MontyMM

That and the xbox. But don't get me started on everything being designed for seven year-old hardware. I remember when you had to have a shiny new PC to play the best stuff. I haven't upgraded for years, and I don't think I'm missing much.

AFAIK, Skyrim doesn't support PhysX. I know the Gamebryo engine can support it, but I don't think they bothered to implement it. It's a fairly short list of games that do. EDIT: Yeah, I'm pretty certain now - I see they use Havok, which I don't believe is compatible.

Bummer. As someone once said, probably the last words ever spoken on this planet will be, "Hey, it works!"

I use Dxtory to cap at 40fps, with no probs. Makes everything feel smoother, and removes mouse lag. I wouldn't be without it.

This is well worth revisiting Bealdwine. I might be a good test subject for the efficacy of texture optimization, with my older hardware and 2 x 896mb GPUs in SLI. Unless Z denounces the app you mention, I'll give it a try and see what I get.

I'll have to see if Sydney can tempt me back to RL. Spoilt for choice!

Good learnin'. Thanks S4N.

That's just his preference for AA. The main factor for me is the quality and restraint of the lighting and environmental effects.

Quite a helpful review of RCRN here: Skip to 7:10

Rats. You're right. You can't create junctions from a subfolder to its parent. I think that's what it means by 'recursive links' - you'd be creating an infinite regression. I've used junctions for redirecting installed apps I moved to my SSD, which works great, but the sub directory problem didn't occur to me. Time to think again...

Symlinks and junctions are all similar ideas. They're a bit like wormholes - you can place folder in one sub directory, but it actually leads to a different place. You could make a junction folder in 'Data' called 'Root', that actually leads to the main skyrim game directory. In this way, you could trick Wrye in to managing those top level files too.

AFAIK, Wrye won't handle anything in the root directory. You could do it by using junction points to create a redirected folder in the data directory, but as RCRN is a bit of a special case anyway, I'm not sure it's worth the bother. This little app is quite handy for messing about with junctions, if you want to: https://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm The textures, I believe, are just some less reflective snow, and the esp I let BOSS order for me. If you want to keep things as clean as possible, you could just put the esp and textures in an archive for Wrye, and place the dll and shaders in the root by hand - it's easy to remove those manually if you don't like it. EDIT: BTW - it's all gone batsh1t crazy over in the RCRN forum - a war of the shader programmers! I'm not going anywhere near it

Yep. I get this specifically when I delete a package from the installers tab, if it had an ESP in the load order list. Just its fancy way of telling you its cleared up the consequences that aren't visible.

I'm a big fan of RCRN - I would never go back. It seems to have a greater range of atmospheric lighting, and handles the contrast between light and shadow far better than RL. I also find it errs on the side of subtlety - you have to use it for a while before you really appreciate it. Performance-wise, I found that using it with its own AA, I was getting an image quality that I could not achieve with standard AA without incurring an even bigger penalty. Mind you, my setup is a jury-rigged old banger, and YMMV. Pure vs Classic seems mainly to be quite dark vs very dark nights, though I think there may be some colour differences too. I like both.

I tested at top of Whiterun looking down, on ultra, all of STEP with lower res textures, plus Beautiful Whiterun and the RCRN shaders. With Skyboost on, lowest FPS I could get was 31, rising to 56, depending on where I looked. Without SB, on exactly the same spot from the same save, it bottoms out at 23 - 24, while the top end is about the same.

It may be that shiny kit like that doesn't see much of a benefit. My old banger is an unusual configuration, and SkyBoost does help. In fact, it runs remarkably well in ultra @ 1680x1050, so long as I stick to the lower end of the textures. I'll dig out FRAPS and run some numbers in tough spots. Intel Q6600 8GB 2 x Nvidia 260 GTX in SLI (recently bought the second one on ebay for next to nothing, rather than upgrading yet) Intel SSD

That looks good. I'm working on a real newbies' introduction to modding, while being a newb is still very fresh in my mind and a certain conceptual approach appeals to me. It doesn't touch on installation though, and isn't STEP specific, so we shouldn't both be inventing the wheel.

It might be good for STEP to offer advice on updating; to recommend Skyrim Unplugged, and to have a status page that suggests when it's time to update to the latest patch, along with links to the updated managers, p-processors, script engines etc. to go with it. I thought that was a slight flaw in the guide actually - recommending that all mods be kept constantly updated. I could point to a couple of mods that have changed radically or introduced regressions between updates. I like the fact that the nexus keeps legacy versions, and I think that STEP should specify known-good versions that should remain static until the next (minor?) update of STEP.