What Should Be Here?

[flyingspatula]

Not quite sure about this one. I am just using STEP Extended and noticed some invisible ground and/or objects in the area. I am floating about 5 feet off the ground walking on top of something. It's between Chillwind Depths and Robber's Gorge just off the road to the right if you were headed north to Solitude. I can post a load order, but if anyone could spend a few minutes and check if that area is bugged for them too and get back to me, that would be great.

 

Thanks

 

Edited February 26, 2015 by flyingspatula

[Xaviien]

You're missing one big ass pile of rocks.

I have no idea what you've done to make them disappear, but David Copperfield would be proud!

 

Vanilla

Extended

Extended from almost the exact same position you're in

[Aiyen]

Seems like that mesh is not loaded for rendering... does this happen for more objects or just that one? 

 

Normally it would pop in eventually as the textures etc get loaded if you got too much going on. 

If you can find the cell id you could coc directly there from the main menu. Then it would be the only cell to be loaded and then the mesh should load if that is the issue. 

(there are mods that will provide you with current cellID... such as STATUS or the one in Skyrim revisited.. which I forgot the name of atm. )

[flyingspatula]

Hey, thanks for both your help. I isolated the cell itself and still initially had the same problem, but for some reason after disabling STEP, saving, re-enabling STEP, and then loading the new save, the rock formation was back. Very odd, but may have just been some weird save file glitch? Also, Xaviien, are you using any kind of ENB or color/graphics mod outside of STEP in those screen shots? Your landscape, colors, and shadows looks a lot better than mine for some reason. Your rock formations also look like entirely different meshes from mine!

 

Edited February 26, 2015 by flyingspatula

[Xaviien]

If you click the link in my sig that says Current Mods, you can see an almost full rundown of what I have installed. I tried to follow STEP Extended 2.2.9 to the letter, except in most cases I installed the higher quality textures when available.

 

I have no lightin or ENB mods installed, but my pic was definitely taken much later in the afternoon, which means the shadows are very different.

 

Did you tweak the ini for grass textures? It looks like you're missing some of the benefits of Skyrim Flora Overhaul.

It also looks like the rocks are quite different, both in the foreground and background.

[flyingspatula]

If you click the link in my sig that says Current Mods, you can see an almost full rundown of what I have installed. I tried to follow STEP Extended 2.2.9 to the letter, except in most cases I installed the higher quality textures when available.

 

I have no lightin or ENB mods installed, but my pic was definitely taken much later in the afternoon, which means the shadows are very different.

 

Did you tweak the ini for grass textures? It looks like you're missing some of the benefits of Skyrim Flora Overhaul.

It also looks like the rocks are quite different, both in the foreground and background.

That is really ******* weird! Our setup isn't much different, definitely nothing landscape oriented. I use the newest SFO 2.0F version, so that may be why my grass is different although looking at it, new one definitely looks worse compared to older version. My ini has texure at 7, and other at 40. Still doesn't explain the different looking rocks though. Even at a distance your rocks look 10x better and more smooth. I almost want to compare a save file from that exact view for same day/time/weather. It doesn't even matter what weather or time of day mine is, it looks about the same always. This really has me annoyed now lol.

 

Ok, here is with SFO 1.87 and I even set time of day to same as yours given position of shadows. The general color of yours looks much better still, and the rocks especially further away look MUCH better.

 

Edited February 26, 2015 by flyingspatula

[Xaviien]

I'll post the saves tonight for you to look at. I'll also post my ini's and anything else you think might be relevant.

EDIT: Just realised my ini's are shown in modwat.ch.

Might be worthwhile setting up a modwat.ch account and uploading to make it easier to compare.

My install was only done in the last 2 weeks or so, so I can't imagine there'd be too much difference.

 

You might even be able to figure out what's missing using the missing mod error message when looking at the save in MO, but I get the feeling it's not a missing mod, but a mod that hasn't installed or downloaded correctly.

 

EDIT: Do you want to also upload you savefile? Not sure if we can attach saves to posts, but if it doesn't let you, just change the file extension to .txt and it should work.

[Xaviien]

Sorry for the double post.

 

Here are my saves for that location. Save 56 is the vanilla version, Save 57 is STEP Extended. I had to upload to Dropbox otherwise I would need to make one post per save due to the attachment filesize limitations.

I'm not sure what the difference between .skse and .ess is, but I would just drop both of them in your saves folder, and rename if necessary to prevent conflicts with your own saves.

Save 56 skse (Vanilla)

Save 56 ess (Vanilla)

Save 57 skse (Extended)

Save 57 ess (Extended)

Like I said in the above post, take a look in the saves tab in MO, and see if it tells you there are missing esps. It should mention a few, like Better Stealth AI for Followers, since I'm testing those, but they shouldn't interfere with this save at all. What you're really looking for is anything at all related to graphics.

Based on that fact, I also would definitely not recommend using this save for anything more than a quick look. If you try to keep playing, who knows what might happen...

 

EDIT: Pretty sure I ruled out the theory in the spoiler with a quick test. Even with max saturation my screenshots look the same when the saturation goes back down.[spoiler=Display settings]For anyone playing along at home, would screenshots be affected by the tweaks from 1.E.2 Display Calibration? That's the only other thing I KNOW would be different between our systems. I had to play around with my settings a LOT once I got a HDMI cable to connect my PC to my LCD TV. Such a pain in the ass, and totally not worth it, except for the fact that I couldn't figure out any other way to successfully connect my PC to my home theatre.

 

One other thing, it MAY still be the weather/lighting. I had to force weather (fw) through the console as it was pouring down rain when I got there. I may have forced a weather type that is not meant to happen in that area. Taking a look via each others save should prove/disprove that theory though.

[flyingspatula]

Hmm, I can't seem to get any of them to work. The .ess files are the proper save files, but even the vanilla with no associated mods still crashed. May be easier if I just send you mine for comparison. I disabled any of the patcher files which is probably why yours would crash. Yeah, color calibration would not affect how an image would look after taking a screen shot other than just for yourself. Your game definitely has more color and better looking landscape than mine all around. I also found out my bashed patch was causing missing rocks earlier and will have to figure that out later.

 

Here's a save and screen shot comparison. Btw, I think I totally ****ed up my guys face making a new character in a hurry so probably not a bug or anything. Just if you get time, try my save and upload a 1080 screenshot like mine.

 

Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q50hw9yop6mobna/Save%2059%20-%20Prisoner%20%20Skyrim%20%2000.27.24.ess?dl=0

 

Edited February 27, 2015 by flyingspatula

[Xaviien]

Hmmm. Strange that the Vanilla saves wouldn't work.

I'll try your saves tonight, but I get the feeling they may not work for me either.

 

You really should get your setup onto modwat.ch so we can easily compare mods, order, and inis.

[Xaviien]

Curiouser and curiouser! Even when I disable every single mod, including Optimised Vanilla Textures, all the unofficial patches, skse, SkyUI, Stable uGrids, absolutely EVERYTHING, I'm still able to load even my Extended save game with no issue at all.
 
[spoiler=Short image hosting rant]First of all, I just realised how crap Photobucket is. There seems to be absolutely no way to view my images on their own, without downloading them.
Postimg is annoying me just as much though, as it keeps resizing my pics to 1280x720, even though I selected "Do not resize" and was uploading 1920x1080 images. That MAY be because I don't want to sign up there.
I give up, imgur seems to work perfectly. Here is my screenshot!

The rocks closest to the camera seem better defined in your screenshot, as well as the dirt beneath the characters feet, but over the river there seems to be a lot missing. The trees on the left are a SLIGHTLY different colour, not a big deal, but the trees on the right are completely different.
There are a lot of rocks missing over there, but funnily enough, I don't seem to have any of the small "grass" plants over there.

One thing I did notice though, your "grass" looks a lot better in the latest screenshot than it did in this gif from a few posts back.

A lot of the other differences have disappeared as well, most likely due to them being taken at the same time of day, possibly due to using the same save file.

Might be worthwhile finding a coc location to spawn into so we can get a comparison from the same spot without using the same save game. Not sure how much that might change things.

 

---

I was already thinking about going through and checking which higher res mods I installed, and replacing them with the baseline versions, but now I'll also need to check which of the landscape mods I may have installed the baseline on, and replace THOSE with the higher res versions
 
Since I wanted to check anyway, I'll list off a few of the landscape mods where I have the HQ or Baseline versions.
[spoiler=List]

• Serious HD Retexture - Baseline (Most likely because the 2k version is half a gig. Will probably update to the HQ version at some point. Maybe when the new version is complete.)
• Skyrim Flora Overhaul - Baseline (I know you have the newest version, and that may have something to do with the difference in the "grass")
• 
  HQ Enhanced Terrain - HQ (2k, not sure what you have.)
• 
  Enhanced Distant Terrain - No idea, my download file is about 2.5 MB, there is no LQ/HQ listed in the guide, and the mod has been taken down. My guess is that like EDT2, there was only 1 version.
• 
  Trees HD - Ultra (Probably unnecessary)

 

As you can see, there wouldn't be too much variation there, but enough to make a difference. As for the blurring of the rocks, it could be coming from anywhere, ini's, driver settings, who knows. I definitely like yours better though. Rocks should definitely be crisp!
 
One last thing, rather than create a character and go through all that hassle to test something like this, you can just ~coc <Location ID> right from the main menu. Spending a few minutes to figure out which Location ID to use would be much easier than whatever you did to get there

---

Anyway, that's enough ranting from me. This post has taken me almost 3 hours, and I've done virtually nothing else since I got home from work. Hopefully we are almost done here

[flyingspatula]

Damn, I feel bad you wasted hours on this then. Haha. I have been pretty busy and was in process of reinstalling STEP again just to make sure, and think I was about done. I will probably manage to get it running soon. Sofar from your post, it really looks like whatever weather you had going on at the time made the game look way better. Weird how that works. Maybe when I can start playing again soon, we can have one final comparison with location ID instead, and see what differences we have.

[Xaviien]

It's ok, I really don't mind, it was an interesting experience/test.

 

I still can't work out why your grass is showing so much further away than mine. Have increased any of the values above the max?

[flyingspatula]

It's ok, I really don't mind, it was an interesting experience/test.

 

I still can't work out why your grass is showing so much further away than mine. Have increased any of the values above the max?

Oh, that one is pretty simple. I changed this in my SkyrimPrefs.ini over the default value.

[Grass]
fGrassStartFadeDistance=18000

Doesn't have to be 18000 though. That was just something I randomly tried in the last screenshot just to see how it would look. You don't really lose any fps doing it from what I could see either.

Edited March 4, 2015 by flyingspatula

[Xaviien]

Oh, that one is pretty simple. I changed this in my SkyrimPrefs.ini over the default value.

 

[Grass]fGrassStartFadeDistance=18000

Doesn't have to be 18000 though. That was just something I randomly tried in the last screenshot just to see how it would look. You don't really lose any fps doing it from what I could see either.

Perfect, thanks. I don't really notice it with anything else, but having all the grass just appear 100 metres ahead really grabs my attention. I'll try crank it right up to about 50000 and see what happens.