johnnyboy88

Okay I took a quick look at skyrim.esm in the creation kit as well. If you go to the traits tab of HousecarlWhiterun there is a disposition base of 35 set. However, according to the Creation Kit wiki that field is not used. https://ck.uesp.net/wiki/Traits_Tab Although other tutorials say different. Such as this one https://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/Adding_a_Follower_NPC_to_Skyrim It says in order to recruit someone a minimum value of 75 is required. Seeing as Lydia is set to 35, if it does do anything, it must be dynamic and linked to relationship values somehow. According to this page. There are relationship levels ranging from -4 to +4 https://ck.uesp.net/wiki/Relationship In the object window if you select "*All" And then put "housecarlwhiterun" into the filter, you can open the relationship window there. The default relationship value is set to Ally or +3 for Lydia. Now, according to this page on adding voice. https://ck.uesp.net/wiki/Adding_Voice_Intermediate_Tutorial Sound files don't change for any given dialog choice. The only thing affected by dispostion or relationship status is what dialog options are available to choose from. As an example. If you don't have a high enough disposition/relationship value you don't get the option to recruit someone as a follower. So with all that said. It looks to me that nothing is "technically" broken. So all that remains is deciding on whether or not she should sound so put out and sarcastic when you select that dialog option. If not, then this sound file mod is the fix for it.

I'll give that a try it, but I seem to recall the only option I could get to work right was the default menu choice. Either way it's not a big deal now that I have this mod. She's a lot more pleasant now :D And as you say that option is still available so this mod would still be effective/needed/useful. It's not like it's heavy. It's a quick audio patch; no esp; no scripts. Plus, I think it will be a while before they include follower mods into STEP. It was mentioned earlier that her disposition is locked at -100. It would be nice to have a fix for that if that's the case (That is if locked -100 is a bug and not intentional). Having her audio adjust to how much she likes you would be perfect. However, until that happens I think this is best we can do.

I use AFT as well and when I give her equipment to upgrade what she uses/her outfit. The menu selection I use, uses the same voice.

Well, I'm going to promote my favorite as Phinix ENB all the way :D It also works with CoT and ELFX and RLO. Phinix says he's still testing it with ELFX and RLO but I think it works really well with ELFX as I use that and prefer it over RLO.

Respectful Lydia - Willing Burden Carrier by Man or Monster This mod replaces Lydia's sarcastic, disrepectful "I am swoooorn to carry your burden" with another saying of your choice. I never could figure out why she sounds completely subservient in every way, but when you want to give her some nice armor, she makes a snide remark. Choose from the three following options: "As you wish, my Thane." "Let's see it." "What do you want me to carry?"

Comparing Blender and other 3D packages like Maya, Max, or Blender to a game engine is like comparing apples and oranges. They are two completely different animals. A game engine is more of a form of playback of pre created/rendered objects and files. The assets have already been rendered from the 3D package. Most 3D packages are CPU based because GPUs have only recently begun to get powerful enough to be of any use to high quality renders. Not to mention GPU rendering require vram and CPU rendering require system ram. And even with a GTX Titan you can only get 6GB vram. They have only recently started implementing more code to optimize for offloading instructions to the GPU. They are CPU based because there are a lot more complex calculations involved with rendering a HQ image. And a lot more memory requirements. Even a "simple" scene of just a box with a lambert shader can take a second or two. That's just one image in one second. Whereas a game engine displays 30-60 images in a second. The more complex the image the longer it takes. This completely demonstrates the differences behind CPU and GPU rendering. If the CPU were rendering the shadows there is no way you'd be able to get any kind of framerate that would playable. And 3D apps are starting to use the GPU because it is faster at a lot of rendering functions. But that demonstrates the point of the CPU not being capable of it as well. Game engines are able to display at these speeds because most of their assets are pre-rendered and they sacrifice quality for speed. A 3D package needs to be able to produce 4K plus images capable of being displayed for IMAX in 3D HD. Here's a GPU rendering engine and it still takes 23 seconds to render a full single frame https://furryball.aaa-studio.cz/aboutFurryBall/whyGpu.html So again, you can't really compare a 3D app to a Game engine's realtime "rendering" They work completely different. A game engine sacrifices a lot and is very limited to be able to do what it does. TLDR: Basically. You can see the difference of CPU and GPU rendering by firing up your favorite 3D app and building a basic scene that you see in Skyrim of; a house, trees, flora, fauna, your 2k texture packs, myriad of misc details like bowls and foods, sky, multiple light sources. It would take a long time to render 1 frame wouldn't it? And that's what would happen if the shadows were rendered on your cpu. And if you pre-cook your scene like you mentioned, (similar to having pre created objects for a game engine). It does render faster. But nowhere near the speeds of playablity. Here's a long discussion why games render realtime and 3D apps don't https://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=838177

I posted this in another forum a little while ago. I thought some people may find it useful here. I wasn't sure if it should go here or under guides and resources sub forum. This info is taken from around the web: Keep your iShadowMapResolutionSecondary at 1024 to avoid some performance loss. These are the far shadows and it's not really as noticeable. Try to keep the primary at 4096 if possible though. The real issue here is that Skyrim isn't using a lot of cascades. There are two cascades, the primary and the secondary. The entire shadow map is stretched over the distance set by fShadowDistance. Note that when you switch to medium this gets set to 2500. When at ultra it's set to 8000. Whatever the distance is, the shadow map is getting stretched. The higher the distance, the more stretching, the more pixelation. In the ideal world you'd have more cascades to minimize any stretching, but that isn't the case in Skyrim (yet anyway). Lowering the distance remedies that problem, at the cost of not seeing shadows at the cut off distance. Thankfully shadows "fade" in instead of popping, so it's not completely jarring if you use a setting of 2500. iShadowSplitCount=2 // How many times shadows are split. ie how many shadows one object can cast. fShadowLODStartFade=400 // Lod shadows fade time. ie do the shadows fade out slowly or faster the further away you get from them. iShadowMode=3 // Not really sure. I always thought this was the shader mode used. ie 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. Though I've seen some "tweaks" set this to 4 I can't really tell what it does. iShadowMaskQuarter=4 // This controls the interior lights shadow mask, spolights, hemis and shadow onmis all have shadow masks. Adjusts shadow crispness. Lower values make shadows less detailed. Performance impact can be major. iShadowFilter=3 // Filters out the shadows. ie abit like anisotropic filtering for shadows. Adjust shadow filtering or smoothness. Affects all shadows. low=1, medium=2, high=3, ultra=4 fShadowBiasScale=0.2500 // Affects exterior shadows look and position depending on the respective angle the pc is looking. determines the degree to which a surface is shadowed. Determined by angle to light source. higher values reduce shadows. lower values increase shadowing. iBlurDeferredShadowMask=2 // Valid values range from 0 - 7. Lower values will sharpen shadows (not the resolution), making vegetation more "vibrant." It gives a subtle increase in performance, but also gives more pixelated and striping effects to shadows. Higher values will make shadows softer and more blurred. Consider a value of two if using ENB. fInteriorShadowDistance=3000.0000 // Distance interior shadowmap is stretched. Increasing the value has no noticeable effect beyond reducing the quality of indoor shadows, and decreasing the value causes unsightly fade-in. fShadowDistance=3000.0000 // Distance outdoor shadowmap is stretched. Determines the distance at which shadows appear outside, as referred to earlier. 8000 to avoid shadow pop-in. Lowering the number increases shadow detail by a significant degree, experiment with this setting until you find a balance between quality and view distance that you are happy with. iShadowMapResolutionSecondary=2048 // Increases the detail level of shadows. The max setting, 8192, massively improves shadow quality, but in our testing we discovered a few objects and areas that absolutely crippled performance on even our beefiest machines when using 8192, but not 4096. As such we recommend sticking with this lower setting. Other possible values are 2048 and 1024. iShadowMapResolutionPrimary=4096 // As above. iShadowMapResolution=4096 // Directly controls shadow resolution. Values larger than 4096 are possible such as 8192 for a substantial fps hit. The performance impact of Primary and Secondary is linked directly to the ShadowMapResolution settings. The defaults for Ultra are 1024 and 2048, respectively, which means that the performance ‘cost’ of Secondary shadowing will quadruple, and the cost of Primary shadowing double. If you’re losing too many frames per second lower the Secondary value first, and then the Primary if problems persist. iBlurDeferredShadowMask will have, at most, a few frames per second impact when going from the Ultra default, 3, to 0. Finally keep in mind a four-channel uncompressed 2048x2048 texture takes up 17 MB of texture memory. For 4096x4096, this is 67 MB. For many GPUs out there, that is more than half of the available texture memory. It's simply not feasible to go bigger than 2048x2048. Also somebody mentioned shadows are done by the CPU. That is simply not the case. The following are quotes from around the web because they say it rather well:  How the CPU affects GPU:     I hope this sheds some light on how the CPU and GPU function. I am no expert, but this is my basic understanding of the subject.

That looks like some kind of mesh problem to me as well. Which shouldn't happen if you clean uninstalled/reinstalled properly. Did you follow these steps? Then after those steps you still have a problem; It can't be the game, it has to be hardware/driver related. Possibly OS but unlikely. Maybe D3D related. You can try to uninstall/reinstall directX. You can also try to do a complete clean uninstall of your video drivers. Google proper steps for whatever kind of card you have; ATI/Nvidia/Intel whatever. Try another graphics card if you can get your hands on one. Borrow one from a friend or something.

AA is called imultisample=

Mod Organizer uses a different ini than if you run TESV from default directory. The MO skyrim ini is kept in C:\program files (x86)\ModOrganizer\Profiles\ You can also edit it from within MO itself by selecting the profile you want to edit then clicking on the Tools button and selecting "Ini Editor". You can then change the skyrimprefs.ini for the appropriate screen size.

Found something else that may help you with your mouse lag. I updated my previous post to reflect it. Basically if you have Nvidia you can try setting your Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames to 1

I'm not saying some people will not notice a difference. I'm just saying that the way you made it sound, sounded like you were stating a fact. And the fact is, some people won't notice a difference in the flow of the game and others will. Perhaps it wasn't your intention. But statements like that make make some people think they need more when they really don't. It's kind of like a placebo effect. FPS counters certainly add to it as well. It's my belief that people shouldn't use fps counters unless they notice stuttering and or lag. Then they can use them as a tool to try and smooth out their gameplay. Then they can turn them off again. Here is a little program to show the difference between 30fps and 60fps. For me the difference is hardly noticeable and I certainly can't claim that it would be "unplayable" at 30fps FPSCompare by Andreas Gustafsson You should really read this page on fps it covers all the stuff we're talking about https://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_5.html

You can enable Triple Buffering for D3D games on ATI cards by using either of the following ATI Tray Tools https://radeon.ru/downloads/att/ D3Doverrider https://www.guru3d.com/content_page/rivatuner.html D3Doverrider comes packaged with RivaTuner which is for Nvidia but D3Doverrider still works with ATI "A huge difference" That is a subjective opinion and everyone is going to perceive it differently, it also depends on a lot of other factors. Such as how much action is going on such as explosions and fighting vs fishing and watching a sunset. Motion blurring will also have an effect as well as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. Texture resolutions and display resolution and screen size. Not to mention the fact that everyone has different eyeballs.

Input Lag Unlike a movie, you actually control the camera in a game. The lower your FPS the more 'laggy' your on-screen interactions will feel. This also adds to the perception of certain framerates being inadequate. The most common fix is to raise your fps. Control lag is simply what happens when your graphics card struggles to keep up and the resulting frames go slightly out of sync with input commands. There is no precise or magic fps level. 23fps make look terrible but 24fps may look smooth. The fact is, everyone is going to perceive things differently. If it looks and feels smooth to you, then you're getting enough. But someone else may not agree. As for other possible "fixes"? You'll have to play with your vsync and tripple buffering settings to see what is smooth for you. And if various combinations of those don't work. You'll have to reduce the load on your graphics card by reducing your graphics mods to increase your fps. Finally. Skyrim has a setting for mouse acceleration. Try disabling that inside Skyrimprefs.ini [CONTROLS] bMouseAcceleration=0 Other options that control input: [interface] fMouseCursorSpeed=1.0000 [Controls] fMouseHeadingSensitivity=0.0125 also try turning off the gamepad if you're not using one. [MAIN] bGamepadEnable=0 EDIT: Nvidia has an option called Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames that can possibly help with mouse lag. Try a setting of 1 https://www.tweakguides.com/NVFORCE_6.html A method to help reduce stuttering and smooth out gameplay: Combine Adaptive Vsync with Framerate Limiting. 1 - Find a framerate that you will be ABOVE 99% of the time. - example: If you have a 60Hz monitor and you typically get 35-45 fps set your Adaptive Vsync to "half-refresh rate". This sets your Vsync cap at 30Hz. 2 - Set your Framerate Limiter to 30. This limits your graphics card to rendering a max of 30fps This syncs both your monitor and graphics cards to your systems performance level. By setting them just below your sustained fps level it will smooth out your gameplay experience. If you have an uber rig you may be getting over 60fps so using full adaptive sets a 60Hz cap (if you have 60Hz monitor) so use a limiter of 60fps. If you have a lot of mods installed you may only be getting 24fps so setting the cap at 30 would do you no good. Use "1/3-refresh rate" and cap it at 20fps. 20fps may sound low but, with the smoothness of the gameplay, you will percieve it as feeling much higher.

Well, it can certainly be part of it. You can turn Vsync off in Skyrimprefs.ini [Display] // 0 = off // 1 = on // 2 = reduced fps cap iPresentInterval=0 I recommend turning it off in Skyrimprefs and use your drivers to control your vsync settings and if you want an fps limiter as well, Nvidia control panel has one, enb includes it, as well as other tools like msi afterburner. FYI, if you use enb. It also has a Vsync setting so check that out as well. If you're using your driver control panel all software options have to be disabled. I'm not real familiar with ATI so I'm not sure how tripple buffering would work for that. But I can do a little research unless someone else knows.

The following link should help dispell a lot of myths and sort out most confusion: (Including the "minimum" fps and "maxium what the human eye can see" myths) https://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_1.html Refresh rates do NOT affect FPS. They are two separate and distinct things. FPS = Frames per Second = How many distinct individiual images or frames a GPU outputs, per second Refresh Rate = Number of times a screen is capable of DISPLAYING or redrawing, per second (FYI, even if your monitor is capable of 120Hz refresh, and a lot of LCDs are, WindowsOS or your Hardware connection type, may be capping it at 60Hz) Even if you have a static 2D image your monitor is still refreshing or redrawing 60 or 120 or whatever times every second. So, if your fps is less than your refresh rate, say 19fps, those 19 frames are just getting redrawn several times. And if your fps is higher than your refresh rate say 200fps, and your monitor is 60Hz refresh rate, then you're only displaying 60 images per second, because your monitor can't refresh/redraw/change it's crystal state fast enough to display it. And this is where Vsync comes into play. Because if your graphics card is outputing 200fps and your monitor can only display 60 you get what's called screen tearing. Vsync is what prevents the Tearing. Vsync caps the maximum number of frames to the moniters refresh rate, so enabling Vsync on a 120Hz moniter would cap FPS at 120 FPS instead of the normal 60. Now, let's step backward a second. If your refresh rate is 60Hz and your fps is anything lower than that, and you have Vsync enabled; It is possible that Vsync can reduce your framerate significantly. Because Vysnc slaves your grahics card to your monitor. Your graphics card only sends frames from the framebuffer when the monitor tells it to. Which is between each individual refresh. If your graphics card misses completing a frame it has to wait until the next reshresh to send it. So it sits idle and wait to send the next frame. This results in half the framerate whenever you fall below the refresh rate. So as long as your fps is higher than your monitors refresh Vsync will not reduce framerate. But if your fps is lower than your refresh rate Vysnc can reduce your framerate further. Nvidia has an Adaptive Vsync that can be enabled to automatically disable Vysnc if your fps falls below your monitors refresh rate. It will only be enable if your fps exceeds your refresh. Nvidia also has a Smooth Vsync option for SLI and when fps is below your monitors refresh rate. It is suppose to help with micro stutters. It locks in the sustainable framerate of your game and only increases it if the performance move is sustainable above the refresh of your monitor. It does lower average framerate but "smoothes" it out. This is where Triple Buffering comes into play. Tripple Buffering will add an extra frame buffer so your graphics card doesn't have to wait for the next refresh to keep working. It will start to fill the 3rd frame buffer with an image and then once the monitor refreshes and syncs up with the graphics card, it will rotate the framebuffers sending the 1st one to display, the 2nd to the 1st, and the 3rd to the 2nd. The problem with adding an extra framebuffer is that it requires additional VRAM. So if you're using HighRes textures, Anisotropic Filtering, and AntiAliasing; you may have increased stuttering or hitching as your textures are swapped out.

Basically that's what it sounds like. I'm not sure how enb is implementing it. But it sounds like you'd get the best performance if you enable it via your drivers. However, if you do that it is considered hardware aa. And if you have hardware aa enabled it disables a lot of enb effects. If you use the transparency aa via enb settings though it's software transparency aa and will take more of a performance hit. Will it be enough for you to notice? It depends entirely on your system.

I haven't tried enb transparency aa yet. But what should do is provide aa for objects with transparent textures. While it's possible that those are the only jaggies you notice it's probably not the case. Transparency aa was designed to work in tandem with other aa techniques. Here's a short Nvidia video demonstrating the techinque: https://www.nvidia.com/object/transparency_aa.html Here are some screenshots demonstrating how MSAA is not performing well on objects with alpha transparency. But combine Transparency aa with it as it looks good: https://techreport.com/review/8466/nvidia-geforce-7800-gtx-graphics-processor/21 And some more screenshots demonstrating the technique. https://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/g70-indepth_10.html And finally the whitepaper with more information than you'd probably ever want to know https://developer.nvidia.com/content/transparency-aa-antialiasing-whitepaper

I like Phinix's ENB. https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/24235/ It's designed with CoT in mind and I think it works rather well. I also use ELFX and I think it looks really good.

Here are some comparison shots of Crysis 3 with the different types of AA https://www.tweakguides.com/Crysis3_6.html A video showing some differences (recommend downloading as compression for online viewing makes it difficult to see) https://www.iryoku.com/smaa/#movie And here is a little discussion about it as well https://www.tomshardware.com/forum/126371-13-crysis-beta-smaa-txaa-fxaa-msaa another discussion https://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=360758 TXAA info from Geforce https://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/txaa/technology CSAA info available on Geforce 8 series https://developer.nvidia.com/csaa-coverage-sampling-antialiasing With the SMAA injector you can actually enable temporal supersampling through SMAA.h too and it tells you how to do it. As well as getting rid of the ghosting associated with it. Because enb's temporal aa is so new it still has ghosting. I played with it a little while but I think the frame rate hit of enb temporal aa is higher than smaa. I also prefer smaa over enb edge aa, as I think enb edge aa blurs things too much. With smaa there are four presets in the injector.ini: * SMAA_PRESET_LOW (%60 of the quality) * SMAA_PRESET_MEDIUM (%80 of the quality) * SMAA_PRESET_HIGH (%95 of the quality) * SMAA_PRESET_ULTRA (%99 of the quality) There are also three different edge detection techniques: luma, color or depth. * They represent different quality/performance and anti-aliasing/sharpness tradeoffs You can read about how it works and customize it inside SMAA.h

Well, As for scale and whether or not you can see it. It would depend on a few factors. Distance being one of them. Weather and atmospheric clarity is another. And elevation of the person viewing as well as the elevation of the target. And finally the curvature of the planet has to be taken into account. Now, Red Mountain is the largest volcano in Tamriel and according to a few maps I've seen, they all place it at about 200 miles from the edge of Skyrim. Here's another map: (if you visit the actual like it's a really big image) I haven't seen any info on elevation data for Tamriel. So, we can't take that into account. We also don't know the size of the planet so can't take curvature into account. But let's just say it's similar to Earth. Now. Seeing as it's the biggest volcano in Tamriel I'm going to equate it to Mt. Saint Helens and Krakatoa. When they blew their tops ash fell over 200 miles away. There would be no doubt you could see the ash cloud. As for the mountain itself, the closet image I could find was a photo of Mount Rainier. This was taken from the summit of Brunswisk Mountain in British Columbia, north of Vancouver. Approximately 195 miles. (another really big image if you visit the image link) So it very possible one could see Red Mountain from Skyrim. As for the artistic size representation? Well, you can run from one side of Skyrim to the other in just a couple of in-game hours. So why not take a few artistic liberties to make a fantasy world look a little more interesting? But really? looking at the photo of Rainier; Red mountain size isn't that unbelievable. Especially since we don't have any elevation and size information. Who's to say Red Mountain isn't even bigger than St. Helens or Krakatoa?

I would have to agree with a few others here. I don't believe this belongs in Core STEP. Maybe extended STEP as an alternative. The GCR is a better mod for Core, giving a higher quality texture while maintaining the vanilla look and feel. As for whether the coins should look new or old? It's a personal preference, but just pull the change out of your pocket. How many look like they just came from the mint? Even if you go to the bank and get brand new coins they don't stay looking new very long.

Just noticed that there are light grey versions now that are closer to vanilla. These are 4k screens from nexus as I'm downloading 2k and 1k versions now to check them out.

I like the idea of a Dwemer metal retexture. But I don't think this is a good inclusion personally. The clean version is too clean and doesn't look old enough to be ruins. With the scratched version there are to many scratches, they are all uniform in size if not length. and they just look like a pattern thrown on top of the texture. Also old bronze and copper is more splotchy and green if left unattended. It would have more roughness, dents, and divots than all those scratches. Just do a quick google image search for old or aged bronze and copper to see what I mean.

https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/705 Just ran across this Re-texture for Riften and seemed like a good candidate for STEP. It maintains the vanilla look and feel with higher quality textures. more screenshots available on nexus page.