Skyrimprefs.ini settings changing

[Joat_Mon]

First, thank the gods for S.T.E.P. and all the dedicated people here that offer their time freely to make it available to an undeserving soul like me. Over the past year I’ve installed Skyrim using the S.T.E.P guide 12 times on 3 different machines and 4 different versions of Windows.

 

My problem is some settings in skyrimprefs.ini are changing, seemingly at random, specifically;

 

iMaxDecalsPerFrame=250

 

iMaxSkinDecalsPerFrame=100

 

change to 800 and 250 respectively.

 

First thought is user error and the first couple times I edited in notepad but the last several times I’ve edited only through Mod Organizer. Maybe a senior moment since I am at that age but it has happened too many time now.

 

Knee jerk reaction is Steam is overwriting the settings but this does not seem likely with Mod Organizer storing the profiles as it does and on a dedicated game SSD, plus I mostly play in offline mode.

 

If Mod Organizer is changing the settings I can’t figure out where its getting those numbers. I’ve searched all of my connected drives files and compressed files for the text “iMaxDecalsPerFrameâ€. All the instances discovered were iMaxDecalsPerFrame=250 or much lower (default settings).

 

Next I thought it might be some MOD changing the settings through SkyUI/MCM so I started new characters with some mods that I suspected not loaded, but I still have the problem.

 

I hope somebody else has experienced this problem and can point me in the right direction.

 

This has happened on S.T.E.P. Core and a slightly pruned Extended on a few different profiles.

 

To add to this a few days ago I changed;

 

fSplitDistanceMult=1.5000

 

to =2.0000, but when I opened my skyrimprefs.ini file today to change it back I found it was already at =1.5000. I thought I must be getting senile but then I saw the other two settings were at 800 and 250 again. I’ve never changed this setting before so it might be coincidence, but I doubt it.

 

 

[DoubleYou]

Enhanced Blood Textures.

[TechAngel85]

If you're editing this in MO, then my only thought is permissions issue that isn't allowing MO to write the changes to your profiles. Where is MO installed?

[Joat_Mon]

Thank you for your reply TechAngel85

 

F:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim\Mod Organizer (Samsung 840pro 512)

 

OS is on C:\ (Crucial M4 256)

 

All other files are on a 600 Gb Velociraptor or my NAS.

 

The settings do get written to file and can stay set through several restarts. A while ago I thought it might be related to the game crashing as I was testing some strange mod combos for a friend's 15 Year old daughter. But that has not been the case recently as I seldom experience a crash that I didn't cause on purpose (I think I must be running pretty close to the edge with GpuZ reporting over 3000Mb dedicted vram in use on a 3Gb AMD HD 7970 on Win 10).

[Greg]

Are you perhaps running Skyrim Launcher from Mod Organizer at any time? The reason I ask is because the Skyrim Launcher may rewrite the ini files with default settings.

[Joat_Mon]

Thank you Greg, I understand your question. I have hidden the various shortcuts to launch Skyrim in a folder on my desktop because I did do that once from desktop and once in MO when I first started using MO. The text is small for me in MO at 2560 x 1440 and I grabbed, by accident, the skyrim launcher after running Loot. I now launch being careful to choose SKSE using the orange arrow RUN button in MO only. I really don't want to make that mistake again.

[Joat_Mon]

TechAngel85

 

To follow up on your speculation that I could be having a file permissions problem, since I’m not using the Local Savegames option at the moment my game saves are saving on my C:\ drive at;

 

C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Saves\Save 4397 - Priscilla Falskaar Hold 214.01.34.ess

 

The skyrimprefs.ini is stored at;

 

F:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim\Mod Organizer\profiles\STEP Try Again\skyrimprefs.ini

 

Both of these locations appear to have the appropriate permissions set in the advanced permissions tab for each of the principals.

 

What principal group does MO need to use?

 

The parent folder for MO appears to have two different sets of permissions set for the USER group, I’m guessing because one set of credentials is inherited.

 

Depending on when MO writes .ini changes that where made in game to disk it could potential lead to problems if it needs execute certain operations on the save game file from that location in order to finalize the stored .ini files. I would need to know more about how MO handles file and paths. I have read as much documentation on MO as could find to resolve (at least in my mind) some other file handling issues that I see going on in MO, i.e. sometimes showing wrong file name in Data tab of right pane. I can see where the mod author made a change concerning files path/name from case retention to case insensitive, and I can see where that decision to solve a particular issue caused a different issue but hopefully that was not a global change and will not cause the problems I am having with my skyrimprefs.ini or a whole lot of other people would be having the same problem.

 

I am getting feeble minded, I seem to remember seeing the 800 and 250 settings in MCM in a MOD but I can’t remember which one, but that was STEP v2.2.9.1 and I removed that mod then and have since reloaded everything including OS.

 

Thank you for your help so far.

 

EDIT: left out a word

Edited June 28, 2016 by Joat_Mon

[Greg]

Windows uses somewhat of a chain of security permissions depending on the permission present in the Security tab. It first tries to use specific permissions for the logged in user (e.g. COMPUTERNAME\JOAT_MON), then CREATOR OWNER if you are the owner of the file or folder, then the user group your are in (which is typically Users unless you are using administrative privileges via the User Account Control dialog in which case it is Administrators). If you have multiple entries for Users, one typically is applied to folders and subfolders and the other one to files. You can see this in the Apply To column in the Advanced dialog.

 

The easiest way to determine what permissions you have is to right click on the folder or file, select Properties, click the Security tab, click the Advanced button at the bottom, then click the Effective Permissions tab. Click Select, enter your user name and click OK. The Effective Permissions tab will now show the specific permissions you have for that file or folder.

 

Of course, the easiest way to find is to run Mod Organizer, open the INI Editor, make a change somewhere, save, and verify the change persists with Notepad or such. I doubt this is the issue though because Mod Organizer will show an error dialog if it can't save the changes.

[TechAngel85]

If it's saving to the profile's INIs then it's not permissions. If the INIs themselves are being reverted, you have something going on that I've never heard of and could be a third-party software reverting them like System Restore, backup/cache programs, etc.

[Joat_Mon]

Of course, the easiest way to find is to run Mod Organizer, open the INI Editor, make a change somewhere, save, and verify the change persists with Notepad or such. I doubt this is the issue though because Mod Organizer will show an error dialog if it can't save the changes.

Hi Greg,

 

This test works, the changes made through MO ini editor are persistent and can be verified by looking at the resultant file in notepad. I doubt this is a file permissions issue but TecAngel85 mentioned it so I figured he knew that I was unaware of about MO.

[Joat_Mon]

TechAngel85 & Greg  thank you again, I will look at some third party software causing the problem, this is a dedicated machine now mostly for Skyrim or encoding. It uses too much power to be my daily use machine (i7 3930k @ 4.6). One of my drives has a old unused EXT partition on it and my server uses UFS so so maybe a permission flag that ntfs does use got set by accident. Unless you have any other ideas I'll wipe all the drives a do again, maybe go back to Win 7.

[Joat_Mon]

DoubleYou,

 

That is it. I reinstalled it when I updated S.T.E.P.. The other weird thing about Enhanced Blood Textures, if you make kill on the first floor you will also find a blood pool on the second floor right above.

 

Thank you, I will remove it later today to test.

[Joat_Mon]

Enhanced Blood Textures appears to be required for the S.T.E.P. patch so no simple test possible. I'm going to mark this as solved, as I remember this as being one of the mods I intentionally did not install on a previous build and I did not see the skyrimprefs.ini problem again until I updated to the latest S.T.E.P.. Again thank you all for your help.