MontyMM

Couldn't agree more. As you say, these sorts of advanced mods are an absolute honeypot for ignorant and bratty users who don't read instructions, expect a magic bullet for all things, and don't have a clue what they're shouting about. I thought I was going to to have to chew one my own limbs off while trying to explain about the relatively simple hokum of memclean, and these guys are at a different level entirely. I really hope they don't get burned out by the nonsense. I don't think Boris will - he likes to blow off steam and speak his mind now and then, but I'd say he's too tough and attached to his work to be put off. It's great that these two are communicating well, and I think their work has the potential to lift major restrictions of the engine.Â

I would agree with that. But while I think that this is great work with great potential, it is nowhere near ready for daily use, IMO. I'd call it a very exciting alpha demonstration of the possibilities. I would really like to see this one taken to a polished final state. At present, I find the clipping and flickering issues unplayable, and the presence of clouds and rain far too dominant. I do wonder if there are fundamental problems with the methods used, as SparrowPrince mentioned. If the primary graphical issues could be resolved, and the clouds used in a more subtle and restrained way in harmony with the weather, then this would be one of my top mods. The proposed lightning effects also look superb.

Hello all. There's been some very cool developments since I've been away, with this one, the stable uGrids project, and the distant animated lods (praise the Lord and pass the biscuits), being of particular interest to me. On this one, and any potential similarity to the phoney optimizer apps we bored everyone about a while ago, I think this is a horse of very different colour. I haven't looked into the details of it yet, but seems to be a serious attempt at a proper solution, from a real programmer who has done some reverse engineering and modified specific DLLs used by Skyrim, to alter its memory management behaviour. By understanding the engine and DX, interjecting in the way this specific program runs, and altering the way memory is allocated and cached, then this seems plausible. If it works, also very impressive. The ugrids stability project also looks promising, and, from having a quick look at it, may also have uncovered some fairly fundamental yet simple problems that could also be relevant to loading and stability in the default game. All potentially very promising, I think.

Many thanks, Aiyen. Your contributions are much appreciated.

yes, it's a crying shame that ugrids can't be scaled up. A half decent rig can clearly handle the performance demand. I tried extensively to see if I could make it work, and I can get it be very stable for long periods, but one way or another, it gets you in the end.

Yeah - the static waterfalls really bugged me and I looked into it (so did SparrowPrince, ages ago). It seems that the engine simply cannot deal with animated LODs, and no modder, to my knowledge, has ever figured out a way around this. Hard limitations of an ancient engine.

That's all fair comment, IMO. I'll add the short description text to the head of the main page, for clarity. There was some talk a little while back about other options for maintaining a presence on the Nexus besides the PDF. I'll see where we are with that. I wouldn't generally tout the idea of automation too much, but I felt it was worth mentioning as part of the summary, in response to the OP's question about why STEP can't be made more convenient.  Â

The short text on the Nexus is what displays as a description of the "mod" in the listings. For STEP it reads: "STEP is an extensive STEP-by-STEP guide to enhancing TESV SKyrim with the best mods, tweaks and settings." The description of the download is: "This is a PDF containing a link to the wiki guide. Please download in support of STEP on the Nexus!" If it's agreed that there is a lack of clarity on the main page, we can certainly update it. I don't personally feel any great concern about the current PDF download. It's not ideal and hopefully we'll have a better solution in due course. We're going to carry on talking about automation until/if we can put something workable together. No promises.

If you've sorted out your ini files, then I still think memory is a likely cause. You must remember that the memory figure reported is highly inaccurate - the 3.1 figure is a *very* rough guideline that emerged during our early testing. Skyrim could easily be hitting its memory limit while reporting 2.8gb, or even lower.

Amen to that. Filesystems must be up there for the most backwards and underdeveloped aspect of IT development over the years.  In my mind, I divide my IT experience into fair (my fault) problems, and unfair (not my fault) problems. :P Crappy filesystems have caused me so much wasted time - not just the frequency of problems, but the amount of bloody time it takes to sort them out in big configurations *shudders*. EDIT: @phazer The books I've looked at weren't free, but I'm sure there's some great stuff online. Be worth posting if someone finds some.

I'm having trouble viewing your ini fle on my phone, but I think you might have some items in there that dont belong. One item that I can see is the raised imaxmemory setting. This is way too high based on the Bethesda description of this setting, which assumes a default of 75k, and specifically states that values too high can cause crashes. I know it's touted as a good tweak in a few places, but I'm not at all convinced. I'd start by creating some fresh inis and see how that goes for a while. it could also quite easily be the good old memory limit, exacerbated by too many varied spawns with AV.

For anyone that's interested in Linux, programming, web technologies and the like, I'd give a big +1 to the Raspberry Pi, and some of the excellent books to go with it. It can seem very difficult to break into this stuff, because every concept seems to rely on other concepts. But I would say that gaining a useful level of understanding in this stuff is far less of a challenge than say learning a language or an instrument. I beleive that following along with a good Pi course could get you up to speed with a lot of stuff in just a few weeks. You'll soon understand at least the concepts the four parts of a LAMP server, python scripting, and the Unix command line. Pi also uses an excellent visual programming package to teach kids - I forget what its called.

well, the short description on the nexus does make it clear that step is a guide, and the download is clearly marked as a guide too. I don't think we'd be too concerned about flaming and bad mouthing - that's just part of life on the nexus, even for the very best and most hard working modders. You just have to learn to tune it out, or you'll just get bitter and burned out no matter how hard you try. We have looked in great detail at the possibility of automating step for casual users. The first problem is that the nexus, quite understandably, denied us permission to automate downloads from their servers. The idea of creating a consolidated pack would be great, but it would be a nightmare managing permissions, particularly as we must risk upsetting modders by being honestly critical. Also, things have changed in recent times, with endorsements, and, crucially, donations, making it far more likely that modders will want to retain control of their mods on the nexus. The final possibility is automating at least the reconfiguring , optimizing and restructuring of mods. This is quite possible, and I've looked into it in some detail. The difficulty is that, which ever way you slice it, you run into the need to maintain and update the automation process to account for new mod versions. Many updates are quite radical, and these have to be manually examined and reconfigured. In the past, we haven't had the manpower and community input to make this viable. But, with our new expanded team, this is still something I would like to make happen in time.

if anyone had the patience for my extended screed on memory management, do bear in mind that the same caveats apply to the figures shown by this app too.

Just to that idea generally - I would think that the good people at Nvidia would not be too distressed at the idea of garnering fine benchmarks and reviews in the here and now, and having people wishing for an upgrade before too much longer. :P

I'm another penguin lover CentOS is great if you need stability, but the trade off is that it remains well behind other distros. In practice though, this is often not much of a drawback. I often look favourably upon it when certain other distros taunt me with half-baked features not quite ready for release (I'm looking at you, Ubuntu.) Manjaro is coming along quite nicely - XFCE on top of Arch. Superbly fast, and the package management is powerful, if not entirely friendly.

I would always advise people to research properly on the serious tech sites. Mind you, I would hope that if someone went in saying that they really wanted an Nvidia card, with more than 2gb of vram, they would get the sort of helpful and clear technical advice as provided by that guy Lephron in your thread - laying out the considerations and options. If they get laughed out of town by gurus, I would suggest they pick another forum. On the question of vram - to suggest that the vram requirement is entirely dictated by resolution is somewhat misleading. You will often see it discussed as if this were the case, because the limitations of current game engines have meant that the requirements for textures and effects have remained fairly static. So, in practice, for a long time the only real reason to invest in more vram was to drive larger frames, or more frames in the case of post processing. But this is not the whole picture, and it is changing, particularly in the wake of the suddenly raised scope of the next gen consoles. Displaying the pixels of the final frame at a given resolution is only part of the story for vram use. One other major consideration is simply the number and quality of textures that are sent to the GPU to be processed (and cached) at a given time. There is enormous scope for this to increase, as we demonstrate with STEP, and increases of this sort do not necessarily tax the GPU to the point where it cannot provide decent performance. The another consideration is that the frames generated and held in vram are by no means only the final frames that are output to the screen. Many effects and post processing are achieved by rendering multiple frames, parts of frames, frames consisting only of individual textures, and so on, as frame objects. These are then combined to output the final scene. This applies to optional effects like AA, but also to many effects within the game engine itself, and, again, there is tremendous scope for these to increase. Increases of this sort clearly do also demand a higher processing burden. The point is, that though the question of whether it is worthwhile to invest in more vram at a given point is certainly open to debate, it is fundamentally wrong to insist that extra vram will be useless below certain resolutions.

No-one wants to do any banning - we don't like mashing the moderator buttons around here. But we have discussed this attitude before - treating other people in a derisory way because they disagree with you - and you agreed that this is not helpful. Asking you to stop posting your technical opinions would be very much against the spirit and intention of the site, but, equally, so is implying that other people are stupid and laughable because you think that their decisions are not optimal.

You're still linking to the wrong card. And you still don't realise how stupid buying a GTX 660 with 3GB on board is. I advise posting posting about your choice on some larger tech forum for some laughs. You can't have enough of those. Have a good night, mate. EDIT: I've just looked at that thread again, and oh my god, are some people funny. We're getting tired of warning you about your attitude. Keep posting your tech opinions if you want, but stop being obnoxious about it, or go and do it somewhere else.

Anyone who feels his masculinity is enhanced by the teraflops of his GPU, is in serious, serious trouble. :P

These are very good. I recognise one technique they're using that can be very effective, and makes drawings really stand out from others. They're using graphite pencils in combination with charcoal pencils. The charcoal gives you the really deep blacks that you can't get with graphite, and the high contrast looks amazing. You can see this used to best effect on those Lady Gaga drawings.

I should say so. Here is one of the first "next-gen" games to declare its recommended specs. This only the beginning, of course, and it wants ">2gb" vram, 8GB ram. Also note the much lower minimum specs. I would expect to see this trend continue, as publishers won't want to alienate the huge market of lower spec PCs. But, as I've said, I assume we're talking about a fairly "enthusiast" audience here at STEP.

You must eat what you believe to be right for yourself, and listen to no-one else. Vegetarianism and meat consumption both have certain practical and physical advantages, and I don't hold with preaching to anyone (unless they try to annoy me). This is my first posting about veggie-ness online! Aside from the rationality, though, and to be honest, I have a certain soft spot for the critters. I always liked George Bernard-Shaw's answer to why he was a vegetarian: "My animals are my friends. I don't eat my friends."

hard to say. The arguments in its favour seem clear, but that doesn't often seem to inform the control freakery that publishers engage in. They might get it into their heads that it steps on their future plans to rerelease in some other format in the future, as with Baldurs Gate. I have in my mind a character at a desk in most games publishers, rather like Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder - "You shat in the money bed!!!"

The problem with thinking about the question in terms of resolution and multiple monitors, is that is doesn't consider the possibility game engines simply generating larger and more complex worlds, with a greater amount of more detailed objects displayed. It assumes that the amount of texture data required will remain fairly static in coming games, and that only increasing the size of the scene displayed in two dimensions will increase the demand. The vram that is required to simply display the pixels of a given display size is only part of the consideration. More powerful engines that render 'deeper' and more complex spaces will include more objects requiring texture data, and yet more to be cached, if you want to avoid the stuttering of texture loads as the scene changes. You can demonstrate this even in Skyrim (a pretty dated engine) by jacking up the ugrids and watching the vram demand climb as the world space grows. You can also see this with mods that add variety to flora and fauna, for example - more varied objects in the scene boost the vram requirement, even if their resolution is at the lower end. With boosted ugrids and a good card, you can also see how vram use can increase significantly, while still retaining solid framerates on current gpus. The size of textures, like any digital images, is also not determined only by its X x Y size. It is also determined by the detail and complexity of the image, and the amount of degradation that is tolerated in the level of compression; there is scope for texture sizes to increase in ways other than sheer resolution.