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SSE & Modding - The early days

Pretendeavor

By Pretendeavor
in Skyrim Revisited (retired)

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Nozzer66 Talos

Nozzer66

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I will probably download it just to check what changes they made... but not for a long playthrough. I will wait a bit until the modding community starts for the special edition.

Much the same here. I'll likely boot it, run through Helgen to Riverwood and check what's going on, then wait for SKSE and SkyUI if it gets ported. BTW Schlangster has said he's not against porting it, he's just not going to do the work for it. If someone fixes everything so all he has to do is update the esp, repack and reupload, he'll do it.

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Neovalen
Neovalen
Kesta
Kesta

Vivid Weathers should be available in 1 or 2 hours also ;)

jdsmith2816
jdsmith2816

I have no interest in playing until skyui (or some replacement w/ mcm support) and skse are available.  I only play Skyrim using Requiem or YASH... both require SKSE and one requires SkyUI.   The only

Pretendeavor Knight

Pretendeavor

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Posted (edited)

Some first thoughts:

 

Performance wise everything feels really smooth. Started at 1440p ultra (launcher) settings right off the bat, and not dropping a frame below 60 in Whiterun felt satisfying. Of course this is unmodded except for USSEP, EBQO, Alternate Start and some of Arthmoor's other mods, so I shouldn't get too excited yet. I did drop into the high 40s/50s in some exterior areas, mostly in places that had a lot of fog. I arrived at the Helgen cave exit in a storm and fps varied between 50-60. I also couldn't maintain 60 during the intro sequence. Though despite it not being 60 fps, it still felt smooth and I probably wouldn't be bothered by it had I not enabled a FPS counter. I'll try it at 1080p tomorrow, but I think I might keep 1440p as default resolution now. Oh, and there's zero stuttering so far. Nada. No stutters walking up the road from Riverwood to Whiterun's stables and a steady 60 fps. No crashes either, but without 100 texture mods the engine isn't exactly being pushed to its limits yet.

 

With downsampling and TAA, I'm not bothered by aliasing at all. What I am still bothered by is overall texture resolution. It's still bad. Spoiled modders like us will probably feel that many objects need replacements ASAP, but it's not as if we expected it to be any other way. There are improvements though and some models seem relatively okay, I was impressed by some of the vegetation for example. Impressed as in, I had no expectations it would look any better than old Skyrim. The road from the Helgen cave exit to Riverwood seems to have been decorated with a lot of vegetation and doesn't look half bad. Most of that probably comes from what they've done with the grass. The textures look okay in combination with what I think is TAA's doing and it is a lot denser. Grass fade in is very obvious though in areas like Whiterun's tundra, but that should be easily tweaked.

 

Distant terrain still looks terrible.. after having used DynDOLOD for so long it was really obvious. Not sure if it changed compared to vanilla. I also looked out for Z-fighting and found that while it didn't occur on faraway mountains, Whiterun's Dragonsreach had some terrible flickering thing going on. I did quickly change the FOV via the console right before I arrived at Whiterun and saw this, maybe that messed some things up.

 

Shadows look good, shadow draw distance seems fine while seemingly not compromising performance much. I haven't looked at the ini's yet but personally that means no more fShadowDistance tweaking to get the perfect draw distance/performance balance. I wonder if it will stay like this with clutter-heavy mods like JK's towns and Dawn of Skyrim.

 

The godrays that were especially noticeable during the intro sequence were pretty impressive, but I have to admit that I'm a sucker for these effects. I like them, even if other games do them better. They seem to be performance heavy though, or it was the fog. Or a combination (TAA?).

 

Water also looked pretty okay, and so did the splashes of rain. As you get close you start to notice the low resolution, but from the standing stones' viewpoint it looked pretty good in rainy weather. Waterfalls also look better than vanilla I feel, but that might be because of TAA+downsampling. Even so, I'd still love to get them replaced by Purity's superior waterfalls when possible..

 

The changes to the sky impressed me. Whiterun greeted me with a striking 60 fps sunset and I had to admit that they did well there. The night sky didn't look half bad either.

 

Finally, I'm not sure what to think about the built-in mod menu. I just installed my mods manually and activated and sorted them in their in game menu, which seemed to work just fine. Hopefully we won't have to deal with it at all in the future though, because to get to your load order you have to get through the auto login screen for bethesda.net first. I don't have an account for it and I'll probably avoid the site entirely if mods can be found elsewhere.

 

All in all I'm impressed. I'm not satisfied by how it looks right now and the absence of SkyUI + iHud is already killing me but I think it's a solid base for modding.

 

 

(Oh, and one last thing for now.. apparently your character will keep sprinting if you let go of the sprint button.. Is this a new feature or am I completely losing my mind? Because I accidentally ran out of stamina about 10 times already..)

Edited by Pretendeavor
DanielCoffey Jarl

DanielCoffey

Posted
Posted

I will have a look to see if Bethesda fixed the bug that prevented me using Alternate Texture Sets in Book Covers Skyrim but I won't hold my breath. This was an issue where, although xEDIT would let me enter the alternative texture sets, the game would not parse them for the World view of a book. If it was switched on properly it would allow me to get rid of about 80Mb of meshes in BCS.

 

It is certainly great to see that xEDIT is ready so quickly!

 

Oh, and since the XBox is apparently limited to 5Gb for mod storage, I assume that I would have to look at a "reduced size" version of BCS for the XBox? I could save some file space by making all the meshes use the world view normal map rather than the full inventory view.

paul666root Emperor

paul666root

Posted
Posted

@Pretendeavor

nice review. I concur to everything you said. The only thing i like is not having FPS drops anywhere. 60 all the time. Water and godrays are nice also.

built in mod manager is bad... really bad. Takes a lot of time to adjust the load order....

Textures are really bad.... i forgot how bad vanilla Skyrim looks.

Also the first thing i noticed is the lack of SkyUI... vanilla UI is a no no...

so i guess this needs a little love until i can actually start a playthrough with it.

Nozzer66 Talos

Nozzer66

Posted
Posted (edited)

I could live with the default UI if I had to in general use, but by the beard of Satan is it a PITA at character design. I need that fixed, STAT. I miss my RaceMenu too :)

 

EDIT: I will give them some credit for the Mod Manager. I don't like it, but at least they tried.

Edited by Nozzer66
CovertSlinky Guard

CovertSlinky

Posted
Posted

I had some awful performance at first, then I remembered how awful Skyrim handled Vsync before, and sure enough remained true again. I shut off Vsync, and performance was wonderful after. Another thing, I noticed I have zero z-fighting right now. My z-fighting is awful for other version. Just need to wait for more mods to be ported or created to see just how much difference or how much further we can take the Creation Engine this time around.

Hackfield Thane

Hackfield

Posted
Posted (edited)

 

(Oh, and one last thing for now.. apparently your character will keep sprinting if you let go of the sprint button.. Is this a new feature or am I completely losing my mind? Because I accidentally ran out of stamina about 10 times already..)

I concur with everything you said, I already replaced some texture (Rustic Clothing, can't play without it anymore)
 
Also, alt toggling sprint is new, it's the default behavior in Fallout 4, and I personally like it, since keeping alt to sprint and pressing spacebar to jump at the same time was a challenge :P
Edited by Hackfield
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