Witcher79

This. Also: Complete High-Res Retexture Project Nuff said.

Make sure there's line in your Skyrim.ini [Display] bAllowScreenshot=1 Then use PrntScreen button on the keyboard. Screenshots should appear in your main Skyrim directory.

Damn! These are exactly my thoughts when I want to put something on the shelf in my Whiterun home: "Why o why there's no Feng Shui for Skyrim!" But truth is - such mod can't be done without scripting and CS. But fear not. There's a fairly good way to set up things. Just drop item on the ground, then open the console and click the item with your mouse - you'll see the ID number of it. Then use these console commandsto manipulate it: Getpos x,y,z = Gets the position of an object (ex. getpos z) Setpos x,y,z # = Sets the position of an object. (ex. setpos z 250 ) Getangle x,y,z = Gets the angle of an object (ex. getangle z) Setangle x,y,z # = Sets the angle of an object. (ex. setangle z 245 ) Rotate x,y,z # = Rotates the object manually. (ex. rotate z 245) Setscale # = Sets size of object. You can also read this thread how to use commands to set up your items or even floors and walls in your house: Renovate your house with console.

To cut story short you might want to track this topic as we are focusing our efforts to create one big texture pack (by means of merging existing work, and also creating new textures) which would keep close as possible to original design vison of Bethesda artists. Complete High Res Retexture Project Opinions of users and artists most welcome.

Improved textures tiling and blending. The worst problem was with grass to dirt to road transition. I know that my version isn't 100% identical with vanilla textures but it was impossible to achieve without changing the textures altogether. I've used 3x3 internal multi-tiling of 1024x1024 textures so there's better blend and overall quality without any performance drop. Also mipmaps with colour-blending to get better distant landscape view and to get rid of those awful tiling rows. I'll drop full pack and a tutorial talking about idea and execution Sunday evening CET. Anyway - waiting for any opinions what to change/improve. Small example below:

If that was about my screens thanks, but it isn't full effect I desire to achieve, yet. There's not that much magic in it and to be honest just basic texture rules apply. Although there are some ideas behind it which need some deeper explanation I suppose. I'm gathering screen shots of my work flow and few graphics/schematics which I hope are going to be helpful in creating proper tutorial on landscape texturing (which may apply not only to Skyrim but to many engines in general too I suppose). I'll be releasing some textures here in this thread for you folks to try out and also making other thread with tutorial within couple of days. Annoyingly December tends to be a month for me when real life collides with modding , but I'll try my best to deliver stuff asap.

uExterior Cell Buffer uGridsToLoad iPreloadSizeLimit If you had them changed prior to patch and then tried to run the game crash is inevitable. Patch reverted ini files to their default values, what means simply that any save with altered above values would crash due to how engine handles cell buffer. After applying the patch just move your saves from My Documents folder, set up graphic options, start new game, change whatever you need to in game settings, exit menu with Esc (to the point when you see "Saving settings..." message) then exit the game. Compare newly created ini with your old ini files, apply your previous changes (WinMerge or Notepad++ is great for that), copy back your saves where they belong. Apply new version of LAA if you have to. Enjoy the game. The only thing which is borked for me after the patch are resistances which seems non existent. And they removed exiting menus by Tab and changed it to Esc (why not leave both?). Dragons act properly, no problem with mouse cursor anymore, static shadows (from like furniture not actors) looks great, better performance overall. Actors dynamic shadows still pixelated. Couldn't check any quests related changes yet. Some UI related mods might cause compatibility problems as they changed stuff in Skyrim - Interface.bsa

Have you changed any of those values by any chance? uExterior Cell Buffer uGridsToLoad iPreloadSizeLimit If you had them changed prior to patch and then tried to run the game crash is inevitable. Patch reverted ini files to their default values, what means simply that any save with altered above values would crash due to how engine handles cell buffer. After applying the patch just move your saves from My Documents folder, set up graphic options, start new game, change whatever you need to in game settings, exit menu with Esc (to the point when you see "Saving settings..." message) then exit the game. Compare newly created ini with your old ini files, apply your previous changes (WinMerge or Notepad++ is great for that), copy back your saves where they belong. Apply new version of LAA if you have to. Enjoy the game. The only thing which is borked for me after the patch are resistances which seem non existent. And they removed exiting menus by Tab and changed it to Esc (why not leave both?). Dragons act properly, no problem with mouse cursor anymore, static shadows (from like furniture not actors) looks great, better performance overall. Actors dynamic shadows still pixelated. Couldn't check any quests related changes yet. Some UI related mods might cause compatibility problems as they changed stuff in Skyrim - Interface.bsa.

Yeah. My experience is more tied with UDK and Maya than Bethesda games really. What buggers me though is that there's no chance for any other color than shades of gray in Beth specular layer (for creating non-metallic reflections for example). That's what led me to (false) belief that _m would be specular/enviro and _n would be more like parallax occlusion thing. I'm fairly familiar with cubemaps but thanks for explanation anyway. Just a thought - maybe enviro blur is tied somehow with bUseWaterReflectionBlur from Skyrim.ini? Water uses CubeMap reflections too (bUseCubeMapReflections=1 and fCubeMapRefreshRate). Either that or there's some value in shaders001.fxp file. I would love to have that one fully readable...

@ThrottleKitty Well maybe shader 11 is a "water flow"/"waves" shader then? Looks like that for me anyway. Thanks for all your hard work on nifskope updating. Really appreciated. *bows* @Ghogiel I'm starting to believe from what I've seen that alpha channel in _n files is occlusion and proper specular maps are _m files. Also what I've seen so far is that alpha in normal diffuse textures is treated as 0/1 switch. So if we understand alpha as 0 - 255 value engine reads as 0-->127 = 1 (invisible) and 128--->255 = 0 (visible). That's why moss or snow for example have that odd blending issue and in alpha channel you can see different alpha shapes blended with each other. Engine "adds" different shades of grey and creates output depending on final result:

Looks like _m and alpha channel in _n textures are similar somehow which leads me to believing that one of those might be an occlusion map. Just make one of those completely black and see which removes gloss/shine. What alpha channel/extra texture do is dictated by a shader instructions. Unfortunately I wasn't able to decode fxp files. From what I've seen fiddling with environment textures, that _n alpha channel is occlusion and _m textures are proper shine/metallicness info for objects. I might be wrong though so don't take my word for granted.

To turn off shadows try changing in your My Documents SkyrimPrefs.ini bDrawShadows=1 to 0. Beware though that it won't be nice game to look at from that point. I would advice you to verify game files via steam first. Just make sure you have your saves archived and My Documents/My Games/Skyrim folder removed. Try to start new game with default settings, then start again with settings appropriate for your system. See if there's any difference. Then copy your saves back where they belong. Wacky stripes and low res shadows are common issue. Bad implementation of shadow map, low res specular and normal maps with compression artefacts and lack of Adaptative AA and DX10 support. BTW: If you're on ATI card - turn off Adaptive Anti Aliasing in CCC. If you're on nVidia search these forums for tips how to improve your experience. Also check this mod. It helps not to focus on some graphical glitches here and there and makes great use of FXAA shader without huge fps drop. Good luck! ;) P.S. With few tricks and couple of mods you can have really awesome looking game with very playable frame rates. I'm on moderate system ([email protected] / RadeonHQ4850 1gb / 4gb RAM) and have 30-60fps. 100+hours into game with no issues except some very rare stuttering while entering new cities. Here's how my game looks like:

Small presentation of my puny attempts to improve terrain blending and tiling - as promised. Also some dirt and moss blending experiment. Still very very WIP though. I'm partially happy with that although lack of proper alpha blending support is visible... It's not easy to change without even read-only access to shader values, sadly... Comments and constructive criticism most welcome.

^^This. Just invert the green channel (in Photoshop: select channels view tab, select green, then [Ctrl+i]). Also depends on a texture type alpha channel is sometimes used for specular (if there's no xxxx_s.dds and there's some alpha channel in xxxx_n.dds it most likely is specular information). Also some useful reading here: http://cs.elderscrol...ity_Normal_Maps http://tech-artists....wiki/Normal_map and enormously useful guide to normal map altering courtesy of Ben Cloward here: http://www.benclowar...al_maps12.shtml EDIT: Actually, I just looked at that pic you submitted and the main problem is that you're using your high colour "texture" picture to create your normal map. That's wrong approach, especially with nVidia tool. You'll get better results by making second file with a desaturated (gray scale) copy of your texture and use nVidia normal map tool then. Before you start creating normal map it's handy to alter contrast/brightness slightly to have bigger difference and less shades of gray in areas you don't want to be so grainy. Normal map is way better when created from grayscale because "bumpiness" depends on luminosity/contrast of pixel and not its colour.

I don't understand exactly what you mean by "x86", but if you mean main Skyrim directory where other files are stored (like TESV.exe, data folder etc) these ini files are default/safe mode. Also high.ini low.ini etc are used by a launcher when you pick quality setting first time when you launch the game. As an experiment try to move these files to some other folder (ex. to the desktop) and launch your game with the launcher. You'll notice that the game starts with no problem not asking for those. Next step of an experiment would be to try changing your graphic settings from the launcher and see what happens... :whistling: *Hint: The launcher is going to work again when you move back ini files to the main game directory.