ENB for SR:LE going forward

[Neovalen]

I've used Unreal Cinema for quite a long time and it is by FAR the best atmospheric ENB in my opinion. However since UnrealWarfare does not have a video card at the moment it's falling a bit behind the latest ENB updates. I've mostly succeeded in trying to update it myself to the best of my ability but I do not know how to fully tweak it on my own. I am not an ENB expert.

 

Therefore, I'm opening the door for other options but... honestly your going to literally have to blow my mind to get me to switch away. My criteria of must-haves:

 

1. Dark Dungeons and Interiors. Torches are an absolute must unless there is a Skylight or a well lit room.

2. Dark nights that require torches and/or lanterns but not overly dark since there is moonlight.

3. DoF must be subtle/background, I don't like feeling like I'm looking through a spyglass at something. For me this is one thing Unreal got 100% right.

4. Parallax must be enabled.

5. CoT + Weather Patch / ELFX compatible (non-enhancer).

6. I generally prefer muted colors and not over vibrant fantasy. So cinematic or photo realistic.

7. Must be actively updated to the latest binaries (with ENBoost).

8. Performance must be minimum 30 fps (for me). I realize that this is very rig dependent.

9. No SSAO bugging (transparent first person or glowing first person)... I never EVER saw this effect in Unreal.

10. Word walls, night vision, and fade outs must work properly. (no inverted colors, etc)

11. I'm sure more will come up over time....

 

Suggestions anyone? Details on WHY you think it's a good fit is welcome as well. I'm keeping an eye out for Prod80's new ENB for weather patch but it's not released yet.

[rootsrat]

Did you try Aiyen's Skylight ENB at all? It hasn't got the sepia tone (one of the features that put me off UC ENB after a while - it made Skyrim look somewhat tropical on sunny days).

 

1. YES

2. YES

3. No DoF included, but you could copy one from UC.

4. YES

5. YES (made for those 2 mods specifically!)

6. It's not too vibrant, I like it personally (obviously, since I was testing it extensively during development and it's tuned somewhat according to my suggestions :) )

7. YES

8. YES

9. YES

10. YES

[Aiyen]

Thank you root! However you are a bit off! ;)

 

1. yes

2. yes

3. like root says.. just keep using the same enbeffectprepass.fx file and you are set. You can use it for any ENB.

4. yes

5. yes... I kinda helped develop the weather patch :P

6. Kinda... it is not muted as much as unreal, but I could fix that up for ya. I have been considering making a muted version these past few days anyways. Just let me know the dominant tone you want and I will get cooking! :)

7. yes

8. YES... if you do not then O_o

9. Technically no... since depending on weather location and view angle then this will happen for any ENB... unless they have no shadow intensity at all. The first person bug is ALWAYS there, since Boris cant fix it. The best you can do is hide it, but if you look closely then it is always there. The glow depends on quite a few factors, but is essentially also always there if you look for it. However when you use muted colors then the shadow intensity drop and it is not as noticeable as with higher contrast usage.

10. yes

 

Prod is doing some lovely work... keeping tabs on that, and trying to help out a bit every night! However it is NOT going to be muted at all, Prod loves his bloom! So if that is the main criteria then it wont happen.

[statmonster]

Interesting.

 

I was considering using Aiyen's next go around (and I'm getting quite itchy to star another play through...)

 

Things I dislike about UC:

• Colors are too muted. Northern winters tend to be bright during clear days and nights (all that reflected white light from snow I guess) but get get gloomy if overcast. But mostly it's just a personal preference that everything not look at gloomy and blurry all the time.
• I hate DOF, the human eye easily corrects for this - it's only when you use a camera that you get this effect IMO.  I find it silly to degrade visuals just to make it look like a movie instead of reality.  I'm probably wrong about all this and know lots of people love DoF but feel pretty strongly about it. (But I'll just disable DoF anyway, so...)
• Seems to have too much a performance hit (though it was better when I dropped DoF, blur, etc...)

[PioneerRaptor]

• I hate DOF, the human eye easily corrects for this - it's only when you use a camera that you get this effect IMO.  I find it silly to degrade visuals just to make it look like a movie instead of reality.  I'm probably wrong about all this and know lots of people love DoF but feel pretty strongly about it. (But I'll just disable DoF anyway, so...)

Have you ever fired a weapon before? It's a really easy way of seeing DoF in reality.

 

Just stare down the iron sights and focus on the target and everything around that target will become blurry and out-of-focus. Also you can also focus on the little "iron" post near the front of the weapon as you're staring down the iron sights and even though the target is directly behind it, it will be blurry. Heck, put a finger in front of your face and focus solely on it and things further in the distance will be blurry.

[Redferne]

I keep bouncing between those two:

RealVision ENB: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/30936/?

Select Option B - FULL in installer. For the rest choose according from your personal test.

Pros: great light, warm colors, great interiors, multiple choice of DOF.

Cons: high FPS impact especially in exterior (I can go down to 20 FPS sometimes, disabling DOF helps a lot, you can also lower bloom setting).

Phinix Natural ENB: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/24235/?

Pros: very light impact on FPS, no DOF, great ambiance, color less warm compared to RV (closer to vanilla). Really good shadows and color balance in exterior.

Cons: interiors too really cold for my test.

Both works great with ELFX and CoT. If you want even darker interiors select an interior preset in CoT (I suggest warm).

[Aiyen]

To this day and age, I still do not understand why having a DoF file is a pro for an ENB... once you have a file with the settings you like in ENB A, then you can use it in ENB B.

Far too many people seem to think that all the files in a preset must be used or it will not work! So silly really! :)

 

Also if you are using ELFX, then mix it with ELE image spaces and you got gold.

Reason... using ELE makes it so that ALL interiors have a decent base of image spaces. Hence there will be no more weird going into cave A have everything look blueish.. then walk into bleak falls barrow and have everything look epic. etc.

 

One thing many people forget is that most ENB´s cannot ignore the default image spaces, and these just.... well they are too diverse for the post processing that ENB preset creators throw out. They only really work for vanilla post processing. Also they are in 90% of the cases responsible for issues such as "Its not warm or cold enough".

[Neovalen]

Also if you are using ELFX, then mix it with ELE image spaces and you got gold.

Reason... using ELE makes it so that ALL interiors have a decent base of image spaces. Hence there will be no more weird going into cave A have everything look blueish.. then walk into bleak falls barrow and have everything look epic. etc.

 

My only *****/gripe with ELE is that it doesn't forward USKP fixes like ELFX does... therefore it takes a HUGE amount of patching... If the author of ELE ever did that I might consider actually using it. I amazes me to this day how many mod authors don't do the simplest thing to make their mods easy to use.

[Aiyen]

Neo.. i have 12 forms edited... Unless I am entirely blind then that is all the relevant conflicts USKP et. al has with it.

7 cell entries, and 5 world space entries.

Hardly constitutes a HUGE amount of patching.

 

Most of the stuff that is flagged is because the USKP have altered the default image spaces.. and those entries do NOT need to be forwarded anyways.

Also the ever present water height is there.. but this is one of the 3 values it should be so again no need to forward anything.

 

Guess we should talk more in detail over steam about what you see that I do not! :)

[Neovalen]

Neo.. i have 12 forms edited... Unless I am entirely blind then that is all the relevant conflicts USKP et. al has with it.

7 cell entries, and 5 world space entries.

Hardly constitutes a HUGE amount of patching.

 

Most of the stuff that is flagged is because the USKP have altered the default image spaces.. and those entries do NOT need to be forwarded anyways.

Also the ever present water height is there.. but this is one of the 3 values it should be so again no need to forward anything.

 

Guess we should talk more in detail over steam about what you see that I do not! :)

I didn't look close, just at the colors and figured if it's editing every cell in the game then one would assume... ;) I was going to look eventually. In any case, my main point still applies as to why it wasn't already done in the first place! :P

[Aiyen]

In this case because water height is irelevant... and Image spaces are kinda... well obviously not a conflict!

 

But in general I guess because it is tedious for something that is not really anything but a semantics fix (Water height).

 

Guess it would be nice if there was a script that could do it for authors!

[Rune11]

I'll throw my vote in for Aiyen's Skylight ENB, I have been using it for a couple of weeks now and I am really liking it.  I have always been a big fan of RealVision and Bronze316's ENBs, but they are slightly too...I don't know quite what the word is, colorful maybe.

 

The ONLY thing I didn't like about UW was the skies, maybe it is just me but clouds and skies are a big part of the visuals in this game and I always felt like UW's were just a bit too washed out/muted.  I like a little more color variation I guess.  I did love the DoF from UW, best one I ever came across and when trying out different ENBs I would always end up copying over UW's DoF.  I have ended up ditching DoF altogether though, I usually get rid of microstutter when I disable it.  Microstutter annoys me greatly, and since ditching DoF I am surprised to find that I actually prefer the visuals this way.

 

Skylight ENB looks great in nearly all regards, my only negative thus far is performance, not sure why either.  That said, I'm definitely over 30 fps consistently, I just like to be more like 45-60.  As for ELE, I have been using his Interiors plugin for a couple of months now.  It did require a TON of edits, more so than any other mod I have ever messed with.  They were all straightforward, but there are soooo many of them.  However, I have found it to be very worth it.

 

But even if you don't want to use ELE, correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me that Skylight would still look great without it.  I have used a few different presets with ELE that weren't designed for it and they all still looked very good (especially RealVision).  ELE seems to be subtle enough that it doesn't make a huge difference in that regard, I see it as more of a fix to vanilla issues than an enhancement or overhaul like ELFX.

 

So in summary, Skylight is definitely worth testing out!

[Rune11]

To clarify on the amount of ELE edits I made, I have a few mods that load after ELE (I believe Alternate Start is one) that obviously block the changes ELE makes.  So it is mostly just forwarding the imagespaces, I probably had to make a lot more edits than you would with a standard SR install.  Even then, they were just edits to forward functionality.  As was pointed out, their really aren't that many unofficial patch edits to make.  At first I was forwarding the unofficial patch changes like "show sky" that ELE didn't have incorporated, but after testing things out and actually going to these locations, I realized that the ELE changes were correct every single time.  I was surprised to find that the unofficial patches had enabled sky and weather in some locations that absolutely had NO sky at any point.  Not even through a crack or fissure.  It seems he has put forth a lot of effort to enable/disable sky, weather, and other such changes only where appropriate in ELE.  In short, his changes just make a lot of sense.

[Neovalen]

Developments on the ENB front:

 

1. I was having some massive water flickering and other issues on the world map, disabling occlusion culling in enblocal.ini fixed the problem. So this is basically out there to let people know so they don't have to suffer as I did:

Under [PERFORMANCE], EnableOcclusionCulling=false

 

SR:LE has already been updated for this change. As a warning, this parameter was added by the ENB binary with a default of true for me... so careful if using an out of date ENB!

 

2. Using the following tweaks I was able to up my MINIMUM fps to 28-30ish for Unreal Cinema ENB in pretty much most areas:

enblocal.ini:

Under [ANTIALIASING], EnableTransparencyAA=false (HUGE!)

enbseries.ini:

Under [RAIN], EnableAntialiasing=false and EnableSupersampling=false

 

In actuality I was getting 40+ in most locations.

 

3. I agree with Rune11's assessment that I wouldn't mind seeing some clouds using Unreal Cinema. Aiyen, where would need tweaking you think? (bloom maybe? Its only set to 0.2 though...)

 

4. I'm still going to try out a few other ENBs for variety and will provide some feedback. So far I've briefly tried Phinix Natural, Skylight, and Weather Patch ENB. Will provide more feedback at a later date.

[Aiyen]

Said it once, and will say it again.... do not use weird enblocal.ini files from authors... then you end up with weird stuff like badly optimized ENBoost, or occulsion culling when you do not need it, or most vitally.. that some crazy person actually enabled transparency AA!

 

Also using the ENB rain feature... if you do not have to then just dont. It sucks performance like a beast! And without AA and super sampling it just looks horrible. But in general I prefer the default textures for rain anyways.

 

As for the clouds.... throw me the preset files you have at some point and I will take a look at the clouds... it could be many thing, and I would need to have it at hand to come with input.