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I also want to put in another plug for Relationship Dialogue Overhaul. Simply incredible, while simultaneously managing to be subtle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzWZKutgCck I was able to install it mid-playthrough along with its USLEEP patch without any issues. The mod instantly enhanced immersion in all aspects by doing just what its description promises. Your waifu actually treats you like a significant other if they are also a combat follower with you, and he/she doesn't keep repeating the same three or four idle chit-chat lines constantly. Likewise, other NPCs aren't repetitive to the point of being annoying either and there's lots of new lore-friendly dialogue added to them. Perhaps the coolest feature however is the fact that NPCs now respect whether you are shunned or welcomed based on your faction/political affiliation. As a stormcloak, imperial-leaning townsfolk in the western reaches would grumble when talking to me, toss casual insults, and eventually even start ignoring me altogether, while stormcloak sympathizers were always hospitable and warm to me during conversation. Really amped up the immersion of the civil war and overall setting for me.
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Aug 22, 2016 17:43
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GunnerJ posted:It'd probably be good to have an ENB section but I just don't know poo poo about them because I don't use them. I'm actually working on an ENB post right now. While I've only used a few, I've gotten pretty good at the whole process of installing/uninstalling/manipulating ENBs and have a nice bank of links to reference when getting into the nitty gritty. Going to do a mini-writeup on performance in Skyrim too, since I did so much troubleshooting on that and actually managed to get some results. Funky See Funky Do posted:It's been a few years but the masochist in me wants to play and mod this up again. Is texture pack combiner redundant now? I want to replace every single texture in the game with 2-4k textures because even the texture pack dlc ones suck. Is there an easy one stop shop to replace every single texture in the game. Seriously, it's really annoying to spend the time downloading all these great looking texture packs, then you walk past a wooden beam that looks like it belongs on an NES game and you can't figure out which mod would fix it. Short answer: No. Long answer: You can get really, really close to a one-stop-shop. First get the bog standard Bethesda Official High-Resolution texture pack and place at the top of your load order, then follow it up with the Noble Skyrim HD texture pack. Noble Skyrim replaces basically 97% of what is in the game with gorgeous, aesthetically-unified textures. Check out its Mod Features section. No more faffing about with "rocking stones" this and "aMidianBorn caves" that and however many other texture files you used to need to download. Siets fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 20:21
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Alright folks. This ended up way longer than I thought it would, but I wanted to be thorough. Here's my ENB write-up. Apologies in advance if it's terrible or incorrect. Open to feedback! Except the Sparkly Text. That stays.   Because deep down... You know you want to recreate Tormund Giantsbane in the most stunning and gloriest of detail.  ENB Binary Download Files http://enbdev.com/download_mod_tesskyrim.html Gopher's Guide to Skyrim ENB Mods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxl59pFXhTU&list=PLE7DlYarj-De1YrWupbcesibJIRZkMVB8 ENB S.T.E.P. Wiki http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:ENB  Why should I install an ENB? Because this is how you turn Skyrim up to 11 and/or impress other members of your gender-preferred sex. In one sentence, what does an ENB technically do to the game? It is a .dll file that inserts itself between the game's code and the final rendering engine in order to significantly alter the game's lighting effects, thereby producing dramatic and spectacular visual enhancements when tuned appropriately. Why are there so many different ENBs? I dunno. Why are there so many anime hair mods for a game that is supposed to be about vikings? I suppose everybody has their preferences. In reality, that "when tuned appropriately" statement is the key phrasing from the technical description and is why there is such a variety of them out there. Every ENB mod author has their own aesthetic goals in mind when they set out to develop an ENB mod. Think of the "ENB .dlls/binaries" that Boris's site provides as the canvas and paint, and the "ENB mods" made by the various mod authors out there as them taking those materials and producing a finished painting. Some try for realism, others try for impressionism. Depending on what kind of Skyrim playthrough you are going for, you can have everything from gritty Game of Thrones naturalism up to colorful World of Warcraft high fancy. It all depends which ENB mod you decide to go with. What does ENB stand for? "Everyone Needs Boris" "Enhanced Natural Bloom" "Extra Nefarious Bitcoins" Take your pick! Near as I can tell, nobody actually knows. How bad is the framerate hit and is it really worth the visual quality upgrade?   I tend to think so! This varies greatly between ENBs, in-game location rendering demands, and hardware configurations. Some ENBs are designed to be performance friendly and only result in a 5-10 FPS hit in the most demanding of circumstances. Other ENBs are basically designed for screenshot archery only and murderize your FPS by 20, 30, or more before ultimately melting the solder on your video card. Do not let those numbers scare you away. You really do owe it to yourself to at least try a few of the popular ENBs out before deciding they aren't for you. Even several years old hardware configuration rigs may surprise you depending on the ENB. My old nVidia GTX 770 rig was able to run several popular ENBs with only a 3 to 5 FPS loss in most situations and still get incredible results. When testing out ENBs, pressing Shift + F12 will instantly turn the ENB effects on and off so that you can instantly gauge what the impact is on your configuration and decide if it is worth using. Here's what I achieved at a nice, stable, 60 FPS on my old GTX 770:  Not bad right? It must be stressed that you really do need to try out a few ENBs at the beginning of your game before committing to a full playthrough. Learn from my mistakes! I am currently running RealVision ENB on a system with an nVidia GTX 1080 and occasionally see my FPS dip into the 30's and 40's  when strolling through Solitude or Riften (although, to be fair, most everywhere else I do still enjoy a stable 60.) I plan to switch to Natural Lighting and Atmospherics ENB for my next playthrough, which I hear from the thread and other modders is much kinder on the performance and does not force ten thousand SSAO rendering passes on the card before offering up a single frame to my monitor. Fingers crossed!How do I get an FPS counter in Skyrim without spending money on Fraps? Steam does this natively with any game. Make sure the Steam Overlay is enabled, then in-game invoke the Steam Overlay, click on Settings at the bottom, go to the In-Game tab, and then choose your desired FPS counter position via the drop-down menu. Voila!  How much work is it to install an ENB? Honestly if you follow this guide, it really should only take you 5 to 10 minutes to get one of the mainstream ENBs up and running and decide if it's something for you. Really all you are doing is manually dropping a few files in your Skyrim installation folder, and then installing the rest of the mod normally with your mod manager of choice. *cough* Mod Organizer *cough* This is where 90% of folks can safely call it a day with their ENB setup. Where ENBs can get time consuming is if you start delving into the documentation of each rendering effect, of which there are many that can be tweaked to your preference. Sometimes you do this because you feel like tinkering and squeezing out a few more FPS, and sometimes the pig just needs more lipstick.  Alright, you've convinced me, let's give this ENB thing a whirl. Can I get a quick tl;dr version on how to install one of these? Oh good. You've seen the light.   Then let us begin...
Finally, remember to follow any written instructions from the ENB mod author. Every ENB is a little bit different. Always read and follow the mod author's instructions, which trump anything I've written in this ENB write-up. Argh. RIP my framerate. I decided I want to ditch or switch my ENB. WARNING! Be careful doing this mid-playthrough, since ENBs often require compatibility plugins for weather and/or water mods and thus will corrupt your save if removed. You really ought to pick your ENB ice cream flavor at the start of your playthrough. With that out of the way, here is a quick step-by-step on removing an ENB:
Manual file copying feels dirty in a post-Mod Organizer world. Is there anything out there that manages ENBs for me? Indeed there is! This was news to me, but forums poster extraordinaire ThaumPenguin turned me on to a fancy little tool called ENB Mod Manager and Changer. This will likely save you a lot of time if/when you decide to go flipping through various ENBs before a new playthrough. ThaumPenguin posted:Siets, maybe it would be a good idea to cover the ENB Mod Manager and Changer as well?  Chances are (since you are already a true nord by choosing to add an ENB to your game) that you may wish to tweak it further in order to enhance performance, turn off that annoying depth of field effect, or just fix something that unexpectedly broke. Who's ready for some .ini editing!? There are two ENB .ini's to be concerned with:
The enblocal.ini file is a bit more boolean in nature and is the place where you toggle the larger features of an ENB mod "on" or "off." You will be in here editing if you are experiencing weird crashes, memory problems, or framerate stuttering. This is also often a place that a mod author of another graphical mod will reference to make sure their effects work correctly. Realistic Water Two has a "Subsurface Scattering Patch" that won't actually do anything unless you go into enblocal.ini and confirm that FixSubSurfaceScattering=true is set under the [FIX] section. Of special mention is the [MEMORY] section of the enblocal.ini file. When people refer to "ENBoost", this is what that is. An ENB graphical mod, or just ENBoost by itself, allows Skyrim to expand beyond it's 32-bit 3.1GB memory limit by creating additional "spillover" memory allocation for the game engine to reference. 9 times out of 10, people that are having framerate stuttering issues (even without an ENB) need to pursue installing either an ENB or ENBoost so that they can have expanded memory. Just think about it, if you are installing multiple gigabytes of 2K and 4K texture packs, you are going to very quickly cross that 3.1GB memory threshold. When that happens and the game is trying super hard to somehow load 10GB of textures in a 3.1GB RAM allocation, it is going to dump the remaining 6.9GB to your hard drive. Then as you pan your camera around the game keeps trying to trade off textures between your 3.1GB of VRAM and what's in the hard drive swap. This is a relatively slow process, hence you get: awful, awful frame stuttering. How do we fix modded Skyrim's very common frame-stuttering problem? Let's dive into the [MEMORY] section: code:ReservedMemorySizeMb=512 This is a number that you more "feel out" rather than "precisely calculate." The ENB S.T.E.P. Wiki recommends 1GB video card users to start with "128" Mb and then increase by +128 increments until the stuttering goes away. My GTX 1080 is an 8GB video card, so I felt pretty comfortable tossing in 512Mb as a reserved memory segment of that VRAM and this right away resolved my frame-stuttering issue. VideoMemorySizeMb=22528 This is a number that you can easily calculate. Take your system's RAM in GB, add it to your video card's VRAM in GB, subtract -2048 to leave a healthy bit of a buffer for basic OS and system processes outside of Skyrim, then finally multiply by 1024 to get the number in MB. I've got 16 GB of RAM and my GTX 1080 has 8GB of VRAM, so ((16GB + 8GB - 2GB) * 1024) = 22528. (NOTE: The ENB S.T.E.P. Wiki says you can subtract -170 instead of -2048, but I wanted to leave a larger buffer for myself.) The fun part? This was all fine and dandy under Windows 7... Before the dark times... Before I upgraded to Windows 10. The S.T.E.P. Wiki has this to say: ENB S.T.E.P. Wiki posted:Notice: Windows 8/10 users: Microsoft has, unintentionally, introduced a memory limit for DirectX 9 games/software. This limit is 4GBs (4096) and there is nothing which can be done to circumvent this limit. For users seeing the VRamSizeTest tool reporting 4064 or similar, this is not a mistake. This is actually the limit for the OS in use and the maximum value you can set the VideoMemorySizeMb to.  Yes. That means if you run Windows 10, your choice is to either downgrade all of your texture mods to 1K/2K and hope for the best, or once again endure awful frame-stuttering regardless of how you tweak your ENB .ini files. Supposedly if you Google this random forums people say to install the latest release of DX9 manually and that fixes it. I tried it. It didn't work. Thanks Micro$oft. There is good news however! The Skyrim Remastered Edition due out this October 2016 runs Skyrim on the Fallout 4 version of Bethesda's engine which leverages DX11! This means that Windows 10 users won't have to worry about this stupid hard-coded DX9 limitation for much longer. For now though, thems the breaks. October 28th, 2016 can't come soon enough! 
Siets fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Aug 24, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 03:20
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GunnerJ posted:I think something it'd be worth clarifying (like, really early on) is the distinction between "ENB" the system (i.e., the dll/binaries) vs. "an ENB," as one item from a countable set of preferences and settings that tells the ENB "system" how to produce a certain visual effect. I have picked it up from context over the years but lacking that, it might seem like you need to choose from a number of binaries from Boris's site. This is a really, really good suggestion. I will incorporate a bit on that. Also yeah, the Windows 10 find was a massive bummer.  Psion posted:Not all ENBs come with an ESP plugin so not all ENBs require the "don't change it mid-playthrough" warning. Only ones which give you custom weather (like Natural Longname McENB) do. Good to know! The one's I've used have all had some kind of Climates of Tamriel compatibility patch or some such. Makes sense that it isn't required in the pure sense though. I will make an amendment. Thanks! ThaumPenguin posted:Siets, maybe it would be a good idea to cover the ENB Mod Manager and Changer as well? This is incredible. I had no idea this was a thing. I will be trying this out tonight!
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Aug 23, 2016 14:07
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You can remake the ENB headers too if you want. Was just joking about the Sparkly Text. Mostly. 
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Aug 23, 2016 15:21
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Funky See Funky Do posted:Would anyone with similar specs that knows what they're doing and has their ini's configured for ENB be willing to PM me their SkyrimPrefs and Skyrim ini's? I'm going to do a bigger post on performance, but the most significant FPS gains I received came from this performance guide on Nexus Mods that also details numerous settings in your .inis. Have a go and let me know if it helps. Worked wonders for me. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50214/
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Aug 23, 2016 23:45
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GunnerJ posted:I would never in a million years dream of using anything but the ones you did. I think it's good to go. I've added or clarified content based on all the feedback so far. Can't really think of much else to change at the moment. If any goons have particularly awesome ENB screenshots, those are always welcome. Show off your bling!
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Aug 24, 2016 13:55
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Yeah what Deadly Combat does, in addition to making stamina matter and modifying stagger mechanics, is that it drastically increases both player damage and NPC damage to make combat more... well... deadly. These new base damage multipliers from the mod then scale with what Skyrim difficulty you set for your game. Yes, you will kill things in one power attack or a few swings, but the idea is that so will the enemy NPCs. What I like to do for combat (at a minimum) in Skyrim is install the following mods:
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Aug 26, 2016 19:56
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He's saying Skyrim HD is "hot trash" (a thing that is bad to all but a hobo who is cold in the streets and could use the heat source regardless of how it smells.)
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Aug 29, 2016 20:45
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OneTweak Best Tweak. 
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Sep 1, 2016 13:32
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Mizuti posted:And should I even bother with ENB Boost if my OS is Windows 10? It sounds like it's throttled to the point of uselessness. You shouldn't and it is. The magic of Skyrim performance on Windows 10 is strictly limited to fine tuning your .inis sadly. This should be fixed come the Remastered Edition though.
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Sep 15, 2016 12:42
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Randaconda posted:Frostfall was like... install it for a couple hours, then uninstall. Tedious and didn't add much. Your posting is tedious and doesn't add much. Frostfall owns. More immersion mods please modmakers.
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Aug 26, 2017 23:43
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Randaconda posted:stop being mean, Siets. 
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Aug 26, 2017 23:53
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How do you pronounce EnaiSiasion anyway? "Ee-nay See-ya-sion?" "An azee-asian?" "Een-eye Shaw-shawn?" These are the questions that burn in my brain at night.
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Sep 11, 2017 16:58
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