Seasons of Skyrim SKSE (by powerofthree)

[DoubleYou]

Discussion topic:
Seasons of Skyrim SKSE by powerofthree
Wiki Link

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I think everyone knows about this game-changing mod already. As for people who have actually gotten this working smoothly, there are probably far less people. I want to attempt to get this working with a Step build.

[z929669]

Me too. I plan on supporting the LOD trees at some point for existing mods. I should be able to do this without the seasons mod I think

[DoubleYou]

13 minutes ago, z929669 said:

Me too. I plan on supporting the LOD trees at some point for existing mods. I should be able to do this without the seasons mod I think

There is a seasonal beta for Aspen's Ablaze. I was wondering if I could install the Summer and Autumnal DynDOLOD 3 Addon models and it pick the right ones off the CRC?

[z929669]

12 minutes ago, DoubleYou said:

There is a seasonal beta for Aspen's Ablaze. I was wondering if I could install the Summer and Autumnal DynDOLOD 3 Addon models and it pick the right ones off the CRC?

Seems right, but I haven't gotten into SoS

[TechAngel85]

I can just imagine all the assets that don't have snowy versions...

The current snowy regions of Skyrim are fairly good now so the vanilla game should be fairly well covered. Besides the mountain flowers...they're about the only non-snowy object left in those regions without a snowy version.

[DoubleYou]

11 minutes ago, TechAngel85 said:

I can just imagine all the assets that don't have snowy versions...

The current snowy regions of Skyrim are fairly good now so the vanilla game should be fairly well covered. Besides the mountain flowers...they're about the only non-snowy object left in those regions without a snowy version.

Yes, that will probably be the main issue to overcome. Shrubs of Snow sounds like it might handle the flowers you mention, however.

[z929669]

Tons of work to mod this one. Tons. Great concept though

[DoubleYou]

15 minutes ago, z929669 said:

Tons of work to mod this one. Tons. Great concept though

Darn! I'm generating LOD now and praying it works out of the box! 

[TechAngel85]

19 minutes ago, DoubleYou said:

Darn! I'm generating LOD now and praying it works out of the box! 

[DoubleYou]

So, it isn't perfect but it works. Some notes:

• Landscapes are mostly fine, but some places that I think have special vertex coloring looks significantly off. To be perfect, a landscape mod would probably need to be created to fix these issues. It's better than I expected, however. 
• Terrain LOD takes significantly longer to generate, due to generating for each season. However, our settings work fine, with the simple addition of adding the seasons. 
• The map does update with the seasons. This is in line with my expectations. ACMOS will need to create a tool to dynamically add roads to the xLODGen output, as I intended to do anyway. 
• Farms need a special mod made for them. Farmers should not be hoeing the garden in the wintertime. And green cabbages should not grow in winter. 
• Shrubs of Skyrim fixes most of the shrubs, but there are stragglers. CACO plants may need a patch.
• EVT looks perfect. Aspen's Ablaze seasons beta is not perfect. I found a location with default trees in winter.
• Grass cache and grass lod are basically incompatible pending some form of NGIO update. If there is any workaround, it probably would be convoluted. 
• DynDOLOD takes very long to generate, quite naturally. Best to test on only Tamriel worldspace until you have everything set up right, as you likely will need to change things that require regeneration. Also, it is a good idea to limit LODGenThreadSplit and MaxLODGen to help prevent it from trying to do too much at the same time. It also is probably wise to generate Occlusion separately after successful lod generation. 

[TechAngel85]

1 hour ago, DoubleYou said:

So, it isn't perfect but it works. Some notes:

• Landscapes are mostly fine, but some places that I think have special vertex coloring looks significantly off. To be perfect, a landscape mod would probably need to be created to fix these issues. It's better than I expected, however. 

There's this: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/64132

[DoubleYou]

5 hours ago, TechAngel85 said:

There's this: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/64132

That looks promising. 

[z929669]

13 hours ago, TechAngel85 said:

There's this: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/64132

Wouldn't this (visually) break Snowy Landscapes in Snowy Regions?

[TechAngel85]

24 minutes ago, z929669 said:

Wouldn't this (visually) break Snowy Landscapes in Snowy Regions?

No. It's just making the vertex colors white. That would actually be a preferred thing in snowy regions to get rid of a lot of the artificial darkening caused by dark vertex colors. I did this manually along the roads and within the cells that had to be included, but didn't got beyond those cells. This mod would take care of the rest of it. That first image on their page explains why I did it along the roads.

Dark vertex colors will also darken the grass that is above it. So if you ever see a dark patch of grass in the middle of normally lit grass, this is why. The vertex colors under that patch are darker than those around it, making the grass dark and look out of place when it should be lit by the sun.

[z929669]

24 minutes ago, TechAngel85 said:

No. It's just making the vertex colors white. That would actually be a preferred thing in snowy regions to get rid of a lot of the artificial darkening caused by dark vertex colors. I did this manually along the roads and within the cells that had to be included, but didn't got beyond those cells. This mod would take care of the rest of it. That first image on their page explains why I did it along the roads.

Dark vertex colors will also darken the grass that is above it. So if you ever see a dark patch of grass in the middle of normally lit grass, this is why. The vertex colors under that patch are darker than those around it, making the grass dark and look out of place when it should be lit by the sun.

Got it. I thought you had said you used vertex colors for painting the paths in SLSR. This mod sounds like something we should be testing at some point then.