Blu02

Mmh I didn't think so, but I gave it a try and I went back to the old Skyrim to give a look (it was Enderal, but it's the same), and no, the book of silence looks great in there, even without an ENB. Instead in the SE it looks bad, or more correctly, it looks out of place. I think it needs to be adapted, and looks like Cabal will most likely come back to update them, thanks god. The only adaption I see necessary in Cabals case are less contrast on diffuse-maps, because his textures are very dark compared to everything else in the game, which makes them stand out and also tend to absorb some of the details. Shaders in SSE makes that more apparent in some situations compared to original Skyrim. There is however no difference to the formats and therefore no conversion or changes in workflow. This reminds me much of how specular balance became more important back when ENB's became a thing in old Skyrim. With the default primitive shaders you could use extreme values to make details pop out more, but with ENB in the mix that could become way too bright and distracting. And so many texture-modders started to release ENB-patches with more normalized textures.

As far as I know there is no conversion needed. The problem we're having is that some landscape textures that previously didn't make use of speculars now do, and so they appear as shiny until properly added with gradient alpha. That's a much welcome feature though, if you ask me, so I can't complain about it. I've tried a lot of old texture-mods for weapons, armor, creatures, furniture, etc in SSE with ~20 hours of playing in different environments and lighting conditions without any problems what so ever. Book of Silence, Bellyaches Animals, UNP body textures, Beards, Brows, etc, all work fine. I think you're just used to advanced ENB's that can bring out more details from the maps than the current shaders in SSE. It has nothing to do with the textures themselves. I thought at one point there were some issue with a grey shade that can appear in strong light, which I've seen others point out as well, but that's an issue with selfshadowing, not textures.

I've experienced this bug as well when I didn't have any mods installed or ini-changes. It flickered a bit and disappeared shortly when moving around, seems like a lod-issue or something. This was just outside the Halted Stream Camp north of Whiterun.

I was going to jump in here and say "Unreal Cinema - Directors Cut", but then I noticed that the mod and the author (Unreal Warfare) seems to have completely disappeared :( That's awkward, I re-downloaded this excellent ENB just barely a week ago. Oh well, you could always google for another place to download, or check workshop. It's a pretty cold and gritty enb, as in your pictures, which fits the world of Skyrim excellent imo. Good performance and supports the latest ENB. Here's a video;

This is great! Thanks a lot :D

My game also often crashed when interacting with the menus ingame after 1.8 forced itself into my dear Skyrim. But it disappeared when I updated SKSE to 1.6.5 and iHUD to the matching 2.0.2 version (I originally had previous versions installed of both). Good ol' SkyUI is working as flawlessly as always.

Nope.

Have you tried going there after reinstalling the game with a brand new character-save with no added mods or modified ini's? Make sure that after un-installing the game, you delete the remaining Skyrim-folder as well as anything left in My Documents\My Games\Skyrim before you install the game again. Saves that have been used with activated mods before can still cause problems after they're deactivated. There might also still be forgotten mod-files in your Skryim-folder that are still loaded when booting the game with deactivated mods. Also, make sure to activate V-Sync with an fps-limit just below 60. If you run the game with higher fps, physics can turn crazy and can cause crashes. I have experienced this especially around the Reach in the past, probably because it's a quite empty high-fps area with a lot of slopes.

I've never had any problems with Bethesda's texture-pack. Even if I have tons of other texture-mods (TPC and some more) overlapping, the official pack still a great base which will cover a bunch of things the custom packs doesn't. Especially clothes! It's DEFINITELY worth it imo. Graphic quality become top notch compared to vanilla. Especially when combined with ENB or RCRN which will sharpen your view, making all those new details around you extra visible. But of course you'll need a proper monitor to see this, as well as a system that can run it.

Dead is a bit harsh word. Stalker 2 was heavily anticipated before it was canceled earlier this year. Since the developers immediately started a new Studio and began working on a spiritual sequel afterwards, I'm guessing the reason was they didn't get along with their previous publisher or whatever, or because the deal with Bethesda was already in the workings. There are obviously still a lot of money in this franchise. Hard to say if Bethesda bought it because they want to remake it or because they think it was a threat to their Fallout games. Time will tell I guess. Meh, they are practically ripping out the soul of the original and replace it with something they know will sell a lot on as many platforms as possible. Of course it will be way more popular than the original, but it will be a completely different game. Some original players will like it and some will despise it, but none will consider it a part of the original series. And to be honest, the only reason I like Bethesda's RPG's is because they're built upon a powerful and very mod-able engine with great first-person gameplay (Great for an RPG). The vanilla games themselves are not that good at all, and becomes even worse with every sequel as they're ridiculously dumbed down for the mainstream. But as long as I'm able to mod it to however I prefer it, I can still dig it. That's the one and only beauty of it in my opinion. Just because a game sells a lot more, it doesn't mean it's better. It's all about marketing and publicity, which is what these huge companies do best.

Yeah, it has great graphics and share the post-apocalyptic theme, but it's a linear heavily scripted shooter, not an open world RPG as Stalker or Fallout. I have at least tried it, but I didn't like it enough to finish it at the time. Might give it another shot this winter before the sequel is released next year. It's just too bad I can't activate PhysX with my current AMD gfx-cards :P F*ck you Nvidia!

Then I think More HotKeys is another mod you should try out ;) It adds the possibility to bind a lot more keys, as well as several spells to a single key. Incredibly useful for mages. Here's a demonstration from the previous Beta.

Heh, yea it's too bad there aren't any more iron or steel for high levels, except possibly the Companions slightly better version, but oh well I dont care much for leveled gear or enchants anyway. It just makes the game too easy in the long run. I rather wear whatever I feel fits my character, not the best, and variate with capes, hoods/masks and shields. If I would want something else there are a bunch of great matching alternatives to steel and iron to download from here ;)

A new card is definitely the best solution in your case. You don't want to go SLI/Crossfire unless you really need the few upsides that comes with it, especially not with an old 460 that would still be very limited in performance. You will have to specify a budget though. You could also try using RCRN instead of ENB. It's a great alternative which wont kill your performance, also very adjustable. The current version doesn't have depth of field though, but you can combine it with Dynavision until they release 3.5 very soon.

I always use heavy armor for my male fighters. I love the iron and steel versions, which I often use even on high levels. Not a fan of daedric, dragonbone and dwemer though, as I think they look ridiculous on anything but boss-enemies. Female fighters always get light armor though, as they look a lot better in tight leather. But mostly my female characters are mages who wear regular clothes/robes.

I recently started to use PsiKotics Necromancy Mod, which is a huge expansion for everything that involves necromancy and manipulating the undead. It adds a lot of new spells, functions and revamps the whole conjuration tree. The creator is seems to be very active on the project and updates it a lot. This currently also works with Belua Sanguinare, with the exception of some vampire-boosts from the Necromancy Mod that doesnt have any effect on BSR vampires, but which luckily doesn't cause any crashes or bugs. Perfect for anyone playing vampire necromancers :) I really think this project deserves a lot more attention. Also, Forested Skyrim is an excellent mod that turns the boring flat area around Whiterun into a pine forest :D Probably not something for any lore-geeks, but it adds a massive refreshing and cozy feeling to that area which is much welcomed after hundreds of hours of running back and forth around that place. It seems to be very well done and doesn't affect my performance much at all. I recommend to combine it with Lush Trees and some mod of your choice that also add trees within the walls of Whiterun (There are a few to choose from). Here's a pic I grabbed earlier today from the gates of Whiterun; http://i.minus.com/itvYPmxCa3d4X.jpg

The STEP Guide is your bible. It is constantly updated with the latest awesomeness the community has to offer when it comes to graphics, with detailed instructions of how to install and configure everything, and what choices to make if you want it "optimized". It will take about a day to get done, but it's the only way and totally worth it imo. Personally I also combine it with UNP body and aMidianborn's retextured armors (Check description for links to all of them), and a bunch of other more character specific ones.

UNP, because I think it's the most natural looking one and most beautiful. Fits my taste perfectly. But I'm only using it for my characters, while NPC's still have vanilla bodies but with better textures.

It is almost always mentioned in the mods description and/or readme, unless it's an obvious fact. ALWAYS read this first. If you're still unsure then simply ask in the comment-section.

I'm guessing you're talking about 3d Studio Max? Boolean and Pro Boolean are pretty messed up tools which can cause the strangest problems, especially when exported outside of 3dsmax. I recommend you to only use them when you really have to. To repair your model after using Boolean you can go to your "utilities"-tab (Looks like a hammer) located to the right in 3dsmax. Make sure your model is selected and then press "Reset XForm". This should fix your polygons back to normal. Then press "Collapse" in order to reset your modifier-list (Always recommended when switching modifiers). This works excellent for me anyway. You can also do this if you're having problems with mirrored objects getting inverted or such. Edit: Also, Boolean can cause duplicated verticies. Make sure everything is welded together!

If you want the best for Skyrim, then follow this excellent guide called STEP. It will take you a few hours to install everything, but the huge difference is definitely worth it! You basically use the official HQ Texture-pack as a base, and let community-mods overlap it. I recommend to only download mods from Nexus, just to keep things organized and be able to give proper credits to the real authors. This is still where most mods are located.

When I disable trifire and only use one GPU with my system, my fps falls from ~70 to ~30. I noticed this yesterday when I was trying to get ENB to work correctly (Apparantly crossfire isn't working properly with this, so I went back to RCRN instead). It seems crossfire is scaling very well with Skyrim nowadays, compared to a half year ago when it could give you negative performance. I have a HD6990 and a HD6970 (Primary), so when disabling the HD6990 and its 2 GPU's I practically lost 20fps per GPU. So I guess that could give you an idea of how much performance you can gain with just one more GPU. But it probably depends a lot on your surroundings and situation. This was measured in Riverwood. I'm using the latest AMD drivers (12.8 ) and have a complete install of Texture Pack Combiner (Except for Project Prallax) with maximum resolutions, as well as most other texture-mods mentioned in STEP 2.2 and a few additional choices of my own for gear and bodies. Runs like a charm! So the new HD79xx-series should run it even better.

Many mods will leave information in your saves that can cause glitches and crashes later on if you just disable them. There are procedures on how to make clean uninstallations of some more advanced mods. Always read the installation/uninstallation-notes for respective mods.

I honestly can't see much of what people are complaining about in Skyrim. I play quite a lot, and I rarely see any bugs nowadays. When I do, it's always little things which would be ridiculous to start whining about on forums. Any crashes I experience now and then are more because of my heavy list of mods rather than the game itself. Hell I even played through Dawnguard on release without any glitches worth mentioning. And I haven't even been using the Unofficial Skyrim Patch. But as they say, a big open game like Skyrim will never be completely bug-free, so don't expect it. Bethesda is however doing a lot better work with patching Skyrim than any of their previous games, so at least they're working on it. The Creation Kit however is a story of its own when it comes to bugs. When it comes to graphic quality, I was indeed greatly disappointed with the initial release of Skyrim. Especially with the heavily compressed textures and bright interiors. For some reason they felt they had to squeeze the whole game into a single DVD (Probably because of Xbox 360), and that's partly why they had to compress the textures like madmen. Also because the game didn't support enough amount of RAM to keep the game stable with bigger textures. Overall default graphic settings is also limited by console-versions, this because they didn't want the game to look any different on any platform on release. With Dawnguard however, textures are topnotch on PC and in some cases even slightly overkill (Or un-optimized if you will). I guess they didn't feel they had any restrictions in this case, and since they released the HQ Texture pack earlier this year the game looks better on PC nowadays anyway even without mods. I think Bethesda just like to do their thing while letting the community do theirs, and I play in harmony in between. Remember that Bethesda is a company, not a worldwide army of dedicated modders who doesn't really have to care about timelines, compatibility, standards, multiplatform, competition, financial success and strategy, end product, teamwork, working hours, chains of command/responsibility, third party participants, etc, etc. Developers and modders work in completely different worlds. They can achieve things we cannot, while we can achieve things they cannot.

Would most likely work with metal in cozy Falkreath, and grab a sword for "the cause" whenever the time comes. Sounds like me :P