SKYRIMLE RCRN AE -- HDR Lighting and Weather Enhancement

[Aiyen]

Thank you for this detailed work keithinhanoi! Rather impressive!

 

I am sure it will help some people get it working. But in general I also think it highlights the issue with the installer of RCRN. It was just not designed for the way MO does things, and most new mod users are most likely going to see this and run away screaming! And since MO is getting more and more popular every day then I guess it is an issue that will have to be handled at some point. The main reason to have an installer is ease of install after all, but this is clearly not easy! :)

 

In an ideal world the customizer (The post processing parts at any rate!) would be an ingame menu, like ENB has (I fully expect that aLaaa and Co. have this on the pipeline down the road!), and the mod itself installed as a FOMOD. I also hope there will come an elegant way to install folders and files to the skyrim dir from inside MO in the future. Would be a natural way to expand upon its functionality, and remove the last real need for manual install.

 

Or the RCRN developers figure out a nice way to adjust their installer around this whole thing, and create an MO version of it. I have seen enough creative solutions to many issues this past week so would not be surprised if that happens!

[dunz]

Nice write up keithinhanoi

 

I was thinking of using a similar method but ended up using https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/24402/? instead.

[keithinhanoi]

@Aiyen:

 

Although I agree with you that my guide does show just how much RCRN's installer wasn't meant to work with MO, having looked at how the install and subsequent customization settings are handled, I can understand why they have taken the route of an automated installer and customizer.

 

I think aLaaa mentioned 60+ .esp plugins to cover all of the potential variations given the users settings preferences and installed DLCs.

 

The only other way I can think of at the moment to handle this would possibly be through MCM menu settings, and scripts that check for the presence of either/both official DLCs. I imagine that could be far more complex than the installer/customizer combo they've come up with, and may not even be technically feasible to do in the first place. Add to this the requirements of SKSE and SkyUI.

 

I suppose a FOMOD (or BAIN?) installer would also be possible, but you then lose the "ease of use" aspect of the customizer, or at least it would not be as slickly presented all in one executable. With RCRN as a FOMOD, you'd have to reinstall it again and again in most cases where you want to change the custom settings.

 

Whether or not you agree with the method of installation, I honestly feel the RCRN team deserve respect for producing something so well organized that can offer all of the customization options it does, and still be as accessible to the largest number of people modding their Skyrim game as possible.

 

Personally, I'm a user of Mod Organizer, with a set of mods derived from (but not strictly following) S.T.E.P., and yes, I'm a control freak about my Skyrim / Windows setup - and have to realize that I'm not part of the group that RCRN AE was "targeted" at.

 

That's fine, I can deal with it, and know that MO is still powerful enough a tool to allow me to get RCRN working for me. It involves a lot of steps, but actually is a lot easier to deal with than working with some other external executable tools within MO.

 

That said, certainly my variation of DoubleYou's guide is not meant for first time MO users!

---

Nice write up keithinhanoi

 

I was thinking of using a similar method but ended up using https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/24402/? instead.

'Doh! Why didn't I think of that for managing RCRN's shader, etc. files installed in the /skyrim directory?!

 

What brilliant idea - a bit of a hack, but very useful to be able to "switch" off RCRN's shaders (which would still remain even if you "turned off" the /data assets part of the mod in Mod Organizer.)

 

Thanks for mentioning that, and I'll do some more investigation into whether I can add that to my guide in an "Advanced Users" section at the bottom.

[z929669]

Thanks for the write-up, Keith.

 

Still, a simple package that organizes options into subfolders is easy to produce and alleviates any issues for those of us that wish to tinker and play around with the config ourselves.

 

If the RCRN team does not produce this, then somebody most certainly will at some point. Best if it comes from the mod creators, as they know it best.

[Aiyen]

In more general terms this highlights the general issue MO has with post processing utilities. Or in general anything that needs to be placed in the skyrim folder rather then the data folder. If that was implemented in MO then I think it would be possible to see more installers of this type working more smoothly. Heck many people still manage to get confused when they have to install SKSE.

 

Still down the road then it would be epic to get most of the visual customizer options just ingame. Makes any tweaking so much easier.

And you would not need any MCM stuff for that, the code in the hook would automatically be able to update the shaders with the new settings in real time. At least as long as we are only taking color correction, and not adding in new effects.

 

That said then yeah, their installer is sleek and nicely done, but still for the people who know what they are doing an optional with just the textures and .esp´s would be more then enough. It would not require much maintenance, since if someone is stupid enough to download a manual version instead of the installer, and they just started to learning about modding.... well then that person would most likely mess something up regardless.

 

And they are there. This shows rather quickly by just taking a quick glance over at the RCRN support forum. There are people who do not even run BOSS and then comes with issues where they blame the installer since it does not do everything for them. This was also part of what I meant with my initial criticism of the installer... it is so well done that you get the impression that it does it all for you. Hence when you run into basic modding issues (like running BOSS) then you get really confused really fast.

[Bundy714]

Thanks so much for the instructions Keith. I wanted to give this mod a try, but I had no idea how to get it to work with MO. With your detailed instructions I think I may try it out. Thanks again.

 

P.S. Looking forward to your testing the use of the ENB Manager and Changer for your advanced user part of the instructions. That would be great, then I could try both RCRN and RealVision ENB and choose whichever one works best for me.

[keithinhanoi]

@Bundy714:

 

Just to avoid confusion here - the RCRN AE mod is a combination weathers / lighting changes in Skyrim (like CoT + some parts of RLO) and postprocessed video graphics effects using a d3d9.dll wapper (very similar to SweetFX.)

 

The postprocessed graphics provided by RCRN are nothing like those offered by ENB.

 

Since the postprocessed effects of RCRN is very similar to what SweetFX does, as a user of RealVisionENB you're probably not going to RCRN's postprocessed effects on their own.

 

What you'll probably want to do is proxy "chain" RCRN's wrapper to be loaded along with ENB.

 

As to what to do depends on which RealVisionENB option you're using. For example, Option A FULL is already set up to proxy load SweetFX's wrapper. So in this case you could try changing the proxy setting in enblocal.ini to load RCRN AE's wrapper instead of SweetFX (ie., by setting ProxyLibrary=RCRN_d3d9.dll).

 

The problem is that the people who made RCRN AE "tuned" the postprocessor wrapper settings to work with the colorspace changes they make through the weather / lighting .esp plugins portion of the mod. So combining the RealVisionENB with the RCRN AE postprocessing may not look right color/contrast-wise without some tweaking.

 

Anyhow the truth is that you don't really need to use ENB Manager and Changer to test RCRN versus RealVision.

 

You can manually manage them by keeping backups of the two (or three) d3d9.dll files (ie., for ENB, SweetFX and RCRN AE) along with a copy of an enblocal.ini with the correct proxy load setting. Those are the only things that determine what gets loaded - all the other .fx, etc. files don't get used without them. So, if there's not d3d9.dll in your Skyrim folder, no ENB/SweetFX/RCRN gets loaded.

 

Anyhow, if you do install RCRN AE, when it sees that you've got ENB, make sure to choose the "I'll set it up manually" option so that you've got their postprocessing wrapper named as RCRN_d3d9.dll, or otherwise it will change out the SweetFX proxy load (assuming you're using a RV-ENB FULL option) to load RCRN AE's postprocessing instead.

 

I'm sorry to say, however, that since the best ENB I can use on my particular system is ENBoost (without postprocessing), I can't really do any in-game testing with any option of RealVisionENB and RCRN AE.

 

In my case, I'm comparing RCRN AE to CoT+RLO with my own custom SweetFX settings.

[Razorsedge877]

Does anyone know if there are any other mods with dynamic interiors

[Aiyen]

Both ELFX and RLO in conjunction with CoT has it, hence I would think they would also have it with other weather mods, but I might be wrong!

 

I am unsure if Relighting Skyrim has it as well....

[aLaaa]

NO, again. None of ELFX, RLO, or any other mod, are using Dynamic Interiors, since none of them are using the needed scripts for handling it. Both of them are still using the default interior system, just tweaked. RCRN instead uses the exterior lighting system (which is updated minute by minute, unlike the super-simple 4 states system used by the default interior system) converted for interior usage, matching it according to the currently ongoing exterior weather.

 

We probably need to make a video about it in order to clarify this subject.

[deathneko11]

I believe it would be inaccurate to state that RLO does not use dynamic interiors. We just do it a different way than each other, using different resources. The way you are describing here is putting another load of scripts on papyrus (not saying this is a bad thing, just saying it IS added stress to the script engine), and RLO strives to be as script free as possible (or at least it did when I was actively working on it a few months ago). Both have similar functionality, just a different method with different results.

[aLaaa]

When speaking about "Dynamic Interiors" we are referring to the system used by RCRN (who is named so), which is only used by RCRN. RLO uses a method similar to the one used by ELFX, and is called "Adaptive Interiors" (named so by Syd back in the days).

 

I'm pointing this out, just in order to avoid confusion, since as you wrote too we are talking about different stuff, who works in different ways and with different results. This also why both DI and AI may coexist, for example ELFX is compatible with RCRN, and also RLO could be with not so much work (and would be nice having it finally compatible too).

 

It's not a load of scripts, I assure you it's really lightweight at that side, also because the exterior weather system is preloaded anyway by default. But there is no way to handle it totally scriptless. You can't match the exterior weathers, you can't handle imgs exceptions and the fading bug without using a script.

[deathneko11]

I never said it was possible to do so without scripts, or that it would be script heavy. I simply meant that the fact that custom or edited scripts used by RCRN should be taken into consideration for those that may be running papyrus engine on a hair trigger as it is. However, in most cases this probably won't be a concern.

 

I admit I am extremely interested in seeing how AI and DI from both mods can be seen to work together (if I read your post right), and I am also interested in hearing some details from you in how the two mods could ultimately become compatible with one another. It's been a good 2 years or so since I've seen RCRN and back then it had its fair share of issues, so if the mod has been polished up since then I am willing to take another crack at it and if there are ways to make the two compatible, then I'm all for it.

 

I am assuming that some of the compatibilities you speak of are similar to how RLO is compatible with COT?

[Aiyen]

Ah thanks for clarifying aLaaa..... my head had messed up adaptive and dynamic in that regard. Looking at it more closely I can see that they do stuff a bit differently.

 

Guess most people are just going to notice the obvious differences, like hearing rain while inside. Rather then the subtle lighting changes depending on weather. But once you know what to look for!

 

As for the script loading. This is always going to be an issue. Any mod is always going to say that their scripts are light, etc, and it is most often also true. However sadly when used in conjunction with script heavy mod lists, any added script adds to the probability of issues.

Hence even simple script mods like "Auto unequip ammo" will do so. This does not mean that anything bad will absolutely happen using it, but once stacked on top of a thousand others it might just be the proverbial drop.

[Bundy714]

@Bundy714:

 

.....  In my case, I'm comparing RCRN AE to CoT+RLO with my own custom SweetFX settings.

 

Any thoughts on how this comparison is going?  Just curious as to which setup is looking and working the best? 

 

And actually, since I expect both look better than Vanilla, the deciding factor for me might be which set-up has the better weather, and runs the best on your PC.  Enhanced lighting is great, but I really like immersive weather just as much, if not more.