touched the site theme, so I assume default. Running Firefox 11.0. Firefox does have the Adblock Plus and NoScript plugins, but NoScript is set to allow all scripts on this domain.

Post post. :happy: In the editor it all looks fine. It's happened a couple of times, then I've edited the post to remove the breaks, which seem to be carriage returns, and all is well. Weird.

A question for the heavy tweakers among you. Have you found a good spot for memory usage and caching settings - MaxAllocatedMemoryBytes, cells to load, and all that jazz?

If I were to buy a new card at an almost reasonable UK price right now, it would be the ATI 6850 2gb. It has the chops to run Skyrim at a decent framerate, and the memory to handle upgraded textures. It could also be crossfired when you upgrade, to give very respectable performance going forward. https://www.dabs.com/products/sapphire-technology-ati-radeon-6850-hd-775mhz-2gb-pci-express-hdmi-7V4Q.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=product+search&utm_content=Q200 Personally, I’m holding out for as long as possible. Since every damn thing is developed for seven year-old consoles anyway, my old machine is still just about good enough. I’m going to save up until the next gen consoles start looming, along the Unreal 4 engine and its competitors. Then I’ll buy a nice beast when it’s really essential. EDIT: For some reason my posts keep getting these weird lines breaks, like I was writing free-verse poetry! Any idea why?

I'm not sure I like the look of the 440s - had a quick look at some benchmarks and they appear to me to be one step up from an IGP. FPS in the teens for many games. Not really gaming cards. If you go down the route of a second 8800 in SLI (as I mentioned somewhere, a similar setup works well for me) do make sure your PSU has the wattage for it, and that it has enough of the right power connectors. Mine is 550w, which I reckon is borderline for SLI.

I'm a bit cautious of uGrids - I've always assumed that TC omitted them for a good reason. I think longer term testing is a good idea. I read respectable-looking reports that higher ugrids settings tend to CTD after crossing a certain number of cells.

Interesting. I'm curious - at which point do you make the downloads BAIN friendly? Do you modify the downloaded archives themselves?

I haven't actually read Z's guide, because I'd already made friends with Wrye before he published. I'm sure he'll answer any specific questions about his implementation when he drops in. Don't worry about seeming silly. None of this stuff is what you'd really call complicated - but it is a daunting pile of simple things that can't be apprehended all at once. Also, with modding in general, things often don't seem very intuitive or logical. I think that's because it's community driven, so it's more like evolution than an intelligent design, and gets messy! Asking questions is much more sensible that trying to figure it all out. EDIT: And compared to engineering calculations (fluid dynamics anyone?) this will be a walk in the park!

It's by no means hopeless, just there's just no foolproof way of getting rid of the glitches. Below is the procedure that Optic was recommending to 'clean' the old saves. It seemed to work well for some people, but not others. It's not an isolated problem with this mod - Bethesda save games are just not very robust. If you keep changing mods and just continue saving, it's not unusual for something to get screwed up. 1) Travel to another world space that IS NOT classed as the Skyrim world space. This is either Solitute, Windhelm, Whiterun or Riften. You need to be in the city walls loaded into these separate worlds. Other places like Morthal won't work as they are located in the Skyrim world space. Interiors may also work. 2) Open the command console and type "pcb" (without quotes) 3) Make a new save. 4) Exit Skyrim and Uninstall the 2.0 version of the mod. 5) Install the newest version of RWT 6) Play Skyrim and load your "world space/interior" save. 7) Open the command console and type "pcb" again (without quotes) 8) Play.

I keep all the original packages as NMM downloads them, so that NMM can track the updates, and I can go back to the clean sources if I screw things up through tinkering. Then I convert them to BAIN friendly packages for Wrye, and rename them to their STEP names. I also merge all of the small texture packs together, to shorten my list and simplify things.

Yes, I must admit I am finding harder it to keep track of everything.

AFAIK, these are the files updated by 1.5, which may lend support to your suspicion. TESV.exe SkyrimLauncher.exe From the Data folder: Skyrim – Interface.bsa Skyrim – Misc.bsa Skyrim – Shaders.bsa Update.bsa Update.esm …and the Strings folder

The extra bits have become a bit of a sore subject it seems. So many people were such dicks about it that he's dug his heels in. I don't think he's really planning on diluting the focus of the mod in any significant way - it's really just a few easter eggs and a bit of sunken treasure for fun.

I think this is worth having here, to flag up the issue as it affects STEP. The other thread just mentioned the story in passing.

Opticshooter used a paraphrased version of what I said, and I think I might suggest he put up a longer explanation. I explained the whole story to Bealdwine here: https://forum.step-project.com/showthread.php?tid=20&pid=327#pid327 I think it probably is worth mentioning in STEP, or we'll start getting hundreds of posts about missing waterfalls too!

Pretty much anything that resembles a corporate structure really. We're like a techno-hippie commune - we should build ourselves a geodesic dome. With fiber-optic broadband, naturally.

Yes, as I understand it RL with the iCCC injector is directly comparable to the RCRN package. And I believe that you're also right about daisy-chaining post processors by using the proxy setting, but I haven't been tempted to try it. I'm really pretty happy with the way my Skyrim is looking now. Just need the Real Lights mod to arrive, and someone to figure out how to animate LOD waterfalls, and I'll be made up. : )

Just a thought Bealdwine (any possibly others) - if you have an nvidia card and a motherboard with a second PCIe slot, you can use this little app to enable it for SLI, and stick in an old matching card. https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2414995&postcount=1 That's what I did a while ago. I enabled my ancient non-Nvidia motherboard (Asus P5W DH) for SLI, then bought another second-hand geforce 260 GTX from ebay, for peanuts. Combined with Skyboost, it makes a pretty good fist of running Skyrim, hovering around 45 - 50 FPS most of the time. Those older cards aren't far behind the current ones when you double up.

I'm posting my reply to Bealdwine here, so as I don't take the other thread off topic. I just wanted to agree with the point that you made about Bethesda. The modding community works hard and maintains interest (and I'm sure to some degree, sales) in their products in a way their marketing department could never hope to achieve. I find it gob smacking how little consideration they show. If I were part of Bethesda, I would seriously propose that a member of the staff had at least a part-time responsibility to 'sit on the board' of the modding community. I don't just say that as wishing-on-a-star - I think they miss a real business opportunity by not building a stronger relationship with the community. Aside from a lack of concern, it's a lack of imagination.

I ran it on my untouched STEP installation. Didn't take too long - long enough to make a cup of tea. The results look good. It claimed to have reduced textures by 315mb. In game I have noticed little difference in visual quality. There has been a clear reduction of stutter, particularly when turning 180 in a complex area, and a reduction of fps dips, rather than a boost to the upper limit . This is hard to quantify, as you say, but I'd testify to it under oath.