MontyMM

It comes from Cleanmem pointlessly writing the contents of RAM to the pagefile, as it attempts to hide memory use.

@Garfink Excellent! I've created a pack WIP thread so we can discuss it without derailing this one.

You certainly are entitled to your opinion, Garfink, particularly when it is correct. :P I've spent a lot of words on justifying why Cleanmem does not do as it claims, and there's no point going over it all again. But for new members who might not have read through all that jazz, I just offer my personal opinion for those that are interested, though I won't get into more debates about it: Cleanmem doesn't do what it claims and creates misleading memory readings. ENBboost is genuine and does work.This guide contains several recommendations that I do not agree with, and could cause you significant problems.

When I get some time to sit and play about with my toys again, I've been looking at putting together an alternative gameplay pack - perhaps I'll call it 'Old-school Adventuring'. It will likely use a patched combination of Skyrim Unleashed, Duel Combat, SXP, Morrowloot, and possibly some elements of SkyRe. The aims are: De-levelling the game to a workable degree.Introducing a D&D XP replacement for the current skill-use progression system.Removing high-level loot from levelled lists, and placing only it in specific locations and inventories.More unique items, hidden in specific places.Morrowind was one of my favourite games, but with Oblivion, I shelved it at around level 20. I had created a ranger-thief type character, and as I gained levels I became weaker in every fight compared to the levelled enemies and their fancy weapons. This displeased me mightily, and Oblivion went back in its box. I'm hoping to create a gameplay experience that is more in line with the old Infinity D&D games.

Yes - I'm all for experimenting. But as an answer to Deathwing's question - these tweaks have definitely not yet been shown to help with anything, and could easily be detrimental with arbitrary settings. Experimental testing for script-related stability - go for it. It will be quite hard to prove their efficacy beyond the anecdotal though, unless we can identify some specific script-related crash situations that are repeatable for a number of people.

No. What majin662 said is true - most people don't understand what these tweaks do, and have probably only been recommended because they sound vaguely like they might be useful, and then caught on like urban legends. A lot of tweak sites just unquestioningly collect and repeat every suggestion they see posted, and so it goes on. I would leave these settings alone.

The only other thing I would add is, if you're a real enthusiast, there are a few PC-focused games that could still benefit from the most powerful rig you can buy. MS Flight Simulator will still use all the CPU power you can throw at it, the Total War games also benefit, and Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame is up to his old tricks with Star Citizen. This last one is described as a high-end PC space sim built with Cryengine and realistic physics, and could well make the most of overpowered PCs. I'm personally very fond of these types of PC game, and for those willing to spend more on the highest spec kit, they may provide some justification. Also agree about SSDs - certainly in daily use, they make the OS much more of a pleasure to use.

LOL, and quite right too! They could take SP and Cabal while they're hiring! If you're up for it, I think we might be able to come to some critical agreement on a 'best of breed' rock retexture, upon which you could base your proper fix. I would also support EWIS as a solid choice in this regard.

I've tended to shy away from these subjects in recent times as they seem to get contentious, but most of us seem to be on the same page here. In terms of CPU, I think the demands for gaming plateaued a while back, and I'd say the last gen i5s could serve you well for some years. Given the very modest CPU specs of the new consoles, I think it unlikely we'll see too many games with higher CPU requirements for a long while. A quality motherboard and 12 -16gb sounds good to me. Assuming a motherboard with 4 DIMM slots, you could happily get away with 2x4b at a reasonable price for now, with the option to upgrade at a later pay-cheque. A decent GPU with a generous amount of VRAM should also see you right for a couple of years too. The exception is if you're looking to really push into hardcore territory. I have an Nvidia 670 4GB, and with the meanest ENBs I could already welcome some more horsepower. Some game designers (though likely not too many) will also design their engines with the potential to let PC enthusiasts go wild. Expect to see this from the likes of Crytek and CDProjekt, in which case the sky's the limit on GPU, but likely not much value in going crazy on the other components.

I haven't really looked at the spawning system but I'm sure one of the guys here will know about it. You might want to have a look at the Skyrim GEMS website as it has a whole section of suggested mods for dealing with this sort of thing, including removing the levelled enemies and setting fixed levels of enemies in each location. I like these ideas, though it can make the game much harder to begin with. Skyrim Unleashed is an interesting mod that does something similar, and also alters enemy AI so that bandits will largely ignore you while you're a lowly peasant with no decent loot, and animals will growl to warn you off before attacking.

I think Unreal is an excellent ENB in many ways, but to my eyes it falls prey to the evils of blue/orange filter abuse. This has been driving me nuts since movies went digital a few years back. I'd almost a watch a movie now purely on the promise that it had a full and natural colour palette! :P

I'm also a fan of Rocking Stones. B&B I think looks good in certain scenes (particularly up close) but, as was mentioned, it does seem to make the whole landscape appear volcanic, which doesn't seem quite right to me.

This is looking very good to me - EDT +EDT 2. I'll check out the results with snow in my new build, but the shots look very promising to me. I'm glad SP has taken this one forward, since he seemed a bit unhappy with EDT, initially.

I'm a bit of a heretic here. I really dislike the ambient lighting in vanilla, but I'm also not sold on any of the major lighting mods at this stage. I do think that RLO was doing some good work and showing promise, but it seems to be in development hell, perhaps understandably given Sidney's difficulties.

Yes, and what I like about these core issues is that they could so obviously be responsible for fatal crashes, and he seems to think, perhaps possible to fix through DLL injection. What's really annoying, of course, is that the two main issues he's described, the infinite looping in the loading thread and the runaway unnecessary creation of new memory stacks, could have been fixed so easily by Beth coders.

Boris-English is far kinder to the language then the torturous contortions of logic and facts that it was subjected to by our native snake oilers! :P

Excellent. I need to download my whole mod collection afresh, and this map will definitely be in my new permanent setup. Though it's a big change to the vanilla 3d map, the design looks entirely in keeping with the maps seen throughout the game, and feels like it was always meant to be this way.

To give everyone an idea of what they're up to, here is an exchange from Altimor and Boris that I clipped out of a long and sprawling thread on his forum. Don't worry if you don't understand exactly what they're talking about, but after the scams and unpardonable bollocks of the previous memory and stabilty "apps", this is a refreshing example of what technical NON-******** looks like. :P Keep your fingers crossed that these guys keep working on this stuff, because they may be able to uncover and address many stabilty issues in this way. A: "Turns out there's another bug w high ugrids, an infinite loop in cell loading code. I hope to fix it tomorrow. I'm working on multithreaded cell loading atm." A: "It definitely seems to be very finicky regarding PC differences. I can get grids up to 13 (poor performance but stable), other people have been able to use 15. For some reason if it fails the grid loading thread just continues forever. Breaking with the Visual Studio debugger during such a freeze showed that most of the threads were waiting for the grid loading thread to finish." A: "From what I can tell the infinite loading is caused by 2 threads waiting on each other." A: "uGridsToLoad 21: https://i.imgur.com/qtJh1tg.jpg     Extra contrast to show distant terrain: https://i.imgur.com/i8tLHNo.jpg I have a rudimentary fix for the threading deadlock, but I'm not convinced it's stable right now." B: "I hope you didn't changes to functions of critical sections or other similar as it's not solution, rather new bug. Please confirm or users will corrupt their saves." B: "Hmm, just thought that replacing thread sync functions can be good idea, if to bypass only specific threads. Gonna try myself, but such simplest tricks require heavy testing." A: "I stop a specific WaitForSingleObject several calls deep in CellRefLockEnter, I'm aware it's probably not safe and that's why I'm not releasing it yet." B: "Then better to detect which threads to bypass after some time, from my experience render thread and objects loading thread may work together not synced without issues to files, some graphic bugs occur, but it's minor. The same should be with sound thread (that damn with real time priority)." B: "Just thought, any changes to sync functions may fail in "non game" conditions, like alt+tab and some time passed after this. Don't forget to test also."

I don't have a STEP setup right now (I need to redownload afresh), but I did some simple measurements with VMMap at a few locations. In every case, the detailed metrics show a reduction of hundreds of MB of in use by the Skyrim process when ENBBoost is active. This memory decrease is real, IMO, and not merely hidden as in the phony toy apps. Whether this is a stable solution itself, and how far these new limits can be pushed, I can't say. But I can say that I beleive it is doing what it claims, and I look forward to pushing it with a heavy texture load to see how it shakes out. I'll put up some figures, and I think we're going to like them.

Top quality, as usual!

Good stuff. Apart from the awful auto correct again ;) How are you anyway? How is your writing going? Also I can't ever edit posts anymore I just get this: It has been hours. Maybe a bug? Oh and can I get a random funny tag change? I mean people can already see I'm a author. It's like you having STEP above the STEP lol. I just know I'm going to get "Surfin' Bird" but oh well. ;) Hello Matey. I see you're still doing top work - I really like the new sharper looking waves in WATER. I'm still writing away, but I haven't had much time for Skyrim things of late. I've just popped in to catch up, really, and dispense some drive-by opinions.:P I'm not sure what the gang has been up to with the limits on post editing. Perhaps one of you Orange Hats can shed some light?

I have always been very impressed by CaBaL's work, and I'm very pleased to see that he's moving onto landscapes and towns. For my two cents, I wouldn't be concerned about individual textures, or even groups of textures, deviating widely from vanilla, so long as the combined result remains coherent and doesn't take huge liberties with TES architecture, etc. I like things faithful to vanilla in the macro, not the micro. Keep up the good work CaBaL, and I hope you create a full and original replacement for SRO.

Good stuff.Â